Decentering Collective Self-Legislation for the Anthropocene

The vocation to realize autonomy defines what might be called modernity’s insurrection against contingent and heteronomous existence, both societal and natural. Modern constitutionalism takes up this vocation and the family of concepts associated to it, compressing them into a single expression: collective self-legislation. Yet the Anthropocene has turned the tables: nature is in a state of insurrection against the drive to secure human autonomy, reminding us, modern denizens, of our irreducibly contingent and heteronomous condition as natural beings. This paper argues that affirming a constitutive condition of interdependency between humans and other-than-humans requires decentering collective self-legislation in two distinct but related ways. The first undercuts anthropocentrism, thus centrism as such; the second challenges anthropocentrism, hence human exceptionalism.