Geophilosophy

The Eurasianist movement launched a theory according to which Russia does not belong to
Europe but forms, together with its Asian colonies, a separate continent named ‘‘Eurasia’’ whose Eastern
border is the Pacific Ocean. Similarily, in the early 1920s, Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi, the founder of the
Pan-European movement, developed, the idea of ‘‘Eurafrica.’’ I compare the writings of Coudenhove and
those of Nicolas S. Trubetzkoy and show how the idea of Europe was used as an anti-essentialist model of a
cultural community. Though both ‘‘Eurasia’’ and ‘‘Eurafrica’’ may be understood to express cultural and
economic imperialism, the sophistication with which both concepts are brought forward makes their interpretation
as simple derivatives of chauvinism impossible. Both Trubetzkoy and Coudenhove refuse national
‘‘egocentricity’’ which ‘‘destroys every form of cultural communication between human beings.’’ Above that,
Trubetzkoy and Coudenhove agree that cultural apogees have often come about through fusion. I discuss the
idea of ‘‘convergence’’ in the context of Bergson’s and Deleuze’s biophilosophies.

J’explique comment dans les années 1920, l’idée d’Europe a été employée pour construire un modèle anti-essentialiste de la communauté culturelle. En 1921, le mouvement eurasien lance une théorie, selon laquelle la Russie ne fait pas partie de l’Europe mais constitue, avec ses colonies asiatiques un continent séparé nommé « Eurasie » dont la frontière orientale est l’océan pacifique. Parallèlement, Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi (1894-1972) fonde le mouvement paneuropéen qui tombera dans l’oubli à partir des années cinquante, mais qui doit être considéré comme le mouvement fondateur de l’Union Européenne. En 1929, Coudenhove invente la notion d’« Eurafrique » comme version élargie de l’Europe incluant de même les colonies européennes. J'insiste sur le fait que Coudenhove et Trubetzkoy, un des représentants principaux de l’eurasianisme, affirment que les apogées culturelles ont souvent été le résultat d’une fusion.  Je mets aussi en avant des théories de la convergence culturelle.

Cet ouvrage invite à une lecture critique de la philosophie de Gilles Deleuze en reconstituant le système perspectiviste qui le sous-tend. La thèse qui est défendue est qu'on ne peut comprendre le « perspectivisme » deleuzien qu'au regard de sa théorie de la « structure Autrui », c'est-à-dire de son analyse des interactions avec l'autre. C'est le cas des premiers écrits de Deleuze, marqués par l'influence de Sartre et de Ferdinand Alquié, jusqu'à des textes plus tardifs, coécrits avec Félix Guattari. Chaque fois, l'autre est défini comme « l'expression d'un monde possible », c'est-à-dire comme celui qui perçoit ce que je ne perçois pas moi-même. C'est ce qui justifie une redéfinition d'autrui en termes de « disjonction de perspectives » ou de « perspective alternative ». Afin d'évaluer l'intérêt d'une telle redéfinition, l'auteur présente d'abord le système perspectiviste deleuzien à partir de la théorie de la « structure Autrui » qui le sous-tend. Puis il évalue les apports théoriques de ce modèle-que ce soit par rapport à un certain nombre de références canoniques ou en discutant les principaux commentateurs du corpus deleuzien, dans le champ francophone et anglosaxon. Enfin, il articule la théorie deleuzienne aux différentes approches contemporaines qui se revendiquent de la notion de « perspectivisme » pour en indiquer à la fois les points de contact et d'incompatibilité.

„Geophilosophie“ bedeutet zunächst ganz allgemein eine Betrachtung des Verhältnisses von Philosophie und Geowissenschaften (oder Erdwissenschaften) bzw. deren Gegenständen. Im Spezielleren weist das Kompositum auf den Umstand hin, dass entweder peripher oder oftmals aber im Zentrum jeder Philosophie ein explizites wie implizites Verhältnis zur ‚Erde‘ oder, neutraler, zu territorialen Begebenheiten besteht. – Insofern meint „Geophilosophie“ zuletzt vor allem eine kritische Perspektive, in der bislang zumeist als bloße Metaphorik ausgewiesene Anteile philosophischen Schreibens als zentral für deren Verständnis erachtet werden, insofern sie Hinweise auf verdeckte Ziele und kulturhistorische Rahmenbedingungen von Texten und Theorien enthalten.

