These my brand-new reflections on geopolitics present it as a philosophical field, emphasizing the influence of geography on political strategies and the impact of geopolitical actions on collective identities and human conditions. It integrates classical philosophical thoughts on power and State acts, aiming to deepen the understanding of nations’ strategic behaviours and ethical considerations. This reflective approach seeks to enhance insights into global interactions and the shaping of geopolitical landscapes.

 

The Geo-Philosophy

Part IV

 

 

Geophilosophy, in itself and in relation to what produces it, is therefore, first of all, a thought of the outside. This is because it has in the “outside” the only philosophical ground from which to draw its start; such a “start” is “unique” because any other ground would be, and is in fact, precluded to it, from the exclusion from which it comes: the almost nothing of heterogeneous existence and provincial thoughtfulness. In trying to reach a certain understanding of its theoretical consistency and its cultural role, geophilosophy thus comes to think of the place of its Herkunft, which means both belonging and provenance, as the fruit of a meiotic activity within a space of immanence. The mechanisms of exclusion and removal proper to meiotic activity destine a part of being to rejection: it is meiosis that produces that secluded region that constitutes, within the totality of things seen, organized, transmissible, and sensible, a Mërtvogo doma, a dead house, a closed region of the heterogeneous that resembles nothing, with its own laws, its own customs, with a life that does not exist anywhere else, where one can suppose that there is no crime that does not have its representative there, where the existing forces, there cohabiting under duress, are put to work under the threat of the stick, but without such employment having any purpose, its only purpose being instead to deceive the wait. A house where one can therefore learn patience in anticipation of being either enabled to join the bright world beyond, or at least pointed out by it as a mere moral reminder. A dwelling in every way similar to that prison of which Dostoevsky not only sculpted the figures, but also the dynamics, the chemical reactions, the vital functions, and the global dysfunction—the Other, for geophilosophy, is not high (Evola), but low (Nietzsche). The zero degree of exclusion corresponds, however, to the groundlessness of the world and the sense and organization of collective life are directly in function of the degree of exclusion. In this way, the crisis of desynthesis of the West comes to express, in addition to what has already been said, the weakening of the mechanisms of self-recognition on the part of the homogeneous world, which indeed used the inside/outside relationship to determine the sense of the positive, of the good, and of the superior in relation to the negative, the bad, and the inferior. The positive and the homogeneous are the ‘inside,’ the heterogeneous, the negative, and the transcendent are the ‘outside’; the ‘inside’ is a free, evasive region, the ‘outside’ is a closed and secluded region; the inside is the part of sense, of reason, of man and of being, the outside is the part of insignificance, of being, of god, and of the beast; the inside is the organized, serviced, and productive urban space, the outside is “the consistency of a vague ensemble that opposes the law (or Polis) as a hinterland, a mountainside, or the vague expanse around the city.” The desynthesis of the West therefore corresponds to an increase in the disorganization of the world, and thus also to an increase in its insignificance. The degree of insignificance to which the world bends corresponds, however, to the degree of liberation of flows of uncoded thought.
In the face of theology as the perfection of philosophical thinking, geophilosophy, one might say, unfolds—in the sense that it hoists, as sails are hoisted—the imperfection of an absolute anthropology. This, unlike subjective anthropology, which assumed the earth as that sector of being that constitutes the subordinate complement of the sphere of transcendence, assumes the earth as the conclusive, extreme horizon, as an “absolute,” within which the terrestrial and the transcendent, being and being, the human and the divine, the ἱδιότηϛ and the πoλίτης exchange incessantly, in a regime of unlimited reversibility.

In the second place, geophilosophy is a “minor” thought. Being excluded from thought does not mean not being able to learn its features, but rather: not being able to utter a philosophically legitimate sentence unless overcoming within oneself the stammering of the ἱδιότηϛ. “Minor,” in the sense of professional and homogeneous philosophy, is that use of the mind that stammers in thought, that use of the mind that is without past and without future, where, precisely, only what has a past, and therefore a future, and therefore a History, is philosophically relevant. Stammering in thought, without past or future, is indeed the almost nothing of provincial thoughtfulness. Taken in the “geo-” sense, this “minority” is therefore, to use a Deleuzian image, the autonomy of the stammerer insofar as he has conquered the right to stammer.
Finally, geophilosophy is a provincial thought, in the sense that it operates starting from the almost nothing of provincial thoughtfulness and unfolds like a path through the fields.
It is not easy to say whether Heidegger’s famous Feldweg also has this sense, but it is certain that if a path through the fields is mentioned here, it is meant to allude to a path that winds far from the road network of professional philosophy, to a path whose destination is not known with precision nor whether it leads anywhere, and thus to a path that must be attempted before it can be mapped. The path through the fields is therefore first of all a “trial path” (Holzweg), then a relationship of orientation with space, with the landscape and places (Wegmarken)—and not with the history of homogeneous thought, at least not primarily—, then a journey delivered to the horizontal development of the earth’s surface; the spirit does not invert, is not something that rises and falls, but rather, as is clear in the preludes of the dream, it rather spreads “over the broad surfaces of the earth, itself mountain and field and earth…”. Why the sky makes sense writes Cesare Pavese, who is perhaps the greatest poet of the landscape and earthliness of our twentieth century you must sink well black roots into the dark and if light flows right into the earth, like a shock, then even the peasants have a sense and cover the hills, immobile as if they were centuries, with green, with fruit and with houses and every plant at dawn would be a life.
The spirit spreads and covers the surfaces, the timeless hills, within a “closed” that we might say, delimits the absolute terrestrial; not therefore “celestial earth,” as has also been said, but rather, on the contrary, terrestrial sky, in the sense that it is the earth that has a sky, and not vice versa.
Finally, this image of the path, refers to a dialectic between ‘locality’ and ‘dislocation’, between rooting and deterritorialization. In the very near future, every thought begins. The landscape determines our first meditations. Our thoughtfulness is initially perhaps nourished by nothing but landscape. In the landscape and in the mother tongue, our ancestral sensibility is preserved and transmitted. The earth, not as a unifying symbol, but as this concrete relationship with a particular place-territory, gathers and preserves what, eluding manipulability, is free from technique: the faces of the ancestors inscribed in the folds of the landscape, the small cemetery up on the coast, where the ancestors insist and things that last forever. But without a dialectic between rooting and deterritorialization, between remembrance and flight, between the Langhe and Turin or the southern seas (to remain with Pavese), the call to the earth is useless rhetoric. Provincial thought unfolds this dialectic. But this dialectic does not reconstruct the universal, does not restore the eternal, does not provide global solutions, does not console, does not expand knowledge, and does not legitimize political choices. It might be said that it, very imperfectly, articulates local truths and transient facts within a concrete morality, also constantly in transit, aimed at clearing the path for the journey of a restricted community, in search of autonomy and “property” in the drift of the West, in search of a possibility of coexistence in the continuum of conflict, in search of a right and a victimizing responsibility in the deflecting system of laws and universalistic ties, and, finally, perhaps, in search of a terrestrial religion in the decline of Transcendence.
Geophilosophy is thus not, strictly speaking, either a new theoretical proposal or political, even if it has its own theoretical consistency and politics to be carried out, but rather a way of giving itself to thought “from the lucid fury that smolders in the somber thoughtfulness of peripheral recesses.” As such, it is but a transitory and lateral phenomenon, exactly as brigandage was caught between the decline of the ancien régime and the advent of the new political organ, the liberal State.