The World's Negligence: Globalisation, Philosophy and the Misadventures of Space

The descriptions of our epoch as a time of technological despatialization, deterritorialization and dematerialization deserve to be discussed in order to bring out the complex genealogy of the changes to which they refer. Contemporary philosophy - especially the reading of Bergson, Heidegger, Arendt, Schmitt, Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari - helps us to do so in at least two ways: first, by testifying that space and the material world represent a kind of obstacle to the visions prevailing in modernity, that give the human being a privileged relationship with time and a right to separate himself from the world in order to dominate it; second, showing us the ways in which spatiality is presented as a political stakes irreducible to both rigid territorializations and pure and simple despatializations. From this point of view, even the current telematic technologies are proof of this irreducibility re-spatializing the world with their systems for tracking, surveillance, monitoring, etc.