The famous codification controversy of 1814 between Carl von Savigny and Anton Thibaut has been a turning point in the history of European legal culture. Starting form this remarkable and very passionate debate it is my intention to examine Savigny’s Beruf unserer Zeit für Gesetzgebung, stressing the importance of space and time in his thought. Even today it is a perspective that is very inspiring, being an excellent opportunity to think about the present. Moreover this brilliant pamphlet has raised the most important question of the relationship between the State, its constitution and its territory. In the following years, the issue of how political institutions are rooted in space has been crucial and still echoes in the debate about globalization.

In the following, I interpret Nietzsche according to Gilles Deleuze’s and Félix Guattari’s concept of ‘geophilosophy,’ a category they introduced into philosophical discourse in 1991. Deleuze and Guattari raised the question of the status of a geographical paradigm within the positioning of philosophical problems. They did this specifically with respect to the meaning of landscape metaphors, descriptions of the sea, and mountaineering analogies in philosophical texts. Their work redefines the utopian structure inherent in most philosophies (especially revolutionary theories) in a geographical context that usually persists in the presence of the absence of the place to come. This redefinition consists in the transformation of a temporal structure back into the spatial structure from which, they claim, it originally stemmed.

Order and Chaos are fundamental and archetypal concepts that allow us to understand and order reality. Thanks to the hermeneutic key which they offer, the paper addresses the relation between the tension towards order and stability and the indistinct and pre-formal original ontological dimension (distinct from disorder) within the study of the philosophy of places. Some more specific declinations of this question will be explored along the trajectory that, starting from sacred geography and Genius loci figure, leads to contemporary disciplines such as geophilosophy and geopolitics.

Whilst Deleuze and Parnet discard French literature from all aspects of deterritorialization or even reterritorialization in favour to North American literature, Pélagie-la-Charrette as a Canadian literary work sets new ideals for both French but also Francophone realms. Quebec as a territory has a rich and violent history on the threshold of acceptance and submission, culturally but mostly ontologically. The novel narrates the story of Pélagie, an Acadian woman who has suffered many years of pain under a British cotton plantation owner and finally breaks free from his dominance. In the spirit of any voyage novel, Pélagie experiences and exposes herself as well as her family and friends to the traditional tropes but especially the question of origin. Her only means of transportation is an ox cart whose wheels grinds the earth, get stuck in mud or snow, break down and need to be replaced. It becomes a metaphor for her journey, what Deleuze calls ‘becoming’ but it also becomes an observation desk for us, giving us a view to the changes of the mere term of “earth” to a synonym of “home”, this grounding desire to claim our own origin.

The invention of new forms of geo-social knowledge has become one of the imperatives for  resisting the so-called Anthropocene.
Critical theorists have called for enhanced interdisciplinarity collaborations between the earth sciences and the social sciences and humanities to disrupt conventional nature/culture divisions
and imagine more sustainable futures. The condition for such geo-social encounters, the argument goes, is the politicization of the geosciences, or the correction of their abstracted modes of knowing. Inspired by feminist science studies and geophilosophies, in this article I follow geophysicists to find in their encounters with lithic
things alternative modes of knowledge production. By tracking ethnographically their scientific practices, I try to render visible the pragmatics of the abstractions through which they attempt at
apprehending inhuman elements and processes. Particularly, I identify two geophysical operations. First, what I call the geoaffective operation of geophysics, or its constitution on a sensual
and embodied ecology that does not suspend the abyssal difference between ‘us’ and the radical alterity of geological things, but is rather the consequence of an open being-with inorganic matter. Second, I engage with geo-poetics as a genre of scientific narration that integrates geological entities into scientific accounts, while at the same time preserving their impossible distance with the human. Both operations, I argue, gesture
towards a mode of geo-social knowledge in which geophysical abstraction-making, against the call of critical theorists, is empowered to avoid anthropocentric absorptions and symbioses
– and hence towards the reformulation of what politicization means in catastrophic times.

