The Finitude of the World: Economy and Ecology

Expanding on Foucault and Bataille's work, this essay explores the archaeological a priori that has come to define our understanding of the world's finitude in an age of environmental crisis. It first shows how—by giving a political form to biological conceptions of life and death—classical political economy first forged and shaped the notions of scarcity and production that still inform debates over the current state and limits of the planet. The paper thus suggests how an alternative thematization of the finitude of man and of the world might contribute to understanding today's environmental crisis.