This talk will elaborate on certain aspects of thought of Brasilian scholar Denise Ferreira da Silva, regarding raciality and her concept of state of necessity, which is according to her a philosophical baseline for separation between white subjects and black bodies. In particular, according to da Silva, white subjectivity emerges out of its presumed exemption from this state of necessity, which might be otherwise labelled as natural necessity. Here, I'd like to track racial origins of environmental violence and climate collapse. From that point on, I will join this survey of raciality and state of necessity with questions of autonomy in planetary entanglement - an entanglement that can be described via Virilio's notion of metabolic multitude, or ecological economics and degrowth movement emphasis on reading human political economy as material and energy metabolism. If we are elements of this multitude/metabolic continuum, then reconsidering of energy expensive liberal notion of freedom might lead to deleting white exemptionalism and inserting human species-being back into reconfigured state of necessity. However, a space for productive notion of autonomy as elaboration on and through existing limits imposed by natural necessities might be still possible even under such conditions.
Project