Demons of the Anthropocene. Facing Bruno Latour’s Gaia

Philosophy Kitchen #5 Anno 3 Settembre 2016 ISSN: 2385-1945 L’impersonale Si pensa, si sente, si crea Philosophy Kitchen #5 Anno 3 Settembre 2016 ISSN: 2385-1945 L’impersonale Si pensa, si sente, si crea Philosophy Kitchen #5 — Anno 3 — Settembre 2016 — ISSN: 2385-1945 — L’impersonale. Si pensa, si sente, si crea L’impersonale Si pensa, si sente, si crea 5 L’impersonale. Prospetive e implicazioni Carlo Molinar Min, Giulio Piatti Editoriale A. L’IMPERSONALE. OLTRE I CONFINI DEL SOGGETTO 12 L’impersonale, tra persone e cose Roberto Esposito 19 Sulla genesi impersonale dell’esperienza Rocco Ronchi 26 Buone regressioni. Meità e impersonalità alla luce della Nuova Fenomenologia Tonino Griffero 39 Gli invarianti storico-antropologici in una prospetiva fenomenologica. Per una fondazione trascendentale dell’impersonale Giovanni Leghissa 55 Sopravvivere. Per la biodecostruzione di Jaques Derrida Francesco Vitale 68 Gilbert Simondon: un’assiomatica aperta Ugo Maria Ugazio B. GENESI 88 Una vita oltre la maschera: Panimmaginismo e immanenza Pierluca D’Amato 102 he Impersonal Superadditive Cosmology Zornitsa Dimitrova 115 Fati, valori e norme. La libertà dell’impersonale in Georges Canguilhem Gabriele Vissio C. VITA 77 La maschera e la morte. Sulla categoria di impersonale, da una prospetiva storico-culturale Antonio Lucci 130 «Come i cirri delle piante rampicanti». Ruyer e lo spazio dell’impersonale Veronica Cavedagna – Daniele Poccia 3 Philosophy Kitchen #5 — Anno 3 — Settembre 2016 — ISSN: 2385-1945 — L’impersonale. Si pensa, si sente, si crea 143 Una vita come campo trascendentale impersonale. La ricezione deleuziana di Ruyer Natascia Tosel 170 Istituzione e processi di individuazione. Per una ecologia dell’impersonale Prisca Amoroso – Gianluca De Fazio 193 L’inquietudine bestiale: he lobster come esperienza dell’impersonale Emilia Marra D. PROPOSTE E. ESTETICHE 157 Demons of the Anthropocene. Facing Bruno Latour’s Gaia Federico Luisetti 184 L’art, avec et contre l’être. Levinas-Deleuze Pierre Montebello 4 Philosophy Kitchen #5 — Anno 3 — Settembre 2016 — ISSN: 2385-1945 — L’impersonale. Si pensa, si sente, si crea D. Proposte 157 Demons of the Anthropocene. Facing Bruno Latour’s Gaia Federico Luisetti 170 Istituzione e processi di individuazione. Per una ecologia dell’impersonale Prisca Amoroso – Gianluca De Fazio 156 Philosophy Kitchen #5 — Anno 3 — Settembre 2016 — ISSN: 2385-1945 — L’impersonale. Si pensa, si sente, si crea Demons of the Anthropocene. Facing Bruno Latour’s Gaia Federico Luisetti As proposed in 2012 by the 3th International Geological Congress, the Anthropocene is the geological epoch of the Quaternary Period following the Holocene, the age that accounts for the transformation of humans into a force shaping the Earth, and of human actions into a geological phenomenon. Current debates on the Anthropocene are introducing new igures of impersonality, modes of political agency that are shaking the certainties of modern political philosophy. A key protagonist of this epistemic turn is Gaia, the Earth, the Greek Mother of most Western gods. Borrowing from James Lovelock’s Gaia Hypothesis and addressing the Earth beyond the organisms/environments, humans/nonhumans divide, Bruno Latour has turned Lovelock’s planetary vitalism into the cornerstone of a new state of nature. Latour’s Gaia is a philosophical demon replacing Hobbes’s Leviathan and introducing a new political theology of nature. As in Roberto Esposito’s biopolitical naturalism, Gaia’s archaic relations with things and bodies suggest a return of animist and totemist paradigms and confront political philosophy with unprecedented questions. LATOUR ANIMISM POLITICS GAIA ESPOSITO ANTHROPOCENE 157 Philosophy Kitchen #5 — Anno 3 — Settembre 2016 — ISSN: 2385-1945 — L’impersonale. Si pensa, si sente, si crea Demons of the Anthropocene. Facing Bruno Latour’s Gaia — Federico Luisetti The Festival of the Supreme Being, by Pierre-Antoine Demarchy (1794) I survived the savageness of civilization Rosa Chávez (K’iche’/Kaqchikel Maya) 158 Philosophy Kitchen #5 — Anno 3 — Settembre 2016 — ISSN: 2385-1945 — L’impersonale. Si pensa, si sente, si crea Animism Revisited Demons of the Anthropocene. Facing Bruno Latour’s Gaia — Federico Luisetti he current debates on the Anthropocene are introducing new igures of impersonality, modes of political agency that are shaking the certainties of modern political philosophy. 1 1 Since the publication of Dipesh essay (Chakrabarty, A signiicant example is the collective desire to re- Chakrabarty’s 2009), the geological term place Hobbes’s Leviathan with other political myths, Anthropocene has captured the of a large community of thus introducing new states of nature and socie- attention scholars, promoting a widesprety, other conigurations of subjectivity detached ad debate that is reconiguring distribution of human, techfrom the dualism of natural impersonality and hu- the nological, and natural agencies. man intentionality. As noted by Donna Haraway, For a recent assessment of thethe Anthropocene, as well as the Capitalocene, and se debates see Moore (2016). Haraway’s own demonological term Chthulucene, are atempts to name planetary phenomena, emerging states of nature and society populated by ferocious gods, by “promising and non-innocent monsters” (Haraway, 1990, p. 14). A key protagonist of this epistemic turn is Gaia, a poetical form of Gē, the primal Earth goddess, the Greek Mother of most Western gods. Departing from the original 1970s formulations of Gaia theory by British atmospheric scientist James Lovelock and American evolutionary theorist Lynn Margulis, who introduced Gaia as the igure of our “living planet”, a description of the Earth as a vital, self-regulating cybernetic system with homeostatic tendencies, two signiicant, although divergent philosophical cults of Gaia have emerged in recent years: one introduced by Isabelle Stengers, the other promoted by Bruno Latour in several essays and most notably in his 2013 Giford Lectures on the political theology of nature. 