Vitalist temptations: Life, earth and the nature of war

Abstract

This article stages an encounter between contemporary vitalist thought and the work of the controversial zoologist turned political geographer Friedrich Ratzel (1844Ratzel ( -1904. The remarkable degree of congruence between Ratzel's ideas and contemporary more-than-human geography, I argue, opens up crucial questions about vitalism as a political project.A discussion of Ratzel's concept and personal experience of war brings into sharp focus a number of problems in the academic language used by vitalism to blur the boundary between nature and society. The article concludes by suggesting that vitalism should pay closer attention to its own place in the history of modern biopolitical thought.

Infrastructure and non-human life: A wider ontology

“…Such a programmatic would entail reinvigorating more-than-human geography's inaugural concerns of attending to spaces of embodiment, motion and relation and how they are constituted through traffic at the feverish borders between human and animal, flesh and information, body and machine (Whatmore, 1999). Fourth, it demands taking seriously emerging trends of infrastructuring non-human life and the political economies surrounding vitality, an endeavour crucial for addressing calls for providing correctives to some of the new materialist accounts of agency that dispense with a critical politics and economy in their recuperation of elusive material ecologies (Braun, 2015;Gandy and Jasper, 2017;Klinke, 2019;Lemke, 2015). A wider infrastructural ontology can in fact furnish ground for another kind of politics where nonhuman life might be allowed to subvert capitalist capture.…”

Elemental worlds: Specificities, exposures, alchemies

“…Keighren, 2006). Instead, it is a reminder that thinking with the elements implicates us in geopolitical and biopolitical questions about the relations between life and environment (Klinke, 2019;Yusoff, 2018). And it is a reminder that milieus can easily be framed as biopolitical mediums for forms of action at a distance in relation to which apparatuses of security operate (Foucault, 2007: 19; see also Foucault, 2006;O'Grady, 2019).…”

Besides affirmationism? On geography and negativity

“…Gandy and Jasper (2017) express concerns that to engage with vitalism requires that one risks overlooking the historiography of ideas. Ian Klinke (2019) has gone so far as to claim that human geography is haunted by the "spectre" of vitalism and describes vitalism as a "temptation." For others, there is a fear that we are witnessing "a kind of normative vitalism" (Romanillos, 2015, p. 565), where "theories of life, of vitality, and of affirmation, are in the ascendant" (Harrison, 2015, p. 285).…”