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KATE RIGBY Gernot Böhme’s Ecological Aesthetics of Atmosphere In The Ideology of the Aesthetic, Terry Eagleton acclaims A. G. Baumgarten’s ‘‘discourse of the body’’ as ‘‘the first stirrings of a primitive materialism—of the body’s long inarticulate rebellion against the tyranny of the theoretical.’’∞ While Baumgarten is widely acknowledged as a founding figure in modern philosophical aesthetics, the counterideological potential that Eagleton locates in his valorization of corporeality failed to be realized, as the emergent discipline of aesthetics fled the flesh, restricting itself instead to a consideration of the formal properties and moral-intellectual significance of the work of art. Gernot Böhme, a leading figure in contemporary German ecological thought,≤ has set about reversing this historical trajectory by returning to Baumgarten’s theory of sensuous cognition as a point of departure for a new ‘‘ecological aesthetics of nature.’’≥ Here, nature no longer figures primarily, as it does in Adorno’s aesthetics of natural beauty (another important precursor for Böhme), as the locus of a promesse de bonheur situated beyond the realm of social oppression, but rather as itself a site of su√ering: one that we can more readily recognize as such as we begin to experience in our own bodies what our society has done to the earth.∂ While Böhme’s ecological aesthetics promises to take us ‘‘beyond the frame’’ of the work of art, it also o√ers an ecocritically valuable perspective on the arts, including literature. Böhme’s work on aesthetics is part of a wider project entailing the rehabilitation of the German tradition of Naturphilosophie (natural philosophy ) in the guise of a critical theory of social-natural relations, interweaving (post)Marxist social critique and the ‘‘new phenomenology’’ of Hermann Schmitz. This project is underwritten by a sober recognition that ‘‘we no longer stand on the brink of environmental catastrophe: we are in the midst of it.’’∑ Under these circumstances, Böhme calls for a pragmatically oriented Naturphilosophie, which, like the older Critical Theory as defined by Max Horkheimer, would be ‘‘driven by the interest in reasonable conditions,’’∏ ∞∂≠ kate rigby while nonetheless recognizing that what constitutes ‘‘reasonableness’’ with regard to social-natural relations cannot be presupposed, but must be communicatively elucidated over time, and oriented toward safeguarding the reproduction of natural systems as the necessary foundation for human society. The urgent need for such a critical theory of social-natural relations arises from the increasingly anthropogenic character of our earthly environs, or ‘‘the nature that we are not,’’ coupled with the growing technologization of the human body, or ‘‘the nature that we ourselves are.’’ This implies that at least on the scale that is most relevant for human life, the nature/culture binary that has for so long structured Western understanding, while perhaps always partially illusory and certainly culturally contingent, has now become highly problematic, and with it, the modern division of the natural and human sciences must also be challenged. What is required is a new ‘‘socialnatural science’’ which acknowledges both the social production of otherthan -human nature and the bodily dimension of human subjectivity.π With the disappearance of ‘‘nature’’ as pre-given, it makes little sense to talk of ‘‘conservation’’ or even of ‘‘sustainability.’’ This is not necessarily a cause for despondency, however. Perilous though our current situation might be, Böhme has so far remained remarkably upbeat. If the impact of industrial societies on other-than-human nature is rendering our planetary home increasingly uncongenial to human life, while the encroachment of technology on our own nature as bodily beings challenges our very sense of what it is to be human, then the onus is on us to figure out what kind of a ‘‘nature’’ we actually want to inhabit collectively and to embody individually. Picking up a resonant expression from Ernst Bloch, Böhme insists that although the global environment might everywhere bear traces of human impact, that does not mean that we should simply consign ‘‘nature’’ to the past, as promodernists (and ‘‘postmodernists’’) would have us do: on the contrary, ‘‘nature’’ represents a possibility that as yet lies ‘‘before us.’’∫ This Böhme identifies as the transformation of our industrially degraded earthly environment into a humane living space, in which a decent life might be enjoyed by all, together with the limitation of the technologization of the body to levels that we, individually, deem compatible with human dignity: a dignity, that is to say, which is proper to humans, not as...

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