2 he 2014 Rio de Janeiro conference he housand Names of Gaia: From the 2 See Stengers (2015) and Latour The English text is avaiAnthropocene to the Age of the Earth, organized by (2015). lable only as an unpublished draft Eduardo Viveiros de Castro and Bruno Latour, has on Latour’s website (http://www. Facing Gaia: Six then institutionalized the convergence of Gaia par- bruno-latour.fr/): lectures on the political theology of adigms and the Anthropocenic vocabulary, popular- nature. Being the Gifford Lectures Natural Religion. Edinburgh, izing an inluencial lexicon of vitalist impersonalism on 18th-28th of February 2013. and political animism. 3 3 See https://thethousandnamesofgaia.wordpress.com/ Having invented them four centuries ago, Western intellectuals know what to do with the “savages” and their “fetishes” (Landucci, 2014). So it’s no surprise that they can balance their fear and fascination, synthetize their colonial impulses and decolonial conscience, dialecticize anthropological abhorrence and religious guilt, retool them thorough mechanisms of inclusive exclusion, and project the primitivistic conceptual fantasies that have dominated the cultural vocabulary of Western modernity, from Hobbes and Rousseau to Bataille, LéviStrauss, Deleuze-Guatari and Latour: the state of nature of social contract theory, avant-garde barbarism, savage mind anthropology, poststructuralist nomadology, and nowadays Gaia political epistemologies. 4 Latour’s cult of Gaia and appeal to the “fac- 4 Neopaganisms, new age ocWicca practices, antish gods” (Latour, 2010) is a temperate form of primi- cultisms, archo-primitivisms, and rewildtivism, a rationalistic neopagan mythology predicat- ing movements can also be seen grassroots expressions of the ed upon his diagnosis of the repressed, nonpersonal as discontent with the state of nafeatures of Western modernity. 5 Contemporary ge- ture of Western modernity. On opolitics requires according to Latour a new geophi- the contemporary discourse of 159 Philosophy Kitchen #5 — Anno 3 — Settembre 2016 — ISSN: 2385-1945 — L’impersonale. Si pensa, si sente, si crea Demons of the Anthropocene. Facing Bruno Latour’s Gaia — Federico Luisetti losophy, a description of «the world as we now see barbarism see Boletsi (2013). it through nonmodern eyes» (Latour, 1993, p. 7). 5 On the resurgence of animism Latour is aware that «the West (Europe, at least, see Franke (2010), Lazzarato unquestionably) is inally in a situation of relative (2012) and Chen (2012). weakness» and that «Occidentals will have to be made present in a completely diferent way, irst to themselves, and then to the others» (Latour, 2013b, pp. 15-16). Not only decolonization has ofered a glimpse of what ontological pluralism may entail; most signiicantly, the weapons of “universalization, globalization, and modernizations” used by the West in its planetary war of conquest against traditions and superstitions, are now in the hands of the East and the South, ready to be mobilized agaist their former masters (ivi, p. 485). Latour portrays himself (and) as the High Commissioner of Western Epistemology, a sorcerer-diplomat dedicated to reversing the decline of Western universalism and introducing a new constituent lingua franca, «in preparation for the times when we shall no longer be in a position of strength and when the others will be the ones purporting to “modernize” – but in the old way and, as it were, without us» (ivi, p.16). Latour’s “recalling of modernity” is not the acceleration of the demise of the West but, on the contrary, an extension of its modernizing impulse (ivi, p. 15). Revisiting the founding categories of the ‘modern adventure’, preparing a realistic “inventory of the Moderns’ legacy”, and mobilizing comparative anthropology in order to undertake an “anthropology of the Moderns” are necessary steps that will allow to redesign the postnatural state of nature of the Earth (ivi, pp. 14-17). For Latour, the only hope remained to the West for “facing Gaia” and siting at the table negotiations with the world powers of the future, is to accept its nonmodernity. Since the conluence of the lexicon of savagery and naturalness has allowed the state of nature conceptuality to achieve its paradigmatic dominance in Western philosophical discourse, it is important to understand how this constellation has built its hidden articulation, subtle pervasiveness, and all-encompassing eicacy. In We Have Never Been Modern, Latours characterizes the epistemic separation of humans and nonhumans as the fundamental Great Divide of Western modernity: on the one side, the transcendence of an indiferent, a-human, in-human