Is it possible to think an ecology beyond finitude? There might appear to be an opposition between the mathematical and rational concept of the infinite versus the fragile, interdependent, and single living system that is the Earth. Our current Anthropocenic predicament would seem to force us to recognize that there is only one—now transformed—ecology, with no outside, no exit, and no lifeboats. Despite postapocalyptic fantasies of planetary migration, it is our finitude and immobility that dreams of such an elsewhere betray. Our only strategy is a radical exit strategy because ultimately we are all bound to this finite Earth; the only future is elsewhere. If, however, there is no actual outside when we think ecologically, there is nevertheless an intense imperative for a virtual infinite that practically transforms how we think about ecology. One might argue that infinites are always virtual, but the sense of that virtuality changes when one thinks ecologically. Rather than an infinite that extends ever outward, beyond the earth toward the cosmos, one might think of an immanent infinite, opened up in the smallest spaces of this fragile life.How do dreams of a beyond of finitude transform, diminish, and intensify who “we” are? We might think, for example, of the ways in which Octavia Butler wrote beyond her own time precisely by intensifying the racial and ecological horrors of the late twentieth century. It was from a damaged and terminally violent planet that Butler created a point of view in which one might observe a certain inescapable attachment to who “we” are. By imagining that “we” might be offered an elsewhere and yet not be willing to abandon who “we” are, Butler's novels open to what one might think of as the infinitely small: There is more complexity, difference, potentiality, and futurity in the unlived forces of the present than in imagining the future extending indefinitely. Continuing Butler's legacy of unfolding the infinite from the intensification (but not extension) of the present, we might think of N. K. Jemisin's repeated descriptions of destruction, over and over again, as rupturing this enclosed and finite world. The infinite, in Jemisin, is located in the intricacies of the past, in inscriptions that might be opened to produce new lines of time. Her Broken Earth Trilogy opens with the deliberate destruction of the world, and then traces back a journey of the narrating character who begins life as an enslaved power because only her compliance will hold the world together (Jemisin 2015). Her journey through a “season” of destruction becomes a recognition that what inaugurates the world is a violence that knows no limit; she discovers a fragmented archive of “stonelore” that forges the order of things, and a counternarrative that discloses that “the world” is a fragment, generated from cutting the Earth off from its own order. Only by destroying the world is it possible to break with finitude. What the end of the world exposes is not the collapse of the infinite but the exposure of other lines of time that were crushed by holding on to who we are, as if “we” might last forever. We might think of the infinite not as radically futural and made possible by the undecidability of the present, but rather as the infinitely small made possible by ever further gradations of the past and the unlived. I will return to these two forms of speculative fiction in the conclusion—Butler's ambivalent embrace of the infinite potential of space travel, and Jemisin's affirmation of the ruptures made possible by the infinitely small. In both cases, questions of the infinite are as much ontological as they are physical and racial: To think of finitude, the given, the inescapable, and the limits of what is, is to ask how such demarcations are brought into being and unfolded.Ontological questions concerning the relation between the finite and the infinite might seem to be all too indulgent and cerebral in an era of climate chaos, yet there are (at least) three ways in which a sense of the infinite plays a role in composing the present and its possibilities. Science fiction has repeatedly depicted an unlimited capacity for “human” colonization, as if Earth were but one more resource to be used and discarded. Second, the ideology of capitalism has its own sense of infinite growth, endless expansion, and limitless horizons (often bound up with the sci-fi or geoengineering fantasies of space colonization). Third, there is a normative conception of “humanity” as defined by infinite potential, with the capacity to think of reason being essentially bound up with the negation of finitude. The infinite is cosmological, financial, and rational.At the level of both fantasy and corporate endeavor, the distinctly modern colonizing imperative of ever-expansive horizons maintains what might be thought of as a material or actual infinite. There will always be a space to colonize, and always a new world. If the Earth is destroyed there is always the cosmos, whether that be through pioneering space voyages or imaginary projections of human renewal on other planets. The most obvious example here would be the hyperhumanism of Oxford University's Future of Humanity Institute, where securing “technological maturity” is one of the major goals. Transcending the temporal and cognitive finitude of the human body to achieve “superintelligence” would be the fulfillment of humanity's potentiality and ought not be limited by folk attachments to who we already are: Let us not lose track of what is globally significant. Through the fog of everyday trivialities, we can perceive—if but dimly—the essential task of our age. In this book, we have attempted to discern a little more feature in what is otherwise still a relatively amorphous and negatively defined vision—one that presents as our principal moral priority (at least from an impersonal and secular perspective) the reduction of existential risk and the attainment of a