This work brings together quite heterogeneous sources for reasons, which at first glance seem marginal. For example, without delving too deeply into Naess’ problems Latour uses his constructs to sweep them aside. Another example is how Naess makes multiple references to Nāgārjuna’s emptiness of own-nature in order to illustrate his relationism. Nevertheless, there are more important structural and philosophical reasons for bringing these three together. These are collected around two primary research points.
Firstly, we want to offer an articulation of relationism for ecology, its scope and the difficulties it faces. These span between the problem of the concept of nature and the problem of representation.
Beginning with Naess’ ecosophy, we can secure a better grasp of the problems environmentalism faces when it makes use of an organicistic and interrelated image of nature. Relationism attempts to posit the overcoming of the subject/object dichotomy as it is structured in the representation of nature, but eventually finds itself trapped in the same premises.
Naess’s problems are, nevertheless, more radical. Overcoming the subject/object and human/nature dualisms is not just a matter of integrating the two poles into a greater whole. The problems opened in relationism are intrinsic to the concept of nature as otherness to humanity, which underlies both managerial environmentalist approaches and ecological attempts to bridge the dualistic gap. Issues of continuity and difference, belonging and otherness emerge when the nature/humanity axis is articulated. The humanity/nature fracture is most tragic in the political tension between ecological naturalism and culturalist critique. The difficulties of environmentalism emerge as equivocations caused by the a priori framework of nature as otherness to humanity.
Latour’s idea of the end of nature is a political-ecological solution to the problem of representation. The nature/culture framework is only one way to represent the common world of humans and nonhumans. It is possible to reopen the political work of composition of the common world, bringing the sciences (both humanities and hard sciences) to give scientific and political representation to phenomena such as climate change or species extinction.
A second research focus shifts from the political dimension and looks at subjectivity as the main difficulty in the problem of representation. Nāgārjuna’s concept of emptiness [śūnyatā] proves to be a powerful insight into the tension between a radically relative reality and the attachment of the subject’s view to a “nature of things.”