The paper attempts to read Deleuze and Guattari's geophilosophy as a conceptual tool able to produce a theoretical alternative to the so-called Anthropocene, i.e. the supposed new geological era at the same time driven and threated by the Anthropos. After a critical analysis of the very concept of Anthropocene, I use Eduardo Viveiros de Castro's anthropological work to provide some key elements useful to elaborate a political ecology based on Amazonian perspectivism as an interdisciplinary development of Difference as such. By using several examples of such a development, I try to show the theoretical pertinence of Viveiros de Castro's concrete and situated geophilosophy. The last part of the paper attempts to cross Amazonian perspectivism with Simondon's concept of individuation and Stiegler's negentropic and negentropological perspective based on locality and geo-satellite localization as geo-philosophical concepts.

Abstract

This dissertation is divided into two parts.  In part I the argument is put forward that the ideas and practices informing life and work (with a special focus upon work within the human services industries, including education) must emerge from and find ways to return to the specific relational and ecological assemblages that include the land, air, and water with which we live and work.  The term geophilosophy is explored to help unpack such an assemblage of land and thought, ecology and history.  In Part II of this thesis the reader is invited into a succession of explorations with a geophilosophy.  These explorations involve a kind of pilgrimage with a river, in particular with the Fraser River – a geological entity with which the author has close personal ties.  In articulating the concept of geophilosophy, the author takes guidance from a diverse group of  thinkers, such as: Deleuze and Guattari, Gregory Bateson, Lynn Hoffman, Jacques Derrida, Tompson Highway, John Kelley, Isabelle Stengers, Bruno Latour, Dianne Chisholm, Brian Massumi, Eduardo Galeano, and Bruce Alexander. 

Part II of this geophilosophical journey involves two forms of chapters.  First, there is what the author calls the Dérive-Prayer, a process which requires travel with the river accompanied by a series of reflective essays focusing upon the relations that emerge between a specific location along the river and spiritual, political, and ecological realities that also come to life within the same area of the river.  Secondly, there is a series of essays that the author describes as Experiments – these are geophilosophical experiments. Significant philosophical concepts are tied to the geographies connected with the river.  This pilgrimage with the Fraser River watershed follows a particular path -- beginning at Sts’ailes First Nation and moving upstream along the Fraser’s watershed, through Kamloops, the Thompson and the North Thompson Rivers, all the way to the Fraser’s headwaters at the continental divide.  The Fraser is then followed downstream through its Eastern reaches, past the Cariboo, past the town of Lillooet, through the Fraser Canyon and the Fraser Valley, rolling on through Vancouver and into the Salish Sea.  This pilgrimage ends in the same place the river begins, far out in the cold waters of the Pacific.

This study is seen as having an ontological focus in that it attempts to open-up possible worlds in which those who recognize their relations with these geographies can learn to live and take action.  Such ontological unfoldings hold much diverse relevance for the assortments of living beings who reside with the river, and it holds particular relevance for those of us who work within the various human service industries connected with these lands.  The author offers this work as a form of contemplative inquiry placed philosophically before the creation of ethical imperatives, yet after, or in the midst of, its ontological unfolding.

Keywords:  geophilosophy, philosophy of education, ecological philosophy, philosopher naturalist, contemplative inquiry, Fraser River, Stó:lō, Sumas Lake, Sts’ailes, overlanders, Deleuze and Guattari, Gilles Deleuze, Lynn Hoffman, Gregory Bateson, Jacques Derrida, rhizome, arborescence, lines of flight, ontology, lyrical ontology, relational ontology, posthuman, affect theory, Gaia, ecology, smooth space, striated space, withness, derive, death of god, will to power, neoliberalism.

Making Worlds: Art and Science Fiction is an anthology of new writings by artists, curators, art historians and writers who are self-confessed science fiction fans. The linking point is the idea of science fiction as a platform for the building of alternate art histories. This collection is concerned with the ways in which science fiction might be performed, materialised or enacted within a contemporary context. Featuring essays on Stanislaw Lem, Robert Smithson, J.G. Ballard, Eduardo Paolozzi, H.P. Lovecraft, Philip K. Dick, Samuel Delany, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Andrei Tarkovsky, R.A. Lafferty, and Stanley Kubrick as well as texts on time travel, philology, geophilosophy, loops, speculative realism, dystopias, telepathy, surrealism, pop, Mercerism, and contemporary art.

