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Were a wind to arise
I could put up a sail
Were there no sail
I’d make one of canvas and sticks

        —Bertolt Brecht, ‘Motto’ 
        (Buckow Elegies)

Beware, o wanderer, the road is walking too. 
        —Rainer Maria Rilke

My head is my only house unless it rains

[...]

        —Don Van Vliet


A still from Harun Farocki's Das Silber und das Kreuz / The Silver and the Cross (2010).



(It is almost impossible to see in retrospect 
what was not built in perspective.)




Terra Cosmica / 
Traces of Georealism
Giovanbattista Tusa

Tenement Press / Yellowjacket 13
978-1-7393851-9-4 / 175pp / £17.50.


Order direct from Tenement here.

(23.08.24)


An ‘end-times’ philosophical enquiry in which 
the author argues with stones and geological time 
to compose a suite of interlinked fragments. An act of lapidary; a five-part antagonisation of the elements; an essay on representation,visualisation and prediction; an ecologue on ecology.

         *

Our age is characterised by the increasing humanisation of a planet that is more and more subject to metaphoric representation and visualisation. 
        The memorialisation, anthropomorphism, and narratological charge of time has birthed an intellectual industry in which the summation of history plays out like a hand of cards. A game in which retrospect and hindsight informs our present and sits us ever at the mercy of prediction and chance in a time increasingly defined by catastrophe, and as emergent crises affect every stratum of life and lived experience. We are currently witnessing a mutation of our thinking that disrupts the mythical imaginary that had hitherto confined viruses, climate change and atmospheric turbulence to an unalterable background in the all-too-human narrative of the struggle against nature.
        Tusa’s Terra Cosmica / Traces of Georealism is the result of a series of lectures and essays—a quintet of pieces published over the course of a four-year period—that, woven together into a new collation of interlinked fragments, calls time on time to consider the new form of planetary realism resultant of this restructuring of the imagination. Tusa presents a cosmic remapping of our modes of thinking that assumes that our contemporary moment is absented from its representability, its history of representations, and all means of explanation, thus remaining open to a sense of its own infinity… Open to an encounter with that which remains absent and unknowable, with neither horizon nor memory available as any weathervane for comprehension and action. Tusa’s work is a scrutiny of our exosystemic condition; a suite of exploratory antagonisms on the need for a new philosophical perspectivism of time, of earth, and a new charter for the foundations of thought and thinking.


Gaspar Miguel des Berrío, ‘El Cerro Rico 
y la Villa Imperial de Potosi’ / ‘Cerro Rico 
and the Imperial Municipality of Potosi’ (1758).



Launch Events


18:00 / 09.10.24
Tremulations x Terra Cosmica /
Giovanbattista Tusa
Daniel Birnbaum
Jacqui Davies

Swedenborg Hall
Holborn, London

16:00 / 03.10.24
Tenement Press x UAL Libraries
Giovanbattista Tusa
at the High Holborn Library
London

15:00  / 29.06.24
Ecocosmism /  
The Limits of
an Unsustainable Life
Waseda University
Tokyo, Japan


Tusa, 2024.



Brick & mortar bookshops /
order via asterism.



Giovanbattista Tusa finds the words that won’t fill the disquiet and the terror of the illegible revolt of the elements against our way of production. 
        The fury of climate deregulation and the ecological crisis have a history and a foreseeable future that we now must become acquainted with. This book is a magnificent tool to help us begin to accomplish the most urgent task of contemporary humankind: the only one that can save us. 
        —Claire Fontaine





Giovanbattista Tusa is a philosopher and video artist based in Lisbon at the Nova Institute of Philosophy (IFILNOVA), where he coordinates the X-CENTRIC FUTURES research seminar. His publications include Cosa resta del futuro / What Remains of the Future? (Mimesis 2024), Quasi Niente: Il tempo cosmico di Claude Debussy / Almost Nothing: Claude Debussy’s Cosmic Time (Il Palindromo 2024), and he is the author, with Alain Badiou of The End (Polity, 2019), translated in French, Portuguese and Spanish. Tusa co-edited the volumes Contemporanea: A Glossary for the 21st Century (MIT Press, 2024), Dispositif: A Cartography (MIT Press, 2023), Fernando Pessoa and Philosophy: Countless Lives Inhabit Us (Rowman & Littlefield, 2021), and PPPP: Pier Paolo Pasolini Philosopher (Mimesis International, 2022). He is editor (with Michael Marder) of the Political Theory and Contemporary Philosophy series published by Bloomsbury.





The moment the earth was transformed into [an] artefact, nature ended, and ecology began: ‘ecological’ thinking became inescapable as the planet became a work of art. Technology is no longer a system at the disposal of human reason to act on the world because human beings are no longer the subject, but the object of an echo-technical metamorphosis.

(From Tusa’s ‘Post-Scriptum.’)




MMXXVI