A few years ago something new appeared on the streets and sidewalks of New York City, Americans finally catching up to similar shifts that had already happened in other places around the world. Recycle bins finally arrived in public spaces. The cans near me arrived in pairs, each with a label: “Recycling” and “Landfill.” It struck me as a classic Baudrillardian moment. The recycling can is the false supplement that exists in order to make us believe that the trashcan is real. And no longer merely trash, but landfill. The very thing that environmentalists in the 1970s were campaigning to curb, now reappears as a special privilege granted to all. I recycle waste with my left hand and proliferate it with my right. Like that insidious mechanism known as pollution credits, which grants toxic industries the right to pollute provided they monetize their right via markets, I too may now spoil the land without guilt, provided I recycle as well. I claim my landfill privilege because, dammit, it’s my land to fill.
The concept of the Anthropocene does similar ideological work. Several years ago pundits, critics, philosophers, and scientists alike started to describe the current age as the Anthropocene, an epoch of Earth’s geological history defined by the presence of mankind, particularly mankind’s pollutants. Until recently humanity conceived of nature as something like Big Nature, an entity too inscrutable to describe, too massive to comprehend. Now, though, the natural history of the planet has been irreversibly altered by the outsize influence of humanity.
Like the dustbin labeled “Landfill,” the concept of the Anthropocene teeters with postmodern vertigo. The concept indicts mankind for its fiduciary failings, only to promulgate a new historical narrative with mankind at the center. Tell humanity it failed, then put it in the spotlight. Remove agency, then assign it again. Ironically the term is used most often by self-styled ecologists, those erstwhile opponents of man-made change. In academic circles, the term became trendy among post-humanists and new materialists, who assert, in varying measures and in different ways, that humans aren’t ontologically special, that humans are merely one entity on equal footing with all other entities. But which is it? Are we special or aren’t we? Are we special enough to go toe to toe with the planet? Or are we merely a mess of desiring machines just like all the others, no different from a lowly mouse or a string of deoxyribonucleic acid?
Let’s give a different name to this ideological inversion. Instead of the Anthropocene, let’s call it warm pride. Having warm pride is feeling important enough to imprint the soil at geological time scales. Having warm pride is being powerful enough to re-engineer the planet (but apparently not powerful enough to stop it). Warm pride, in such a conflicted state, splits along classic metaphysical lines. Warm pride has an ontic component and an ontological component. The one has to do with actual existence in the world, and the other has to do with being as such. Warm pride insists that humans are impactful in matters of existence, but peripheral in matters of being. It stipulates that humanity may be ontically chauvinistic, as long as it remains ontologically humble. The split between these two domains is part of the fuel that sustains warm pride. Someone may display hubris toward the natural world, provided they subscribe to annihilation at the level of being. The logic of living with only works because it is divorced from the logic of extinction. Such is the logic of today’s warm pride. Humanity gains pride of place in geological history, but only within a declension narrative that ends one way. Mankind is powerful enough to do anything, but only if that anything ends up being just one thing. Humanity’s powers are seemingly infinite, except for the climate where we remain forever trapped in our own finitude.
Meanwhile, discourse around ecology changes day by day. The conversation around global warming is slowly but decisively changing from « addressing » warming to “living with” warming. The conversation has shifted from a language of natural equilibrium, to a language of irresistible evolution. I find this particularly astonishing. We moderns, lovers of sober rationality and freedom from constraint, have slowly succumbed to the ultimate amor fati. Always unwilling to adhere to a disciplinary regime if it might curtail one’s lifestyle, humanity now willingly submits to the greatest force of all. Those who were the most levelheaded pragmatists now unwittingly adopt a brute fatalism. Climate Change = Destiny.
