The Unconstructable Earth: An Ecology of Separation

The Anthropocene announces a post-natural planet that can be remade at will through the process of geoengineering. With it, a new kind of power, geopower, takes the entire Earth, in its social, biological, and geophysical dimensions, as an object of knowledge, intervention, and governmentality. This shift has been aided, wittingly or not, by theorists of the constructivist turn who have likewise called into question the divide between nature and culture and have thus found themselves helpless against the project to replace Earth with Earth 2.0. Against both camps, this book confronts the unconstructable Earth, proposing an “ecology of separation” that acknowledges the wild, subtractive capacity of nature. Against technocratic delusion, but equally against a racially tinged organicism, Neyrat shows what it means to appreciate Earth as an unsubstitutable becoming that cannot be replicated in a laboratory and that always escapes the hubris of those who would remake and master it.