The Last Humanity: The New Ecological Science

185 Pages·2020·1.216 MB·English

by  Francois Laruelle

THE LAST
HUMANITY
i
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ii
THE LAST
HUMANITY
The New Ecological Science
FRAN Ç OIS LARUELLE
TRANSLATED BY ANTHONY PAUL SMITH
iii
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First published in 2015 in France as ‘En derniè re humanit é ’ by Fran ç ois Laruelle
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First published in Great Britain 2021

Copyright © Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2021

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iv
CONTENTS
Translator’s introduction: Why ecology at the end? vii
Foreword xvi
Introduction 1
1 In search of a messianic ecology 17
2 Philosophy’s degrowth for a generic ecology 41
3 The house of philosophy is in ruins 57
4 The antinomy of ecology and philosophy 65
5 The unifi cation of the lived-without-life and
being-in-the-last-humanity 89
6 Ecology as quantum of the messianic lived 115
Conclusion: Ethics between ecology and
messianity 133
v
vi CONTENTS
Afterword: Quantum Laruelle – A principle of philosophical
uncertainty by John Ó Maoilearca 153
Notes 159
Index 163
TRANSLATOR’S
INTRODUCTION: WHY
ECOLOGY AT THE END?
ANTHONY PAUL SMITH
The generation coming to be today may be the last of humanity. The
grand apocalyptic visions of religion have not come to pass, but
have instead given way to prosaic litanies of violence, suffering, death,
and extinction reported in the news and shared on social media
alongside banal details about reality stars and the day-to-day
fl uctuations of the global market. Who would have thought the end of
the world would be so dull, that the death of species would go so
unnoticed? Throughout the world, the various and uneven struggles
for survival require so much energy, so much attention, that the
struggles of others pass without being seen. Whether what is lived be
human, animal, or plant, they all pass into the rushing fl ux of a
generalized death, a generalized extinction, a shared fate that we may
call ecological.
This is the background against which thinking—be it philosophical
or not—fi nds itself being practiced today. The climate crisis is what
pushes ecology as a way of thinking to the fore of human
consciousness. For it is certain ecological theories and the results of
certain ecological researches that has brought global humanity face
to face with the material and natural basis of our existence, with
vii
viii TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION: WHY ECOLOGY AT THE END?
the horror of interconnectedness that links all living and dead things
(as well as links these to the never-living). Horror because nothing
we do appears to escape ecological reality and while it may be true
that nothing we do escapes mathematical reality either, the nature
of ecological reality is the nature of bodies, of fl esh, of eating, of
fucking, of shitting, of leaking bodily fl uids, of gases, and of dying.
That is, the science of ecology brings us face to face with what
is abject, with what is visceral, in ways that more seemingly
abstract sciences cannot and in ways that other biological sciences
are unable to do in regard to the overwhelming immensity of
connection.
Fran ç ois Laruelle’s project of non-philosophy or non-standard
philosophy rarely touches in a direct way on contemporary problems.
Laruelle himself does not intervene in public debates about this political
policy or that social problem in the way that many of his contemporaries
have. In an extended interview with the journalist and trained
philosopher Philippe Petit, Laruelle is indeed invited to pronounce
on various issues of the day and steadfastly refuses. While he
acknowledges that, “of course as an ordinary citizen I have ‘my
opinions’,” his discussion remains at the level of abstraction, at the
level of the generic.1 The Last Humanity , even though it emerges out
of the conditions for thought given by the climate crisis and so
represents his most direct engagement with a live political and social
problem, continues this practice of focusing on the work of abstraction,
of thinking. In this introduction I will not be translating what Laruelle
has said about ecology into some simpler form. The work of translation
has already taken place and what Laruelle has written is what he
has written. Instead, this introduction will contextualize Laruelle’s
engagement with ecology by considering what ecology as a name
refers to, why the project of non-philosophy has now engaged with
this ecology, and possible paths of research that this engagement
makes visible, possibly especially for those who may be the last
humanity.
TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION: WHY ECOLOGY AT THE END? ix
Ecology Is Said in Many Ways
In The Last Humanity Laruelle tells his readers that ecology has come
to rival philosophy. We will explore why he says this a little later, but
fi rst it is important to understand what exactly ecology names in this
rivalry. While Laruelle does not explicitly state this, it is very clear from
his description early on in the text that he is not referring to the purely
scientifi c theory and practice that goes under the name of ecology, but
to a more expansive way of thinking and sensibility toward experience.
The science of ecology is generally considered to be a new science,
coming to be distinct in the 18th century and even then, only in the
mid-20th century gaining prominence. The use of the term ecology
in the sense still carried today is usually attributed to the German
zoologist Ernst Haeckel whose coinage of the German word Ö kologie
borrowed from the Greek words oikos or “household” and logos ,
which usually translates to “science” but also “logic” and “word” or
“speech”. Early ecological theory attempted to explain the
interconnected nature of life in the light of Darwin’s discoveries
concerning the evolution of species in relation to one another and their
shared environment. The history of ecology and its contemporary
principles as a science are not well known or understood in our general
culture and when people talk about this or that practice being
“ecological” they tend to mean something more general about the
relationship between humanity and non-human nature, between how
we live and the effects it has on the wider ecological system we are a
part of. These ideas are derived from ecological science, but largely
without a strong understanding of their scientifi c source, the conceptual
meaning, or the debates and different approaches and scales found in
scientifi c ecology.
Some theorists, including those within the natural and social
sciences as well as the humanities, distinguish between “political
ecology” and the purely scientifi c fi eld of ecology. Political ecology in
this case refers to the sense that ecology has an obvious bearing on