Winner, Grand Prize, French Voices Award for Excellence in
Publication and Translation The Space Age is over? Not at all! A
new planet has appeared: Earth. In the age of the Anthropocene, the
Earth is a post-natural planet that can be remade at will,
controlled and managed thanks to the prowess of geoengineering.
This new imaginary is also accompanied by a new kind of
power—geopower—that takes the entire Earth, in its social,
biological and geophysical dimensions, as an object of knowledge,
intervention, and governmentality. In short, our rising awareness
that we have destroyed our planet has simultaneously provided us
not with remorse or resolve but with a new fantasy: that the
Anthropocene delivers an opportunity to remake our terrestrial
environment thanks to the power of technology. Such is the position
we find ourselves in, when proposals for reengineering the
earth’s ecosystems and geosystems are taken as the only
politically feasible answer to ecological catastrophe. Yet far from
being merely the fruit of geo-capitalism, this new grand narrative
of geopower has also been activated by theorists of the
constructivist turn—ecomodernist, postenvironmentalist,
accelerationist—who have likewise called into question the great
divide between nature and culture. With the collapse of this
divide, a cyborg, hybrid, flexible nature has been built, an
impoverished nature that does not exist without being performed by
technologies that proliferate within the space of human needs and
capitalist imperatives. Underneath this performative vision resides
a hidden anaturalism denying all otherness to nature and the Earth,
no longer by externalizing it as a thing to be dominated, but by
radically internalizing it as something to be digested.
Constructivist ecology thus finds itself in no position to confront
the geoconstructivist project, with its claim that there is no
nature and its aim to replace Earth with Earth 2.0. Against both
positions, Neyrat stakes out the importance of the unconstructable
Earth. Against the fusional myth of technology over nature, but
without returning to the division between nature and culture, he
proposes an “ecology of separation” that acknowledges the wild,
subtractive capacity of nature. Against the capitalist,
technocratic delusion of earth as a constructible object, but
equally against an organicism marked by unacknowledged traces of
racism and sexism, Neyrat shows what it means to appreciate Earth
as an unsubstitutable becoming: a traject that cannot be replicated
in a laboratory. Underway for billions of years, withdrawing into
the most distant past and the most inaccessible future, Earth
escapes the hubris of all who would remake and master it. This
remarkable book, which will be of interest to those across the
humanities, natural sciences, and social sciences, from theorists
to shapers of policy, recasts the earth as a singular trajectory
that invites humans to turn political ecology into a geopolitics.
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