THE EXTINCTION LIMIT: ANTHROPOCENE ONTOLOGIES OF DIFFERENCE IN HEIDEGGER AND DELEUZE
THE EXTINCTION LIMIT: ANTHROPOCENE ONTOLOGIES OF DIFFERENCE IN HEIDEGGER AND DELEUZE

Summary/Abstract: This article stages an encounter between Martin Heidegger’s ontological difference, Gilles Deleuze’s ontology of difference, and two scientific framings of the Anthropocene: stratigraphy and Earth System Science (ESS). First, I discuss how Heidegger conceives difference through the distinction between Being and beings, which grounds human self-interpretation, and how Deleuze treats difference as primary and generative. The article maps these positions onto contemporary Anthropocene scholarship by reading stratigraphy as boundary-work that inscribes human traces in sediment, mirroring Heidegger’s disclosure of Being, and ESS as a transdisciplinary account of a planetary system in line with Deleuze’s immanent field of becoming. Then, I argue that both pairings drift towards abstraction, as the Heidegger–stratigraphy pair reduces the Anthropocene to ontic fixation and humanist horizon, while ESS and Deleuze’s immanence tend toward a managerial and accelerationist control that flattens differences in power and responsibility. The last section argues that neither Heidegger’s being-toward-death nor Deleuze’s productive difference can register the absolute erasure posed by the concept of extinction. Extinction, therefore, tests these ontologies and requires a critical ontology of difference for the Anthropocene grounded in material histories and the possibility of there being no relations at all.

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