Ecocosmism: Finitude Unbound

Abstract

Western modernity was born with a revolution of limits. Western man, who has become the creator of his own destiny, has identified freedom with a conscious and systematic violation of the given conditions, with a future that constantly transcends the present. This modern condition is thus characterised by the fact that it is limited by boundaries that are mobile and can change. From this observation arises the paradoxical situation that growth today is inconceivable if it is not linked to a scenario of scarcity, in contrast to premodern theological views based instead on the abundance of creation, the original richness of the world. Inspired by this vision of a sustainable world, ecological thinking today is immediately associated with a language of finitude. Degrowth, self-limitation, and resource efficiency, these are all terms associated with a universalist model of progress that seems to know no limits. This article argues that the world is doomed to its own inevitable end if sustainability is understood from the perspective of an economically sustainable future defined by the limits of capitalist management. If, on the other hand, we step out of this impoverished and economic perspective of the concept of limit and the condition of finitude, then we open ourselves to an ecocosmic perspective that understands the world as part of a cosmic diversity that cannot be contained within a more or less extended totality of resources. In this article, being finite is understood ecologically as being a non-self-sufficient part of the interrelated possibilities of worldmaking, not as an element of a set of individuals or things.

1. Introduction

In a famous interview, the philosopher and psychoanalyst Cornelius Castoriadis, founding member of the libertarian socialist group Socialisme ou Barbarie (“Socialism or Barbarism”), argued that a radical transformation in the nature of desire characterises modern societies. “If you take archaic societies or traditional societies”, Castoriadis said on this occasion, “there is no irreducible desire” [1]. The main characteristic of modernity is that it has entered the age of illimitation, in which desire is transformed on a social and collective level, “into the desire for the infinite” [1]. The frontispiece of Francis Bacon’s Novum Organum, a groundbreaking work of the modern era published in 1620, seems to be emblematic. It depicts a galleon crossing the mythical Pillars of Hercules—which rise on either side of the Strait of Gibraltar and mark the transition from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic—and thus entering the open sea. Multi pertransibunt et augebitur scientia is written on the frontispiece. “Many will pass through and knowledge will be greater”: crossing borders means transcending what is already known and expanding the world in which one lives.

In the past, the progress of civilisations was subject to natural cycles of destruction and rebirth that periodically interrupted their stabilisation and growth. The Stoics, for example, imagined that at the end of a cycle of progress there would be a universal conflagration of the cosmos (ekpurosis), which would also be a purification of the universe. The destruction of the world would be followed by a ‘rebirth’ (palingenesis) of the same (apocatastasis): the cosmos was thus destroyed each time in order to be reborn, to reproduce itself. Although the Greeks and Romans had terms that could denote “a relative progression (Fortschreiten) in particular spheres of fact and experience: prokope, epidosis, progressus, profectus”, these terms were—according to Reinhart Koselleck—always about looking back, not about “an opening up of new horizons” [2] (p. 222). In contrast, modernity is characterised by an infinitely dynamic progress that makes the present better than the past and the future better than the present. And this transformation of the idea of change and progress created the “constant expectation of the end of the world into an open future” [2] (p. 225).