or extra-human nature, the impersonal mater and mysterious energy of a segregated nonhuman life; on the other side, the cultural sphere, historicity, and social interactions (Latour, 1993, pp. 10-12). Subjected to an endless play of transcendence and immanence, the nature of the moderns is deined by spontaneity or causal determinism, while the human dimension is perceived as a locus of freedom or social necessity, will or fate. And yet, for all their dialectic reversals, these series are always heterogeneous, mutually exclusive. Latour argues that, although the institutional organization of knowledge relects the split between nonhumans and humans, the conceptual chasm between two hermetically sealed ontological regions is constantly overcome by technical and scientiic activity, by the proliferation of hybrids that are neither natural nor human: unthinkable in-betweens such as the communication technologies and the biopolitical regimes of contemporary capitalism. 6 Western modernity’s dual- 6 Among the quasi-objects menby Latour are also «frozen istic constitution multiplies semi-technical objects, tioned embryos, expert systems, diginature-culture assemblages, while simultaneously tal machines, sensor-equipped concealing its presuppositions. he radical separa- robots, hybrid corn, data banks, 160 Philosophy Kitchen #5 — Anno 3 — Settembre 2016 — ISSN: 2385-1945 — L’impersonale. Si pensa, si sente, si crea Demons of the Anthropocene. Facing Bruno Latour’s Gaia — Federico Luisetti tion of nonhumans and humans is the “unconscious psychotropic drugs, whales outwith radar sounding deviof the moderns”, what is masked although it simul- itted ces, gene synthesizers, audience taneously presides over the production of uncatego- analyzers» (Latour, 1993, p. 49). rizable nature-culture mixtures: «Everything happens in the middle, everything passes between the two, everything happens by way of mediation, translation and network, but this space does not exist, it has no place» (ivi, p. 37). Nature, which is theoretically a thing-in-itself and a dehumanized ield of forces and events, is continuously mobilized by technosciences and biotechnologies, manipulated and exploited, constructed and reshaped while remaining unthinkable and inaccessible. he Great Divide of human and nonhumans is for Latour an internal partition, a phantasmatic issure internal to Western modernity’s self-consciousness. hrough an operation of epistemic puriication, already at work in Hobbes’s state of nature, this civilizational narration generates a hallucinatory purity divorced from all other collectives, which are reconigured as disturbing arrangements of humans and nonhumans, sorcerers’s fetishes. 7 he colonial fracture between political so- 7 «Moderns do differ from premodby this single trait: they refuse ciety and premodern states of nature, the Western erns to conceptualize quasi-objects as Hemisphere and the rest, is for Latour the other side such. In their eyes, hybrids present horror that must be avoided at of the nature/culture divide: a ictional and yet con- the all costs by a ceaseless, even macrete universal, which holds together the violence niacal puriication» (ivi, p. 112). of colonial domination and an ethnographic museum of animisms and totemisms, idolatry and epistemic confusion. Modernity is not a Weltgeist but the grammar of a process of modernization perpetrated by the moderns. By charging all premodern collectives of «making a horrible mishmash of things and humans, of objects and signs» (ivi, p. 39). Western modernity elects itself, in its multiple self-fashioned guises, as a planetary destiny: a triumph of humanism and technicity, historicism and positivism, liberal democracy and economicism. his distribution of subjects and things, nature and culture, is questioned by Latour’s posthumanistic principles. From the point of observation of quasi-objects, mixed realities of subjective and material things, nature and society occupy a symmetrical position that explain nothing and instead need to be explained as the outcome of real mediations. Once the ethnographer positions herself in this in-between territory, she suddenly witnesses the evaporation of all tenets of Western modernity: premoderns stop being opposed to moderns; the extrahuman nature of the moderns ceases to be alienated from the interiority of culture; premodern worlds, in which nature and society are confused and mismatched by totemic and animistic ainities, do not stand anymore against the rational present of scientistic reason. 8 In the postnatural age documented by Latour’s an- 8 «Real as Nature, narrated as collective as Society, thropology of the Moderns, the “beings of meta- Discourse, existential as Being: such are the morphosis” of psychotropic phenomena and the en- quasi-objects that the moderns hachanted objects of contemporary technology are ve caused to proliferate» (ivi, p. 90). endowed with a threatening kind of archaic naturalness. 