In What is philosophy? Deleuze and Guattari proposed to engage philosophy in a form they called 'geophilosophy'. The status of this form has remained opened. The aim of this article is to give an account of the main axes of this geophilosophy, to identify its origin and necessity, and to assess its actuality. Geophilosophy, as I have tried to show here, is essentially a matter of gestures, of ways of posing and constructing problems, of making sense of the events that engage us. It is constituted at the intersection of three gestures that this article attempts to identify and whose logic and coherence it aims to demonstrate: inscribing thought in its terrestrial forms, regionalising our modes of thought, intensifying the contingency of events. The question at the heart of geophilosophy, and which marks its profound topicality, particularly in the context of the 'new climate regime', can be formulated as follows: how do we inhabit the earth?

Isabelle Stengers' thought revolves around a strange demand: we must take care of our abstractions. She finds this demand in Whitehead's philosophy, which she takes up in a singular and original way. Taking care of our abstractions implies two things: First, to diagnose our contemporary experience, the abstractions that govern our ways of thinking and have contributed to the modernist legacy. Second, to explore other modes of abstraction that would enable us to deploy the multiple forms of experience in a different way and reweave the links broken by the incessant bifurcations of modern thought. This question of abstraction, as I have tried to show in this chapter, is at the heart of aesthetic questions, where it implies both a resistance to the bifurcation between nature and experience, fact and value, and existence and aesthetics, opening up a new field on the varieties of aesthetic experience in nature.

Résumé La notion d’abstraction est au cœur de la pensée de Whitehead. Des formalismes logico-mathématiques au schème spéculatif, en passant par le statut des entités physiques et des formes esthétiques, la question des abstractions est l’une de celles qui animent la totalité de l’oeuvre de Whitehead. Pourtant, la question des abstractions est restée relativement peu traitée. Il faut dire que Whitehead n’a cessé de leur donner un statut particulier et pour le moins inhabituel. Elles sont, dans sa pensée, au coeur de l’expérience sensible ; elles définissent les êtres dans leur constitution même ; elles forment une prise sur les mondes possibles qui accompagnent toute existence. Cet article vise à proposer une interprétation de la pensée de Whitehead à partir du statut si singulier qu’il accorde aux abstractions.

Bruno Latour a proposé une enquête pharmacologique sur les idées, auxquelles les Modernes ont donné un pouvoir inouï, souvent dévastateur, par opposition aux croyances des « autres ». Et il a offert un récit alternatif de la modernité, fondé sur notre existence terrestre.

The idea of ‘progress’ was undoubtedly at the heart of the experience of the Moderns, guiding at the same time their thought, the values that they gave themselves, the hopes that animated them and of innumerable justifications that they found for all the processes of dispossession, disqualification and dismemberment that they implemented. Starting with William James’s diagnosis of the hold the idea of ‘progress’ has over us, and following his proposition that this idea is at work in the world itself, in the ecological and social ravages that it guides and justifies, this article aims to analyse the political and speculative effects of the notion of progress and to propose, through what we call an ‘ecology of trust’, other ways of collectively composing our modes of existence.

« La philosophie de Whitehead se présente comme une vaste entreprise de refondation de la philosophie de la nature. Ce projet est annoncé dès les premières œuvres philosophiques de Whitehead, notamment Les Principes de la connaissance naturelle et Le Concept de nature et ne cessera d’être repris, transformé, amplifié dans les œuvres ultérieures, notamment Procès et réalité et La Science et le monde moderne . La nature n’y est plus pensée comme un domaine particulier, mais elle devient la matrice d’une reconstruction de toutes les catégories de la métaphysique et le lieu de toute expérience. Cette ambition impliquait de redéfinir la place de l’expérience humaine, à la fois entièrement située à l’intérieur de la nature et en même temps véritablement singulière. Cet article vise donc à interroger, à partir d’une interprétation de l’œuvre de Whitehead, la place de l’humain dans une philosophie de la nature. »

In this article, I propose to take up and give new relevance to an intuition that W. James developed in Pragmatism: « things tell a story». I take this proposition as literally as possible: a physical entity, a living being, a technical object, would tell stories by themselves, in the materiality of their existence, in their very bodies. The stories would not be about how humans relate to more-than-human realities, but they would be the very matrix of things. James called for a change of perspective: “The center of gravity of philosophy must therefore alter its place. The earth of things, long thrown into shadow by the glories of the upper ether, must resume its rights.” How to give back to the earthly things their rights? By which mode of knowledge would it be possible to follow these stories? This is a whole program that James announces with ontological, epistemological, and political dimensions, and that finds today, in the context of the “new climate regime,” all its relevance.

Certains usages de l’abstraction et une certaine peur d’être dupe régissent nos rapports au monde dans le cadre des épistémologies et des politiques de la modernité. La notion de planétarité contribue-t-elle à amincir notre monde, ou à l’épaissir ? Comment l’inscrire au sein d’agencements collectifs qui aident à cultiver une confiance, précondition au développement de pratiques et de savoir collectifs ?

