Geophilosophy as the end of philosophy

Geophilosophies: towards another sense of the earth

“…Geophilosophy qua philosophy happens because thought always inhabits a time and place, and thus must be considered as a relation of territorialisation. This is not to say that philosophy had to emerge out of, and remain causally bound to, a localised event; " [o]ur authors in no way intended to argue for any geographical determinism that made the birth of philosophy in the Greek world inevitable" (Dosse 2011, p. 254; also see Zourabichvili 2012, p. 166;Colebrook 2022). As a relation of territorialization, Greek philosophy could "also have happened somewhere else" and is "capable of being repeated" (Gasché 2014, p. 13).…”

“…In the final paper, Claire Colebrook (2022) counters the temptation to see the Anthropocene as a component of geophilosophy by heightening the sense that thinking geophilosophy after Deleuze and Guattari would resolutely be a task of placing thought within the rhythms and inhuman forces of the Earth. The task of placing thought as an outcome of inhuman force is not only about confronting the sense that philosophy has no internal necessity and access to absolute Reason, but to say that, if philosophy is to become geophilosophy, it must itself be willing to approach its own nonbeing and inherent contingency within a history of the earth that could have been otherwise.…”

“…Recognising the contingency of philosophy is, for Colebrook, not merely about grounding concepts within a specific context and situated territory; concepts, for Deleuze and Guattari (1994), have a capacity for de-territorialization that need not be resolved into any pre-given milieu. Instead, as Colebrook (2022) argues, there is a contingent history of philosophy that might be better understood as a 'counter-history' whose function is to think "philosophy as a power beyond its actual history".…”

“…It leads us to understand what may have an agency or force on forms of life and on material objects: the earth itself, while 'unliving' as chemical elements and forces, can be understood as having a kind of life of its own when it is understood as a system of order and organization that is continually changing, never fully stable, dynamic" (Grosz et al 2017, p. 132). Similarly, Colebrook (2022) presents thought as an outcome of inhuman forces of the Earth, but crucially draws attention to the way those outcomes, and thus histories, can always have been otherwise. Geophilosophy, therefore, makes possible situated and, since such situations can always have been otherwise, speculative styles of research (Williams and Keating 2022) capable of attuning to an inhuman production of thought that is disruptive of the subject's conventional habits of thinking.…”