9 hings have become unsetling monsters, 9 «Since we can’t live an instant the help and menace of the an assembly of preoccupations and desires, a demon without being of metamorphosis, couldn’t that “interrupts any progression” (Latour, 2005a, p. we inally recognize them in all arrangements charged with 30). Nature, «instead of being a huge reservoir of the taking them in rather than feeling forces and botomless repository of waste», now ap- obliged to insult invisible beings 161 Philosophy Kitchen #5 — Anno 3 — Settembre 2016 — ISSN: 2385-1945 — L’impersonale. Si pensa, si sente, si crea Demons of the Anthropocene. Facing Bruno Latour’s Gaia — Federico Luisetti pears as a pandemonium, a phantom, populated by and explore the inner depths of the specter of emancipated colonial savages and en- the ego?» (Latour, 2013b, p. 482). igmatic quasi-objects (ivi, p. 15). In the realm of politics, traditional legal and philosophical categories are confronted by puzzling arrangements, by uncanny techno-social fetishes demanding new assemblies. hings of all kinds gather and pertain, concern and question. hey are not the usual objects, a calculable mater of fact, but unstable beings, automated or catatonic, endowed with demands and needs or empty and passive. «Scientiic laboratories, technical institutions, marketplaces, churches and temples, inancial trading rooms, Internet forums, ecological disputes» are the quasi-subjects of a contemporary, nonmodern Dingpolitik (ivi, p. 22). Latour asks that we recognize the archaic features of Western modernity, while simultaneously claiming the right to address, comparatively, the “savageness” of non-European modes of existence (Latour, 2013b, p. 11). his crucial tenet explains why, for accomplishing his «re-anthropologization» of the modern world (Latour, 2010, p. 133), Latour insistently appeals, against the decolonial critiques of ethnographic reason, to the methods of “comparative anthropology” (Latour, 2013b, p. 15). As in Félix Guatari’s “machinic animism” (Melitopoulos–Lazzarato, 2012a), Latour’s political animism is both an extension of Western subjectivity beyond the dualisms of persons and things and the manifesto of an «artiicial alliance between animism and materialism» 10 (Viveiros de Castro in Melitopoulos– 10 «If I understand Guattari, the irst thing to do is to cut off the reLazzarato, 2012a, p. 242). lation between the subject and the A premature postcolonial guilt must not, human. Thus subjectivity is not a of humanity. The subject is according to Latour, obstruct the ethnographic in- synonym a thing, the human is another thing. ventory of fetishes surviving in contemporary modes The subject is an objective function one can ind deposited on the of existence. Western moderns too oten “misunder- that surface of everything. […] That is stand idols and idolatry”, separating as diferences how it is for Amazonians. For them, subject is a way to describe the in kind what are, instead, just diferences in degree the behavior and attitude of things, just (Latour, 2013b, p. 166). he Mosaic division between as for us, objectivation is a way describe things in this sense» fetishes and facts, idols and rationality, archaisms to (Interview with Eduardo Viveiros and science, can be overcome exclusively by redis- de Castro, in Melitopoulos– covering the idolatric practices of the West, not by Lazzarato, 2012b, p. 4). destroying the idols and fetishes of the colonial others, and banning their sorcerers, phantasms, and metamorphoses. he problem of Western modernity is its rareied consciousness, the denial of its occult powers and exorcising practices, the repression of its hybrid beings and nonhuman demons, the neutralization of its cosmological imagination and prelinguistics rituals. When the Occidentals’ iconoclasm is unmasked as an immunitarian gesture against “savage thought”, 11 when the common anthropological matrix of transformations be- 11 «Beyond every question of epislies another question: tween humans and nonhumans is revelead, when temology what to do with the idols or fetsorcerers and scientists are placed in a horizontal ishes? This is the most striking of the anthropology of the plane of relations and mediations, then also the dis- feature Moderns: they believe that they tinction between facts and fetishes disappears, re- are anti-idolators and antifetplaced by the power and complexity of “factish” rit- ishists» (Latour, 2013b, p. 165). uals and technologies: «I ind more accuracy in my lactic acid ferment if I shine the light of the Condomblé divinities on it. In the common world of comparative anthropology, lights cross paths» (Latour, 2010, 162 Philosophy Kitchen #5 — Anno 3 — Settembre 2016 — ISSN: 2385-1945 — L’impersonale. Si pensa, si sente, si crea A Political heology of Nature «hree centuries of total freedom up to the irruption of the world in the form of the Earth, of Gaia: a return of unanticipated consequences; the end of the modernist parenthesis» (ivi, p. 176). his Nietzschean sentence captures the latest installment of Bruno Latour’s reenchantment: his “political theology of nature”, his humorous preaching of a philosophical cult of Gaia, 12 the Mother Earth of the Greeks, the «chton- 12 «Since we are assembled for a of political, scientiic, and anic divinity much older than Olympian gods and god- sort thropological ritual in order to redesses» (Latour, 2014, p.1). Borrowing from James view, utter, celebrate, list, enlarge, down, pin point, conjoin Lovelock’s Gaia Hypothesis (Lovelock, 2000) and narrow or compose the Thousand Names addressing the Earth and its people beyond the or- of Gaia» (Latour, 2014, p. 1). ganisms/environments, humans/nonhumans divide, Latour turns Lovelock’s planetary vitalism into the cornerstone of a new state of