The 20th century, however, seems to have experienced a crisis of this paradigm of infinite progress, for the urge to overcome limits was accompanied in the last century by a parallel urge to rediscover limits, a counter-movement to degrowth or self-restraint, which in a sense broke through the front of progress. Since his seminal essay Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics (1929), Martin Heidegger has emphasised that the question of finitude is the starting point for a reconsideration of human beings and their relationship to the world. For Heidegger, when a power is called into question and demands a delimitation of its possibilities, it is already in a state of impotence—“it already places itself within a disability [in einem Nicht-Können]” [3]. It has already assumed a non-power for itself, which, however, is not a lack but the manifestation of a finitude inherent in its innermost being. The ‘not yet’ in the question “What can I know?” of the Critique of Pure Reason not only declaims the finitude of human reason but also the waiting for something of which it feels deprived and which it wants to take care of; for despite its deprivation, human reason perceives this ‘not yet’ as its deepest interest [3]. In the context of 20th-century finitude, ’finitude’, the decisive philosophical figure of the last century [4], does not refer to a given fact or condition but to an active relationship to the end that is constitutive of the human way of being. However, if in the existentialist philosophies of the last century ‘finitude’ was considered a state of non-self-sufficiency that gives human existence the form of a project, of a process that is always in the process of realisation, today, ‘finitude’ returns instead in the form of an ethics of association and implication. The environmental catastrophe, in this sense, takes now the form of an accumulation of present and future catastrophes that spread between places and generations. Our time, wrote Günther Anders, has become Endzeit, the “End-times” of an “apocalypse without kingdom has hardly been thought before” [5]. In these “End-times”, the sense of a real or potential loss of the world grows hand in hand with the progression of the human capacity to change its own environment. Today, our thinking must imagine a “naked apocalypse […] that consists of mere downfall, which doesn’t represent the opening of a new, positive state of affairs” [5] and does not anticipate any progress, any new beginning. But the time of the end of one’s own world is also the time in which one can no longer distinguish one’s own world from that of others, the time in which we are all proximi, in which we are all part of a space that no longer belongs to anyone. The constitution of a common world occurs through the interweaving of a multitude of places and perspectives. A ‘common’ world is never simply the result of the accumulation of interconnected actions; “it does not imply a shared terrain, but it creates a basis for political negotiations of our common divergences” [6].

2. Memories: Of the Earth

In a fragment of the short meditations collected under the title Care Crosses the River, Hans Blumenberg returns to the topic—central to 20th-century philosophy—of the “essence of reason [Wesen des Grundes]” [7]1. The German word ‘Grund,’ which is translated as ‘reason’ in English, has a very specific connotation in Western thought. ‘Grund’ is in fact the foundation or foundations on which reason is built, the ultimate ground on which the system that determines our way of understanding the world can be established. The solidity of foundations is a privileged metaphor of modernity because “the covering up of the old with the new, the embedding of the conquered in the foundations of its conqueror, has an apotropaic, exorcising, assuring function” [7] (p. 80). For this reason, according to Blumenberg, the soil on which reason builds its construction is saturated with the sediments of cultures, but also, in order to remain fertile, this soil cannot be as solid as it appears at first glance, since it must retain a certain degree of permeability and porosity that allows for cultivation and change.

The metaphorics of soil [Boden] (in which everything that grows and bears fruit and nourishes takes root) and the metaphorics of foundation [Grund] (upon which everything durable and solid works and stands, is built and erected) do not seem to be easily brought together in imagination: roots require the soil’s porousness and permeability to allow trees and plants to rise to the light from which they first properly take life; on the other hand, a human building demands rocklike density and insolubility for the foundation it rests upon. These “fundamental differences” of the ground of life [“Grundverschiedenheiten” des Lebensboden] also seem to condition divergent worldviews and lifestyles: the cultivating and the constructing [7] (p. 68).

While modernity is obsessed with the search for universal foundations for its own reason, it simultaneously denies this background and relegates it to an unhistorical epoch. The emergence of this incomprehensible depth only occurs when the historical layers that mark a historical form of reason begin to disintegrate, “when the structure starts to crack” [7] (p. 68).

The emergence of something that has always been beneath our feet requires a radical re-foundation of the ground of reason, as Maurice Merleau-Ponty emphasised in his lectures on the concept of nature at the Collège de France in the 1950s. In one of his lectures, he argues that there is a dimension that precedes the phenomenological realm of “pure things” described by Edmund Husserl—namely, what Husserl calls ‘the earth’. As Merleau-Ponty explains, for Descartes, the Earth is only one body among others, whereas for Husserl, the Earth is indefinable in relation to the body: it is the ground of our experience. The Earth is not a body and is therefore “neither mobile nor at rest: it does not fall within these oppositions” [8] (p. 77). It should be considered in terms of a concrete primary passivity in which the whole economy of relations between inside and outside is undermined. Conceptualised as a universal element, Grundbestand—and not as planet-Earth and celestial mass, as in the Copernican perspective—the Earth for Husserl is neither an object nor a substance; rather, it is the constitutive site of a perspective that moves with us, our “original ark” [9].