Such ideological manipulation makes it difficult to believe in ecology any more, at least for me. It doesn’t help that ecology is very close to the word economy, close etymologically but also conceptually. And ecology is frequently bundled with discourses around webs, networks, environments, and systems, a cluster of concepts that one should greet with a good deal of skepticism. The preponderance of such concepts indicates a kind of network pessimism, defined as the tendency to see everything as a network, and, further, the tendency to foreclose any alternative to networks, except by recourse to some new and more appealing network. Given my lingering skepticism toward network thinking, I have also cultivated a similar skepticism toward ecology or ecological thinking. Just as defenders of democracy frequently bring violence and cruelty to the very publics they ostensibly represent, defenders of ecology include some of the dirtiest and most reactionary institutions on the planet, usually touting happy names like « Green Climate Fund » or « Beyond Petroleum »One of the largest polluters in the history of the world, BP (formerly British Petroleum) rebranded itself as « Beyond Petroleum » in 2001.. At the same time, influential intellectuals like the late French sociologist Bruno Latour have insisted on rejecting the concept of nature in favor of ecology and ecological thinking, nature having been inherently stained by essentialism and romanticism, at least in Latour’s version of things. Although today it feels more and more sensible to endorse the exact opposite opinion. What would it mean to reject ecology and favor nature?
Thankfully a series of countercurrents have emerged in recent years that help unravel this mess. I’m referring to the surge of attention paid to ecology (and even nature) in contemporary Marxist theory, a wing of the intellectual left that had been on life support for the last few decades, only occasionally revivified amid a seemingly interminable decline. Many Marxists, myself included, were encouraged to learn of Kohei Saito’s book, Marx in the Anthropocene: Towards the Idea of Degrowth Communism, a bookworm’s Marxological investigation into the elderly Marx’s gravitation toward geology, soil nutrients, and what Saito identified as a series of ecosocialist concerns.Kohei Saito, Marx in the Anthropocene: Towards the Idea of Degrowth Communism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023) The term « ecosocialist » is obviously anachronistic, and Marx was a communist not a socialist, but these are minor quibbles. (Although don’t expect a book about petroleum, or solar panels, or veganism; Saito’s exegetical talents take the reader on a different kind of odyssey.) At the same time Andreas Malm has emerged as one of the smartest, and also one of the fieriest, intellectuals and activists within Marxism’s eco wing. Famous for his « pipeline » book and its accompanying film adaptation, I am also drawn to Malm’s 2018 book The Progress of This Storm: Nature and Society in a Warming World, where the author demolishes several recent intellectual tendencies that aim to speak in the name of ecology while also actively undermining any sort of real political change.Andreas Malm, The Progress of This Storm: Nature and Society in a Warming World (London: Verso, 2018). See also Andreas Malm, How to Blow Up a Pipeline: Learning to Fight in a World on Fire (New York: Verso, 2021), and How to Blow Up a Pipeline (d. Daniel Goldhaber, 2022) As others before me have already pointed out: Malm’s pipeline book says a lot about global climate politics but doesn’t actually instruct the reader on how to blow up a pipeline; whereas the film adaptation shows its viewers how to blow up a pipeline but doesn’t really say much about global climate politics. These include the mushy connectionism of Latour and also the twee materialism of American political theorist Jane Bennett, both of which Malm staunchly opposes. « Less of Latour, more of Lenin »; « Analysis demands razor blades »: Malm is nothing if not a blunt wordsmith.Malm, The Progress of This Storm, 118, 186.
Both Malm and Saito tarry with the expression « metabolic rift, » a concept that John Bellamy Foster seems to have glued together from several references in Marx.For instance, in Capital Marx defined labor as an act of influencing « the metabolism between [man] and nature » (Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes [New York: Penguin, 1976], 283). And later, in Capital, vol. 3, Marx wrote of « an irreparable rift in the interdependent process of social metabolism » (Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 3, trans. David Fernbach [New York: Penguin, 1981], 949). The term « metabolic » refers to the dynamic relation between humanity and the natural world, while « rift » implies that it’s all out of whack. So far so good. Only the most dug-in conservatives still contest that something is wrong, even if many conservatives (and in fact many liberals too) stridently contest the plausible remedies. Still, authors like Malm and Saito are not afraid to take the next logical step. For if « believe the science » means acknowledging the metabolic rift, it also means acknowledging a dualist ontology. What things are rifting if not the natural world and the artificial world? I’ll admit I was surprised to see these two widely-read authors come out in favor of an ontological dualism between society and nature, using Marx as their evidence no less, given the robustness of contemporary orthodoxy around rejecting the bifurcation of nature. Similar to Saito, although more direct and confrontational, Malm shows that the critique of binarisms is, well, sort of stupid. In fact the critique ends up being fairly reactionary when it comes to the climate debate. Always unsubtle, Malm even chose « The Value of Binaries » as one of his section titles in The Progress of This Storm. Binaries are necessary for Malm, necessary both at the level of diagnosis (humanity is destroying nature), but also at the level of action (which side are you on?). I can only imagine how different audiences might react, particularly those from feminism and queer theory. Not positively I would imagine.