nature. Lovelock’s Gaia is a scientist’s description of the «largest living creature on Earth», a self-regulating «entity involving the Earth’s biosphere, atmosphere, oceans and soil» (ivi, pp. 1, 11). In contrast to the conventional principles of natural sciences, Gaia is the Earth considered as a living assemblage, in which biological life extends its inluence and models to its advantage the physical and chemical conditions of the surface of the Earth. he atmosphere, according to Lovelock, is an extension of the biosphere, Demons of the Anthropocene. Facing Bruno Latour’s Gaia — Federico Luisetti p. 66). Political animism is for Latours «a revision of the critical spirit, a pause in the critique» (ivi, p. 81). the entire range of living mater on Earth, from whales to viruses, and from oaks to algae, could be regarded as constituting a single living entity, capable of manipulating the Earth’s atmosphere to suit its overall needs and endowed with faculties and powers that far beyond those of its constituent parts. (ivi, p. 9) Latour embraces enthusiastically Lovelock’s Gaia Hypothesis, reformulating its straight-forward vitalism according to his posthumanistic principles. For Latour the size, nonhumanity, and yet anthropic connotations of Gaia mark the end of modernity and its categories. Gaia is a trick for resisting «the temptation to jump to the global» (Latour, 2005b, p. 174), the goddess of a secular philosophical religion, the object of an airmative ritual, what comes ater the deconstruction of the anthropocentric categories carried on by the last humanists. Compositions, assemblages, morphings of entities that were previously separated by the divide between nature and society, invocations of forgoten myths as contemporary forces: Latour’s Gaia cult is the manifesto of a nonmodern political philosophy of nature. As proposed in 2012 by the 3th International Geological Congress, the Anthropocene is the geological epoch of the Quaternary Period following the Holocene, the age that accounts for the transformation of humans into a force shaping the Earth, and of human actions into a geological phenomenon. Latour overlaps his Gaia rituals and the geohistorical features of the Anthropocene. he Anthropocene is «the most decisive philosophical, religious, anthropological and […] political concept yet produced as an alternative to the very notions of “Modern” and “modernity”» (Latour, 2013a, p. 77). Since modes of existence on 163 Philosophy Kitchen #5 — Anno 3 — Settembre 2016 — ISSN: 2385-1945 — L’impersonale. Si pensa, si sente, si crea he Great Artiicial Leviathan Latour’s Gaia rescues Hobbes’s categories, extending and globalizing political theology through a new theology of nature, taking advantage of a planetary ecological crisis for reairming the hegemony of a European State philosophy. 13 Latour’s invoca- 13 On the contrary, Stengers’s «Gaia the Intruder», a «form tion of Gaia’s many epithets – ‘Gaia-Enigma’, ‘Gaia- Gaia, of transcendence» that is «inhousand Folds’, ‘Gaia-he Recalcitrant’, ‘Gaia-he different to our reasons and our (Stengers, 2015, p. 47) Incomposable’, ‘Gaia the Uncommon-Commons’ etc. projects» emerges from radical ecofemi(Latour, 2014) –, with its mixture of grotesque aes- nisms and feminist witchcraft 2016). Stengers’s Gaia is a thetics, politicized ontology, and ethnographic sur- (Tola, deconstruction of the very idea realism, can be seen as a Collège de Sociologie-like of the Human (including Latour’s a challenge to the program, embracing the positivist lexicon of actor/ anthropos), Anthropocene and the political network theory. Gaia’s airmative energy, her “mys- ecologies of Western humanity. tical and mechanical”, compositionist labor, may also be interpreted as a reenactment of the French philosophies of nature of Bergson, Tarde and Merleau-Ponty, as an atempt to prolong their legacy beyond the conceptual solutions of Deleuze and Serres. We could also look back to Rousseau’s deism and Robespierre’s Cult of the Supreme Being, recalling the festivals that celebrated this new rationalistic divinity, and approaching Latour’s Gaia an a neo-Enlightenment, statist secular mythology. his genealogy would explain Latour’s unapologetic return to European political theology and his proud revitalization, through his political theology of nature, of the discourse of sovereignty, in opposition to the biopolitical, post-Foucaultian 14 For a biopolitical critique of pophilosophies of life. 14 Most likely, the fascination exerted by litical theology see Esposito (2015). Latour’s Gaia results from the coexistence of heterogeneous motifs, uniied by the overarching atempt to rethink the apparatus of our contemporary state of nature: «Since politics has always been conducted under the auspices of nature, we have never let the state of nature» (Latour, 2004, p. 235). Latour takes up Michel Serres’s programmatic return to Hobbes and ambition to rewrite the social contract as a “natural contract” (Serres, 1995). Gaia sets the stage for a new political epistemology, disclosing «a new state of nature» that is nothing else than a generalized state of war: «a war of all against all, in which the protagonists may now be not only wolf and sheep, but also tuna ish as well as CO2, sea levels, plant nodules or algae, in addition to the many diferent factions of ighting humans» (Latour, 2013a, p. 103). As in Serres