The Wasteland of Nature. Human Existence between Junk and Utopias of Reintegration
Profiles of Secularisation
Gianluca Cuozzo
Published 2014-09-08
https://doi.org/10.15388/Relig.2014.14-15.10823
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Keywords

nature
consumerism
residuality
utopias of reintegration

How to Cite

Cuozzo, G. (2014) “The Wasteland of Nature. Human Existence between Junk and Utopias of Reintegration”, Religija ir kultūra, (14-15), pp. 30–43. doi:10.15388/Relig.2014.14-15.10823.

Abstract

To live in today’s disfigured landscape – where nature is but a fragment of an ancient beauty and richness – means entering the era of allegory tout court, within which human existence is forced to dwell in a lunar landscape remindful of those described by P. K. Dick, the locus of rotting refuse, where everything is swiftly reduced to “kipple” and “gubble.” Yet, despite being a mere fragment, an allegory of its former self, nature still retains a historical dimension: that dimension of time which the social universe – turned into an obtuse self-perpetuating myth – has given up in the name of the “always identical and always new” and of the irrevocability of a particular historical-contingent outcome. Yet, even a disfigured nature can be the source of a concrete utopia of reintegration, by virtue of its histori­cal dimension. In other words, neither the wasteland of nature nor our dreams of salvation are exempt from an otherwise unsuspected mutual solidarity: being interconnected, they push imagination into remote and long forgotten lands where a happiness dwells, whose name – now unsayable in history – is Paradise regained.

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