So let me state my position clearly; it’s not a complicated position. We need to remove carbon pollution from the atmosphere. To do that we need to end capitalism. This is a question of motivation, action, and will. Epistemological questions like « believing the science, » much less squabbles over the nature-culture divide, are virtually meaningless at this late stage.
Infinity, Bad and Good
« [T]he earth is finite, » wrote Saito in Marx in the Anthropocene. And yet « capital is incapable of limiting itself ».Saito, Marx in the Anthropocene, 18. Indeed, climate catastrophe invites an investigation into the relation between the finite and the infinite. Yet very few people before the contemporary era, which is to say before the advent of human-induced ecological collapse, would have ever claimed that « the earth is finite. » On the contrary, the earth, its soil, its nature, have for millennia functioned as the very exemplar of limitlessness.
Throughout the ancient period, infinity appeared through a series of crises, from Zeno’s paradoxes, to the discovery of irrational numbers by the Pythagoreans. Add to this the tradition of atomism, which attempted to stop the infinite regress of continuous nature through a kind of terminal foundation, the atomos or « indivisible » element. Is it possible to do without these sorts of terminal foundations? Is it possible to think the continuum directly? « Anaxagoras was the first to give the concept of the infinite, » wrote the mathematician Hermann Weyl, in his book Levels of Infinity. « [Quoting Anaxagoras:] ‘In the small there is no smallest, but here is always a smaller. For what is can (by no division, however far it is carried out) ever cease to be’… The continuum, [Anaxagoras] says, cannot be put together out of discrete elements. »Hermann Weyl, Levels of Infinity: Selected Writings on Mathematics and Philosophy (Mineola, NY: Dover, 2012), 17, emphasis removed. For centuries the continuum has shared a special relationship with the infinite, both extensively and intensively. On the outside, the continuum extends indefinitely, while on the inside the continuum proceeds without gaps or steps, without any articulable anchors that might act as a basic unit of measure.
Even then, infinity was understood through at least two different fundamental species: the apeiron (or the limitless) and the aóristos (or the indeterminate). The former indicates the continuity of infinity—either internal (the infinitesimal) or external (the transfinite)—while the latter acts as a kind of crypting, quite literally a hiding, or a saying less, the indeterminate being the thing that one can only say less about. And while ápeiron is famous from Aristotle’s tepid discussion of infinity in the Physics, the latter, aóristos, is equally familiar, at least to any student of Ancient Greek grammar, for the « aorist » is the name given to the simple, indeterminate past tense for verbs. For many years, up through the Scholastic period, Aristotle’s opinion on infinity had pride of place. Aristotle had notoriously dismissed any kind of « actual » infinity, allowing only for a kind of potential infinity, an infinity-in-waiting that might be postulated but never actually achieved.See in particular book 3 of Aristotle, Physics, Books 1-4, trans. F.M. Cornford, et al. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1929). This eventually lead to the Scholastic dictum, infinitum actu non datur, or « there is no actual infinity, » and colored many years of subsequent skepticism toward the realness of the infinite.
The typical, if not also cliche, story of modernity is one of nihilism and finitude. Man has been thrown into secular existence, into this mundane and profane world, and he must come to terms with it somehow. Recall the importance of finitude in the work of Martin Heidegger, or, much more recently, in Martin Hägglund’s book This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom published in 2019.Martin Hägglund, This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom (New York: Pantheon, 2019). Hägglund’s work is frequently compelling, not least because finitude becomes the logical impetus for an ethics. For Hägglund, human beings are inherently finite creatures. All people face death. Thus according to Hägglund the essence of humanity should be grounded in an ethics of care. Indeed Hägglund finds his modern ethical program through the very absence of the infinite.
Interestingly the story about modern finitude isn’t entirely true. Or at least several prominent figures would largely disagree, arriving at the exact opposite position. Some of the most vocal objections would likely come from G.W. Leibniz. Already in the 17th Century, Leibniz had devised a fantastic philosophy of the infinite. And not only did he wage his crusade at the level of being and thinking, Leibniz also invented (or co-invented with Isaac Newton) an actually-existing technology of the infinite, which we know today as calculus. Leibniz even supplemented his paper calculations by building a machine for calculation, a proto-computer really, which could mechanize the infinite, step by step, one sliver at a time.
