Towards a planetary coalition (a Preamble)

Abstract

When ‘megafires’ and ‘superstorms’ proliferate, who is the real sovereign of the Anthropocene: anthropos, or nature become monstrous? In the Teracene (‘tera’ meaning ‘monster’), I argue that sovereignty should mean the right to refuse that which turns our existential situation into a horror film, in order to defend what preserves life’s endangered conditions of possibility. To build this right, I first need to deconstruct the concept of sovereignty and to reveal its groundlessness. Acknowledging this groundlessness, I propose an ‘ecopolitics without guarantees’ in which the otherness at the core of possible new Constitutions would not engender an alternative sovereign subject (a subject that would just replace anthropos or the ruling class), but rather an unconditional requirement and the rights that it legitimates. I explain that this unconditional requirement concerns the necessity of caring not only for future generations but also for past ones. I finish my article with a political fiction: the outline of a Preamble for a Constitution able to give voice to the damned of the Teracene. To acknowledge the existence of those suffering from the ongoing exploitation and colonization of the Earth and of those who wither from a future erased in advance, this speculative Preamble is centered not around the present but around the heteronomous, divergent temporality of that which never existed enough and that which threatens to fall out of existence entirely.