Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: Geo-philosophy, born from the fusion of “geo” and “philosophy,” bears a productive ambiguity: spanning geography, geology, and something even more expansive: a super-massive, unclassifiable rhizome. It invites us to untangle the entwinement of human and non-human life, confronting the wreckage of modernity’s legacy. The Enlightenment’s blind optimism birthed the myth of human exceptionalism—a myth that now teeters on the brink of planetary collapse. In this delusional world, the messiah complex thrives, embodied by billionaires like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, whose fantasies of off-world salvation mask the ongoing commodification and destruction of Earth. This is called as geo-fetishism, and masquerading as hope: the heroic gesture of saving the world while devouring it. As we descend deeper into the Dark Anthropocene, the human merges with the non-human in uncanny proximity, dissolving boundaries and unsettling species hierarchies. Also, posthumanism arises not as liberation, but as a symptom of collapse, blurring the borders of world-systems and natural kinds amid thickening ecological dread. Here, geo-philosophy reveals its radical edge, yet also its tragic limitation. It speaks not to the triumphant, but to the defeated, to those who live in the ruins, haunted by extinction, carrying the crisis of being like a wound. In this "wonderful" ruin of a world, I challenge geo-philosophy, for whom, and for what? Unfortunately, it is limited only for the oppressed, the defeated, the marginalized beings. Only they can grasp its “essence”—those haunted by death, who carry the crisis of existence like a love-hate companion. It is for the lost, whose struggle is etched into the very bones of the Earth, enduring until their final breath, in the name of extinction nihilism.
Author: Rangga Kala Mahaswa
Institution: Universitas Gadjah Mada
Language: English
Subfield: Cultural Studies
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W4413003236