Wednesday, October 30, 2024

The Intrusion of Gaia: New interview with Isabelle Stengers

 That’s why I personally chose to name it the Intrusion of Gaia. She is
intruding like someone we weren’t expecting, like someone we, myself
included, would have preferred seeing later, maybe when we were better
able to confront capitalism, or at least that she gave us more time in order
to try and address our issues than the very few decades Gaia seems willing
to give us. Gaia is not really an intruder; we, all those who blessed the
power to reconfigure the world which is called modernity, did “awaken”
her. But now that she is awakened, we cannot ignore her, we cannot send
her away, we cannot put her back to sleep. Indeed, the Intrusion of Gaia
also indicates that what we are involved in today is not a crisis from which
we can escape; from now on we will need to deal with this Gaia, which I
qualify as being sensitive [chatouilleuse] and unstable. The Intrusion of
Gaia is a name that puts the emphasis on a present which is only just
beginning. Dreams of mastery are over for good.

https://library.oapen.org/bitstream/handle/20.500.12657/86106/1/978-3-031-35430-4.pdf#page=367 

 Lovelock did show that Earth was anomalous if considered from that point of view, and he related this anomaly with its being inhabited by living beings, the activity of which is part of its definition. Earth has been kept able to sustain life because living beings are
ongoingly keeping it so.......
This is what Bruno Latour calls “coming
back to Earth.” What does it mean to ground thinking in Earth’s contin-
gencies, rather than dreaming of escaping its eventualities? What does it
mean to come back to Earth? I believe that the new generation, who will
face things that I cannot imagine, deserves to be equipped. Eventually,
there will be a slowdown in innovation, but what threatens us is precisely
the idea that there will be innovative, undreamed-of solutions, that
Anthropos will find, must find solutions.

 

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