civilizational trajectory that leads to a compassionate and jubilant use of humanity's cosmic endowment. (Bostrom 2014, 298)Nick Bostrom, commenting on not finding life on Mars, calculates that the absence of life elsewhere evidences that life could (and should) develop beyond its initial planetary locale. If there were life elsewhere, we would expect it to have reached maturity and somehow not been able to conquer the galaxy, but if there is no life elsewhere, then there is also no evidence for any limit to our expansive potential. The fact that “we” are alone allows us to assume that maturity may well yield extraterrestrial triumph: If Mars is indeed found to be barren. In that case, we may have a significant chance—if we play our cards right—of one day growing into something almost unimaginably greater than we are today.In this scenario, the entire history of humankind to date is a mere instant compared to the eons of history that lie still before us. All the triumphs and tribulations of the millions of peoples the have walked the Earth since the ancient civilization of Mesopotamia would be like mere birth pangs in the delivery process of a kind of life that hasn't really yet begun. Because surely it would be the height of naiveté to think that with the transformative technologies already in sight—genetics, nanotechnology and so on—and with millions of years to perfect and apply these technologies and others that we haven't yet conceived of, human nature and the human condition will remain unchanged for all future. Instead, if we survive and prosper, we will develop into some kind of posthuman existence.Imagine the tremendous responsibility of those who find themselves present and called upon to midwife the conception of such a future.And that is where we are, you and me. (Bostrom 2007)Bostrom's colleague at Oxford's Future of Humanity Institute is similarly explicit and optimistic with regard to humanity's future and potential for technological expansion. For both Bostrom and Toby Ord, the capacity to extend human existence well beyond the present is imperative and evident: If we can reach other stars, then the whole galaxy opens up to us. The Milky Way alone contains more than 100 billion stars, and some of these will last for trillions of years, greatly extending our potential lifespan. Then there are billions of other galaxies beyond our own. If we reach a future of such a scale, we might have a truly staggering number of descendants, with the time, resources, wisdom and experience to create a diversity of wonders unimaginable to us today.While humanity has made progress toward greater prosperity, health, education and moral inclusiveness, there is so much further we could go. (Ord 2020, 39)Even though both Bostrom and Ord are, strictly speaking, assuming a finite timeline for the human species, what is significant is their assumption of a single humanity with a single technological trajectory that ought to extend well beyond this Earth. Because the species is finite, one can also posit that it is in its infancy and for that reason ought to surpass itself well beyond this Earth.Added to this moral conception of “the human” as self-surpassing, there is a technological and theoretical infinite that is entwined with a normative conception of the human as a single species of progress and expansion, but that does not assume the position of the human species within time. Instead, the task is simply that of expansion, growth and progress without limit. If one modern notion of the infinite is expressed in a cosmos available for colonization by a single ever-more-intelligent humanity, another finds itself within this Earth in imperatives of expanding markets, always-rising stocks, constant innovation, and optimizing growth in an infinite horizon (Kravvaritis and Papageorgiou 1991). These two comportments—maximized technological expansion beyond the Earth, and the infinite potential of who we and the world we live in—are captured by Alexandre Koyré’s conception of the infinite universe: The infinite is both an unbounded space of the cosmos and a practical rationalism that knows no limits (Koyré 1957). Every point in space is an extension of the same substance, subject to the same laws. It would also follow, from the imperatives of reason, that there would be a single humanity subject to the same principles of knowledge and logic; humanity in general would be on its way to recognizing itself as the reason of the world.As Bruno Latour has argued, the conception of the infinite universe at the heart of modern secular science occludes the conditions of knowledge production. There simply is one mode of knowledge and one objectifiable universe. What can be known and affirmed for this particular space and this particular subject must be true for any subject and space whatever. The modern comportment shifts knowledge practices from the closed world to the infinite universe: from qualitative distinctions among spaces and substances to a single universe subject to the same laws: The infinite extension of the world, like that of knowledge of the world, became possible, since every place was literally the same as every other, except for its coordinates. As the Latin term res extensa indicates, the idea of what a thing is could be in effect extended everywhere. To return to Alexandre Koyré’s celebrated title, Galileo and his successors made it possible for their readers to pass from a closed world to an infinite universe. The spirit of the laws of nature was hovering over the waters. (Latour 2017, 77)Latour argues that this infinite universe is no longer appropriate for beings bound to this planet. The Earth is not some quantifiable general substance capable of being grasped objectively and in general, but is known in terms of matters of concern that emerge from intricately and multiply composed modes of existence: Suddenly we have to pull back on our imaginary voyages; Galileo's expanding universe is as if