Edited by Amelia Barikin and Helen Hughes with contributions by: Adrian Martin, Amelia Barikin, Andrew Frost, Anthony White, Arlo Mountford, Brendan Lee, Charles Green, Chris McAuliffe, Chronox, Damiano Bertoli, Darren Jorgensen, Dylan Martorell, Edward Colless, Helen Hughes, Helen Johnson, Justin Clemens, Lauren Bliss, Matthew Shannon, Nathan Gray, Nick Selenitsch, OSW, Patrick Pound, Philip Brophy, Rex Butler, Ryan Johnston, and Soda_Jerk.

Wanderschaft und Denken. - Wie kein anderer hat Nietzsche diese Verbindung in seinem Leben und Schreiben hergestellt. Im gleichen Maße, in dem er sich als Philosoph stets an neuen Positionen versucht, experimentiert er mit den Orten seiner Existenz. Dieses Charakteristikum findet seinen Ausdruck zunächst in der räumlichen Form der Texte Nietzsches, den thematisch grenzziehenden und zugleich stilistisch Atmosphären bildenden Aphorismen. Darüber hinaus war Nietzsche aufgrund seines empirischen Interesses ein intensiver Leser erdkundlicher und erdgeschichtlicher Werke. Hierdurch entsteht in seinen Texten eine von der Rezeption bislang nur unzulänglich erschlossene Mischung aus geografischen Metaphern und Referenzen. In der Studie von Stephan Günzel wird erstmals Nietzsches Abwendung vom zeitgenössischen, historistischen Denken entlang geologischer und kartografischer Leitmotive nachgewiesen.

In metamodern culture, handicraft is everywhere. As I argue, the ‘artisanal turn’ is not just a symptom of postmodern nostalgia, i.e. past ‘options’ or ‘instances’ allowed to make a second appearance. Rather, it is our very experience of time that has changed. What seemed old can appear authentically new again. Today's interest in crafts and craftsmanship thus has less to do with the idolisation of pre-industrial handicrafts by John Ruskin or the anti-industrial Arts and Crafts movement founded by William Morris than with Bauhaus. Ever since, craft has been emancipating itself from the intimacy of the studio and the corresponding closed guild mind that values only the specifics of its metier and its skills. This transformation marks less the disappearance of craftsmanship after the end of art than its development into a general media literacy. Given a certain material, what is it capable of? It was perhaps in this metamodern sense that Deleuze and Guattari, in A Thousand Plateaus, proposed the concept of the modern artist as “cosmic artisan”. I offer a mannerist genealogy for metamodern crafts and craftsmanship. Starting from tensions brought about in matter-form relationships by contemporary digital design practices, I retrospectively problematise the division of labor between design and craft at the very moment it first appeared. In this way I expose an informal or cosmic dimension in both mannerist and metamodern craftsmanship, characterized by an infinite and continuous variation of manners rather than forms. I will then develop some of the ontological, epistemological and political implications of this dimension in the light of recent developments in Theory such as New Materialism, Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO), and the care for the plastic relationality of the Self, which themselves are interpreted as expressions of a metamodern sensibility.

This essay examines masculinity as a quasicausal object and naming practice that guides a range of discussions around gender, with a particular focus on the sociology of masculinity. It begins by examining R.W. Connell’s widely
used concept of “hegemonic masculinity,” and scrutinises a series of specialised metaphors around hegemony – strategies, positions, goals – that present masculinity as an effect of competitive communion between men. Having identified key tensions in the explanatory model of hegemonic masculinity, the essay then turns towards the
analysis of sense and language outlined in Gilles Deleuze’s The Logic of Sense (1969). Deleuze’s notions of “singularity” and “event” are reworked to support a pragmatic account of
how masculinity studies can engage tense relationships between observation, description and representation, an engagement that remains salient for developing the ethical scope of gender studies more broadly.

The form of the ars poetica is one in which the poet makes a statement on the art of poetry. Consider this a kind of ars-geo-poetica, a groundsetting for and statement on geopoetics that intends to both situate and to break open the field. This is an invitation for geopoetic texts and practices that draw on the work of poets as well as geographers, for an enchanted, earthy, and transaesthetic approach that moves to juxtapose contemporary poetics, particularly in the realm of ecopoetics, with critical human geography. Looking to geographers, poets, literary scholars, and poems themselves, this article aims to help situate and historicize geopoetics, provide a brief inventory of the current field, and carve out sites for future work.

