The environmental emergency as a contemporary interregnum: analysis and overcoming of the subject/object dichotomy

This contribution aims to interpret the present as an interregnum, having the current ecological crisis as a reference point. This crisis is here understood as an urgent reality that has opened the door to a profound rethinking of the epistemological and normative paradigms of the contemporary Western world. The paper’s starting point will be the critical reading of the subject/object dichotomy developed by Rationalism and the Enlightenment, sifting through the forms it has taken within this cultural framework. It will be shown how the environmental emergency has raised the need to investigate the structure of this dichotomy starting from the role of object assigned to nature by a subject who has proclaimed himself as such on the basis of his own rationality. Indeed, the principle of rationality has historically been established as a criterion of value hierarchy, both between humans and non-humans, and within humans themselves. Women and colonized peoples were excluded from rationality and placed in the category of nature, which has taken on a symbolic negative meaning through the attribution of predicates elaborated in opposition to reason, like passivity and subordination. In this sense, the climate crisis is presented both as a moment of subsumption of the dynamics of domination realised on the basis of this paradigm, and as a real problem that shows the need to overturn it after having critically questioned it. It will highlight how the wide range of entities included in the category of nature and the distinction between the latter and the human collide, showing how this division is an abstraction that conceals the actual blurring of the subject into the object. Accepting this perspective implies the deconstruction of the idea of subjectivity derived from the dichotomous system, and leads to rethinking the predicates used to describe the world and its actors.