and Hobbes, the state of nature is conceived by Latour as a primitive state of war, which requires the invention of a Leviathan as the necessary «civilizational» gesture that restores the legal framework provided by the social contract: «we realize that we can not obtain a civilized collective without composing it […] thus searching for a new Leviathan that would come to grasp with Gaia» (ivi, p. 104). Like Behemoth, the Biblical monster that frames Hobbes’s history of the English civil war, Gaia must be tamed by a new Leviathan, since she is the goddess of our contemporary ecological state of nature. Demons of the Anthropocene. Facing Bruno Latour’s Gaia — Federico Luisetti the planet cannot be captured by topologies of continuous volumes, the subjects summoned by Gaia must abandon the spell of global metaphors and, instead, face the convoluted and conlictual loops of Earth phenomena, take responsibility for the fragmented spaces and tense political geometry of the Anthropocene. 164 Philosophy Kitchen #5 — Anno 3 — Settembre 2016 — ISSN: 2385-1945 — L’impersonale. Si pensa, si sente, si crea Demons of the Anthropocene. Facing Bruno Latour’s Gaia — Federico Luisetti Serres’s Hobbesian imaginary casts a long shadow also on the Gaia myth, which reenacts almost literally its unapologetic Eurocentrism and colonial lexicon: the state of war of every man against every man as a primitive condition to be overcome by the civilizational pact, violence as an immemorial state of nature that can reemerge and threaten the stability of the commonwealth. 15 Latour pushes Serres’s 15 «Suddenly we are returning to most ancient times, whose meendeavor even further, casting himself as the new the mory has been preserved only in Hobbes, the rescuer of Western political theolo- and through the ideas of philowho theorize the law, times gy, the demiurge of a new Leviathan. Latour com- sophers when our cultures, saved by a conpetes with Carl Schmit for the title of high-priest of tract, invented our history, which is by forgetting the state that Western political theology, updating Schmit’s po- deined preceded it» (Serres, 1995, p. 14). litical millenarism with his “prophylactic” use of the Apocalypse (ivi, p. 111), the brutes of Hobbes with the savage naturalism and posthuman archaisms of science-studies. 16 Gaia «commands, orders, binds» 16 «To understand why this state war has been generalized, it is as the secular religion of «a non-existing people» of best to turn to the writer who has (ivi, pp. 136, 142). She does not (yet) possess the deined this situation as being one, he calls it, of exception: the tox«legal quality of the res publica, of the State, of the as ic and unavoidable Carl Scmitt, great artiicial Leviathan of Hobbes’s invention» (ivi, the main expositor of “political p. 136) but her neutralizing function is the same: theology”» (Latour, 2013a, p. 101). «just as Hobbes needed the state of nature to get to the social contract, we might need to accept a new state of war to envision the State of peace» (ivi, p. 114). What I ind troubling in Latour’s Gaia is the rewesternizing impulse. Political animism is not, as such, a regressive neocolonial movement, a statist secular religion. 17 Several 17 Latour distances himselfs with emphasis from all the irindigenous and decolonial thinkers are recovering great rationalistic forms of paganism nonmodern categories and ethnographic tools (see and ethnographic primitivism. «reactionary movements of for instance Nandy, 2004 and Tuhiwai Smith, 2015). The the twentieth century» praising Only those who have overstated the hegemony paganism are «horribly mistakabout what they adore and what and coherence of Western categories may believe en they abhor». Their depiction of the that politics requires only a self-fashioned ration- life of «the savages» is based on most prosaic exoticism» and alism. he revision of the society/nature, contempo- «the hate of reason. Latour considers rary/archaic, civilized/savages oppositions imposed instead his political animism as of hyper-rationalism, and by techno-scientiic networks and dewesternizing ahisform European/universal reason as movements is revealing a lifeworld in which politi- «the most civilized, most reined, socialized, most localized, cal ecologies and indigenous knowledges cohabit, most and most collective form of life disclosing alliances between decolonial movements there is» (Latour, 2010, p. 133). and internal critiques of Western modernity. 18 he 18 On decolonial relations to nadanger is Latour’s reairmation of a Eurocentric ture see Escobar (2009, pp. 111-155). state of nature, with the Anthropocenic goddess of nature Gaia replacing Hobbes’s savages and “a new civilized collective” – the institutions assembled for administering the cult of Gaia and addressing the new wars of the Anthropocene – prolonging Hobbes’s Leviathanic thinking and artiicial commonwealth. States of Nature he nonmodern traits captured by Latour’s Gaia show a deep ainity with the naturalistic orientation of Roberto Esposito’s biopolitics (Luiseti, 2016). In 165 Philosophy Kitchen #5 — Anno 3 — Settembre 2016 — ISSN: 2385-1945 — L’impersonale. Si pensa, si sente, si crea Demons of the Anthropocene. Facing Bruno Latour’s Gaia — Federico Luisetti Persons and hings, Esposito highlights the procedures of puriication carried out by the axiological