Lecture given on the 23rd of November at Radboud Reflects Nijmegen at the occasion of the Spinozalens prize 2020. Arjen Kleinherenbrink asks questions after the lecture. BL was asked to reminisce about the argument first proposed in 1989 on a possible « Parliament of Things ». Thirty years later, we have moved from a question which could be solved by an expansion of parliamentary politics — in the way Rousseau’s version of the social contract or Serres’ natural contract. But we have move to a much more tragic situation. The question is no longer to grand rights to non humans, but to accept to be dependent on them. The lecture uses the “Embassy of the North Sea” — sponsor of the prize — to give practical example of the shift in understanding political ecology.

The background of my piece is that Chakrabarty’s introduction of the Planetary triggered a seism in philosophy of history: if the Planetary emerges so late then all the other moments of what used to be called “history” are taking place on a ground that has lost its stability. Neither the World, nor the Globe, nor the Earth, nor the Global — to take a few of the steps he recorded — are actually the places where humans reside. Hence the deep suspicion projected backward as to why the distance separating the places the Moderns inhabited from those they thought they were inhabiting was not recognized earlier. A deep source of inauthenticity is revealed every time we engage more thoroughly in the Anthropocene. Geohistory breaks down any claim to have a human-oriented history. Hence the new ground for critique that is provided by realizing we live in the well named critical zone. Just at the time that critique had lost its steam, the simple fact of being violently transported onto the critical zone gave a new edge to a ferocious revision of Modernity. The civilization that had claimed to be the discoverer of the world was now dispersed over many incommensurable “planets” — the Planetary being one of the names for our present situation. The aim of this piece and of Chakrabarty’s response is to give a spatial and geopolitical ground to counteract the notion of the arrow of time implied so far by philosophies of history.

— “Landing on Earth? Why would anyone attempt to land there? Are we not already on Earth?” Well, not quite! And that’s the circumstance this book tries to present to the inquiring reader: it seems that there has been in the past some misinterpretation over what it means to be earthly. If you believe it means “practical”, “mundane”, “secular”, “material” or even “materialist”, you’re in for a surprise. If members of modern industrial societies prided themselves on being “down to earth”, “rational”, “objective” and above all “realist”, they seem to suddenly discover that they need an Earth to continue to live — and live well. Should they not have carefully surveyed the span, size and location of the very land inside which they were supposed to reside and spread? Is not surveying and mapping what they had been doing when they engaged for centuries in what they still celebrate as the “age of great discoveries”? How odd that, after having assembled so many maps of so many foreign lands, collating so many views from so many landscapes, drawing so many versions of what they called “the Globe”, they now appear taken aback by the novelty of this newly emerging Earth? Of all people, should they not have been the best prepared for such a discovery?

How in our right mind could we have the idea of convening in one three-day meeting political philosophers with scientists working on ants, baboons, cells, natural parks, together with historians of capitalism and — how totally bizarre! — specialists of the planet taken as a whole, namely Gaia — plus metaphysicians and historians of science thrown in, plus a bit of legal theory and a lot of social science to steer the pot further? What did we hope to achieve by linking corporate law with embryo development, the management of Amboseli with 19th century investment in railway or the competition between baboons and farmers, with the philosophy of Whitehead and the autotrophy of the earth system? And yet the only way to have a chance to renew the question of the extent, function and future of politics might well be to enter into this strange exercise and, against all odds, to carry it obstinately to the end. Why? Because whatever you expect from the future, you will indeed have to join in some ways in the same polity exactly those various types of beings that were brought to the table in September 2017. It is true that the term “body politik” has been disputed, but is there a better way to flag the goal of the new geohistorical epoch? No matter how disputed is the geological term of Anthropocene, this is exactly the sort of clarification that it triggers and the sort of occasion it opens for natural and social scientists to be able to collaborate. Indeed, it has provided a new breed of diplomats with the underserved chance of an improbable encounter, thanks to the generosity of the Cini Foundation, in one of the most beautiful setting there is: the Biblioteca Longana of San Giorgio.