Chapter 2: Geo-trauma

Chapter 2: Geo-traumaSpeculative cartographies attempt to bring together science, politics and aesthetics to pursue a geophilosophy of the earth, "to actually think the earth and to map its ethical, social and political involvements," as Rick Dolphijn put it.278 Such cartographical efforts would usher in an updated vision of the global, or a "new Earth"something that Deleuze and Guattari emphasize in their later works.In order to achieve this, however, as Bryant and Morton stress, nature needs to be recast as the uncanny ground of life and thought.What emerges through such revaluation is an "ungrooved" 279 earthone freed from the shackles of humanbased or transcendental representational graticules used to map it in the past.In result, the anthropocentric ground is snatched from under human feet, revealing planetary ancestrality that resists anthropocentric reductionism.Dolphijn underscores the importance of such estrangement of the Earth as "foreign territory" in the effort to "free thinking through the earth" 280 by confronting the "enigma of openness."281 What Deleuze and Guattari called a perpetual revolution would be realized by completing the Copernican turn, as suggested by Meillassoux, Harman and notably the Iranian philosopher Reza Negarestani.For him, a real revolution leading towards more-than-human "polytics"the plural spelling meant to foreground its many-sidednessis premised on a radical reformulation of otherness as "anotherness" by shifting from "being open (to)" to "being opened (by)."282 Through Cartesianism a rebours, mastery of the cognizant mind is exchanged for a radical immersion in planetary life, quite like in Morton's "dark-sweet" ecology of entanglement.Being "opened up by" is indeed uncanny 278 Rick Dolphijn, "Undercurrents and the Desert(ed): Negarestani, Tournier and Deleuze Map the Polytics of a 'New Earth'," in Postcolonial Literatures and Deleuze.