This themed edition of Angelaki encourages relocations to and within the neighbourhood of masculinity studies. Rather than looking primarily for new thoughts about masculinity we have also been looking to masculinities as sites in which thought is created. We have considered what it might mean to over-populate this neighbourhood, forcing open its borders into new territories.

In this paper I argue that we need not only to ‘decolonise’ the Anthropocene but also to ‘desecularise’ it – to be aware that in the new age of the Earth we may be coeval with gods and spirits.  Drawing particularly on the work of Giles Deleuze, Felix Guattari and Georges Bataille, and using concepts from both thermodynamics and fluid dynamics, I start to develop an interdisciplinary theory of planetary spirit, and use this to speak of both the ‘laminar’ high gods of time that are being invoked to summon the story of Earth’s ongoing transformation into a canonical mythos, and the turbulent lower spirits of place which manifest particular, situated dynamics on an Earth crossed by interlocking gradients and flows of energy, value, power and entropy. I suggest that what might once have been distinct territorialised ‘cultures’ or ‘natures’ in which humans engaged in particular situated patterns of interaction with animals, spirits and other beings are increasingly being convened into a global multinatural system, what we might call a ‘combined and uneven geo-spiritual formation’.

Does knowledge, as a system of thought and as a form of representation,
absorb the simultaneous necessity (and instability) of materiality
in a parallel fashion? More specifically, is systematized knowledge
necessarily ‘further from’ materiality than representation even if the latter is potentially ‘without’ a thinker while the former cannot
be? Or, put more simply, is systematicity or self-reflection more alien
to matter? Georges Bataille and Robert Smithson, in their respective
epigraphs above, deploy knowledge and materiality in order to prove
their structural weakness, they deploy their respective terms in ablative,
or outright suicidal, means.

In this paper, I develop Deleuze and Guattari's Geophilosophy as an expression of the philosophy of becoming-revolutionary. Firstly, I provide a general background on the concept of geophilosophy, in relation to the concepts such as contingency and becoming-Greek. It will be followed by a discussion on the art of fabulation and the people-to-come, in conjunction with the theory of refrain and politics. The said discussions accentuate the close affinity between arts and politics in the Deleuzo-Guattarian canon. Lastly, I elucidate geophilosophy in relation to revolutionary becoming and utopia. In this vein, geophilosophy transforms into a philosophy of becoming-revolutionary whose underlying principle is the creation of a world and people-to-come.

Pendant longtemps, nous avons été nombreux à croire que le philosophe iranien Reza Negarestani, auteur du monumental Cyclonopedia : Complicity with Anonymous Materials, n’était qu’une fiction. Retour sur une fulgurante mise en scène « hyperstitionnelle » qui a bouleversé l’imaginaire de la
pensée spéculative contemporaine.

Natural scientists sometimes us the word ‘memory’ to describe biological or even geophysical process: they talk of ‘climate memory’, or ‘ecological memory’, or materials as having ‘shape memory’.  But what would happen if we took such usages seriously, and applied the idea of memory to a complex entity like a planet?  How could the Earth be said to remember and to forget?  What memory systems has the Earth evolved in its 4.5 billion-year ‘geostory’?  And if the Earth is indeed entering ‘the Anthropocene’, a new geological epoch in which humans are the determining geological force (Crutzen and Stoermer 2000), how might the Anthropocene be inserting itself into the memory of the Earth?  Is the Anthropocene to be thought of as just another layer, inserted into the ‘rock memory’ of the Earth?  Or does it actually change the Earth’s powers of remembering and forgetting?  And might thinking of the Earth as something that remembers and forgets change the way that we think about this thing we call the Anthropocene, what it is and what it means?

For at least two centuries most social thought has taken the earth to be the stable
platform upon which dynamic social processes play out. Both climate change and the
Anthropocene thesis – with their enfolding of dramatic geologic change into the
space-time of social life – are now provoking social thinkers into closer engagement
with earth science. After revisiting the decisive influence of the late 18th-century
notion of geological formations on the idea of social formations, this introductory
article turns to more recent and more explicit attempts to open up the categories of
social thought to a deeper understanding of earth processes. This includes attempts
to consider how social and political agency is both constrained and made possible by
the forces of the earth itself. It also involves efforts to think beyond existing dependencies of social worlds upon particular geological strata and to imagine alternative ‘geosocial’ futures.

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. 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 – 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 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.