The Space Age is over? Not at all A new planet has appeared: Earth. In the age of the Anthropocene, the Earth is a post-natural planet that can be remade at will, controlled and managed thanks to the prowess of geoengineering. This new imaginary is also accompanied by a new kind of power - geopower - which takes the entire Earth - in its social, biological and geophysical dimensions - as an object of knowledge, intervention, and governmentality.
Far from merely being the fruit of the spirit of geo-capitalism, this new grand narrative has been championed by the theorists of the constructivist turn (be them ecomodernist, postenvironmentalist, or accelerationist to name a few) who have also called into question the Great divide between nature and culture; but in the aftermath of the collapse of this divide, a cyborg, hybrid, flexible nature was built, an impoverished nature that does not exist without being performed by the technologies, human needs, and capitalist imperatives. Underneath this performative vision resides a hidden "a-naturalism" denying all otherness to nature and the Earth, no longer by externalizing it as a thing to be dominated, but by radically internalizing it as something to be digested. Constructivist ecology can hardly present itself in opposition to the geo-constructivist project, which also claims that there is no nature, and that nothing will prevent human beings from replacing Earth with an Earth 2.0.
Hence the philosophical urgency regarding the question of the unconstructable. Against the fusional myth of all technological power over nature, but without returning to the division between Nature and Culture, the author proposes an "ecology of separation," which emphasizes the wild, subtractive capacity of nature. Neither a constructible object nor an appalling Gaia, Earth is an unsubstitutable becoming: a traject that can in no way be replicated in a laboratory. Underway for billions of years, withdrawing into the most distant past and the most inaccessible future, Earth escapes the very hubris of the geo-constructivists.