Philobiblon

Written after the election of Trump

p. 36 For the first time, a large-scale movement no longer claims to address geopolitical realities seriously, but purports to put itself explicitly outside of all worldly constraints, literally offshore, like a tax haven.What counts above all for the elites behind this movement is no longer having to share with the others a world that they know will never again be a common world. They do all this while maintaining the American ideal of the Frontier … It is quite remarkable, morever, that his invention comes from a real estate developer who has been constantinly in debt, racing from failed deal to failed deal, and who became famous by way of reality television, another form of unreality and escapism”

p. 37 It is quite useless to become outraged on the pretext that Trump voters “don’t believe in facts”. They are not stupid. It is because the overall geopolitical situation between advance and retreat had to be taken into account … defines the first government totally orienttated towards the ecological question, but negatives, through rejection! … Accountants are quite familiar with entrepeneurs who defraud investors: the innovation of Trumpism is to have the greatest nation in the world take that step: Trump as the country’s Madoff?”

p. 70 “If the planet has ended up moving away from the Terrestrial, it is because everything has happened as though nature seen from the universe had begun to replace, bit by bit – to cover, over, to chase away – nature seen from the Earth, the nature that grasped, that could have grasped, that should have continued to include, all the phenomena of genesis.

The grandiose Galilean invention has come to take up all the space by making people forget that seeing the earth from Sirius is only a tiny part – even if the infinite universe is involved – of what we have the right to know positively.”..

If we recall all the bizarre things that earthbound beings, over the last three or four centuries, have imagined they discerned on the red planet before noticing their errors, we shall not be surprised by all the errors committed, over the last three or four centuries, regarding the fate of the terrestrial civilisations as seen from Sirius!

“The ideals of rationality, like the accusations of irrationality brought against the Earth and the earthbound. So many pipe dreams, so many moons made of green cheese, so many canals on Mars…

p. 71 “It is on this point that the two meanings, positive and negative, of the word “Global” turn out to divurge entirely.

The subjective side begins to be associated with the archaic and the outdated; the objective side with the modern and the progressive. Seeing things from the inside comes to have no value other than being traditional, intimate, archaic. Seeing things from the outside, on the contrary, becomes the only way to grasp the reality that counts, and, above all, the only way to orient oneself towards the future.

It is this brutal division that was to give consistency, as it were, to the illusion of the Global as the horizon of modernity. From this point on it was necessary, even if one stayed in place, to shift one’s position virtually, bag and baggage, away from the subjective and sensitive positions towards exclusively objective positions, finally freed of all sensitivity – or rather of sentimentality.

This is where, by contrast with the Global, the necessarily reactive, reflexive, nostalgic figure of the Local comes in

Losing one’s sensitivity to nature as process – according to the old sense of the term “nature” – was becoming the only way to gain access to nature as an infinite universe – according to the new definition. To progress in modernity was to tear oneself away from the primordial soil and set out for the Great Outside, to become, if not natural, at least naturalist.

p. 72 Through a strange perversion of metaphors of giving birth, no longer depending on those old forms of genesis was what would allow us to “be born at last to modernity”.

As feminists have shown by analyzing witchcraft trails, hatred of a large number of values traditionally associated with women would come from this tragic metamophosis, rendering grotesque all forms of attachment to the old soils. The effort to resist the attraction of any form of grounding was a way of saying – as the hypocrite priest Tartuffe said to his host’s daughter “Cover that bosom, girl.” From then on, objectivity became gendered.

This great displacement – the only real ‘Great Replacement’ – will then be imposed on the entire world, which becomes the landscape of globaization-minus as the last vestiges of adherence to the old nature-as-process are durably eradicated.

This is the meaing of the expression that is now out of fashion, but whose echoes are still heard whenever anyone speaks of progress, development and the future: “We are going to modernize the planet, which is in the process of unification.”

p. 73 No progress will be made towards a “politics of nature” as long as the same term is used to designate, for example, research into terrestrial magnetism…. the role of earthworms in soil aeration, the reaction of shepherds in the Pyrenees to the reintroduction of bears, or the reaction of bacteria in our intestines to our latest gastronomic overindulgence. That nature is a real catch-all.

There is no point in looking any further for the slow pace of mobilizations in favour of nature-as-universe. It is completely incapable of churning anything political… Trying to mobilize that nature in class conflicts is like getting ready to go out on a protest march by stepping into concrete.”

p. 74 “To be knowledgeable in scientific terms, it does not help to be beamed up to Sirius. It is not necessary, either, to shun rationality in order to add feelings to cold knowledge. It is essential to acquire as much cold-blooded knowledge as possible about the heated activity of an Earth finally grasped from up close.

… as early as the 17th century, when economists began to take “nature” into account, they took it as a mere “factor of production”, a resource that was precisely external, indifferent to our actions, grasped from afar, as if by foreigners pursuing goals that were indifferent to the Earth.

