For Love of the World
International Conference
20th-21st September 2019, Università di Firenze
SCARICA LA LOCANDINA DEL CONVEGNO
ABSTRACTS
Elena Pulcini
Introduction. Rethinking the World in the global Age
Dale Jamieson
Loving Nature
Drawing inspiration from Iris Murdoch, I develop a systematic (though rudimentary) account of love that countenances love beyond persons. I then show how this account applies to nature, and explain why loving nature matters. In particular, I discuss how this account of loving nature can help us to think imaginatively about conservation in the anthropocene.
Gianfranco Pellegrino
Ethics and Politics of Hybrid Nature
According to many, we live in a new geological epoch – the age of an unprecedented human impact on Earth, the Anthropocene. According to some, this epoch is the age of the ‘end of nature’, namely the age when there is no longer untouched or wild nature. For some authors, the age of the end of nature is also the age when environmental ethics and politics end. If there is no wild nature, there is no nature to preserve, and there is no need to establish human duties towards nature.
The paper argues against these views, by defending three claims. First, Anthropocene is the age of hybrid nature, not the age of the end of nature. Nature is still here, but it lurks in new human-natural compounds. Second, hybrid nature has value, and we ought to preserve it. Third, the value of nature grounds specific duties and demands specific protection policies.
Olivia Guaraldo
Against Powerless Cynicism: Reality, Illusion and Public Happiness
By drawing on Hannah Arendt’s reflections on the appeal of ideology on totalitarian masses, and on her later considerations regarding the relationship between lying and politics, I will investigate the ambiguities and mystifications of the so-called “post-truth” era. A sinister combination of impotence and cynicism characterizes the collective ‘mood’ of a fragmented and mediatized public sphere, where the borders between reality and illusion are constantly blurred, and the human capacity to act, to start something new, seems lost for good. How can we exit this apparently inescapable condition? Again, by drawing on Arendt, I shall explore how and to which extent we can still rely on her provocative notions of reality, action, happiness to forge a much needed political imaginary of hope.
Saskia Sassen
Predatory Formations Dressed in Wall Street Suits and Algorithmic Math
Assemblages of complex types of knowledge and technologies—including algorithmic mathematics, law and accounting, and high-level logistics—have generated complex predatory formations. The complexity of these formations tends to camouflage their predatory character. Further, such formations are systemic in nature. They are not produced by an elementary seizure of power. Predatory formations are often beyond the reach of ordinary policy responses, in good part because they tend to assemble elements of separate domains into novel configurations. In fact we need new law that can encompass these formations. The focus here is on one of the more powerful and complex predatory formations, (high) finance. And the effort is to explain how even the most sophisticated financial instruments require certain elementary and brutal steps, resulting in highly degraded socio-economic outcomes.
Jean-Luc Nancy
The World makes sense
Hartmut Rosa
In Resonance With the World. Contours of a New Approach in Critical Social Theory
The lecture will start out by systematically substantiating the claim that the dominant mode of our late-modern relationship towards the world is a mode of aggression. The structural cause of this mode of relating to the world lies in the fact that modern societies operate in a mode of dynamic stabilization, i.e., they are forced to constantly grow, accelerate and innovate in order to reproduce their institutional structure. This, in turn, leads to ecological destruction, social alienation, political aggression and individual burn out. The main part of the lecture, therefore, will strive to explore the contours of an alternative mode of being in, or relating to, the world, which is centered around the conception of resonance. Resonance as a mode of relating to the world is characterized by four distinctive features: A) ‘Affection’: The subject is touched, or moved, by someone or something he or she encounters. B) ‘EMotion’: The subject responds to this in a way that includes the experience of self-efficacy. C) Transformation: In this (recurrent) process of being touched and reaching out, the subject (as well as ‘the world’) does not stay the same, it is transformed. D) Unpredictability (Unverfügbarkeit): This process of resonance is unpredictable in a twofold sense: First, resonance cannot be enforced instrumentally, there is no way to predict for sure if or when it will occur or end. And secondly, if there is resonance, the result of the transformation cannot be controlled or predicted beforehand. Resonance is fundamentally open-ended. Resonance in this sense is defined as a mode of relating to the world which is not geared towards increasing the horizon of what is available, attainable and accessible, but which develops ‘responsable’, dialogical relationships in three dimensions: with things (material resonance), with people (social resonance) and with life or the world as a totality (existential resonance).