Husserl says, imagine a bird capable of flying to another planet: it would not have a double ground. From the sole fact that it is the same bird, it unites the two planets into one single ground. Wherever I go, I make a ground there and attach the new ground to the old where I lived. To think two Earths is to think one same Earth. For man, there can be only men. Animals, Husserl says, are only variants of humanity. We think that which is the most universal in us starting from the most singular. Our soil or ground expands, but it is not doubled, and we cannot think without reference to one soil of experience of this type. The Earth is the root of our history. Just as Noah’s ark carried all that could remain living and possible, so too can the Earth be considered as carrier of all the possible [8] (p. 77).

In contrast to a reading of Husserl’s phenomenological writings as an attempt to renew anthropocentric thought, Merleau-Ponty shows how our experience of the Earth cannot be related to a possible stabilisation or re-centralisation of philosophical discourse. For him, the Earth is a non-localisable space of experience—the experience of a perception that is neither appropriate nor appropriative. The dimension of the ‘terrestrial’ must be understood as “dispossession [...], blind, nondifferentiated recognition (of the touching and the touched, of me and my image over there), the zero-degree of difference” [8] (p. 283). This shift in the ground of reason requires a complete ecological re-foundation of reason itself, for while the term ‘ecology’ is directly linked to habit, habitation and dwelling, it also refers to an uninhabitable, non-human dimension that seems to be the paradoxical status of terrestrial experience [10].

The age of integral colonisation of the Earth has been given the geological name “Anthropocene”. This term refers to a planetary appropriation through which the entire Earth has become the mirror of a certain type of human being, the anthropos. This epoch of spatial and meteorological unification seems to be coming to an end but is once again disrupted at its core by a space–time dimension that goes beyond the Age of Man. Or rather, the Age of Man is experiencing another radical finitude, that of the terrestrial. In other words, the humans of this age are confronted with the need to somatise phenomena beyond their reach and understanding. The intrusion of the terrestrial, far from pointing to a domestic, natural condition, opens the way for what Aby Warburg saw as the epistemic disruption of the “mathematical cosmology of the modern” [11]. In Warburg’s Atlas, cosmic time marks the end of any kind of determinate Homo. Confronted with the exogenous forces that lead humanity beyond itself, Warburg was not interested in restoring the past and its images but rather in stimulating the imagination for a completely unknown human destiny.

3. Impasses

In our time, the term ‘crisis’ has become the name for a transformative instance that does not yet have a form. ‘Crisis’ describes an impasse; it denotes the moment in which a subject finds itself deprived of its mastery. When all historical power relations begin to falter, new passages emerge. The eschatological line of historical time shatters in an infinite variety of climatic, social and technological catastrophes, and progress also implodes and collides with the immemorial times of cosmic contingencies.

Rosa Luxemburg had already recognised the paradoxical necessity of capitalism to have an unequal exchange relationship with an externality, with pre-capitalist modes of production, since capital accumulation consists precisely in the fact that the latter are gradually devoured and assimilated. Paradoxically, while capital accumulation consists in the progressive erosion of these non-capitalist formations, they also constitute the conditions for its existence. In this sense, capitalist accumulation reaches its absolute limit precisely when this total assimilation has been accomplished:

Capitalism strives to be a universal system, but it cannot be as long as it is essentially dependent on the non-capitalist system. When it becomes universal, it must break down because the exhaustion of externality is fatal for the externalization society: Capitalism is the first form of economy with propagandistic power; it is a form that tends to extend itself over the globe and to eradicate all other forms of economy—it tolerates no other alongside itself. However, it is also the first that is unable to exist alone, without other forms of economy as its milieu and its medium. Thus, as the same time as it tends to become the universal form, it is smashed to smithereens by its intrinsic inability to be a universal form of production [12].

Although modernity seems to be structured by dichotomies between civilisation and barbarism, culture and nature, and male and female, these polarisations are, in reality, never complementary but always hierarchical. The power of progress is not based on its brute force or the systematic use of violence but on its urge to totalise the existing. Progress, therefore, knows no limits to its expansion but only moments of stagnation. It knows no regulative idea of measure but only the negative and painful moment of possible regression. Endless progress brings with it, each time anew, “those degenerations which show not unsuccessful but successful progress […] The curse of irresistible progress is irresistible regression” [13].

