Derangement in Ecological Consciousness Today
摘要
If Talal Asad points out that for him secular is a concept that “brings together certain behaviours, knowledge, and sensibilities in modern life,” my chapter tries to carry it forward by bringing a few other domains like psychology, earth consciousness, planetarity into the striations of the secular. This secular is a deep commitment to a belief that need not be religious always: an inner sincerity to see the truth of imagination, the cataclysmic state of the environment, the relational mesh with the non-human world, the grammar and paradox of pain and survival, the reality of an understanding the worldliness neuro-sensually and our embodied responses to the world around. The secular is a habitus, sensibility, embodiment, reflections and critical understanding. Being secular is not always being religious; being secular is about being existential, socio-cultural, neuro-natural, and ecosophical-ecocritical. This chapter is about the dynamics and poetics of togetherness and takes three points of explications: three conceptual performatives in recognition, sublime, and improbability from Amitav Ghosh's book, The Great Derangement. We are amid continuous transcendence where climate change, Anthropocene, species extinction, environmental apocalypse, and nuclear war call for separate configurations of the secular. The secular can no longer work as a priori with its own innatism. This is not the Habermasian and Kantian non-religious reason; this secular reason holds desire, romantic and aesthetic qualities, the spirituality of everydayness, the fragility of existence and terror of the non-human green, the green anxiety, our state and conditions and desires of existence, our restless contemporary. Also, our fullness in life, bio-egalitarianism, planet-sharing ethics, and inclusive humanism that believes in being with plants and non-human animals feature in this secular figuration. In a post-natural world with a new sense of nature and increasingly reversed roles, man continues to deanthropogenise himself. Derangement is our new order and new poetics of living together.