Environmental Affectivity: Aesthetics of Inhabiting

Following Spinoza’s lead and Latin American environmental thought, 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, aesthetic 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 - creating an affectivity in direction opposition to the regime imposed by this global ecocidal capitalism.

For the authors, the environmental crisis is more than a technological or economic problem. They see it as 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. Hence, the immense need to dismantle this system of power embedded in the intimacy of our body and to cultivate a perceptual transformation guided by an empathic knowledge that leads to a different understanding of our belonging in that which exceeds us.

This book is a vital manifesto on the political role of affects, an invitation to awaken the sensitive perception anesthetized by the ecologies of cruelty, and an urgent call to understand differently our place in the cosmos in the midst of this war that our civilization has declared on life.

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).