Chthulucène
The name Donna Haraway proposes for our era, in opposition to the *Anthropocene* and the *Capitalocene*. Formed from two Greek roots—*khthôn*, the earth and its subterranean powers, and *kainos*, the "now"—it designates a time-place where humans and non-humans are inextricably entangled, where the task is to *make-with* and *stay with the trouble* rather than flee into a repaired future or an accepted collapse. Nothing to do with Lovecraft’s Cthulhu: Haraway insists on the *chthonic*, on the earth’s beings, tentacular and multiple.
« Chthulucène » est un mot simple. Il est formé à partir de deux racines grecques: khthôn et kainos. Ensemble, elles nomment une sorte de temps-espace pour apprendre à vivre avec le trouble, à vivre et à mourir avec respons(h)abilité, sur une terre abîmée.
Haraway rejects the two dominant terms of our time. The Anthropocene elevates Anthropos to the status of sole geological agent—hero or lone culprit of a planetary history. The Capitalocene more accurately names the driving force—capital, accumulation—but remains fixated on a single system. The Chthulucene shifts the gaze from the singular agent to multi-species entanglements: it is neither Man nor Capital that makes and unmakes worlds, but a myriad of terrestrial forces acting in concert.
The word clings to its spelling. Haraway wrests it from Lovecraft’s Cthulhu— that patriarchal serpent of the underworld—to return it to the chthonians, “beings of the earth, as ancient as they are brand-new,” bristling with tentacles, antennae, and unruly fur, indifferent to Homo with its eyes turned skyward. Khthôn, the subterranean earth; kainos, the thick present, dense with legacies and what may yet come. The Chthulucene is this time-place where we learn to stay with the trouble rather than flee it, where world-making is always a matter of sympoiesis—a making-with that knows no single author.
The Chthulucene ≠ the Anthropocene ≠ the Capitalocene. The Anthropocene casts humanity as a unified geological subject and holds it as the prime cause. The Capitalocene identifies a system—capital—as the engine of devastation. The Chthulucene, by contrast, names no sovereign agent: it names the weave, the teeming of earthly beings who together compose and decompose a wounded yet still habitable earth.