Abstract:

In this article I critically explore the work of the social theorists Klaus Eder
and Ulrich Beck, who in different ways use an account of the ‘postmodern’,
plural character of contemporary ideas of nature to argue for the necessity
and possibility of an ecological democracy. I argue that within such social
theoretical understandings of the contemporary politics of nature is a
tension between pagan and Christian understandings of difference—
between an understanding of difference as fundamentally irreducible and
irreconcilable, and one that sees difference as contained within an overarching
harmony. I cast suspicion on an account of postmodern difference
which would see it as the resurgence of a pagan polytheism which had
merely suppressed by two millennia of monotheism, in favour of an alternative
account in which it appears as a historical product of the contingent
path taken by the development of the Western sacred. I then explore ways
in which Christian thought can provide the basis for an ontology of
original peace in contrast to the original violence of pagan thought, on the
basis of which might be built a different, ‘gothic’ understanding of
ecological democracy, in which consensus is not grounded in the suppression
of polysemy but in the harmonization of generative difference.

Author: Bronislaw Szerszynski