Capitalism wants to conquer all available space. But when the conquest is complete, we realise that the global unification of capital does not guarantee the unity of the world. At the moment when the expansive project of uniting the Earth under the totalising figure of the globe seems to have finally been realised, we sense that the unification of the world market instead deprives us of the experience of the common in human existence. In the age of globalisation, it is becoming increasingly clear that the conquest of the globe goes hand in hand with the progressive destruction of the world. The paradox of our time is that humanity is becoming more unified every day but, at the same time, more and more fragmented. The more unified the planet becomes, the more the ground on which the project of the globalisation of our diverse existences was founded seems to be crumbling.

4. Inappropriable Spaces

New worlds emerge when the representation of the world—which implies a privileged position from which the world can be seen and represented in its entirety—becomes impossible. The representation of the world requires distancing. But it is becoming increasingly clear that the world cannot be encountered in terms of representation—in which the world as datum is represented by a subject outside the world. Today, there is a planetary mass that makes impossible the traditional levitation that characterised metaphysics; humanity is entangled with “eight billion bodies in an ecotechnical whirlwind that no longer has any other end than the infinity of an inappropriable meaning” [14] (p. 84).

The world is excessive in the sense that it eludes all representation. Living in this world thus no longer means inhabiting a space defined and localised by habit but requires a new ability to inhabit the uninhabitable. Indeed, Heidegger had already warned that the progressive domestication of the Earth creates nothing but uninhabitable places. For him, this uninhabitability and unfamiliarity brought about by global and totalising technology has made our age “worldlessness”, characterised by the impossibility of having access to any world. Yet this state of dislocation could be read in an opposite sense to the uniformity of the Same, which Heidegger imagines as the unique and catastrophic fate of the West. This dislocation could be read as the end of regional thinking and the beginning of a real disenclosure of the world. According to Jean-Luc Nancy, this disenclosure must be thought of in its radicality, that is, as the “dismantling and disassembling of enclosed bowers, enclosures, fences” [14], and the deconstruction of all property of man. In this process of general expropriation, “locations [les lieux] are delocalized and put to flight by a spacing that precedes them […] Neither places, nor heavens, nor gods: for the moment it is a general dis-enclosing, more so than a burgeoning” [14].

In other words, this may be the dawn of a new era, which is, in Nancy’s words, Mondiale [15]2—that is, irreducible to the global conquest of the Earth, to the logistics that capitalism imposes on the planet. If globalisation is indeed the product of a specific political economy of space that generates and mobilises flows of energy, money, labour, signs, symbols and people, it ultimately coordinates and synchronises these multiple flows in a unique and asphyxiating space. The disenclosure of the world invoked by Nancy is the disintegration of this interconnected unity, for a world is the space that exposes all finite bodies to a cosmic dimension. And this cosmic commotion of bodies is a movement that has no other purpose than to maintain them in a worldly openness that “exposes a common exteriority, a spacing, a co-appearance [comparution] of strangers” [14] (p. 78).

The world is the space of encounter, the inappropriable space that lies between all defined and punctual places, the area that extends between every origin and destination, the end of any confined place. The world is the strangeness that is not preceded by familiarity, whose uniqueness lies precisely in its non-totalisable multiplicity. This perspective on the world can ecologically redefine the sense of finitude and decouple it from the metaphysical idea of plenitude, from the figure of a world as the realisation of a principle or, conversely, as its catastrophe. We could then speculate that the expression ‘end of the world’ could be read as evidence that the modern universe has always been fragmented into different worlds, each with its own cosmology. The modern mythology of a world subject to a single raison d’être and governed by universal laws collapses and gives way to a what we could call a ‘mundane’ dimension.

If modernity has unworlded humanity in order to relocalise it in the universe, we can imagine a counter-movement to materialise the different worlds that universal reason excludes from its laws. What we need, then, is what Yuk Hui calls a “cosmotechnical event” that can account for a new world history. “Cosmotechnics”, Hui writes, “is defined primarily as the unification between the cosmic order and the moral order through technical activities” [16]. The dynamics of this unification, the definition of the cosmic and the moral, vary from culture to culture, and so does the ground.

