Introduction

Lack of political will and corruption of the ruling class are certainly enormous obstacles but do not (fully) explain the widespread inaction against our current multidimensional crisis (ecological catastrophe, failing democracies, permanent and more destructive wars, etc.). In We Are the Weather, Jonathan Safran Foer writes that our ecocidal society faces a veritable crisis of belief: We are aware of the dramatic consequences of our actions and choose to ignore them.1 This is not simply a cognitive blockage. Although there are many forms of denial, I suspect they have a common origin. On one side, a minority believes that this is a conspiracy or, equally irrationally, knows the effects of global warming but believes that it will be spared. On the other, a majority behaves like Achilles in Zeno’s paradox. A collapse is imminent, but the gap between now and then (in fact, an infinite number of instants) allows them to repress the looming disaster and bask in a kind of indefinite present.2 When looked at closely, the underlining characteristic of these behaviors is that they foreclose the limitedness of our existence, thereby creating an abstract infinity that takes over reality. Consider the increasingly common case of wealthy people investing in big plans to ride out the apocalypse. They firmly support the dogma of infinite accumulation via predation that is responsible for our catastrophe while believing that that very accumulation will save them. The logic of excess of neoliberalism cannot imagine alternatives to itself; rather, it doubles down on its infinite expansion.

To understand why we revere such limitless growth, we need to turn our attention to the symbolic construction of transcendence. In the West, transcendence rules by replacing the here and now of life with the elsewhere of infinite value, a web of injunctions and pressures to augment said value that quashes any urgency to act. While it organized the field of life externally—ruling much like a sovereign by virtue of his exceptionality—transcendence, in fact, originates from an anthropological incongruity of humankind itself.3 As I will discuss, the human animal is structurally ex-centric, always in excess to herself, a condition that may occasion the adoption of defensive mechanisms. Hence, although ex-centricity is inherent to human life and evolution, the response to this instability produces transcendent institutions (i.e., the Other) that offer refuge, binding anxiety through the assurance of protection. To use a Feuerbachian language, insofar as the infinity of human life is alienated, it generates a superior universal infinity that fulfills this very function. From this repression, transcendence emerges as a tripartite power that disciplines our modes of life. They are an economy of rank, an economy of infinite valorization, and a phallic economy of time. The complex interplay of these functions shapes the fundamental dimensions of subjectivity, society, and time, respectively.

In this book, I analyze these structures and propose for each a countermodel, namely, an economy of noncoincidence, an economy of social infinity, and an economy of eternity. The interaction of these countermodels offers tools to breach the systems of control emanating from transcendence and may help us to reactivate the potentials for a different future. Before I begin my analysis, however, I want to make a point about my approach. Just like any critic of Feuerbach’s “projection theory” claims, atheism quickly turns into a new religion by substituting a God-Man with the belief in a Man-God.4 In other words, declaring the oppressive and false nature of transcendence—that is to say, stating that immanence is all that exists—risks replacing this metaphysical position with a new transcendence. This assertion would entail naming a new foundation, thus incurring in the same shortfalls of an elsewhere that gives cohesion to the field as in the formalism established by transcendence itself. By contrast, the radical immanence that I seek to outline as an alternative to the three economies of transcendence cannot be directly affirmed but rather should emerge from the internal dissolution of transcendence itself. Similarly, the solutions to our crisis must grow out of the terminal spasms of the current order. It is thus necessary to enter into a strange relation with transcendence and take up its material and anthropological genesis as if it were true to let them implode internally.5 What emerges from the dissolution of transcendence is the gleam of an immanent scene, one that is (self)-organized via the primary role of relationality and its ecopolitical implications. This is the methodology I follow as I interrogate authors like René Girard and Paolo Virno (part 1) to articulate a different ecology of the relationship with the other or discuss the misunderstood meaning of money by comparing it to a new green digital currency in Kim Stanley Robinson’s novel The Ministry for the Future (part 2). Correspondingly, in part 3, I establish a dialogue between Hannah Arendt, Adriana Cavarero, and Emanuele Severino by gesturing toward a sense of time that is based not on a sense of death but on life and persistence.