Fabio Merlini
Interiority as a Care of the World. An Answer to the Imposture of Immediacy
The external world and the inner world cannot be conceived one without the other. But what happens when the inner world is colonized by a narcissism tending to saturate any sense of the external world? Then the time has come to rethink the notion of interiority. Beyond the naivety to which it was submitted during the twentieth century.
Chiara Giaccardi
‘For the sake of the world’: Hannah Arendt's legacy and generative social action
Hannah Arendt's legacy and her struggle to hold a specific attitude towards the world, that she called amor mundi, can be seen as a contribution to the idea of ‘generative action’, within a more broad paradigm for contemporary global societies that we call ‘social generativity’. Starting from her critique of the desertification of our common world, due to the transformation of the whole society into a ‘laboring-consuming’ society, some crucial ideas in Arendt‘s work (especially natality, plurality, promise, forgiveness), open the way to a generative idea of freedom. In particular, the possibility of free acting, which through the amor mundi develops between past and future, combining individual initiative and mutual cooperation, reveals the same features of ‘inter-temporality’, ‘authorization’ and ‘exemplarity’ that lay at the core of the relational, dynamic, open construct of ‘social generativity’.
Alain Caillé
Are the Gift Paradigm and Convivialism a Response to the Pathologies of the Global World?
Of course, my answer is yes! Let us assume that the most important part of the pathologies of the present world stems, directly or indirectly, from the global domination exercised by rentier and speculative capitalism and that this domination passes (in addition to material, financial, military or police means) through the control over ideas, through the hegemony that neoliberal ideology has managed to conquer. If this hypothesis is correct, then nothing is more urgent than to deconstruct the normative utilitarian anthropology on which neoliberalism is based and to develop an alternative political philosophy that can be universalised (or pluriversalised). The gift paradigm, as a follow-up to the Essay on the Gift of M. Mauss (1925), in dialogue with other important paradigms, - care, recognition, resonance, etc. proposes to re-found social science (including moral and political philosophy) on anti-utilitarian bases. The only way to overcome dominant economicism everywhere. Convivialism is the signifier in which many of those who contribute to the development of this post-neoliberal philosophy, in connection with multiple social movements, already recognize themselves.
Christine Unrau
The Patriotism of those with no Nation? Love and Sympathy in the Global Justice Movement
“The real patriotism of those with no nation” – this is how Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri define the motivating force of the “Multitude” in its fight against “Empire”. Thus, like other protagonists of the Global Justice Movement, they turn to love and sympathy in order to argue that a commitment to “another world” is not only required, but also promising. While this seems to resonate with Arendt’s notion of “love of the world”, thinkers of the Global Justice Movement often defend positions on the relationship of passions and politics that are diametrically opposed to hers. In my talk I explore this tension by analyzing the various meanings and uses of love and sympathy in the Global Justice Movement, which flourished around the turn of the Millennium but seems to have lost ground against the background of a rising urge to keep the world behind walls.
Daniel Innerarity
Politics as Life
In modernity, democracy is conceived as a collection of institutions that have allowed people to abandon the natural world. The entirety of modern politics has been an attempt to escape the “state of nature”, which is not a simple metaphor. At the point at which this contrast is overcome, once we begin to see ourselves as part of the natural world, to recover our own ecological nature, the question that inevitably presents itself is how to develop a new understanding of our political systems as embedded into a natural environment that does not correspond with spatial limitations or with the logic of our electoral democracies.