5. The Unsustainable

Today, the word ‘ecology’ is often associated with the economic concept of ‘sustainability’, with the idea of the limited use of dwindling resources. And this idea is linked to a contextual process of continuous accumulation that is supposed to guarantee a ‘sustainable’, economically defined future. The restriction of ecology to the limited economy of a sustainable way of life has become such an epistemological imperative of our time that politics has become mere management, constantly updated on the basis of data on the specific distribution of resources. A unique, suffocating, global biosphere seems to be the habitat of the only conceivable life, and its inhabitants seem to be connected only by the fact that they are confined together in a single world. But this world is coming to an end in the sense that we are facing a future that is unimaginable from the perspective of our present.

As Michael Marder has recently argued, the concept of renewability, seemingly linked to an imaginary of finitude and limitation—exemplary of ecological thinking that resists unlimited progress—is instead indebted to a “phoenix complex” that transforms “finite beings into mere shells for the invaluable molten kernel of infinity, of infinite replicability that overflows them” [17]. Indeed, the concept of ‘renewable energy’ seems to be the mantra of contemporary sustainability: the possibility of making the old new again and again, which in a way promises to counteract the end of things and revive them. In other words, the finite seems to be only a temporary exhaustion of an eternal core that remains untouched by change. Western philosophy has always understood metamorphosis as a change of external form that does not affect the inner, natural, true essence, so that—Catherine Malabou writes in her Ontology of the Accident—“within change, being remains itself. The substantialist assumption is thus the travel companion of Western metamorphosis. Form transforms; substance remains” [18]. If renewability does nothing more than quantitatively reproduce resources in order to continue the same life over and over again, overcoming our obsession with production and reproduction could ultimately lead us to discover a non-renewable nature whose absolute finitude “implies, far from the secular ideology of the end of time and universal damnation, the possibility of life’s reinvention—rather than its reproduction” [19]. Rethinking finitude materialistically means decoupling it from the capitalist scenario of the mere exhaustion of resources and from the metaphysical hallucination of the infinite resurrection of a principle. It means considering singularity as an ecological reality that is not isolated or separate but is in constant relation to a multiplicity that cannot be reduced to the result of an operation of the addition or subtraction of a given quantity. Since the finite is not definite, it is characterised by an ontological indeterminacy that destroys the foundations of the self-identity that characterises a substance.

To be finite is to be indebted to a multitude of finite beings. The temporal form of this participation in many worlds creates a point of intensity that Michelle M. Wright describes in her book Physics of Blackness: Beyond the Middle Passage Epistemology. According to Wright, the ‘now’ intersects with a broader spectrum of identities. Each moment is then a point of intersection of incommensurable and contradictory directions; it is a point of intensity of transtemporal and transpatial forces, open to both the past and the future, and it “should be represented as a circle with many arrows pointing outward in all directions” [20]. In other words, each point is open and never completed in its final materialisation. Each point is always at the point of its own individuation: “closure”, Karen Barad writes, “can’t be secured when the conditions of im/possibilities and lived indeterminacies are integral, not supplementary, to what matter is” [21].

From this perspective, materialism is a long history of encounters and dispossessions. Matter has often been seen as something opposed to form, something whose passivity requires the activity of a formative act in order to leave a state of undifferentiatedness. But, in matter, resonates that which cannot be realised in any form, not as its failure but as its insurrection. In this sense, matter is a paradoxical anarchic principle, a resistance that precedes any structure of power. In a lecture on 30 January 1980 at the Collège de France, Foucault used the neologism “anarcheological” to characterise “a theoretical-practical standpoint concerning the non-necessity of all power” [22]. For a culture obsessed with interiority, with an abysmal, innermost, secret part of the self as the origin of every subject, the possibility of an anarchic constitution of the self is subversive because it implies that any return to the inside, to one’s own principle, means at the same time being exposed to the dispersion of the outside.

6. Cosmic Times

History has taken the form of a reconstitution of the past, whose traces lead linearly to an initial event that is transmitted to the present and the future. However, an origin is not a starting point that remains unchanged through time. Time, Nietzsche writes in a famous fragment from 1873, “is no continuum at all, there are only totally different time-points, no line. Actio in distans” [23]. Moments in time are finite precisely because they are not self-sufficient. There is a material transition, a leap of discontinuity between one moment and the next. Their origin lies in becoming and passing away. Here, then, is the paradox of origin: that “on the one hand it demands to be recognized as restoration, restitution, and on the other—and precisely on account of this—as something incomplete and unclosed” [24]. The origin cannot be reduced to a point of departure; it persists through time as a force of openness, as a non-contemporaneity that endures and interrupts the historical monodromy of progress by constellating it with diachronic deaths and new beginnings.

