Theses on Weak Ecology

Abstract

I. WEAK THOUGHT IS NOT A MERE INVERSION OF THE IDEAL OF STRENGTH ON THE UNDERSIDE OF METAPHYSICS. IT MARKS A SHIFT FROM METAPHYSICAL ECONOMY TO POSTMETAPHYSICAL ECOLOGY.1We live at a time of metaphysical backlash. Behaving as though deconstruction and weak thought were but minor blips on radars of Western intellectual tradition, unfortunate complications in a timeless pursuit of truth, or playful interludes between bearishly serious acts of system-building, metaphysics, realisms, and materialisms- prey to collective amnesia-compete with one another for title of best, most accurate, and comprehensive ontological framework. Two years ago, Gianni Vattimo responded to worrisome trend, which is still gathering steam, in article Need, What Metaphysics? There, he lamented that [a] spectre is haunting (late industrial) world: new (or old) need for metaphysics, for absolute truth, even for eternal life, and suggested asking whether there really is a (be it new or old) need for metaphysics.2 The need of metaphysics itself, experienced from within its systems, is insatiable. It will not rest until it has swallowed up all of raw existence and digested it into its categories. In turn, need for metaphysics can be only sensed from outside, once needed object has been lost, is lacking, and, through its absence, evokes nostalgia, sends spectral tentacles, announces returns and renewals, and so on. It is in register of unsuccessful, because aborted halfway, work of mourning that today's backlash gains strength and threatens to erase each and every erasure, dissolution, or of foundations announced by deconstruction and weak thought.The spectral return of metaphysics suspends thought from a kind of pendulum that has now swung back to default position of same, if only under sign of lack. The risk is that weak thought, too, would be swept away by this pendular movement unless it breaks with dogma of metaphysical monism admitting only or violence and uniformity. Vattimo's appeal to think the history of Being as guided by common guiding thread of reduction of strong structures . . . oriented towards ethics of non-violence3 needs to be accompanied by proviso that reduction and are qualitative, rather than merely quantitative, shifts. To approximate an ethics of non-violence, in other words, it is imperative to make a Hegelian leap from quantity to quality and to recast distinction between weakness and strength in terms of two largely incommensurate attitudes, which I would like to name ecological and economic.Note that ecology and economy at once respect and trouble onto-metaphysical monism I have just invoked in a critical key. With regard to each other, they are both same and other and neither same nor other, since they revolve around oikos (or dwelling), which lends first three letters to each word and at which they arrive from opposite directions of logos (articulation, reasoning, discourse, language, speech) and nomos (law, convention, division, distribution, allotment). If default position of contemporary metaphysics is economic or economist-a position that encompasses assumption of complete interchangeability of parts in whole; obsession with quantification and rankings; and imposition of more or less arbitrary conceptual and concrete partitions, barriers, walls, or separation fences onto world-then challenge addressed to its hegemony should involve ecological alternative that begins but does not end with a one-dimensional weakening or softening of dominant structures. Only proceeding in such a way will we be able to skirt traps that await anyone embarking on Nietzschean revaluation of all values: first, a symmetrical inversion that elevates low and brings down high (read: valorizes weakness over strength) and, second, a leveling down of differences observed through lens of a general and widespread indifference. …