suspended, its forward motion interrupted. Koyré’s title has to be read in the opposite direction from now on: “Returning from the infinite universe to the closed and limited cosmos.” All those fictional characters you've sent out? Bring them back! Tell Captain Kirk that the USS Enterprise has to return to port. “Out there, you'll find nothing like us; we're alone with our terrible terrestrial history.” As for the planet Pandora, it's not in this direction that the next front line against the Na'vi barbarians is going to continue to stretch. Moreover, in the film Gravity, Dr Ryan Stone summed up the situation nicely for us: when she finally made it back down onto the muddy earth, she confessed: “I hate space!” (Latour 2017, 80)Rather than a single reason that applies to “us” all, there are multiple modes of existence, all reckoning with the multitude of forces that compose the whole.In what follows, I want to question the distinction, and the reversal, that Latour draws from Koyré. Rather than think of a modern Western science of the infinite opposed to the finite, bounded, and closed cosmologies of premodern worlds, it would be better to think of the different ways in which finitude is ruptured—sometimes by the Western subject of reason whose questioning and negation of the given counts as an event but also by forms of rupture that are experienced mystically where “the human” is rendered finite by visions of eternity, or the other-than-human. Rather than an opposition between the ecologically Earthbound and the infinite dreams of science, one might look at all the ways in which science's dreams of the infinite have been recomposed in less subjectivist figurations. One of the key figures in Koyré’s From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe and in Latour's Facing Gaia is Galileo, whom Latour imagines as having composed the infinite from a specific moment. Like the later James Lovelock, who composes Gaia (or the Earth as a living system), both scientists have a great deal of creative work at the heart of the project of scientific coherence. Latour is not the first to pose the question of the composition and genesis of the Galilean or Newtonian universe; nor is he the first to ask about the affective force of the infinite, or how thoughts of the beyond-human create a certain way of being in the world.John Milton, in 1667’s Paradise Lost, had depicted the “Tuscan Artist” scanning the heavens with his “optic tube” (Brady 2005). Milton sets this scene within his own speculative vision of the justice of the world that must extend beyond Earth, and that must include a God who could not—being God—be beyond reason. Milton's depiction of Galileo theorizing the infinite was a fragment of a broader epic vision exploring the ethical force of what it might mean, and how it might affect one's being, to imagine the genesis of the infinite. Like Alain Badiou centuries later, Milton is at once committed to a reason that will not be reduced to the given, while also allowing the rational grasp of the infinite to be singular or almost mystical. If the infinite enables a rational computation of the world, the very fact that it can be thought also ends the world. For Badiou, “As such, love, art, science and politics generate—infinitely—truths concerning situations; truths subtracted from knowledge which are only counted by the state in the anonymity of their being” (Badiou 2005, 340).It is possible to compose a countergenealogy, within the Western tradition, of texts and images that do not simply affirm the infinite but also explore the ethical and imaginative demands the concept of the infinite imposes on finite existence. Like Milton in 1667, who sought to “justify the ways of God to man,” Leibniz would later (in his Theodicy of 1710) argue that one's own place in existence can make sense only if one looks beyond the justice of one's own life toward the rational composition of the whole. That very demand to extend reason infinitely may set itself up as a theodicy, but in so doing, the very infinite that would justify the world ultimately delimits the world. If Milton and Leibniz had faith in the ultimate justice of the world once considered from the point of view of eternity, later writers were not so sanguine. Kant would argue that the panorama of history appeared to be futile, and yet one must, for the sake of reason, assume the felicity of history ([1795] 2006).The infinite of science and mathematics that would generate modern dreams of expansion, progress, globalism, growth, and space colonization was accompanied by a series of critical depictions of a disenchanted and quantified empty space that would occlude the vision of eternity. William Blake depicted the Newtonian infinite as a “void” that was cut off from eternity, taking the form of “the formless, unmeasurable Death” (Blake 1988 [1794], 7.11–12). Blake also depicted the infinite unfolding from the infinitely small, seeing eternity in a grain of sand. This eternity would be intricately and infinitely differentiated, and not at all a horizon that would allow “us” to expand indefinitely. However rational, mathematical, universal, and scientific conceptions of the infinite may be, there have always been attempts to delimit the infinite, either by thinking of the infinitely small—the potentialities of this world that have yet to unfold—or by positing a horizon of eternity within which human dreams of the infinite appear puny or hubristic. Twenty-first-century aspirations for endless economic growth and space colonization are extensions and intensifications of what Hegel referred to as the bad infinite, where there is always something more, and no reflection on how the infinite comes to be thought (Kolman 2016).The scientific method of quantification and universal reach may be bound up with a comportment to the infinite universe, made possible by the sense that what is true in a particular case would be true for any subject whatever. Yet