Responsibility,politics and reason

Abstract

This commentary offers a set of sympathetic reflections on Noel Castree’s recent interventions on geography, the environmental humanities and the Anthropocene. Whilst largely endorsing Castree’s exhortation that geographers engage analytically and institutionally with debates about the Anthropocene, the commentary sets out three limits to Castree’s argument. The first is that in directing his argument towards a critically engaged geography, Castree misses an opportunity to draw attention to the way that power shapes institutional formation. The second asks after the kind of politics that Castree seeks to inaugurate through his work on the Anthropocene. And the last asks whether reason and debate are sufficient conditions for social transformation in light of recent interventions on affect and the non-conscious.