L’ecologia sognante

Guida al pensare con la natura

(Dreamy Ecology: A Guide to Thinking with Nature)

What would happen if we realised that our relationship with planet Earth is filtered and polluted by anthropology? What if we began to question our relationship with the imaginary and the real, or even metaphysics itself? To do so, it is argued here, we need not so much to change our thoughts as to change the way we think: we need to think ‘with’ nature. This book is therefore, first and foremost, a guide – complete with maps, clues and ideas – for approaching ‘psycho-ecological’ thought: a brief collection of reflections, concepts and tools for exercising the philosophical and poetic imagination.

I think Giulia has succeeded in creating an aesthetic that suits this book and the themes it explores; and one that is profound, in its beautiful and imaginative lightness. (A. Balzaretti)

 

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After all, imagination is the very stuff of which time is made. (A. Balzaretti)

[…] Jean-Paul Sartre defined the ‘constitution of the imaginary’ as the ‘position of something which is nothing in relation to the world, and in relation to which the world is not nothing’. […] It seems to me that these words, in their resolution into a dual nihilism in which both the world and the imaginary ultimately annul one another, perfectly define the relationship with images that this book invites us to change. […] It is not a question of subverting the image, but merely of going along with its inner nature; not of revolutionising it, but simply of placing it in the right place: the place where it can exist without being annihilated by the world and allow the world to exist without annihilating it, where it can flourish and allow life to flourish.

(from the foreword by Gabriele Pulli)

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Even before the destruction of reality itself, it is the destruction of the imaginative aspect of reality – its capacity to produce images – that should concern us. (A. Balzaretti)

[…] now more than ever, in the brief (compared to that of the cosmos) history of Homo sapiens, there is a pressing need for a new ecology, a new way of inhabiting existence: a pluralistic ecology that is not merely anthropocentric. But how can we break free from this Platonic-philosophical-scientific impasse, from this fundamental and constitutive worldview that has now become almost all-pervasive in our current ways of life? […] The ultimate and primary challenge of inhabiting, of being at home and of managing to build that home, lies in knowing how – or attempting to – reconcile the conflicting and hostile diversities which, left unresolved, risk bringing about mere and mutual destruction.

(from the afterword by Francesco Pluchino)

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Alessandro Balzaretti bio

Giulia Di Palmo bio