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.

Toward a Continuous-Matter Philosophy

In this paper I make a case for a philosophy of continuous matter, in dialogue with object-oriented ontology. A continuous-matter philosophy is one that focuses not on the identity, properties, and relations of discrete, countable objects, but on the nature of extended substances, both in relation to human experience and in terms of their own “inner life.” I explore why and under what conditions humans might perceive the world as objects or as continuous substances, and the language that humans use for talking about both. I argue that approaching the world as continua requires the foregrounding of concepts that emphasize the immanent (internal to a region of space), the inclusive (with contrasting properties coexisting in the same substance), the gradual (manifesting differentially at different points), and the generative or virtual (involving the constant production of form and new gradients). I suggest that starting philosophy from continuous matter rather than objects also has wider implications for speculative thought

From Philosophy of Technics to the Technics of Philosophy

Book Review: Susanna Lindberg, Techniques en philosophie. Paris: Hermann éditeurs, 2020, 378 p. ISBN: 9791037003690

The Soul Might Well Have Been Dreamed by Cicadas: Inger Christensen’s Speculative Realism

In this paper, I reconstruct Inger Christensen’s poetical thinking in a dialogue with the speculative turn in contemporary continental philosophy. Christensen’s poetry has been philosophically interpreted in line with the Romantic tradition. However, I argue that by reframing the context to present day debates in continental metaphysics, Christensen’s position can provide the building blocks for a new hybrid model —an object-oriented philosophy of nature. First, the relation between language as a transcendental semiotic system and reality as a mind-independent realm is addressed not as a correlation between humans and world but as a companionship between two aspects of nature itself. Second, Christensen advocates a generic model of becoming where the engine is fueled by the irreducible “state of secrecy” that generates beings, forces, events on a flat ontological and political plane without ever itself being revealed.

Introduction

Introduction to the issue

Marginalizing the Victim and the Political Body of the People

The article examines Judith Butler’s performative approach to the concept of the people, which allows to not only outline the boundaries of a certain model of political theology, so important for conservative political thought, but to also see the significance born by the acts of entry by collective bodies into public space. In this context, the figure of the victim can have a consolidating function, being the potentially affectively condensed point of the collective body’s assembling. The marginalization of the victim’s body is analyzed through the concept of the politics of grief and that of ungrievable lives. The victim’s marginalization is shown to be a multidimensional phenomenon. Not only the victim, but also the criminal can be marginalized, as well as various circumstances of catastrophic events and acts of violence. Examples taken from the Russian news in recent years illustrate how important the independent media audience’s perception of victims are: whether they perceive the victims they are informed about as marginal or as pertinent to their own lives and identities, whether the audience is ready to shift the boundaries toward greater inclusivity and to reinstate

On Hegel’s Ground

Climate change is not just about rising sea levels and greenhouse gases. It is also an intensive process of real-time terraforming without any obvious subject verbing the process. This is most visibly underway at the ablation zone of the Earth’s cryosphere. Is it reasonable to situate our understanding of ecological crisis at this new ground? What would it mean to take anthropogenic climate change as the ground for reason amid the ecological crises careening toward the present? This essay returns to the second half of part one of Hegel’s The Science of Logic —the culmination of the Objective Spirit — where something appears from nothing, and it does so in and as “Ground.” I argue that recent conceptual basins of attraction in climate and earth sciences —namely, the feedback loop and the tipping point —intimate a return to elemental philosophy, and that the dialectic of nonidentity that marks Hegel’s philosophy of nature interfaces with the form-matter-content triad thrumming at the culmination of the Objective Spirit. The nonidentity of the earth has been unearthed.

Cruel Insensibility and an Ethics Without Authority

This article considers the phenomenon of being insensible to animal cruelty, and how such insensibility relates to human transgressions of the planet. I consider the visualization of animal culls that appeared upon the emergence of the coronavirus pandemic. The spectacular wasting of animal life, I argue, discloses the economic logic by which humanity secures itself as a sovereign species. Such a logic and its visuality are not only underpinned by a broader necropolitical paradigm, moreover, they co-constitute a primal scene that enables the liquidation of animal life to the point of extinction. Following the evolutionary biologist Rob Wallace, I consider animal culls in relation to the phenomenon of virus dumping, a systemic perturbation of forest ecologies preceded by the influx of capital in agricultural markets that results in the release and rapid evolution of viruses. I therefore recapitulate the relationship between animal cruelty and the economy of planet wasting that subtends it. In this vein, I consider how the visuality of animal cruelty is predicated on a banal violence. Yet, drawing from Hannah Arendt, I call for an ethics without authority, a version of the Sensus Communis by which we might witness cruelty from within the depths of planetary transgressions.

The Death Drive of Evolution (From the Perspective of Depressive Realism)

This paper analyses Charles Darwin and Sigmund Freud as depressive realists who attempted to dethrone the human species from their central place in nature and history. Both evolutionary theory and Freudian-Lacanian psychoanalysis partly preserve the idea of human exceptionalism, while considering psychoanalysis’s negative conceptualization of humans as the most maladapted species. This maladaption is conventionally conceptualized in psychoanalysis as a rupture from the natural order and is sometimes presented as the embodiment of the death drive. Such a concept of the death drive tends to be seen as an exclusively human drive. Developments in recent evolutionary biology and psychoanalytic thought suggest ways to elaborate on the concept of the death drive as not being exclusively human. Nature’s evolution is not the embodiment of progress that results in the appearance of the human species, and it is not the embodiment of a harmony from which humans deviate, but it is rather a rupture with itself. Nature as such is an embodiment of the death drive.

Thinking the Political with Jean-Luc Nancy

In this article, I argue that at the center of Jean-Luc Nancy’s approach to the political lies the thinking of subject as that of relation. Throughout the historical actualizations of, for example, the individual, the state, or the people as a subject, the problematic of relation is one that has retreated and now demands to be subjected to a retreatment. When the arche-teleological presuppositions that constitute subject as that which is given enter the phase of deconstruction, subject comes to present itself as nothing but the activity of relating itself to itself. I respond to Nancy’s call to invent “an affirmation of relation” by way of rethinking the logics of sovereignty and democracy. While sovereignty unites, posits, finitizes, and finishes the self of the people, a post-68 democracy pluralizes, infinitizes, and disfigures the identity of the people. Between sovereignty and democracy, notwithstanding their conflicting tenets, the relation is not that of reciprocal exclusion. One is rather the correlative of the other. Without the one, the other would not make any sense. Through this Janus-faced economy of the political, the people can experience its own “reality”—to experience relation itself. The affirmation of relation is what gives and keeps free the voided site of the political for the infinite self-institution of the people, and for that reason is political par excellence.