In conversation 1 with Didier Debaise, this piece thinks transversally across Nature as Event (2017a) and Speculative Empiricism (2017b) to explore some of the key stakes in his philosophy, namely: the relationship between the task of thinking a speculative empiricism and the problem of the bifurcation of nature. Engaging with the themes of nature, abstraction, dualism, pragmatism, and the role of stories in dramatizing our sensitivity to the world, the conversation develops Debaise’s contribution to theorising alternative modes of knowledge and experience capable of admitting those infra-sensible, inaudible, or imperceptible qualities of events. Distinctly, Debaise introduces here the problem of ‘predatory abstractions’ as one way to understand the problem of bifurcation. Ethically, the question of predatory abstractions makes new demands on the social sciences: to story new abstractions capable of deepening our experience of nature.

RESUMO: Neste artigo, Didier Debaise aborda a metafísica moderna, buscando propor uma metafísica alternativa, a qual qualifica de perspectivista. O autor avança a hipótese de que o conceito de Natureza foi a maneira que os modernos encontraram de habitar a terra. Na primeira parte do artigo, Os fundamentos do naturalismo metafísico, ele explica, seguindo o diagnóstico de Whitehead da modernidade, como a reificação dos gestos e operações da ciência experimental nascente fundou uma metafísica baseada na bifurcação entre qualidades primárias e secundárias. A segunda seção, A experiência perspectivista, busca livrar-se da noção de natureza a partir da afirmação radical do filosofia especulativa de Whitehead de que não se pode excluir da filosofia nada que ocorre na experiência. Debaise propõe três operações inerentes ao estabelecimento de um perspectivismo metafísico: fazer de todo ser uma subjetividade; inscrever todos os seres em uma mesma lógica unívoca; e fazer da perspectiva uma atividade possessiva. Através dessas operações, o autor não busca fundamentar uma proposta metafísica mais autêntica do que a metafísica moderna, mas sim um aparato artificial, construtivista, pragmático que ambiciona nada excluir: nem os seres, nem as modalidades de existência.

In his reading of Descartes, Whitehead extracts a definition of the subject as a relation through which feelings are unified and appropriated. The key point of disagreement is found in the inverse relations that each constructs between the subject and feeling. If Whitehead does in fact take up the problem’s terms, he is nevertheless radically opposed to the Cartesian economy organised around a subject qua foundation of feeling. Whitehead’s reading could be criticised, of course: he takes a Cartesian proposition, pushes it in the direction of speculative philosophy, only to return, finally, to Descartes’ own internal coherence, opposing it to an entirely different economy of thought. This, however, would be to lose what is important in Whitehead’s reading of Descartes. Whitehead is not doing history of philosophy. The relevance of each of his critiques and reprises could, of course, be justly attacked in so far as they are constructed on grounds that would have been completely foreign to the original thinkers.

Whitehead writes that ‘[i]n all philosophic theory there is an ultimate’ It would be difficult to find a case study in Process and Reality, a description of the functioning of a philosophy’s ultimate principle. The only example that can be found is a succession of terms: ‘In monistic philosophies, Spinoza’s or absolute idealism, this ultimate is God, who is also equivalently termed “The Absolute”’. Whitehead says no more of it. But how does this ultimate work? Why has he been able to identify it with the ‘absolute’ or with ‘God’? These questions remain unanswered. It is possible, however, to reconstruct a discourse of the absolute by taking a detour to connect a few separate elements.

On Monday, 25 September 2017, I convened a conversation with philosopher Didier Debaise and social scientist Benedikte Zitouni in Brussels, and meandered between French and English discussing the ways in which we study and research the world. This world is, for Benedikte, a world of activist urban practices, nineteenth-century urban planning in Brussels, urban agriculture, and eco-feminism, whilst Didier studies, as a philosopher, the concepts, ideas, and regimes of thought through which philosophers have guided us to study reality, nature, and science. Their work is relevant for architectural studies in that it inspires modes of inquiry, emphasises the importance of narration and story-telling, and helps in discussing reservations about making truth claims in architectural discourse. Their work resists developing generalisations from specific and situated problems, and encourages us to resist the conceptual taxonomies, comparative approaches, and projected abstractions through which theory all too often pretends to study the world and, worse, justify its findings. Instead, I find in Benedikte and Didier's writings companions for my own quest for situated accounts of architecture, and a welcome sense of hope that such accounts carry the potential of resistance and of imagining other possible futures. This imagination, exercised not in a distant future but in and through the thickness of the present, seems to me a task that demands our attention in a world of environmental collapse wherein we are yet to learn how to inhabit the knowledge that we are about to hit the wall, as Isabelle Stengers powerfully argues in In Catastrophic Times.(1) Isabelle Stengers, In Catastrophic Times: Resisting the Coming Barbarism, London: Open Humanities Press, 2015. I believe that architects have a role to play in healing our relationship with and care for Gaia, provided they relearn to celebrate the wildly imaginative nature of the world and of their own training as well as developing instrumentalised solutions (e.g. sustainability, green roofs, solar panels).