If the origin is not a closed point, then the idea of identity as originality dissolves, as the anarchist Blanqui had foreseen, from a revolutionary perspective, in his “astronomical hypothesis” titled Eternity by the Stars. From Blanqui’s cosmic perspective, “at every minute the shock and the volatilization of the perished stars build the worlds anew in the vast fields of the infinite” [25]. To the collapse of a celestial body corresponds the emergence of something else, elsewhere: stellar catastrophes are antagonistic to universal death, against which every living organism must develop, according to Freud, “a special envelope or membrane” that filters and channels “the energies of the external world” [26]. Blanqui’s astronomical hypothesis represents a rebellion against a closed worldview. While the progress of the West is trapped in an eternal self-perpetuation, a catastrophe in the cosmic sense means that the death of something elsewhere entails the birth of something new. The plurality of worlds is no longer a mere speculation but a material necessity. The stars, Blanqui writes,

are our contemporaries, our travel companions, and hence probably, their apparent immobility: we are forging ahead together. […] (The) encounters between sidereal cadavers colliding into resurrection would easily come across as a disturbance of the established order.—A disturbance ! But what would become of the world if the ancient and dead suns with their string of defunct planets continued indefinitely their funeral procession, reinforced every night with the arrival of new funerals? All the sources of light and of life that shine in the heavens would extinguish gradually, like the luminaries of a light show. Eternal darkness would wash upon the universe [27].

Cosmology and politics converge in the attempt to bring revolutionary energy into resonance with natural energy, for the liberation of nature consists—as Oxana Timofeeva recently suggested in her Solar Politics—in “its de-alienation and creation of alliances between the self-consciousness of human struggles and the blind generosity of the sun against the cosmic greed of the police of capital” [28].

7. Conclusions

As we have seen, the paradox of capitalism is that it must internalise the externalities on which its existence depends. To do this, capitalism relegates these externalities to the untimely realm of its own prehistory. These prehistoric conditions can be overcome once and for all precisely because they are deprived of any dimension of becoming. It is thus as if these externalities are withdrawn from the incessant flow of transformation that seems to be the matter of capital itself. But as Luxemburg had already foreseen, the absolute limit of capital lies precisely in the diffraction of the single front of progress that we used to call ‘the future’.

The becoming of non-contemporaries marks a limit that the universal temporality of progress can neither internalise nor relativise. The fact that other fragments of possible worlds resonate with each other today gives rise to unprecedented correspondences and ecologies, as they inscribe traces in our time that elude all attempts at recognition and measurement. These worlds do not belong to a distant, vanquished past because, as Marx already suspected, prehistory is the dimension that eludes chronology. Its anteriority cannot be traced back in our history. So when we think that we think, perhaps we are actually being thought, because our thinking is both older and newer than we are; it is neither ours nor actual. The present is mixed with an incomputable anteriority, but this critical and uncertain zone cannot constitute a tradition because this “non-time-space in the very heart of time, unlike the world and the culture into which we are born, can only be indicated, but cannot be inherited and handed down from the past” [29]. This zone is thus by no means an intemporal space but rather a contested space in which limits and lacunae are temporal interfaces exposed to the conflagration of generations.

We are used to equating a world with an organism. This organism, in turn, is reduced to a self-sufficient, self-determined and even totalitarian model. Today, however, it is clear that this model cannot be applied to the idea of an ecosystem in which ‘nature’ is increasingly inextricable from ‘us’. To think of an ecosystem is to think of the syn-, the bond that holds things together in a way that can only be cosmic because every ecosystem is not a closed, integrated unit, but the ecocosmic coexistence of different openings. “There is a point”, Eduard Glissant writes, at which “Relation is no longer expressed through a procession of trajectories, itineraries succeeding or thwarting one another”, a point at which “the thrust of the world and its desire no longer embolden you onward in a fever of discovery: they multiply you all around” [30].