Environmental Affectivity

Following Spinoza’s lead, this book imagines an embodied environmental ethics based on the relations between sentient beings and sustained by affections, sensibility, the senses, and contact. Engaging embodied, cognitive, phenomenological, and psychoanalytic aspects of affectivity, Omar Felipe Giraldo and Ingrid Fernanda Toro help us understand how places inhabit us, and therefore, how places transformed lovingly have the immense capacity to modify the body, to redirect desire, to clarify our sensibility - in order to create an affectivity in a direction opposite to the regime imposed by this ecocidal society.

Beginning with a discussion of environmental epistemology on ontological monisms and dualisms, Giraldo and Toro question theoretical approaches that correctly challenge Cartesian dichotomies but which they claim continue to examine the environmental problem from two angles: culture versus nature, the human versus the non-human.

The environmental crisis is more than a technological or economic problem. In this book, Giraldo and Toro argue that it is a threat to survival inscribed in the deepest foundations of our body, in the intimacy of our skin, in the intensity and tone of our affections, in our desires, in our perceptions, and in our sensory-motor capacities.

Omar Felipe Giraldo is a Professor at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. Toro does research in Political Ecology and Environmental Philosophy. He received the 2021 Research Award in Social Sciences from the Mexican Academy of Sciences. His more recent books are Conflictos entre mundos (eds.); Afectividad Ambiental (2020); Political Ecology of Agriculture. (2019); and Utopías en la Era de la Supervivencia.

Ingrid Fernanda Toro is in her second year of doctoral studies at El Colegio de la Frontera Sur (ECOSUR), Mexico. She is the author of the books Afectos en línea de fuga (2021) and Afectividad Ambiental. Sensibilidad, Empatía y Estéticas del Habitar (2020).