Catastrophic Fossil Culture and Other Desires of Relatedness

Climate crisis stands as a symbolic failure of the cultural imagination: the notion of nature as separated from societies has been fossilized by carbon economy and represents a cosmology, a set of representation of time, of future, of human beings and of nonhuman as at disposal and separated. This engenders the uncanny aspects of Western notion “nature” in the Anthropocene: living agents show their interrelations with the human condition, acts, re- emerge within “emergencies” in “catastrophic” scenarios. Carbon economy shifts today from promise of modernity and secular salvation to its destructive character in defining futures: it is enmeshed in a petro-cultures, a symbolic set of meanings in full crisis. A decarbonization of the economy relies on a decarbonization of the imagination. A new social and cultural alphabet in defining nonhuman relations is underway, often with a strong generational character, based on metaphors of relatedness and interdependencies, and on the elaboration of a new “crisis of presence,” as ritualized patterns in giving meaning to radical changes, founded on desires of relations and even, of limits.