In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari carve out an image of thought and a path for philosophy that is connected to the figure of the cosmic artisan. This article situates the artisan in relation to both past and future, comparing this figure to that of the artist in the work of another great philosopher who desired to bring forth a new beginning for philosophy, Martin Heidegger. After discussing multiple ways that Deleuze and Guattari's thought is world-destroying in terms of (...) past ontological and epistemological commitments, the article considers the cosmic artisan/philosopher's diagrammatic role in light of the technological-scientific advancements within the field of quantum physics. Through these elaborations, it becomes clear that Deleuze and Guattari are articulating the need for a new sensibility – to the imperceptible, the virtual, the compossible and the molecular. Deleuze and Guattari's noological nomadism opens a way forward, where world-destroying becomes linked to creation, and the figure of modernity becomes the possibility of a new relation to the earth – a cosmic earth. (shrink)

Against the backdrop of the current “geological turn,” the article sheds light on the ways in which the earth has been articulated through strategies of temporalization and territorialization in the context of modern philosophical race discourse. The author first reconstructs the constitution of a “geographic imagination” as it emerged in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The first part focuses on the role of geography in Kant's theory of race, and Alexander von Humboldt's project of plant geography. In the (...) second part, the author discusses Henrik Steffens's account of race. In the third part, the author turns to Heidegger, who rearticulated the “geographic imagination” in the first decades of the twentieth century. The article concludes that a critical theory of nature relations needs to overcome the semantic connections between conceptualizations of the earth and the modern race discourse that haunt contemporary ecological thinking. (shrink)