ECOLOGY UNBOUND: RETHINKING FINITUDE

Giovanbattista Tusa (Universidade Nova de Lisboa)

ethinking ecologically our time is often associated with the economic concept of “sustainability,” with the idea of a limited exploitation of dwindling resources. And this idea is linked to a contextual process of continuous accumulation that is supposed to ensure a “sustainable”, economically defined future. The confinement of ecology to the limited economy of a sustainable life has become such an epistemological imperative of our time that politics has become pure management, constantly updating itself based on data about the specific distribution of resources. Indeed, the concept of “renewable energy” seems to be the mantra of contemporary sustainability, i.e., the possibility of renewability, which in a sense promises to counteract the end of things and resurrect them from their relative non-being.

To rethink finitude in a materialist way, to decouple it from the capitalist scenario of the mere exhaustion of resources as well as from the metaphysical hallucination of the infinite resurrection of the principle, means to consider singularity as an ecological reality that is not something isolated or separate, but that is constantly in an active relationship with a multiplicity that can never be reduced to a simple sum of elements and therefore cannot be the result of an operation of addition or subtraction of a given quantity.

Seminar by Giovanbattista Tusa, philosopher based in Lisbon at the Nova Institute of Philosophy (IFILNOVA) at the Universidade Nova de Lisboa, where he coordinates the X-CENTRIC FUTURES research programme.