opposition of persons and things, arguing that the body, in its manifold individual and collective occurences, presides over a vertiginous multiplication of splitings and hierarchizations. Persons and things are the juridical and theological operators of an anthropotechnical device of exclusion and subordination; they reproduce the summa divisio of Roman law’s res/persona and Christian theology’s lesh/spirit. hinking through Nietzsche and Benjamin, Mauss and Latour, Simondon and Sloterdjik, Persons and hings thematizes the «archaic and postmodern encounter of persons that are not persons anymore with things that are not things anymore» (Esposito, 2014, p. 102, my English translations). he transindividual territory of the body guarantees the spatial condition of possibility for a new alliance between things and persons, nature and history, science and politics; it also ofers an alternative temporal vector, the contemporaneity of a premodern connection of subjects and things: «this is a sagital relation between origin and completion, the archaic and the actual […] that forces the historian, and even more the philosopher, to look beyond the most visible threshold of discontinuity» (ivi, p. 99). Esposito’s “sagital relation” between chronological strata of history cuts through the ictional linearity of history, linking apparently unrelated phenomena that belong to non-contemporaneous times. Esposito’s genealogical method, which projects the premodern onto the contemporary, functions as a non-historicist description of cultural history. It corresponds to Latour’s generalized “principle of symmetry”, to a bracketing of of nature and society and programmatic centering of philosophical investigation on the “Middle Kingdom” of quasi-objects and quasi-subjects that proliferate through bodies and technological artifacts. As in Latour, the nonmodern plane of immanence of things reappears according to Esposito when the ontological dualisms of modernity dissipate, when the mythography of Nature and Society is replaced by a materialistic look on the plethora of sociotechnological networks. Esposito exposes Western philosophical tradition to the same “Copernican counter-revolution” called for by Latour’s “symmetrical anthropology” (Latour, 1993, p. 91), unleashing the nonmodernity of modern times and restituting subjectivity and intentionality to the silent realm of things: «in Brahmanic culture, the thing speak in irst person […] the place where the power of the thing is exercised, and before that it is metamorphosed into a person, is the body of individuals and communities, of which it becomes an internal component» (Esposito, 2014, p. 97). For both Latour and Eposito the asymmetry between nature and culture is thus a phantasmagoria that must be dispelled by a critique of Western epistemology. When the bodily mixtures of things regain their protagonism, dissolving the nature/society divide, the historical relation of past and present gives way to a non-historicist composition of archaism and actuality, of animated things and impersonal subjects. 19 Latour’s Gaia and Esposito’s biopolitical 19 From these premises, Latour the conclusion that a new naturalism, their embrace of archaic relations with draws kind of political imagination, a things, bodies, and subjects, suggest a return within Dingpolitik accompanying his Gaia and destituting the Realpolitik Western thought of animist and totemist paradigms. cult of modern political philosophy must In order to recognize the implications of this epis- be introduced (Latour, 2005a). temic shit, we need to carefully distinguish the generalization of mental properties, “souls”, and internal psychic states atempted 166 Philosophy Kitchen #5 — Anno 3 — Settembre 2016 — ISSN: 2385-1945 — L’impersonale. Si pensa, si sente, si crea human, in the attempt of thematizing the animacy of nonhuman beings. Current debates on new materialisms, speculative realisms, neo-vitalist transcendentalisms, and other object-oriented ontological paradigms have thus recuperated the term ‘panpsychism’, suggesting the existence of a Western animistic philosophia perennis, centered on the idea that «mind is a fundamental property of matter itself» and «thinking happens everywhere» (Shaviro, 2015, p. 20). Demons of the Anthropocene. Facing Bruno Latour’s Gaia — Federico Luisetti by neo-animistic perspectives from the interspecies continuity of both physicalities and interiorities presupposed by vitalist and totemic epistemologies. 20 he animist extention of 20 On animism as a political catfor decolonial thought and subjective qualities to natural objects and the lat- egory poststructuralist philosophy see tening of the «distinction between humans and oth- Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s «canmetaphysics» (Viveiros de er kinds of beings, as well as those between selves nibal Castro, 2014). On the epistemoloand objects» (Kohn, 2013, p. 7) diverges profound- gy of animism and totemism see (2013). On the converly from the political mobilization of totemic lifeless- Descola gence between totemic thought ness and the inert (Povinelli, 2016). As a igure of the and the transindividual, see (2014). Analytic philosemerging states of nature, Latour’s Gaia confronts Karsenti ophy has tried as well to extend “mental properties” beyond the political philosophy with unprecedented questions. 