ROLAND FABER
BECOMING INTERMEZZO:ECO-THEOPOETICS AFTER THE ANTHROPIC PRINCIPLE(Eco-Sophia Lecture, Sophia University, Oct 26., Tokyo)

1 The Necessity of Wildness
John Muir, the whole-hearted naturalist who was instrumental in the creation of thefirst modern National Park worldwide, Yellowstone Park, in the Northwest of the U.S.,
understood the preserves of nature we create as ways to grant nature our absence. It is only
when we recognize and experience the wildness of mountains, waters, and woods that we canperceive their own ways of being, beating in their own rhythms. In recognizing that we are theintruders, the foreigner, the strangers, we are granted the feeling of our own contingency
within the necessity of wildness, in return. Nothing is just for our use—energy, water, andwood—but everything is a fountain of life in its own measures, rhythms, and harmonies. Only
invited to listen to its own ways, the wilderness in return speaks with infinite patience,
suffering our presence without being impressed by it: growing into the sky on its own,
flowing down on its own, bending in the wind with its own voice.
Of course, we can misuse and misunderstand this patience. We can disturb the
wilderness with our own clamor; we can dig tunnels through its mountains, cut its trees, andpollute its waters—and still it is patient; strangely reacting to our inflictions with its own
rhythms of ignorance, degeneration, refusal, retreat, or disappearance. We can misunderstandthis patience as passivity; we can try to fill its seeming silence with our bubbles; we canplaster it with our divisions of power; we can overlook its plenitude and mistake it for awasteland that only waits to be filled by our human rule. We can mistake its voices asformless matter ready to be imprinted with our faces. We can waste it for our own sake. We
can possess it.
I will propose that our ecological future is indispensably entangled with a very
different view of nature that must become sensible to the necessity of wildness in which weare only strangers, guests, invited by incredible patience—only in which we become
participants in what I will call “eco-nature.” In will argue that to recognize this necessity weneed shift the way we experience and frame our world in such a way that we become
contingent on this nature; that to homestead within the necessity of wildness means to let goof all excuses to justify the disturbance that our existence causes. I will propose to you that wemust become an intermezzo within this necessity and that to become such an intermezzo wemust give up on all forms of power of control, manipulation, and destruction in the name ofour survival. We must become what we always have been: an expression of the rhythms ofnecessity in which our contingent existence is an overflow of its patient grace.
As it is the solitude that Muir experienced in the wildness that made him feel asolidarity with its own ways and rhythms, so I am coming here as a stranger from the West
who feels the otherness of the rhythms of the East. Maybe it is precisely the colonizing logic,
economy, and philosophy of the West that is the problem. Maybe I should rather listen to thewisdom tradition of Asia. Maybe, if I finish here today, you will ask: Isn’t that what we havesensed for centuries or millennia? Who am I to teach you about the ecological wisdom ofinterrelatedness with the All that you have already heard through the many voices of Asian
wisdom? Isn’t the dao one of the oldest symbols of such a harmony we desperately seek: ofthe necessity of wildness in which everything goes by its own rhythms, even if they cross one
another, complicate one another, and sometimes, tragically, cancel one another out? Isn’t the
Buddhist realization of suchness (tathata) and all-relational interpenetration (pratityasamutpada) a symbol for an immediate access to this emptiness of patience that harbors its
own liberating plenitude? Isn’t the eco-wisdom of the East all we need to understand? Maybeso, I am not contesting such a view.
What complicates things, however, is the very hybridity by which we live today in thisglobally webbed and mapped out world, an interpenetration of East and West that cannot besorted out easily: technology, democracy, economy, spirituality—all mixed up. We have alllost the innocence of pure traditions both in the East and the West. And, maybe, thesecategories are wrong altogether, making us blind to other binary hybridities: North and South,
for instance, or the “worlds” that we count so lightly with the ordinal numbers 1st, 2nd, 3rd.
Maybe what we need is to realize our common complex contingency in the majestic necessityof this wilderness: the patience of all of these wisdom traditions for our little lives as theyflow together and apart within us, between us, and among us.
All I can do is realize the contingency in my thought within the great streams ofnecessary wildness in their interflowing connections and diversions, consciously
deconstructing my own Western baggage in the face of the confluent and diffluent, affluent
and influent necessities that, from their own rhythms, connect and diverge. All I will do is,from my own location, contextualize my ecological deconstruction so as to take its

2contingency seriously, opening it to the patience of wildness ever beyond and, yet, always
within.