the same concept of the infinite also undermines the forms of rationalism that would seek to tether the infinite to notions of the progress of humanity. The infinite can be deployed in a simple extensive sense to reduce complexity, where what is true here and now applies to every time and space whatever. There is also another immanent and ecological infinite, where the truth that unfolds from the present intersects with other—sometimes contradictory or “incompossible”—senses of the infinite (Deleuze 1993, 137). Each aspect of the universe unfolds the infinite in its own way. Multiple standpoints produce a complex and nuanced truth of various perspectives (Haraway 1988). If one thinks of the world not as a single substance but as unfolding differently (and infinitely) from each perceiver, we are then confronted with the practical and ethical task of composing and negotiating relations without assuming a common humanity. If Latour asks twenty-first-century thinkers to step back from the infinite universe of mathematics and think of themselves as Earthbound, this is, in part, an affective question of comportment; it is not to say that modern science, mathematics, and formal logic are not true, but rather that the ways in which truths are composed, and their constitutive imbrication with matters of concern, require reckoning with the finite conditions of knowledge.To say that the drive toward modern science is bound up with globalism, capitalism, individualism, resource extraction, industrialism, mass production, and technological expansion is to say both that its mode of reaching to the infinite is one in which every aspect of the whole is amenable to the same forms of calculation, and that one's orientation is toward space in general without limit. If, by contrast, one were to explain the truths of one's world by way of a reference back to the specific composition of the landscape, the events that formed this singular set of relations, and one's own spiritual relationship to the Earth, one's affective comportment would be towards maintaining, preserving, and respecting the space and time of one's own, as opposed to deeming every space one encounters a terra nullius, a new world, a land of opportunity. Latour draws upon Alexandre Koyré’s conception of modernity—from the closed world to the infinite universe—and asks us to think once more about the closed world, abandoning the notion of a single horizon of space that is always conducive to our measure. But the closed world that “we” find ourselves in, if we think of this “we” as emerging from a sense of there being no place to go, no exit, no lifeboat, no infinite horizon of possibility, is not at all finite in any simple sense.First, this complex sense of the sixth mass extinction, of the Earth as a living system, of humans as historical beings whose violent bifurcations produced a planet in disarray, was made possible by the intense, rather than extensive, drive for truth. Whatever mathematics and modern science may have yielded at the level of technological expansion, such knowledge practices also posed the question of the very possibility and genesis of truth. Once one proposes a truth that is universal, it is possible to remain unthinkingly dogmatic in one's assertions, and this was precisely how colonialism and capitalist globalism have operated for the most part. At the same time, the question of the possibility of the genesis of truth and the infinite has not only been a long-standing philosophical endeavor—from Plato's Ideas to contemporary forms of speculative realism—but becomes more intense with the very globalism that would apparently homogenize the logics of the world. The racist, colonialist, and Eurocentric aversions to other modalities of the infinite have been robust, but even within the European tradition the ways in which the infinite has been articulated from the finitude of the world raise the problem of transcendence in immanence.Edmund Husserl, who was typically Eurocentric in his conception of the Ancient Greek origin of the opening to infinity, argued that one should not simply accept constituted truths (such as those of mathematics or geometry) but understand how such truths are constituted within finitude. Husserl at once renders the infinite transcendent, by housing it within a specific tradition, but then goes on to argue that the infinite cannot be reduced to this origin (Derrida 1989). Husserl both continues and intensifies a critical tradition that demands an account of the thought of the infinite while also arguing that the infinite that emerges from within the world goes beyond the world. Once one asks how the infinite is articulated or given to thought from within the world, one opens the question of genesis. Kant had answered this question by arguing that the very experience of the world, with one event following another, is possible because of a transcendental subject whose synthesis of experience harbors the forms of time and space that will, in turn, allow for the idea of the infinite. It follows that this would be true for any subject whatever, and yet for Kant it was only the European subject who could arrive at a rational infinite; other ways of imagining the infinite were uncritical assertions that only philosophy could explain and secure (Kant 1784). Kant's critiques of mysticism and enthusiasm were based on the assertion that the infinite could be thought rationally, and ought not extend illegitimately into flights of apocalyptic reverie (Derrida 1984).The Kantian infinite unfolds from the subject; if one experiences causality this is because the very possibility of having a world requires the coherent synthesis of experience, but this synthesis enables one to think (but not represent or experience) the sequence of causes extending infinitely. The infinite becomes a necessary idea, bound up with the very possibility of the world. Those who would claim to intuit the infinite (such as mystics) are