Cosmic Animism

Giovanbattista Tusa (Universidade Nova de Lisboa)

Capitalism has often been reduced to a purely economic system of production, to a product of humans for humans, and its story is reduced to a succession of individual ideas and undertakings. The hypothesis put forward by Giovanbattista Tusa in his "Provocation" is that capitalism is rather a particular kind of animism, i.e. a technique for reanimating matters that had been reduced to inanimate, merely available resources. 

The current shift away from fossil fuels and their gradual replacement by renewable energies interestingly coincides with the dematerialization of money and its partial replacement by digital currencies, whose production is largely dependent on energy. What seems to be happening today is a paradigm shift from the classical thermodynamic system – which is about maintaining an equilibrium – to a system in which every living and non-living being is potentially capable of storing, releasing and multiplying the energy supplied to it. Value creation on a planetary scale is then based on the constant conversion of energy as currency into information and into capital, while social energies, mined with algorithms like oil and gas, become part of the global energy market – with human labour still indispensable and performed by exploited workers in various mines.

Giovanbattista Tusa counters this "restricted', economically determined idea of extractive animism with the blind generosity of a cosmic animism that emerges as a field of compositional, materialist practices of intelligences that resonate with the agency of emergent futurities  that are not captured by the unique direction of the future as progress.

Giovanbattista Tusa is a philosopher and currently works as a researcher at the Nova Institute of Philosophy (IFILNOVA) of the Universidade Nova de Lisboa, where he coordinates the X-CENTRIC FUTURES research seminar on art, ecology and climate change. 

His most recent publications include Terra Cosmica: Traces of Georealism (2024), Ciò che rimane del futuro. Il tempo della decostruzione (What remains of the future: the time of deconstruction, 2024), Quasi Niente: il tempo cosmico di Claude Debussy(Almost Nothing: Claude Debussy's cosmic time) and The End, co-authored with Alain Badiou (2019), translated into French, Portuguese, Spanish and Italian. 

He is also co-editor of Fernando Pessoa and Philosophy. Countless Lives Inhabit Us (2021), PPPP. Pier Paolo Pasolini Philosopher(2022), Dispositif: A Cartography (2023) and Contemporaranea: A Glossary for the 21st Century (2024), translated into French and Italian).

In recent years, Giovanbattista Tusa has been a visiting scholar at the National University of Singapore, the Federal University of Amazonas, the Ryukoku University of Kyoto, and the Energy Humanities research group at The Spanish National Research Council in Madrid, among others. He is the director of the Futures. Of Philosophy Series at Planetary Conversations in collaboration with The Philosophical Salon.

He is currently editor-in-chief, with Michael Marder, of the series Political Theory and Contemporary Philosophy at Bloomsbury. He is also the coordinator of the political ecology, postcolonial and indigenous studies seminar ECOPRAXIS, in collaboration with the Zé Dos Bois Gallery in Lisbon.

Giovanbattista Tusa was awarded a European Cooperation in Science and Technology (COST) Action CA20134 grant - Traces as Research Agenda for Climate Change, Technology Studies, and Social Justice (TRACTS), for a research stay as Visiting Scholar at the Royal College of Arts.