Complementing the esoterica of infinity in mathematics and calculation, Leibniz also focused his attention on the natural world, sometimes using language that, today, sounds similar to ecological discourse. Leibniz was fond of illustrating his ideas with what we might call a « tide pool » or « forest pond » theory of natural infinity. Imagine yourself walking a coast line and peering into a tide pool, Leibniz invited his readers, there you will find a microscopic fantasia of little creatures, each with their own worlds, each containing universes within universes. Or as Leibniz wrote in his Monadology: « within the smallest portion of matter there exists a World of creatures, living beings, Animals, Entelechies, and Souls. »Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Monadology, in Lloyd Strickland, Leibniz’s Monadology: A New Translation and Guide (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014), 28, translation modified. The fantasy of regression continues toward the infinitesimal. « Every portion of matter can be thought of as a garden full of plants, or as a Pond full of fish. Further, every branch of the plant, every limb of the Animal, and every drop of its vital fluids, is another such garden, or another such pond. »Ibid., translation modified.
Leibniz’s mathematical calculus doubtless influenced his conception of a natural recession of ever smaller bits, unending. Historians of science have also identified a more tangible tool, the microscope, as having an influence on the baroque philosopher. The development of microscopes in the decades prior to his writing likely helped Leibniz envision a hidden worlds of infinitesimals. Or as the classicist Catherine Wilson described it,
Developments in microscopy [convinced Leibniz] that organization and activity were to be found at all points along a scale extended from the visible to the infinitely minute. … [Leibniz’s world is] teeming with life and activity; animals are full of smaller animals and even the empty spaces in between are packed with living creatures… [Leibniz] observed in a letter…that the microscope reveals the presence of 800,000 little animals in a single drop of water « each of which is as remote from Descartes’ primary element as we ourselves », and each of which may be composed of smaller animals and plants or « heterogeneous bodies » to infinity.Catherine Wilson, « Leibniz and Atomism, » Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 13, no. 3 (September 1982): 175-199, pp. 176, 195.
There is a beauty to Leibniz’s vision of infinite nature. His was a fractal nature, a complex nature. Yet the intricate complexity was also deterministic in its totality. Even the smallest creatures were subject to the Principle of Sufficient Reason, an iron law of the universe, if not always legible to the human eye then certainly known absolutely in the mind of God. For this reason, Gilles Deleuze, in this 1980 seminar, described Leibniz as a philosopher of order, a philosopher of order and the police, harsh words coming from Deleuze, to be sure. « Abominable, » he insisted. « Leibniz is abominable. »Gilles Deleuze, Seminar « On Leibniz, » April 15, 1980, https://www.webdeleuze.com/textes/50. (By comparison, Deleuze referred to Spinoza as « the anti-Leibniz, » a revealing moniker, given how fond Deleuze was of SpinozaIbid.).
But these microscopic fantasias—Leibniz’s 800,000 little creatures swimming in a single drop of water—also indicate why Deleuze chose not to dismiss Leibniz outright. In fact Deleuze staged no less than three seminars on Leibniz during the 1980s, followed by a book-length study, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, published in French in 1988. This short volume is no doubt one of Deleuze’s lesser miracles—I state this unapologetically for the record—and the book was certainly unaided by Tom Conley’s notorious English translation. Yet with even a cursory knowledge of Deleuze, it is not difficult to see why he was attracted to Leibniz’s worlds within worlds, a universe affected by fractal scaling, continuous and self-similar at all levels of scale down to the smallest infinity. I imagine Deleuze amused but also titillated while reading Leibniz on the Law of Continuity and the Identity of Indiscernibles. After finding a few scattered references to « folds » in Leibniz, Deleuze refashioned the baroque philosopher’s rather un-Deleuzian vocabulary (monads, souls, a universal language, the sufficiency of reason) into a parallel story about operations, characteristics, pleats of matter, and folds in the soul. « The unit of matter, the smallest element of the labyrinth, is the fold, » wrote Deleuze, becoming intoxicated by the Leibnizian universe. “A fold is always folded within a fold, like a cavern within a cavern. »Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. Tom Conley (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 6, translation modified.
