Frontiers of Existence

This article introduces a new concept, ‘frontiers of existence’, to highlight and demand more attention be placed on the lives of human and other-than-human beings whose possibilities to exist are extinguished or radically and negatively transformed at resource and commodity frontiers and demand more attention be placed on this. What happens to existences at these places has not been a central focus in prior studies utilizing political economy, political ecology, or other approaches for studying frontiers. This article is makes a theoretical contribution, by arguing that the research on resource frontiers should more fully recognize more fully the redistributions of existences caused by major landscape changes. The analysis is based on field research since 2004 on the expansion of monocultures and deforestation in Brazil and the effect of this on existences. Four key questions for the existential analysis of frontiers are suggested, and their application is briefly demonstrated through ethnographic material collected in November and December 2019, in the Amazon and Cerrado regions of Mato Grosso State in Brazil. Keywords: resource frontiers, ethnocide, deforestation, political ontology, global land grabbing, frontiers of existence, forests

The political ontology of protected area co-management: worlding and nature perceptions among stakeholders

Political ontology reveals the processes of domination at play in the enactment of realities in a(post-) colonial context. In this article, we illustrate the implications of the power asymmetries inherent in conservation and co-management of protected areas involving Indigenous populations. We do so by exploring the case of Pilón Lajas in the Bolivian Amazon region, an area with double legal status as an Indigenous Territory and Biosphere Reserve. Drawing from our ethnographic fieldwork, we describe how indigenous relational ontology and the modern ontology of 'cultural diversity' are enacted by different stakeholders, and analyse critically the problems that arise for protected area management owing to the domination of a single ontology in a context where different ontologies are enacted. We finish by presenting our argument that solving such problems requires a cognitive justice approach.

"Sensing – thinking with the Earth. An ecology beyond the Occident"

This book review is about the French translation of a book by the anthropologist Arturo Escobar that, though it has not been translated into English yet, deserves to be known by English readers. This book is quite important since it allows one to understand occidental, capitalist and modern hegemony not only as an economic domination but above all as a cultural, epistemological and ontological colonisation. Indeed, according to Escobar, this domination takes its roots in the Occident’s ontology which translates into hegemonic practices that are concrete threats to the other worlds and their dwellers. Thus, Escobar highlights the deep link between ontologies and practices and argues for a new field of study he calls political ontology or ontological politics. To accompany the proposition of a shift from a universal nature to a pluriverse composed of many worlds, Escobar does not only undermine the prejudices of modernity but also puts forward the relational ontologies from indigenous communities of Latin America that concretely resist colonisation, underlining the ontological dimension of their struggles. Such a framework enables one to overcome or at least minimize the distinction between theory and practice.

Democracy and Planetary Fragility in the Anthropocene: on William Connolly’s Political Ontology

As climate change rapidly intensifies, political theory urgently needs to respond to the shock of the Anthropocene and bring nature back to politics. William Connolly’s work is a paradigmatic example of such a theory that actively emphasizes the role nonhuman forces play in the social and political world and the discontinuity this emphasis brings to political theory. Connolly underscores fragile resonances between nature and culture and productively problematizes a human-centric vision of politics. However, while interrogating how contemporary political conjuncture catastrophically increases planetary fragility, he still insists on the continuity of his vision for democratic pluralism that this very conjuncture fundamentally puts in question. Thus, Connolly’s type of post-anthropocentric ontology remains rather inconsistently connected to explicitly political concerns. This article aims to clarify this connection. On the one hand, it shows how his brand of democratic politics that answers to the challenges of the Anthropocene presupposes a heightened degree of political negativism and universalism that used to be excluded from this politics. On the other, it demonstrates how the discontinuities in ontology must be simultaneously thought of as the discontinuities in established political theorizing and to continuously interrogate the very conjuncture that reveals the relevance of these ontological and political discontinuities.

A Political Ontology of the Pandemic: Sovereign Power and the Management of Affects through the Political Ontology of War

The COVID-19 pandemic has made relevant questions regarding the limits and the justifications of sovereign power as nation states utilize high degrees of power over populations in their strategies of countering the virus. In our article, we analyze a particularly important facet of the strategy of sovereignty in managing the affects caused by a pandemic, which we term the ontology of war. We analyze the way in which war plays a significant role in the political ontology of our societies, through its aiming to produce a unified political subject and an external enemy. Taking our theoretical cue from Butler’s thinking on frames of recognizability we extend her theory through augmenting it with affect theory to argue for how the frame of recognizability produced by the ontology of war fails to guide our understanding of the pandemic as a political problem, a failure that we analyze through looking at the affective register. We argue that the main affect that the nation state tries to manage, in relation to the pandemic, through the ontology of war is anxiety. We show that the nation state tries to alleviate anxiety by framing it through the ontology war, this leads to the appearance of a potentially racist and nationalist affective climate where the “enemy” is no longer felt to be the virus, but members of other nations as well as minorities. We argue that the pandemic reveals both the political ontology of war central to the foundation of our political communities, and how this ontology is used by the nation state to manage feelings of anxiety and insecurity. Ultimately, as we will discuss at the end of this article, this leads to failure.

Two Theories of Hegemony: Stuart Hall and Ernesto Laclau in Conversation

This essay stages a critical conversation between Stuart Hall and Ernesto Laclau, comparing their different appropriations of Antonio Gramsci’s theory of hegemony. In the 1980s, Hall and Laclau engaged with Gramsci and with one another in order to conceptualize what they regarded as a triangular relation between the rise of Thatcherism, the crisis of the Left, and the emergence of new social movements. While many of their readers emphasize the undeniable similarities and mutual influences that exist between Hall and Laclau, this essay focuses on the differences between their theories of hegemony and locates the starkest contrast between them at the level of theoretical practice. While the main lesson that Hall drew from Gramsci was the privileging of conjunctural analysis, Laclau proceeded to locate the concept of hegemony at a higher level of abstraction, developing a political ontology increasingly indifferent to any specific conjuncture. The essay argues that this difference between conjunctural analysis and political ontology has a significant impact on Hall’s and Laclau’s respective understandings of two key political formations: populism and identity politics. Thus by focusing on these two formations, the essay argues that Hall’s work should not be read as a derivative or even undertheorized version of Laclau’s, for this tendency obscures substantial differences between their interventions as well as the fact that Hall’s theory of hegemony, as a theory of the conjuncture, ultimately possesses stronger explanatory power than Laclau’s political ontology.

CHRONOPOLITICS AS A POLITICAL ONTOLOGY OF TIME (BIOPOLITICAL ASPECT)

The work of the 7th round table «Philosophy: Hermeneutics of Concepts» is devoted to bio- and chronopolitics. Biopolitics as a powerful organization of the population’s life in the forms of medicalization, normalization and regulation has a direct impact on the biological life of the human. However, this does not mean that bio-power solves the problem of «nature versus nurture» exclusively in favor of human nature. Bio-power also seeks to design the human environment. Biopolitical tools of influence on social time can be designated by the concept of chronopolitics. Chronopolitics, being an integral part of the whole biopolitical impact on a person, appears in the forms of permanent intensification of time; metaphysical interpretation of time, which has political and legal consequences; interpretation of history, in the hermeneutic circle of which the rewriting of the past implies the goal of forming an affective post-memory, which allows us to reconstruct the present and to form trends corresponding to the image of the future bio-power. Chronopolitics accelerates social time and, by contributing to the formation of mega-machine structures that meet the teleology of bio-power, carries increasing risks for human civilization.