Skip to main content

Gaia and the grey zone

Déborah Danowski and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro wonder, in the best part of a chapter of their Há mundo por vir (Rio: Cultura e Barbárie, 2014), who would compose the two poles of the Humans and Earth-bound in the war to be declared according to Latour (in the Gifford Lectures). One difficulty is the grey zone between victims and perpetrators; like in Primo Levi´s grey zone (in The drawn and the saved) those who don´t collaborate with the perpetrators - the nazi or the destruction of the Earth (and of one´s future) - are unlikely to survive. There are increasingly less complete victims - or rather, there is incresingly less testimonies of the complete victims. To be sure, there are clear-cut culprits and drawned, but there is a big violence in pushing people into the grey zone (which is the grey zone of the society of geocontrol where we are forced into a specific fuelpolitics that makes us part of the depletion of the planet no matter how much we feel attached to it. In the sense that Agamben, inspired by Levi, diagnosed that there are no witness of the Lager, there are no Earthbound, no surviving Earthbound. The grey zone is the zone of survival.

Elizabeth Povinelli makes a brilliant diagnosis: our focus on the split between the inanimate and the living (and our image of life as bound by natality and mortality) is shaped by a carbon-based imaginary. The intrusion of Gaia - a living organism made of ecologically crucial ingredients, as any living organism, such as elements in the soil and in the water - challenges this imaginary. She proposes the idea of an ecological condition, like a hyperobject that can be depleted or enhanced. Gaia would be such an ecological condition. The grey zone where the Humans (all of us) are forced to live is just not enough meta-stable to be an ecological condition. Is this a war? Maybe if it is, it would be a guerrilla where no ground is inadequate.




Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Hunky, Gunky and Junky - all Funky Metaphysics

Been reading Bohn's recent papers on the possibility of junky worlds (and therefore of hunky worlds as hunky worlds are those that are gunky and junky - quite funky, as I said in the other post). He cites Whitehead (process philosophy tends to go hunky) but also Leibniz in his company - he wouldn't take up gunk as he believed in monads but would accept junky worlds (where everything that exists is a part of something). Bohn quotes Leibniz in On Nature Itself «For, although there are atoms of substance, namely monads, which lack parts, there are no atoms of bulk, that is, atoms of the least possible extension, nor are there any ultimate elements, since a continuum cannot be composed out of points. In just the same way, there is nothing greatest in bulk nor infinite in extension, even if there is always something bigger than anything else, though there is a being greatest in the intensity of its perfection, that is, a being infinite in power.» And New Essays: ... for there is nev...
1 comment
Read more

The underground of concepts: my talk at the Marxism and the Pittsburgh School Conference

In few minutes I'll be presenting this talk in the Marxism and the Pittsburgh School conference in the UCL. I can still change the text but this is how it looks like now. The underground of concepts: McDowell on the productivity of Anschauungen Hilan Bensusan 1. Jean-François Lyotard diagnosed the idea that concepts do the productive work of thinking as a deception. It is not through a dynamics of concepts that conclusions are reached and it is not with the decisive intervention of them that conflicts between alternatives resolved. Lyotard compares the pretense that concepts think with the mystification that capital works. He argues that “what works is not the concept, […] the concept is [like] capital which pretends to work, but which [only] determines the conditions of labour, delimits the outsides and insides, the authorized and the prohibited” (Lyotard, Libidinal Economy, p. 13). This diagnosis, frequently lost in the middle of an ampler argumentation around t...
Post a Comment
Read more

Necropolitics and Neocameralism

It is perhaps just wishful thinking that the alt-right seemingly innovative and intrepid ideas will disappear from the scene as Trump's reign comes to an end. They have their own dynamics, but certainly the experiences of the last years, including those in the pandemics, do help to wear off their bright and attractiveness. Neocameralism, what Mencius Moldbug and Nick Land with him ushered in as a model of post-democracy that relinquish important ingredients of the human security system, is one of these projects that is proving to be too grounded in the past to have any capacity to foretell anything bright beyond the democratic rusting institutions. It is little more than necropolitics - which is itself a current post-democratic alternative. Achile Mbembe finds necropolitics in the regimes were warlords take over the state-like institutions (or mimick them)  to rule on the grounds of local security having no troubles killing or letting die whoever is in their path. Neocameralism pos...
Post a Comment
Read more