Günderrode’s Earth: On the Political Ecology of “Life”

ABSTRACT

This essay examines the conception of life Karoline von Günderrode develops in her Naturphilosophie. Focusing on “Idea of the Earth,” the essay argues that Günderrode develops a theory of the Earth that understands it as a synthesis of body and spirit akin to a Spinozistic monism. In contrast to Schelling and Hegel, who understood the Earth as the inert backdrop for the emergence of independent organisms, Günderrode’s conception of the Earth treats it as an unconditional form of activity irreducible to its status as an object. The Earth, for Günderrode, is made up of combinatory elements that coalesce and dissolve in a constant tension that emphasizes the impermanence of particular forms of organization. This conception ultimately suggests that the division between inorganic and organic beings is untenable and that the Earth itself is “alive” in ways irreducible to either. The essay goes on to briefly examine the unique political ecology that emerges as a result of Günderrode’s Naturphilosophie which, by undoing the division between the organic and the inorganic, likewise reinvents the relation between what is “natural” and what is “social.”

Notes

1 See, for example, Dalia Nassar, who argues that Günderrode charts her own distinct understanding of the relation between morality and nature by critically evaluating and departing from both Fichte’s and Schelling’s philosophies of morality and nature respectively.

2 For an elaborate and clear reading of the possibility of community with non-human others in Günderrode, see Ezekiel.

3 The enclosure acts against which Clare’s poetry is protesting could be identified with one of the four “deaths of nature,” which include its Global Commodification that Fréderic Neyrat discusses in The Unconstructible Earth.