overstepping the bounds of reason. It is this moment in Kant—where synthesis is referred back to the soul, but then left unexamined—that Husserl and Heidegger will criticize for not exploring the genesis of the transcendental subject (Heidegger 1991, 112). To say that the infinite can be thought as an Idea but not known opens the question of how the infinite unfolds; if the condition for the infinite is the synthesizing subject, who then becomes the ground of all appearing, how does this subject come into being? For Deleuze and Guattari it is at this point that philosophy and the infinite fall back into transcendence: The infinite is enclosed within the subject, even if the subject becomes nothing more than the time from which the infinite unfolds: Kant discovers the modern way of saving transcendence: this is no longer the transcendence of a Something, or of a One higher than everything (contemplation), but that of a Subject to which the field of immanence is only attributed by belonging to a self that necessarily represents such a subject to itself (reflection). The Greek world that belonged to no one increasingly becomes the property of a Christian consciousness. (Deleuze and Guattari 1994, 46)For the most part, for European philosophy the question of what Derrida referred to as the “opening to infinity”—or the ways in which the infinite unfolds from a subject within the world—has had the effect of rendering the subject purely formal. Husserl, for example, insisted that rather than simply posit “the subject” who is the point from which the world unfolds, it is more accurate to think of a pure and transcendental flow of time that is the world. For Husserl this amounted to a purely (and responsibly) immanent philosophy; one would only consider what appears, and what appears is nothing more than the flow of time. The origin of the world is just this unfolding of appearances. For Heidegger, also, Kant's account of synthesis refers back to hidden depths of the soul as the ground from which the idea of the infinite unfolds; the infinite therefore always unfolds from finitude (Heidegger 1967). There is no infinite as such, either as ground or as object of knowledge, but only that which can be thought from finitude.Far from this turn to immanence requiring an account of the finite modes and worlds from which the infinite unfolds, philosophy and theory affirmed an increasingly formal, empty, posthuman and counterecological finitude. This might seem counterintuitive: Husserl's insistence that neither psychology nor historicism can account for pure truth; Heidegger's insistence that “we” are not bound by any human nature but are nothing more than the “there” from which being unfolds; Derrida's insistence on the “future to come”; Deleuze and Guattari's concept of “lines of flight”; Alain Badiou's affirmation of the event; and Quentin Meillassoux's criticism of tying all experience and truth back to the subject would all seem to suggest that twenty-first-century thought is tending toward the infinite and away from the parochial grounding of truth, reason, and right in anything as finite or determined as “man.” From Kant's rendering of reason into the pure forms that make experience possible, to phenomenology's insistence that the subject is not a thing within the world but the unbounded unfolding of the world, to Derrida's insistence that a context cannot contain the iterative force of any concept, one thing has united various strands of philosophy: What is cannot be reduced to what is known, what appears, or what can be imagined.This is where one can return to Latour's charting of the history of ideas and his argument that one should question the modern scientific affirmation of the infinite universe and return to the Earthbound. I would suggest that rather than charting where we are by marking out a distinction between the closed cosmos of premodernity and the infinite of modernity (a distinction Latour both imposes and contests), one might think about the intensely immanent infinite that would not unfold from the immanence of the subject. To begin with, one might make a distinction between the Eurocentric ideology of the infinite that is opposed to closed cosmologies. On this model, which runs from Kant through Husserl to (at least) Heidegger, it is the pure formality of thought that releases truth from dogma, cultural specificity, and transcendent attachments. Rather than think of the infinite as space or the cosmos simply going on without end, the infinite becomes an operation. Any calculation one makes now would be true for any subject whatsoever. One of the more recent versions of the infinite as an operation would be Quentin Meillassoux's claim that rather than reducing the world to what appears to a subject, it is possible to think beyond lived experience, and that a world without subjects is fully coherent. What exists beyond finitude, for Meillassoux, is the absolute of contingency: Whatever is might not be (Meillassoux 2010). If, for Kant, the infinite could not be posited as something real (for we only know the real as it is given to experience), the infinite was a necessary Idea, and could even be felt and have practical force. Confronted with the failure to represent or give an image of the infinite, reason becomes aware of its power to think and be released from mere finitude. It is always thought released from its own finitude, recognizing its own limits, that finds an infinite that does not simply go on indefinitely (what Hegel referred to as the bad infinite, where there is always yet more).There is a distinct difference between two modern modes of the infinite: The first would be virtual (and tied to the power of thought), while the second would be transcendent and would reduce the infinite to capitalism's endless horizon's and “humanity's” limitless capacity for colonization beyond the Earth. If modern science and mathematics proceed by regarding any particular phenomenon through t