‘Planetarity’ (Box 4, WELT)

‘Planetarity,’ as an English word, was first used in a paper I presented at Stiftung-Dialogik in Zurich, December 16, 1997, entitled ‘Imperatives to Re-Imagine the Planet,’ and later printed as Imperatives to Re-Imagine the Planet/Imperative zur Neuerfindung des Planeten, ed. Willi Goetschel, Vienna: Passagen, 1999. ‘Planetarity’ was figured as a word set apart from notions of the planetary, the planet, the earth, the world, the globe, globalization, and the like in their common usage. The untranslatability of ‘planetarity’ rests on an old-fashioned argument. If we think dogmatically (to borrow Immanuel Kant’s phrasing on the ‘dogmatic,’ in English translation) of ‘planetarity’ as contained under another, prior concept of the object (the ‘planet’), which constitutes a principle of reason, and then determine it in conformity with this, we come up with contemporary planet-talk by way of environmentalism, referring usually, though not invariably, to an undivided ‘natural’ space rather than a differentiated political space. This smoothly ‘translates’ into the interest of globalization in the mode of the abstract as such. This environmental planet-speak is the planet as an alternate description of the globe, susceptible to nationstate geopolitics. It can accommodate the good policy of saving the resources of the planet. My use of ‘planetarity,’ on the other hand, does not refer to any applicable methodology. It is different from a sense of being the custodians of our very own planet, although I have no objection to such a sense of accountability. (For that custodial sense a good