From World to Earth: Toward an Ecophilosophical Critique of the Welt–Umwelt Dichotomy

Antonino Firenze (Universitat Pompeu Fabra)

In the first part of this paper, I carry out an ecophilosophical critique of the Welt–Umwelt dichotomy, upon which much of 20th-century philosophy—especially Heideggerian existential ontology and philosophical anthropology—has reaffirmed the traditional metaphysical-anthropocentric separation between the human “world” and the animal “environment.” In the second part, I turn to the Merleau-Pontian interpretation of Husserl’s concept of Earth as a relational intercorporeal interweaving through which the original co-belonging of all living beings to the Earth is revealed. Moving “from the World to the Earth” means rethinking human animality based on this intercorporeality that constitutes all forms of life inhabiting the Earth.

Feral Futures | Voices from the Past

Alice Iacobone (Universität St. Gallen)

In the age of the Sixth Extinction, biotech companies pursue the de-extinction of long time gone animals. In contrast to these technocratic projects, speculative design combines art and science with a different approach. Some imagine beings that entangle their life trajectories with plastics, others imaginatively reconstruct the vocal organs of extinct animals. What does it mean, philosophically, to focus not on language but on the voices of extinct nonhuman individuals? Can listening to these sounds and their counter-narratives help us navigate the complexities of our polluted present and orient us toward a feral future?

Neganthropology and Art for a Technopolitics of Bifurcation

Guillermo Rodríguez Alonso (Universidade de Santiago de Compostela)

I will talk about Bernard Stiegler’s Neganthropocene framework, which I find particularly useful, and focus on how certain artists—like Superflex, for example—engage with the problem of extinction. I’ll explore two key aspects: first, how these artists introduce the hyperobject of extinction into our aesthetic sensibility; and second, how they attempt to create bifurcations that challenge and disrupt colonized imaginaries of the future. 

Aesthetics of Warning. Being Rescued into the Age of Extinction

Santiago Zabala (ICREA / Universitat Pompeu Fabra)

My presentation aims to outline an Aesthetics of Warnings where we are rescued into the age of extinction. Similar to other post-metaphysical aesthetics, this stance is not meant to provide a philosophical reflection on the essence of the beautiful and art as much as how these can help us warn society about our greatest emergencies. The greatest emergency is the absence of emergency, that is, those warnings we do not listen to. Science and its truth, facts, and precision cannot exercise the pressure requested to change our beliefs, customs, and existence. What is the responsibility of artists now that it has become evident that science is not enough to save us? What sort of art is required to understand extinction?

Impossible Encounters: Extinction’s Representation in the Anthropocene

Anda Pleniceanu (Vilnius University) & Justas Patkauskas (Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia)

This talk discusses the function of Anthropocene aesthetics in relation to planetary-scale dimensions of extinction and environmental disaster. We focus on strategies of representation that emphasize absent signs: for example, erased species as evidence of past extinction events as well as extractivist practices indicating future extinctions. Anthropocene aesthetics underscores the post-objective nature of the planet, which cannot be captured in a single organic image and requires artificial visualization practices. In addition, we discuss Anthropocene aesthetics as a visual regime with a strong epistemological dimension that aims to represent, and thus bring to sensibility, an empirical object that is real but whose experience is impossible—the planet.

Time for Other Others: Aesthetic Toolkit to Think Extinction Beyond the Biopolitical Economy

Amanda Boetzkes (University of Guelph)

If we have not yet acknowledged the death of so many others and their others, how can we possibly think extinction? This paper provides an aesthetic toolkit by which to counter the denial and/or disavowal of biopolitical death in such a way as to acknowledge extinction as such. Extinction, here, is positioned in the context of ecological being, which must be distinguished from the limited economy of the life sciences. In order to make this distinction, I make use of the tools of artists and thinkers who have insistently shaped the form of this unwieldy concept. I will propose ten theses on extinction and for each of these a corresponding “tool”: repudiation; fantasy; receptivity; borrowed time; the sublime redux; self-organization; art; utopia; jellyfish; and trust.  These tools are not strictly objects, in the ontological sense. They exist as both operations of thinking and systemic process that lead us away from the fatalism of the biopolitical. Nevertheless, they hold together as a “toolkit,” defining one another coextensively in an assemblage of thinking activities that that shape ecologies. Which is to say that as tools of thinking, acting and making, they are not faculties (say of judgment, understanding, or reason), but rather the effects of sharpening, blunting, forging, smelting, staining and general aesthetic formation at play in the heart of ecological consciousness.