FURTHER PROOF
SPINOZA WAS WISE IN AVOIDING A PHILOSOPHY Ph.D :
ABSTRACT
In this paper, I take up the theme of Spinoza's ars vivendi in relation to its
temporality; duration as the very rhythm of life. In the face of an intensifying
climate crisis, our experience of the rhythm of life in the everyday and its
implications for the deep time of climate futures seem increasingly out of joint.
Building on Morfino's argument of the necessary relationship between ontology and history, I explore the connections between the rhythm of life and our (Western) comprehension of the climate crisis.
This framing provides insights into a fatal confusion. This confusion is fueled by the chrono-topography of the modern capitalist city, its intensification of a perceived separation of daily life from bioenergetic processes; and it is amplified in object-oriented ontology, which, in its treatment of climate as a hyperobject, both accepts and reifies a split between ontology and history.
I argue, in contrast, that to think of the world as multi-relational and multi-temporal provides us with tools to assess the politics of the multitude in relation to the climate crisis, to better comprehend the complexity of the conjuncture and the schematization of divergent climate futures, and to fashion a responsive and responseable ars vivendi.
OTHER WORKS BY SUSAN RUDDICK:
- Grounding our subjectivity in the semiotic web: Or, nature is a language, can’t we read?
- Governed as it were by chance. Monstrous infinitude and the problem of nature in the work of Spinoza
- Hegel reads Spinoza.
- Monstrous Irruptions Cultural Geographies
- Abnormal, the ‘new normal,’ and destabilizing discourses of rights
- Heterotopias of the Homeless