In what we call systems of production, it was known how to identify human agents – workers, capitalists – as well as artificial infrastructure – machines, factories, cities, agrobusiness – but it was impossible to take the beings that had in the meantime become “natural” (seen from Sirius) as agents, actors, animated, acting entities of the same caliber…

p. 75 One could of course go rummaging in the archives of other peoples to discover attitudes, myths and rituals that were absolutely untouched by any notion of “resource” or “production” but these findings were taken, at the time, as mere vestiges of old forms of subjectivity, of archaic cultures irreversibly outstripped by the modernization front. The testimony was mobing, to be sure, but appropriate for ethnographic museums.

It is only today that all these practices have become previous models for learning how to survive in the future.

p. 76 The simplification introduced by Lovelock is the comprehension of terrestrial phenomena is not that he added “life” to the Earth, or that he made the Earth a “living organism”, but, quite to the contrary, that he stopped denying that living beings were active participants in biochemical and geochemical phenomena. His reductionist argument is the exact opposite of vitalism. He refuses to de-animate the planet by removing most of the actors that intervene all along a causal chain.”

p. 77 The conflict can be summarized simply: there are those who continue to look at things from the vantage point of Sirius and simply do not see that the earth system reacts to human action, or do not believe it possible… they do not believe that there is life on Earth capable of suffering and reacting. And there are those who seek, while keeping a firm grip on the science, to understand what is meant by distributing action, animation, the power to act, all along the causal chains in which they find themselves entangled. The former are climate skeptics (through a taste for distance if not through active corruption); the latter consent to face up to an enigma concerning the number and nature of the agents at work.

P. 86 It is perhaps time… to stop speaking about humans and to refer instead to terrestrials (the Earthbound), thus insisting on humus and, yes, the compost included in the etymology of the word “human”. (“Terrestrial” has the advantage of not specifying species.)

Saying “We are earthbound, we are terrestrials amid terrestrials”, does not lead to the same politics as saying “We are humans in nature.” The two are not made of the same cloth – or rather the same mud.”

p. 87 Terrestrials in fact have the very delicate problem of discovering how many other beings they need in order to subsist. It is ny making this list that they sketch out their dwelling places (the expression allows us to shift away from the word “territory”, a word too often limited to the simple administrative grid of a state.”

In a system of engendering, all the agents, all the animated beings, raise questions about descendants and forebears; in short, the question of how to recognize and inset oneself into lineages that will manage to last.”

p. 95 To definte a dwelling place, for a terrestrial, is to list what it needs for its subsistence, and, consequently, what it is ready to defend, with its own life if need be. This holds as true for a wolf as a bacterium, for a business enterprise as for a forest, for a divinity as for a family. What must be documented are the property of a terrestrial – in all senses of the word property – by which it is possessed and on which it depends, to the extent that if it were deprived of them, it would disappear.”

p. 96 “One episode of Frenh history… might give a sense of the undertaking: the constructuion of a ledger of complaints, from January to May 1789, becfore the revolutionary term … before all the descriptions were aggregated to produce the classic conception of Politics as a totalizing question. This same view of Politics faces us again today, in the immense and paralyzing question of how to replace capitalism by some other regime.

In a few short months, at the request of a king with his back to the wall, in a situation of financial disaster and climatic tension, all the villages of France, all the cities, all the corporations, not to mention the three estates, managed to describe fairly precisely their living environments, rgulation after regulation, plot of ground after plot of ground, privilege after privilege, tax after tax… This episode offers a template for trying to start again, from the bottom up… is it possible that politics has never done another accounting of its material stakes, at this level of detail, since … Could we be less capable than out predecessors of defining our interests, our demands, our grievances?”

p. 103 “If the first united Europe was created to give a common home to millions of ‘displaced persons’, as was said at the end of the last war, then the second will also be made by and for the displaced persons of today … Europe’s wiseacres are indignant: How can so many people think they can cross Europe’s border, settle impudently “in our space” and “make themselves at home”? The anti-immigrationists ought to have thought about his ahead of time, before the “great discoveries”, before colonization, before decolonization. Any group that is afraid of the Great Replacement shouldn’t have begun by going off to replace ‘virgin lands’ with its own way of life… There is no way out of this. Europe has invaded all peoples; all peoples are coming to Europe in their turn. .. Europe has made a pact with the other terrestrials, who are also setting out to invade its borders, the water of the seas, dried-up or overflowing rivers, forests obliged to migrate as fast as possible so as not to be overtaken by climate change, microbes and parasites, all these, too, aspire to a great replacement. We came to you uninvited; you are now coming to us uninvited. We have benefited from every resource; now these resources have become actors in their own right, have set out, like the Birnam Wood, to recover what belongs to them.”

p. 106 There is nothing like an Old Continent for taking up on a new basis what is common, while observing, with anguish, that the universal condition today entails living in the ruins of modernization, groping for a dwelling place… when those who constituted the old “West” have abandoned the very idea of building a world order – isn’t this actually a much more positive version of its age-old history. The Earth that Europe had wanted to grasp as a Globe is offering itself anew as the Terrestrial, offering Europe a second chance that it in no way deserved. This is quite fitting for the region of the world that has the greatest responsibility in the history of the ecological upheaval.”