Acta Academica: Critical views on society, culture and politics

Editorial: Why is the world at war

Peter Vale — 2024-12-28

An ‘Asian’ perspective on Europe and its wars

Vineet Thakur — 2024-12-28

Why is the world at war?

Michael McKinley — 2024-12-28

Why is the world at war?

Gregory Treverton — 2024-12-28

Critical Theory and nature in the 21st century

Mark Amiradakis — 2024-12-28

Why ecosocialism is not enough: ecofeminist reflections on another value form

Ariel Salleh — 2024-12-28

In the context of contemporary social movement politics, the paper offers an ecofeminist argument that globalisation should be analysed as the effect of a single entangled system, a unity of ‘patriarchal-colonial-capitalist’ practices. On this basis, the author reflects on the emergence of time dissociation and spatialised abstraction as constitutive of the globally dominant patriarchal episteme; ‘a libidinal rift’ projected in the dualisms of Masculine vs Feminine, North vs South, Production vs Reproduction, Humanity vs Nature. With reference to feminist thinkers from several traditions, the author speculates on the origins of this exploitive ‘1/0 imaginary’ wherein the distinction between production versus reproduction is pivotal. A case is made that to build movement unity in a time of ecological crisis, ecosocialists should recognise dissociated constructs as appear in Marxist productivism and orient their politics around the reproduction of Life- on-Earth. The ‘meta-industrial labours’ of household care-giving and indigenous subsistence economies exemplify this holistic, time sensitive attunement to living processes. An ‘embodied materialism’ would replace the Left focus on use and exchange value with a regenerative eco-centric value form, a ‘meta-value’.

The separation from nature and separated subjects: critical investigations with Theodor W. Adorno and Françoise d’Eaubonne

Marie Loslier — 2024-12-28

Women’s precarity in a globalised world: an ecofeminist perspective

Francesca D'Alessio — 2024-12-28

As French philosopher, anthropologist and sociolo gist Bruno Latour noted, “[f]rom the time the term ‘politics’ was invented, every type of politics has been defined by its relation to nature” (2004 [1999]: 1). When the exploitation of nature became a subject of profit and global political discourse, women’s situation in the labour market underwent significant changes, resulting in precarity and exploitation due to their perceived proximity to nature. This presumed connection between women and nature has been studied by ecofeminist thinkers, revealing its profound influence on women’s roles in the labour system, particularly in capitalist societies where diversity is often sacrificed in favour of uniformity to facilitate the sale of products to a global audience (King 1986: 184). This contribution aims to explore, from an ecofeminist perspective, statistics regarding women’s precarity worldwide, with particular attention to the situation of migrant women in the global North and native women in the global South.

Thinking nature as home: from transcendental homelessness to oikeiosis

Jaco Kruger — 2024-12-28

Ecomodernism – defending a new humanist approach to nature

Patrick Giddy — 2024-12-28

I defend here Luc Ferry’s new humanist approach to nature, ecomodernism, outlined in his Les Sept Ecologies (2021). Ferry’s notion of a “second humanism” takes into account oversights in the Enlightenment thinking, now seen as abstracted from the real life-world of persons, in particular, and arising out of changed conditions of marriage, that of “love-passion” as core value. I first outline Ferry’s account of the contemporary ecology landscape. Three anti-humanist approaches to nature are considered: the pre-modern supposition of intentionality in non-human living beings; deep ecology’s attribution of an equal functionality to humans and non-humans in the ecosystem; and evolutionary biology’s reductionist version of ethics. I then develop a positive account of the isomorphism of the intentionality of humans and all conscious living animals, through an Aristotelian account of sensation as a power of transcendence. The specific condition of human transcendence is reformulated by contemporary commentators through the notion of language, and again through the explanatory notion of self-enactment. This furnishes a foundation for the defence of the new humanist approach to nature.

An ecology of bad ideas: approaching human relations with wider nature from an ecological-complexity perspective

Emma Hay — 2024-12-28

Critical theory and human nature: Hartmut Rosa’s resonance theory from an evolutionary-anthropological perspective

Ole Höffken — 2024-12-28

In one of the major contributions to current Critical Theory in the 21st century, Hartmut Rosa employs the notion of resonant subject-world-relationships to critically analyse structural features of modern societies that systematically undermine stable conditions for such relationships to unfold. The specific critical potential of resonance theory is based on its status as an account of the good life, which has to build on an account of human nature. Arguably, the best available account of human nature is given by evolutionary anthropology and psychology – pro- ceeding from a wide notion of evolution as natural and cultural. I propose to complement resonance theory with evolutionary approaches to the question of the good life. Resonance theory can offer crucial refinements of the concept of the good life as pre- supposed by authors working within an evolutionary perspective, while in turn being able to profit from the empirical insights of evolutionary anthropology and psychology.

Problematising the discursive bases of contemporary ecopolitical vanguardism in social ecology and ecosocialism

Adrian Konik — 2024-12-28

The nature of communication and the communication of nature: revisiting critical theory and nature through decolonial environmental communication and human rights education in Brazil

Vitor Blotta — 2024-12-28

The ways in which Western capitalist societies have exploited communication practices and media are similar to the exploitation and instrumentalisation of nature. In this paper, we want to argue that critical theorists’ concepts such as instrumental reason and communicative reason do not allow for sufficient critiques of current lifeworld colonisation processes, hindering the prevention of more significant forms of violence against peoples, communication, and natural environments. We begin by problematising Western philosophy and its anthropocentric and instrumental approaches to nature, and contrast them with Global South concepts such as Amerindian perspectivism and good living. Then, through case studies of the Amazon news agency Sumaúma and the Human Rights Observatory in Schools Project (PODHE), we reflect upon how decolonial and original peoples’ concepts and principles may enable us to draw the elements of new relations between people, communication, and nature, which may embody a radical critical theory of communication and nature.

Reimagining African scholarship: a convivial approach

Francis Nyamnjoh — 2024-12-28