The Anthropocene is the radical intersection of human history and geological time. Humans have belatedly realised that they have become a geophysical force on a planetary scale. This creeping realisation has an Oedipal logic, that is to say, it is a strange loop in which one level of activity—industrial agriculture and the swiftly ensuing industrial revolution—crosses into an entirely new level of planetary force and, following from that, an uncanny recognition of this force. This essay argues that the Oedipal logic is embedded in the technical, logistical and philosophical framework of agriculture as such. Indeed, the Theban plays (of which Oedipus Tyrannus is one) dwell on the fact of agricultural society as a form of uncanny existence. This essay argues that the principal reason for the uncanniness is the reduction of being to non-contradiction. Exit strategies from this logic (and its concomitant logistics) cannot cleave to a view of beings that is reductionist in any sense. Thus the potential for using Deleuze and Guattari to exit modernity is limited. What is required is a deconstruction of existing (agri)cultures and logics, rather than an attempt to push past them or avoid them, since as in the story of Oedipus, the attempt to push past and avoid is precisely what brings about the cataclysm. In the later eighteenth century, humans began to deposit a thin layer of carbon in Earth's crust. This thin layer can now be detected deep in Arctic ice and at the bottoms of large lakes. These deposits marked the beginning of what atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen calls the Anthropocene, a term that is now widely accepted. 1 By 1945, humans had begun to deposit a second layer, this time of radioactive materials, in Earth's crust. This moment, inaugurated by the Gadget exploded in the Trinity Test, then by Little Boy and Fat Man, marked the start of the Great Acceleration, a moment in the Anthropocene during which its basic forces were exponentially sped up. What is the Anthropocene? Quite simply, this is the period in which human history intersects decisively with geological time. History traditionally is thought as a purely human affair—moreover, history for many scholars is reserved for a tiny and recent segment of humanity. Hegel, for instance, viewed history as intrinsic to white Westerners. Africans and Asians suffered from a lack of history, and so must have it imposed upon them. 2 Heidegger