This is the most significant phenomenon of the present century: ‘the intrusion of Gaia’ (Stengers 2015), brusque and abrupt, into the horizon o f human history; the sensation of a definitive return of a form of transcendence that we believed transcended, and which reappears in more formidable form than ever. The transformation of humans into a geological force, that is, into an ‘objective’ phenomenon or ‘natural’ object, is paid back with the intrusion of Gaia in the human world, giving the Earth System the menacing form of a historical subject, a political agent, a moral person (Latour 2013a). In an ironic and deadly (because recursively contradictory) inversion of the relation between figure and ground, the ambiented becomes the ambient (or ‘ambienting’) , and the converse is equally the case. It is effectively the collapse of an ever more ambiguous environment, of which we can no longer say where it is in relation to us, and us to it.

The Efficacy of Chaos/Disorder in Truing Relationships by Joseph Germana

nobody has ever been animist because one is never animist “in general,” always in the terms of an assemblage that produces or enhances metamorphic (magic) transformation in our capacity to affect and be affected – that is also to feel, think, and imagine. Animism may, however, be a name for reclaiming these assemblages because it lures us into feeling that their efficacy is not ours to claim. Against the insistent poisoned passion of dismembering and demystifying, it affirms what it is they all require in order not to devour us – that we are not alone in the world.

Even in the context of activities whose purpose is to obtain knowledge, meanings continue to be multiple.

to once again take up a story, our own, but in a different mode,

…the evocation of our experiences becomes anonymous, speaking of something other than us—as are anonymous the inflexion points of a life, those encounters or decisions, of which one is never the author even though, whether one knows it or not, one never ceases exploring their consequences or trying to make sense of them;

We are not naive; we know that for certain men (and women!) our topics are suspect, or susceptible to dishonoring philosophy. [...] Initially, what we knew is that neither one of us had embraced, as a vocation, this exercise of thought that is called philosophy. Not that we were wondering if we would be capable of it, if our names would be worthy to one day be added to those of the authors whose texts we were reading, or would be included in the dictionaries of philosophy (they have not been …). If we had doubts, they suggested rather a certain analogy with the “I would prefer not to” of the clerk Bartleby, that living enigma in Melville’s short story who, obstinately and with no other explanation except this formula, refuses to be engaged, to fill any one of the functions that his “boss” proposes, a boss becoming more and more obsessed, fascinated, ready to give anything to him if only he would accept it. Except, of course, that we are not living enigmas, that we have not driven any of our bosses crazy, that both of us have done what had to be done to earn our diplomas and even to launch our “careers” (which means beginning to work on our doctoral dissertations). Simply, if doing philosophy meant seriously considering inescapable dilemmas, irresolvable alternatives, injunctions that put us up against a wall, we would prefer not to. And when we saw the authors that we were reading striking a heroic pose, as if the destiny of humanity or the vocation of the subject was in play in the question they were posing, it must be said that we were laughing up our sleeves, knowing full well that this laugh could mean that we would never be “real” philosophers. But the principal difference with Bartleby, a masculine figure, unfathomable and fascinating, invented by a man, is that, at the end of the short story, he dies (in prison for loitering, preferring not to eat), whereas we are living. Moreover each of us has found her personal way to inscribe herself in this somewhat bizarre story that is called philosophy.