Geopower. On the States of Nature of Late Capitalism
2019, European Journal of Social Theory
2307 ViewsPaperRank: 1.122 Pages
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The article argues that environmental planetary discourses have coalesced into the Anthropocene crisis narrative and reformulated the state of nature apparatus of Western political theory. The Anthropocene, as an ecological state of nature of late capitalism, casts light on the logics of geopower, which assembles species thinking, a fascination with nonlife and sovereignty, and the imaginary of extinction and mutation. Geopower shifts governmental technologies from human populations and their ‘milieu’ to nonhuman species, energy flows and ecosystems, from political economy and biopower to Earth science and systems ecology. This configuration of power suggests a shift in the neoliberal agenda and imposes the Earth as a political personage, generating threatening political myths and figures of chaos and sovereignty, such as Gaia, Chthulu and Climate Leviathans.
Gaia, Goddess of the Anthropocene?
458 ViewsPaperRank: 2.23 Pages
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As one of the figures of the emerging states of nature, a symptom of the preoccupations of neocolonial and decolonial political animisms, Gaia confronts Western political philosophy, political theology, and political ecology. She is not the sovereign of the Anthropocene but the goddess of an age that is still searching for its rituals and shamans, it constitutions and insurrections.
Demons of the Anthropocene. Facing Bruno Latour’s Gaia
1037 Views20 Pages
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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 figures 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.
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