Giovanbattista Tusa, Terra Cosmica / Traces of Georealism
£17.50
Tenement #13 / ISBN: 978-1-7393851-9-4
160pp [Approx.] / 140 x 216mm
Edited by Dominic Jaeckle
Designed and typeset by Traven T. Croves
23.08.24
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Giovanbattista Tusa takes the commitment of lending his voice to the voiceless further, reaching the depth that the Anthropocene demands from us. He finds the words that won’t fill the disquiet and the terror of the illegible revolt of the elements against our way of production. The fury of climate deregulation and the ecological crisis have a history and a foreseeable future that we now must become acquainted with. This book is a magnificent tool to help us begin to accomplish the most urgent task of contemporary humankind: the only one that can save us.
Claire Fontaine
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The moment the earth was transformed into [an] artefact, nature ended, and ecology began: ‘ecological’ thinking became inescapable as the planet became a work of art. Technology is no longer a system at the disposal of human reason to act on the world because human beings are no longer the subject, but the object of an echo-technical metamorphosis.
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(It is almost impossible to see in retrospect
what was not built in perspective.)
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Our age is characterised by the increasing humanisation of a planet that is more and more subject to metaphoric representation and visualisation. The memorialisation, anthropomorphism, and narratological charge of time has birthed an intellectual industry in which the summation of history plays out like a hand of cards. A game in which retrospect and hindsight informs our present and sits us ever at the mercy of prediction and chance in a time increasingly defined by catastrophe, and as emergent crises affect every stratum of life and lived experience. We are currently witnessing a mutation of our thinking that disrupts the mythical imaginary that had hitherto confined viruses, climate change and atmospheric turbulence to an unalterable background in the all-too-human narrative of the struggle against nature.
Giovanbattista Tusa’s Terra Cosmica / Traces of Georealism is the result of a series of lectures and essays—a quintet of pieces published over the course of a four-year period—that, woven together into a new collation of interlinked fragments, calls time on time to consider the new form of planetary realism resultant of this restructuring of the imagination. Tusa presents a cosmic remapping of our modes of thinking that assumes that our contemporary moment is absented from its representability, its history of representations, and all means of explanation, thus remaining open to a sense of its own infinity… Open to an encounter with that which remains absent and unknowable, with neither horizon nor memory available as any weathervane for comprehension and action. Tusa’s work is a scrutiny of our exosystemic condition; a suite of exploratory antagonisms on the need for a new philosophical perspectivism of time, of earth, and a new charter for the foundations of thought and thinking.
A conceptualisation of ‘Growth’ today is unimaginable if it is not linked to a scenario of scarcity, in contrast to pre-modern theological views that instead assumed the abundance of creation, the original richness of the world. Inspired by this vision of sustainability, ecological thinking today is immediately associated with a language of finitude. Degrowth, self-restraint, responsibility, ecosystem vulnerability... these are all terms associated with a universalist model of progress that seemed to know no limits, except those that arise from temporary inequalities or unfavourable geopolitical conditions.
In Terra Cosmica, Giovanbattista Tusa argues that the world is doomed to its own inevitable end if sustainability is understood from the perspective of an economically sustainable future defined by the limits of capitalist management. If we step out of this impoverished perspective of the concept of limit and the condition of finitude, then we open ourselves to an ecological perspective that understands the world as part of a cosmic diversity that cannot be contained in a more or less extended totality of resources. Tusa’s is a work of mineral anarchy; a study of the vertigo of our present thinking; a reorientation of an effort to explore human duration via myth, legend, and symbol; a consideration of a necessary mutation of perspective in our contemporary moment.
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See here for a further word on this title.
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Stickered editions will carry a cover adornment; a still from Harun Farocki's Das Silber und das Kreuz / The Silver and the Cross (2010).
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Giovanbattista Tusa is a philosopher and video artist based in Lisbon at the Nova Institute of Philosophy (IFILNOVA), where he coordinates the X-CENTRIC FUTURES research seminar. His publications include Cosa resta del futuro / What Remains of the Future? (Mimesis 2024), Quasi Niente: Il tempo cosmico di Claude Debussy / Almost Nothing: Claude Debussy’s Cosmic Time (Il Palindromo 2024), and he is the author, with Alain Badiou, of The End (Polity, 2019), translated in French, Portuguese and Spanish. Tusa co-edited the volumes Contemporanea: A Glossary for the 21st Century (MIT Press, 2024), Dispositif: A Cartography (MIT Press, 2023), Fernando Pessoa and Philosophy: Countless Lives Inhabit Us (Rowman & Littlefield, 2021), and PPPP: Pier Paolo Pasolini Philosopher (Mimesis International, 2022). He is editor (with Michael Marder) of the Political Theory and Contemporary Philosophy series published by Bloomsbury.