167 Philosophy Kitchen #5 — Anno 3 — Settembre 2016 — ISSN: 2385-1945 — L’impersonale. Si pensa, si sente, si crea Boletsi, M. (2013). Barbarism and its Discontents. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Chakrabarty, D. (2009). he Climate of History. Critical Inquiry, 35 (3). Chen, M.Y. (2012). Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Matering, and Queer Afect. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Descola, P. (2013). Beyond Nature and Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Escobar, A. (2009). Territories of Diference. Place, Movements, Life, Redes. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Esposito, R. (2014). Le persone e le cose. Torino: Einaudi. Id. (2015). Two. he Machine of Political heology and the Place of hought. New York: Fordham University Press. Franke, A. (2010). Animism. Berlin-New York: Sternberg Press. Haraway, D. (1990). Siminas, Cyborgs, and Women: he Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge. Id. (2016). Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Kohn, E. (2013). How Forests hink: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Karsenti, B. (2014). Il totemismo rivisitato. In E. Balibar – V. Morino (Eds.), Il transindividuale. Soggeti, relazioni, mutazioni. Milano: Mimesis. Landucci, S. (2014, new edition). I ilosoi e i selvaggi. Torino: Einaudi. Latour, B. (1993). We Have Never Been Modern. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Id. (2004). Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences Into Democracy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Id. (2005a). From Realpolitik to Dingpolitik – An Introduction to Making hings Public. In B. Latour – B. Weibel (Eds.), Making hings Public: Atmospheres of Democracy. Catalogue of the show at ZKM. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Id. (2005b). Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-heory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Id. (2010). On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Id. (2013a). Facing Gaia: Six lectures on the political theology of nature. Being the Giford Lectures on Natural Religion. Edinburgh, 18th-28th of February 2013. Id. (2013b). An Inquiry Into Modes of Existence. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Id. (2014). How to Make Sure Gaia is Not a God of Totality? (htp://bruno-latour.fr/ sites/default/iles/138-THOUSAND-NAMES.pdf) Id. (2015). Face à Gaïa. Huit conférences sur le nouveau régime climatique. Paris: Éditions La Découverte. Lazzarato, M. (2012). Animism: Modernity through the Looking Glass. Köln: Walther König. Lovelock, J. (2000). Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Luiseti, F. (2016). From Biopolitics to Political Animism. Roberto Esposito’s hings. In A. Calcagno – I. Viriasova (Eds.), Roberto Esposito: Biopolitics and Demons of the Anthropocene. Facing Bruno Latour’s Gaia — Federico Luisetti Bibliography 168 Philosophy Kitchen #5 — Anno 3 — Settembre 2016 — ISSN: 2385-1945 — L’impersonale. Si pensa, si sente, si crea Demons of the Anthropocene. Facing Bruno Latour’s Gaia — Federico Luisetti Philosophy. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, forthcoming. Melitopoulos, A. – Lazzarato, M. (2012a). Machinic Animism. Deleuze Studies, 6 (2). Id. (2012b). Assemblages: Félix Guatari and Machinic Animism. e-lux, 36 (7). Moore, J.W. (Ed.) (2016). Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism. Oakland, CA: PM Press. Nandy, A. (2004). Bonire of Creeds. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Povinelli, E. (2016). Geontologies. A Requiem to Later Liberalism. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Serres, M. (1995). he Natural Contract. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Shaviro, S. (2015). Consequences of Panpsychism. In R. Grusin (Ed.), he Nonhuman Turn. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Stengers, I. (2015). In Catastrophic Times: Resisting the Coming Barbarism. Open Humanities Press. Tola, M. (2016). Composing with Gaia: Isabelle Stengers and the Feminist Politics of the Earth. PhaenEx: Journal of Existential and Phenomenological heory and Culture, 1. Tuhiwai Smith, L. (2015), Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. London: Zed Books. Viveiros de Castro, E. (2014). Cannibal Metaphysics. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. 169 Philosophy Kitchen #5 Anno 3 Settembre 2016 ISSN: 2385-1945 Philosophy Kitchen Rivista di ilosoia contemporanea Università degli Studi di Torino Via Sant'Otavio, 20 - 10124 Torino tel: +39 011/6708236 cell: +39 348/4081498 [email protected] ISSN: 2385-1945 www.philosophykitchen.com Redazione Giovanni Leghissa — Direttore Mauro Balestreri Veronica Cavedagna Alberto Giustiniano Carlo Molinar Min Giulio Piati Claudio Tarditi Nicolò Triacca Danilo Zagaria Collaboratori Andrea Michael Chiarenza Samuel Re Sara Zagaria Progeto graico Gabriele Fumero Comitato Scientiico Tiziana Andina, Alberto Andronico, Giandomenica Becchio, Mauro Carbone, Michele Cometa, Martina Corgnati, Gianluca Cuozzo, Massimo De Carolis, Roberto Esposito, Arnaud François, Carlo Galli, Paolo Heritier, Jean Leclercq, Romano Madera, Giovanni Mateucci, Enrico Pasini, Giangiorgio Pasqualoto, Annamaria Rivera, Claude Romano, Rocco Ronchi, Hans Reiner Sepp, Giacomo Todeschini, Ugo Ugazio, Marta Verginella, Paolo Vignola, Ugo Volli.