Manuscript Version 1 Forthcoming in Peter Burdon and James Martel (eds), Routledge Handbook of Ecological Law and the Anthropocene (Routledge, 2022). THE ANTHROPOCENE ARCHIVE: HUMAN AND INHUMAN SUBJECTS AND SEDIMENTS Kathleen Birrell We are part mineral beings … our teeth are reefs, our bones are stones … (Macfarlane 2019, 37). The Anthropocene, as both a scientific thesis and a critical provocation, prompts a reckoning with the epistemological archive of modern law. While this law does not literally “fossilize”, its archive can be imagined as comprising both geologic and epistemic sediment (Pottage 2019, 155). Our apprehension of human planetary impact as evidenced in climatic change and ecological degradation elevates a promethean humanity, to the extent that it is considered a “geomorphic force” (Yusoff 2013; Crutzen 2002; Crutzen and Stoermer 2010). While this scalar recalibration accommodates the “tectonic plates of humanity” (Serres 1995, 16), the Anthropocene also draws attention to our coincident and differential vulnerability. We bear witness to the devastating agency of our species, while also acknowledging the brevity of humanity within a vast planetary chronology (Macfarlane 2019, 15). The concept of the Anthropocene returns us yet again to the question of the human, and to the ways in which subjectivity is constructed and rendered meaningful. The figure of the anthropos – the foundational and universalised humanity distilled in the (male) sovereign subject (Grear 2015, 226) – is simultaneously expanded and contracted by the constitutive tensions of the Anthropocene. The epistemic sediment within which this subject is steeped reflects the temporal discipline and ontological categorisation of matter central to modernity, in accordance with which the human and the inhuman are demarcated (Povinelli 2016; Yusoff 2018; Latour 1993; 2017; 2018; Bennett 2010) and the appropriative and extractive impulses of empire are made manifest in the rights-bearing subject of modern law. This chapter examines the distillation of the relationship between modern law and matter in the legal subject, and explores encounters with more expansive renderings of human and inhuman subjectivity. The very idea of the human, delimited by an “exclusionary logic” (Mignolo 2018, 155-157), is articulated most explicitly in the legal register of rights. The “proper” rights-bearing subject embodies the arrogations of empire and its appropriative narrative (Bhandar 2018, 4-5; Yusoff