Event overview
Discussant: Dr Isaac Marrerro-Guillamon (Anthropology)
Organiser: Dr Martin Savransky (Sociology)
Nietzsche claimed that his time was the time of the death of God. Maybe we should characterize our present as the time of the coming of the Earth. More precisely, our time might be that in which the Earth is making its apparition on the stage of history. However, it is also my contention, that we can only get ready to interact with this new actor if we accept that it raises considerable ontological challenges. It is not only a new being; it is also a new kind of being. Many have already argued that it requires from us that we overcome the distinction between nature and culture, reality and representation, constructivism and realism, being and sign, world and language. I will support this idea too, but from a particular line of argumentation: I will argue that getting ready for the Earth requires from us that we accept a form of radical ontological pluralism, of the kind that what has been called the “ontological turn” in anthropology has introduced. For such a pluralism, to be is ultimately to be an alternative of what could have been instead, or to be situated at the intersection of various lines of virtual becoming-other.
My point will be that this new actor that we can call the Earth is at the same time unique – there is no planet B, as the activists rightly say – but nonetheless not unified. The oneness of
the Earth is not separable from the diverging ways this oneness is made on each locality of the Earth (and a locality will have to be defined as such a diverging construction of the globality itself).
Patrice Maniglier is Maître de Conférences at the Philosophy Department of Paris Nanterre University (Paris, France). A former student at the Ecole Normale Supérieure (Paris), he was a Lecturer at the University of Essex (UK), before joining Nanterre. He has written on Saussure, Lévi-Strauss, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida, Badiou, Latour. He is the author of La Vie énigmatique des signes: Saussure et la naissance du structuralisme (Paris : Léo Scheer, 2006), La Perspective du Diable, Figurations de l’espace et philosophie, de la Renaissance à Rosemary’s Baby (Arles : Actes Sud, 2010), and Foucault va au cinéma (Paris : Bayard, 2011).
Part of the Pluralistic Variations Lecture Series
Dates & times
Date | Time | Add to calendar |
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6 Dec 2017 | 5:00pm - 7:00pm |
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