The Call for a New Earth, a New People: An Untimely Problem

Abstract

In their final book, Deleuze and Guattari state that the practice of philosophy ‘calls for a future form, for a new earth and people that do not yet exist’. This call is deeply problematic: aside from its aristocratic overtones, it is difficult to ascertain what it might sound like, how to give it voice, and what might come of it. But it is also problematic in form. In this paper I will explain how. After investigating its genesis in Deleuze’s engagements with Nietzsche and Bergson, I will outline the geography of the call as it appears in the mature work of Deleuze and Guattari. Aided by this analysis, the paper will conclude by making some tentative remarks on what is to be done with the call for a new earth and people – or, more accurately, what might be done with it, for the benefit of what is to come.

Implicated by scale: Anthropochemicals and the experience of ecology

“…The proliferation of distributed transformative practices through community specificity, material singularity and practical concreteness is what creates change: many alterontological practices. Change, even if minor, emerges from creating alternative ways of existence obliged by the experience of ecology that give birth to novel ecologies, and possibly also to worlds that do not yet exist (Lundy, 2019). The political significance of alterontological chemical practices emerges from the fact that they engage technoscience and other traditional forms of knowledge to secure communal life in midst of socio-ecological conflict.…”

Vital aspirations for geography in an era of negativity: Valuing life differently with Deleuze

“…Conversely, the task of freeing life’s intensities from the model of the organism requires that we approach our thinking as a means of bringing something new, something unrecognizable into the world. This aspiration constitutes a key principle of Deleuze’s vitalism, one that is easy to overlook from the perspective of empirical social science: thought discovers its singular vitality in the same moment that life’s intensities exceed the organic model of individual unity, giving rise to an act ‘that shatters an existing façade by providing a glimpse of an Other world and way of being that is entirely unrecognisable and out of kilter with the present’ (Lundy, 2019: 15). The provocation that Deleuze’s vitalism poses to human geographers is thus to consider whether our research practices generate work that holds together – indeed, that quite literally makes sense – without ceding to the organism’s demands for a recognizable world.…”

From ‘world’ to ‘earth’: non-phenomenological subjectivity in Deleuze and Guattari's geophilosophy

“…Deleuze's final collaborative work with Guattari-What is Philosophy?-continues this discussion of creatively refiguring subjectivity in terms of the invention of a "people to come" (Deleuze and Guattari 1994, p. 109). Philosophical thought and artistic creation, specifically, are figured as crucially important sites for the reinvention of possibilities of life in the present (Lundy 2021). What is significant about the 'Geophilosophy' chapter of What is Philosophy is how Deleuze and Guattari connect this problem of the creation of a people to come to another seemingly different problem: "the creation of a future new earth" (Deleuze and Guattari 1994, p. 88).…”