Martin Savransky “Passages to the outside”

Savransky, Martin 2023. Passages to the outside: A prelude to a geophilosophy of the future. Dialogues in Human Geography 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1177/20438206231151426

[…] the task might be to reimagine the future not as the promise of tomorrow or the hope of the yet-to-come, but as one or a thousand untimely passages to the outside: those immanent, groundless zones of indeterminacy, anarchy, and fugitivity composed in the interstices and outlaw edges of every territory, where impossible forms of sociality and speculative methodologies of life are improvised in the act of striding the forces and movements of an unstable and tumultuous Earth, of giving oneself over to the inchoate and the unformed, to a groundlessness that surrounds and subtends every ground, to a runaway metamorphosis which eludes finality and escapes totality. That, I suggest, might be the homeless task of a geophilosophy of the future. (3)

If this is first and foremost a geophilosophical task, it is because the Earth is not what we think (it is) but what makes us think. Geophilosophy, in other words, does not designate the kind of thought which would take the Earth as its object of analysis, but a mode of thinking activated by the speculative forces and metamorphic movements of an Earth which becomes its genesis, its unsettled and unsettling milieu of immanence, its ongoing and unfinished problematic. (3)

To fabricate one or a thousand passages to the outside is not therefore to build a roadmap to a redemptive yet-to-come. It is to risk an improper topology of variations and deformations, of the inchoate and the unformed, a fragmentary cartography of planetary interstices and intervals and outlaw edges where socio-ecological practices and speculative methodologies of life on inhospitable terrain get underway in spite of the world being made and the political, economic, and geo-ecological dynamics of devaluation that its ‘future’ portends. It is here, at the end of this world, in its refusal of the cruelty of the promise and in its joyful scatting of the eschaton, that the outside paradoxically opens a passage to a different sort of futurity: a homeless, intensive space, where ‘noting ends, since nothing has begun, but everything is transformed’ (Deleuze 1988: 89). (4)