Having previously referenced the ethical potential of modern finitude, we may now address the moral nature of infinity. It was not G.W.F. Hegel who made infinity moral, an achievement already accomplished millennia ago, but it was he who phrased the question most candidly by distinguishing cleanly between good infinity and bad infinityG.W.F. Hegel, The Science of Logic, trans. George di Giovanni (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 108-113.. Fold within a fold, cavern within a cavern, x within x—alas, these all remained mired in bad infinity for Hegel. Infinity (the bad kind) may be defined as a series of repetitive steps. How to count to infinity? Hegel’s answer was: add one, and keep adding for a very long time. Step into a cavern, then into a smaller cavern, and onward forever. Yet if these nested caverns could induce the infinite, it would be a bad infinite. « Only repetitious monotony » was Hegel’s acid renunciation of such arithmetical loopingIbid., 113.. Driven by mere mechanical obligation, the bad infinite plods ahead, encompassing an infinite expanse (at best), while never having overcome its own staid regularityHegel’s bad infinity seems to have anticipated Freud’s notion of the death drive, defined by Freud as « the compulsion to repeat. » See Sigmund Freud, Beyond The Pleasure Principle, trans. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1961), 19-20.. Was Leibniz’s infinity a bad infinity? Hegel at least said yes.
All of which is to insist on good infinity, to insist, even in these cynical times, that there is a good infinite, and that the good infinite is indeed good. In fact while « bad infinity » appears several times in The Science of Logic, Hegel didn’t speak of « good infinity » per se. Instead he referenced the « true » concept of infinity and « the infinite of reason, » as markers for a kind of qualitative subsumption of mere arithmetical countingHegel, The Science of Logic, 109.. In a sense, Hegel anticipated at the beginning of the 19th Century what Georg Cantor would demonstrate toward the end of the century, that is, the absolute distinction between two different registers of the infinite, between what Cantor defined as natural infinity and real infinitySee Georg Cantor, « On a Property of the Set of Real Algebraic Numbers » in William Ewald, ed., From Kant to Hilbert: A Sourcebook in the Foundations of Mathematics, Volume 2 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 839-843.. Although while it seems that Hegel’s bad infinity is identical to Cantor’s smaller infinity (the infinity composed of the rational numbers, also known by its technical name aleph-zero), it’s unclear whether Hegel’s good infinity therefore corresponds to Cantor’s larger infinity (the infinity composed of the real numbers). Hegel’s dialectic furnishes not so much the continuous real as it does « the scandalous unity of the finite and the infiniteHegel, The Science of Logic, 115.. » In other words, Hegel’s Logic advances out of the arithmetical into the dialectical, not simply out of the arithmetical into the real.
The contemporary French philosopher Alain Badiou has disambiguated this complicated thicket even further. Given that one of Badiou’s largest influences was Cantor, and that Cantor was the progenitor of the modern mathematical theory of infinity, it is no surprise that an encounter with infinity traverses much of Badiou’s work. Badiou devoted a long section to infinity in his important 1988 treatise, Being and EventAlain Badiou, Being and Event, trans. Oliver Feltham (London: Continuum, 2005).. And infinity serves as the operational core of the recent large volume The Immanence of Truths, where Badiou upset the finitist posture championed by Heidegger or Hägglund. « The finite is only ever a result, » Badiou has insisted. « [T]he finite is generally the result of the operative intersection between two infinities of different types (of different sizes)Alain Badiou, The Immanence of Truths: Being and Event III, trans. Susan Spitzer and Kenneth Reinhard (London: Bloomsbury, 2022), 21, emphasis removed.. » In other words, for Badiou there are two vast infinities—perhaps the two from Hegel, or perhaps the two from Cantor—and these infinities somehow intersect with each other. At the intersection there appears finite things of various kinds (including subjects). Or to translate into Hegelian vocabulary: good infinity and bad infinity intersect; the result is us.