2 The Economy of Omnipotence
Science has always had its unexpected effects. In 1847, Hermann von Helmholtz
formulated the famous law of the conservation of energy. Curiously enough, he had
discovered it by investigating the neurobiological functioning of nerves. This law states thatin a process of the transmission of energy, energy is not lost but only transformed. It became auniversal law of physical, chemical, and technical transformations of energy, for instance,from kinetic energy in thermal energy. It expresses an important axiom of current cosmology,
namely, that there is no “free lunch,” that is, that the differentiated energy in the coolingcosmos must have been the same in the point-concentration of the big bang. It insures that
there is no energy coming in from any transcendent force, such as God, acting upon the world
ex machina. Maybe this cosmos is just borrowed from nothing as it jumped into existencefrom a random quantum fluctuation, its missing part being dark energy. We have only
borrowed this universe and we will eventually have to give it back. Furthermore, Helmholtz’s
law allows us to travel through space. When we burn the thrusters full of rocket fuel we
propagate in one direction because we leave a trail of burned waste of particles behind suchthat the sum of the energy in both directions is zero.
It is even more unexpected that this law became part of 19th century economical theory.
Since there is no prescription for the form into which energy is transformed, we need not carewhat we leave behind as long as we gain in the process for what the process of transformation
was invented. Since our economy can just use the sources of energy transformation, it can,like a rocket, also just carelessly leave a trail of waste behind. The world is a reservoir ofenergy that we transform according to our will, technology, and aims. The economic cycles
are hermetically closed; we only have to sustain the process of economical transformation
since the resources are either inexhaustible or replicable raw material; and after theireconomic transformation, only waste. Nature is a mere supply for the sustainability of an
economic mechanicism; it is a mere substratum, the exploitation of environments just the“outside” of economy, the mere passive material of transformation.
This mechanicism is deeply engrained in Western thought. Alfred North Whitehead,the English mathematician and American philosopher, has called its inner mechanics“substantialism” and followed it back to two of its main roots: Christianity and Greek3philosophy. Philosophically, it claims that the true reality is independent permanence, that is,
first, it is what it is without any relation to anything else except itself and, second, it is what itis through time without being affected by changes in anything else. Such substance, if it
construes our understanding of reality, not only needs nothing to exist but has everything else
in itself or, conversely, everything else is just a mode of dependent participation in its essence.
Whitehead claimed that this mode of constructing reality is deeply inscribed in languages thatuse a subject-predicate form such that it divides our perception of reality itself into
independent existents without any inner relation but only with derivative forms ofparticipation.
Whitehead went even further and demonstrated that this installation of substantial
reality, with its sole legitimate power which excluded the substratum of dead matter as a mere
passive instrument to be imprinted by the activity of a substance, structured Greek society
even in the form of Athenian democracy, which could only live from a substratum of slaves
being the mere instrument of its own sustainance. As substances have all power of activity, so
free citizens have all the power of the polis; and as the material substratum is a mere supply
for the imprint of the substances, so slaves are the supply for the sustainance of the free state.
Indeed, the economical application of Helmholtz’s law is just a late insight in thesubstantialism that has haunted Western societies from their very beginning: that the humaneconomy is a substance, an independent machine of the transformation of material for its own
sustainance, and that the under side, the material, the slaves, the strangers, the others, are only
waste products.
Theologically, Whitehead reconstructed the substantialism of the mainstream
Christian notion of God as having been formulated precisely within this Greek context as thehighest substance. In fact, if God is the independent permanent being, everything else canonly be an inherent derivation from God, and in case of stubborn reservations, evil deviations.
In fact, according to this marriage of Greek and Christian categories, the world’s existence isa mixture of imperfection and evil. If substance is elevated to the eminent reality of God, thatis, if it expresses the ultimate reality of everything, it must become the ultimate power fromwhich everything else created ex nihilo, out of nothing. The wilderness, the chaos of acreative universe, is vampirized of its own life and bestowed to the highest substance, which
as an independent being now grants existence like a substance to its accidents or the master tohis slaves.

4This is the economy of omnipotence: that substantialism from its barbaric origin in therelation of absolute rulers over their subjects is sublimated into “the one absolute, omnipotent,
omniscient source of all being, for his own existence requiring no relations to anything
beyond himself.” As “He was internally complete” (AI 169) so are God’s legitimate powers
on earth and, finally, in ironic participation in this history of substantialism, so was humanity
over against the wilderness and economy over its resources.

