Between Paralysis and Action: A Starting Point for Thinking about the Urgency of Continuing to Live

Abstract

One of the possibilities of critical thinking involves dealing with the problems we face and not only diagnosing and revealing them. However, this ability to devise creative and responsible solutions to urgent matters involves a singular starting point. If we wish to create space for questions where multiple, diverse and contingent compositions arise, at many levels – from sensitive, artistic and biological to political, legal and institutional – we need to set the outlines which enable such capacity. It seems necessary to dismantle, let go and become detached from what still persists within us as metaphysical and transcendental inheritance. It is necessary to bring back some tools into play – some of them probably already known – into both the fields of intellectual thought and practices, in order to make room for the advent of the possible. In our article we will be addressing the issue regarding the term anthropocene, enabling a more complex analysis by examining it from various notions (life, nature, humanity, rationality, politics, prudence, contingency).