Translating Ecosophie

Abstract

The term “écosophie” – a conflation of ecology and philosophy – was coined by the Norwegian philosopher-mountaineer Arne Naess in 1973 and idiosyncratically reworked by Félix Guattari in Qu’est-ce que l’écosophie?, a posthumous collection of essays and interviews from the late 80s and early 90s. For Guattari, écosophie was a critical concept, warding off the tendency, in the ecology movements of his time, to “turn the defense of species into a kind of identity nature politics” all too easily turned to conservative ends. In many respects a perfect example of a philosophical “untranslatable,” écosophie was notably absent from Barbara Cassin’s Vocabulaire européen des philosophies: dictionnaire des intraduisibles (2004). In exploring the term’s applications, historical and potential, this paper focuses on écosophie as a vital political concept with a planetary remit, interrogating where Guattari’s usage overlaps with and diverges from Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s notion of “planetarity.” Broadly speaking, whereas Guattarian ecosophy is weighted towards micropolitics, and Spivak’s planetarity is weighted towards ethics, both rely on a translative praxis conducive to new modes of cognizing (and naming) nomos, cosmos, agency, alterity and value-forms. The essay concludes with some critical reflections on écosophie/ecosophy as an anchor term for emerging glossaries of environmental justice that seek to undercut colonial epistemologies and monolingual idioms of climate-speak.