For Hegel this intersection was a « scandalous unity, » but Badiou pushed the scandal even further. In The Immanence of Truths, as well as in other works, Badiou has defined modernity itself in terms of a sequence of the infinite and the finite, specifically that the infinite precedes the finite. From the perspective of bad infinity, this makes little sense; bad infinity is defined as the rote sum of finite steps, one after another, advancing steadily toward infinity. In a sense, Badiou has inverted the typical story of modern decadence. Modernity does not signal mankind’s falling away from the absolute, and hence being forced to reckon with mundane finitude. Rather, according to Badiou, modernity begins from the infinite, later generating finite entities, encounters, and experiences in its wake. In a technical sense this is undoubtedly true: only in the modern era were mathematicians able to provide rigorous grounds for the continuum. « Dedekind is a true modern, » Badiou said about Richard Dedekind, an important contributor to the modern theory of the continuum. « [Dedekind] knows that the infinite is simpler than the finiteAlain Badiou, Number and Numbers, trans. Robin Mackay (Cambridge: Polity, 2008), 32.. »
Poignant Apathy
No surprise, then, that Badiou also conserved a specific place for Leibniz in his pantheon, since Leibniz too put infinity at the center of his philosophy. No abomination (as Deleuze said before), Leibniz was a true modern marvel for Badiou. « Leibniz! What virtuosity! What endless delight! What an appetite for knowledge and enjoyment! » wrote Badiou in Logics of WorldsAlain Badiou, Logics of Worlds: Being and Event, 2, trans. Alberto Toscano (London: Continuum, 2009), 543. In fact Badiou praised Leibniz before admitting that « he can’t take Leibniz entirely seriously, » given Leibniz’s magpie penchant for collecting and reconciling so many disparate threads. On this point Badiou agreed with Deleuze: Leibniz’s mental architecture was in fact a baroque architecture, just like « the baroque churches of southern Germany, which resemble immense boudoirs for loose women » (ibid.).. Such joyful enthusiasm is a welcome salve amid today’s climate crisis, where one is more apt to encounter poignant apathy than energetic action. Readers of pop climate books will find no shortage of harrowing tales of the wounded or sad stories of the sorrowful, all rendered with a bittersweet beautyAndreas Malm admonished some of the worst offenders in How to Blow Up a Pipeline (133-152), including Roy Scranton, author of Learning to Die in the Anthropocene: Reflections on the End of a Civilization (San Francisco: City Lights, 2015).. Indeed poignant apathy is common in today’s fatalist culture. Walter Benjamin warned of this already years ago in his famous essay “The Author as Producer.” Beware of merely “tendentious” writing, he said, writing that paints a sad picture. Beware of the New Objectivity, which seeks merely to “renew…the world as it is.”Walter Benjamin, “The Author as Producer,” in Selected Writings, Vol. 2: 1927-1934, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 768-782, p. 775. Instead, in order to combat poignant apathy, Benjamin wrote, you must change your life.
Warm pride is the ultimate form of narcissism. As narcissists we are so enamored with ourselves that anything we do becomes terrific and true. Like the baby who giggles with glee after spitting up, we revel in our creation because, dammit, we created it. We walk tall in the warm winds of defeat.
One of the great tragedies of contemporary life is how so many have become vulgar determinists, have admitted to themselves that there is a single force beyond humanity’s control, yet they have mistakenly elected the wrong force, have abdicated humanity’s power before the wrong supernature. Nearly everyone agrees that there is a quasi-infinite force greater than humanity, the juggernaut of climate disaster. In other words, global warming makes us all believers in a kind of religious absolute, whether avowedly secular or not. The real question is why this particular absolute and not another?
Oh, to find the right theology. Oh, to realign the disciplinary regime. If we are all determinists in the end—climate as destiny—why not a determination we can live with? If we are all theologians in the last instance, why not a form of unbreakable commandment that’s less destructive? How to shift from an external determination to an internal determination? We need a voluntarism of the will, but we’re stuck here with a defeatism of the won’t.
Because of this, I suspect that ecological hope lies not so much in more human freedom—as the dopes who created this mess endlessly suggest—but in this very determinism. Amor fati is the key, but it’s only the beginning. Humanity’s fatalism appears here in inverted form; we must flip the valences, as Fredric Jameson likes to say, in order to set it right againSee in particular Fredric Jameson, Valences of the Dialectic (New York: Verso, 2009), 416, 428, 434, and passim.. The first step is already behind us. We have already accepted that life will change. In other words the political conversion has already taken place, the moment in which the individual realizes that his or her life is not given into natural freedom.
But the next step will be harder still. Good infinity will arrive when we realign the disciplinary fiat from Big Nature back down to ourselves alone. The final step will be to swallow our warm pride, and reawaken that force of the greater.