From Hyperabject to Entropy: The Environmental Grotesque in an Expanded Field

Abstract How are we to handle the modernist and avant-garde aversion toward natural beauty in the light of the Anthropocene? Is this aversion a leftover from cynical anthropocentric times that should be corrected in a sustainable direction? Or would such a correction be a pathetic gesture promoting an obsolete idea of unspoiled nature? This article argues that environmental destruction has already become so irreversible that our proposed guiding concept, the environmental grotesque, must be interpreted in the direction suggested by its inventor, Phoebe Wagner: that we have to stay with the trouble and learn to survive with the horrors we have created. Rather than immunizing ourselves against environmental contamination in the way law excludes life itself (Roberto Esposito), we should develop a sense of contaminated diversity (Anna Tsing), dark ecology (Timothy Morton), the relativity of dirt (Mary Douglas)—even the relativity of hyperabjection (contra Mikkel Krause Frantzen) and entropy (contra Bernard Stiegler).