Rick Dolphijn - Matter of Life: Ecology in Spinoza, Deleuze and Meillassoux

A/V#17.02 2013 Autumn
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For over the past decade, radical thinkers, most of them combining several disciplines in their analysis, and then I think of people such as Brian Massumi, Erin Manning, Bryan Rotman, Rosi Braidotti, Jane Bennett, Tim Morton, Slavoj Zizek, Manuel DeLanda and Quentin Meillassoux, increasingly show us that the type of thinking that has been dominating the ecological debates for so long now, are ill-conceptualized in a fundamental way. Often influenced by the work of Gilles Deleuze, it is now all across academia (from architecture (think Lars Spuybroek) to musicology (think Steve Goodman)), that scholars and scientists are mapping that the current state of the earth, of life, demands us to change our thinking about nature, about matter, about technology, and about our role in it, radically.
Crucial here is to tackle this anthropocentrism which lies deeply embedded not only in the dominant ideas about ecology, but in our thinking as a whole. Especially the writings of Immanuel Kant, as they had a major impact upon (German) Idealism, phenomenology and critical thinking, have established this central role of man in thought. Foucault already noted this in the early 1960's, yet "the end of man", as he indeed defined man a 19th century invention which we have to get rid of as soon as possible, still stirs the debate, today more than anywhere, in terms of ecology. Quentin Meillassoux most recently caused an uproar in academia, claiming that Kant’s thoughts, and especially his Subject (the I-think), functioning as the necessary point of departure for anything to come into existence, turned out to be the very “catastrophe” for thinking. This human self centeredness, this arrogance even, has removed us from the earth we live, alienating us from each other and even from ourselves.
In this paper my goal is to reread this ecological tradition central to European thought, starting with Spinoza with special attention to Deleuze and Quentin Meillassoux (who writes important contributions) as a means to realize that the human being is just another form of life that is nothing but a “fungal growth of which the planet is completely unaware”. To realize this deeply Spinozist position, in thought, we cannot be interested in objects, but we cannot be interested in subjects either. Contrary to how the ecological debate goes today, this tradition cannot but conclude that we are not entitled to save the world; we should allow the world to save the world. We should not open ourselves up to the world, as Derrida would have it. We should allow the world to open us up. We should become a target if we truly want to get rid of anthropocentrism and all of its devastations that keep on haunting us.
Rick Dolphijn is Assistant Professor at the Department of Media and Cultural Studies at Utrecht University.