Paper short abstract:

This paper deploys the ancient Greek concept of the daimonic in order to imagine and theorise novel modes of social organization in the Anthropocene, capable of reimbuing Bruno Latour's conceptual persona of 'the moderns' with cosmological purpose and ritual action.

Paper long abstract:

Anthropological conceptualizations of the Anthropocene oscillate between calls for secularism and a mytho-poetics revolving around concepts such as haunting, monsters, ghosts and the uncanny. Through a critical overview of anthropological literature, this paper aligns with the latter perspective. More specifically, the paper deploys the ancient Greek concept of the daimonic in order to imagine and theorise novel modes of social organization in the Anthropocene, capable of reimbuing Bruno Latour's conceptual persona of 'the moderns' with cosmological purpose and ritual action. For the Greeks, the notion of the daimonic pertained to a divine, unknowable mode of action, and to a conceptualization of human societies as porous and constantly affected by the intrusions and moods of daimonic entities (Kyriakides 2022). In what ways can non-human entities of the Anthropocene, such as light, radioactivity and oceans, be considered and treated as daimonic (DeLoughrey 2019) - as dispensers of vitality as well as destruction? On the one hand, the daimonic can be understood as an "example" (de Castro 2019) of ontological alterity radically different to the Western paradigms of nature and the individual, autonomous subject. On the other hand, the daimonic occupies an ambivalent yet important position in the history of Western thought, and has to a degree shaped modern perception of human subjectivity, sovereignty and society. The prospect of a daimonic Anthropocene depends on amplifying daimonic undercurrents (conceptual, material, ontological) internal and external to modernity in order to reconfigure relations between nature and the commons.