3 The Ecological Death of God
Everything changes with a different perception of an economy not based on
substantialism and its philosophical and theological implications. God is dead, claims
Nietzsche; meaning that the substantialist illusion that roams through our abstractions withwhich we order our world is obsolete. Indeed, with the fall of the substantialist God a wholecascade of deconstructions is initiated of which we might not yet have seen a bottom. Most of
the atheist rhetoric in the 19th century might be dismissible, that is, it is not radical enough toovercome substantialism since it builds its very resistance on the same mechanicism that was
the outcome of its substantialist forbearers. If we cannot experience God because we don’t
have any organ for it as in Hume, referring to sense experience, the deconstruction of this
divine fantasy only furthers a mechanistic universe which, in its own turn, sustains the
economical omnipotence. It leaves the deep substantialism with its dualistic binary of
economy and resources, inside and outside, form and matter, master and slaves, in tact.
Nietzsche’s claim was different because it attacked the very underlying substantialism: that a
God of substance is a God that upholds the regime of Being, of the economic laws ofomnipotence, by granting what is life’s own: its becoming, the creativity of fluctuations thatalways escapes substantialism: the waste, the slaves, the underside. To dethrone this God is to
give back the power of becoming to what has been excluded from Being. And in its
groundlessness, becoming now, for the first time, appears in ecological terms: as “eternal
return” of novelty, as recurrence of the cycle of becoming in itself, as an endless cycle oftogetherness.
What becomes obvious is that the mechanicism in which substantialism began tostructure economy as independent, all-present, omnipotent, internal infinity that can ignore
any “outside” or is even the creator of it in terms of divine resources given to control them(make them subjected) must be overturned. It is clear now: the very dichotomy of mind andmatter in Descartes that left our bodily existence outside the mind as the mere extension and5the mere coexistence of an almighty God with an infinite extended space, as in Newton, will
only sustain a substantialist economy. Indeed, it was the Romantic movement of the later 19th
century that questioned this very presupposition. It found in Schelling a proponent that not
only shifted the view of the mechanist universe of exploitation but expressed it with a very
different notion of the divine: that of the depth of nature that, in fact, is so deep—infinitely
deep—that it is even deeper than God. It was this Ungrund or groundlessness that he called
the nature of God, that is, that in God which is not God but even God’s groundless ground.
Here we gain a first glimpse of “eco-nature” in which “nature” was given back its wildness,
indicating the groundlessness of everything that happens. In it, we are at home and strangers
alike; in this nature, we become—with God—contingent on its necessity.
The immanent vitalism of the Romantic movement dealt with the mechanicism in sucha way that a new paradigm could emerge: that of a community of becoming in cyclic fatebound together in their becoming and infinitely hovering over a wildness of which humanity
is only a contingency. With Whitehead, we enter a new phase of the exploration of this
togetherness. Motivated by the hybrid confluence of science and religion in his philosophicalencounter with mechanicism and in light of the new physics of relativity theory and quantum
physics he might have been one of the very first philosophers who systematically proclaimed
a new paradigm of organic philosophy. This paradigm “is neither purely physical, nor purely
biological”; but is always “the study of organisms. Biology is the study of the larger
organisms; whereas physics is the study of the smaller organisms” (SMW 103). His whole
philosophy can be seen as making sense of an organic universe, or in more technical terms:
that the universe is a groundless process of becoming and that this becoming is always anirreducible multiplicity of relations in the process of growing together and dissipating into a
new multiplicity of relations. In this paradigm, everything is related and nothing is without“life”; everything is a becoming of worth (inner value) and nothing is just material or waste.
It was Whitehead's contention that if the universe is a process of processes of
becoming relationships or relational becomings the most fundamental characteristic of thisecological complexity must be only one: namely that there is no other characteristic more
fundamental and, actually, groundless, than this very togetherness of relationships inbecoming. He called this most profound ecological character of the universe that “does notpresuppose any special type of order, nor … any order at all pervading its members”—“thegeneral metaphysical obligation of mutual immanence” (AI 201). Its inner consequence,
however, is the ecological death of the substantial God. Deeper than the death of God as
Being in Nietzsche and the death of God as ground in Schelling, it erases God’s power6altogether, only leaving a trace as a warning: If “there is nothing in the Universe other thaninstances of this passage and components of these instances,” then “the word Creativity
expresses the notion that each event is a process issuing in novelty” such that its “Immanent
Creativity, or Self-Creativity, … avoids the implication of a transcendent Creator,” only in an
air of paradox, or pantheism” suggesting “the [immanent] origination of novelty” instead of“Creator” (AI 236). Strangely enough, as we will see later, this was only the birth of an
ecological divine.

4 The Anthropic Fallacy
So deeply was the justification of substantialism engrained into Western experiencethat the fact of its very inscription came into question. Its easiest and most obvious version is
this: that even the ecological death of God has left us with the dead body of this divinity,
namely, with power-instilled, substantialist abstractions like Subject, Right, Power, Integrity,and Humanity. Point in case is Feuerbach’s analysis of substantialist power as a projection
onto God by social and political interests of legitimizing certain power structures. Theirrupture, however, would not lead to the ecological death of God and, hence, a new ecologicalparadigm of mutual immanence but straightly into reclamation of the diverted powers
projected as powers of the infinite human nature. This is the Anthropic Principle: the halfdeath of God in its corpse—the superiority, even infinity, of humanity. The Anthropic
Principle reverses the necessity of wildness and our contingency into our necessity and thecontingency of nature.
This Anthropic Principle expresses itself most prominently and obviously in the formof the Anthropic Fallacy in the current ecological discourse such that to save nature fromhuman influences is actually a strategy of human survival. We are not interested in ecologicalrelationality in terms of Whitehead's mutual immanence in which we have to situate humanity
anew by redefining what nature means for humanity and in what way it is part of its mutual
environmental relations. Even Muir’s “necessity of wildness,” which includes thepreservation of wilderness devoid of human influence, is not for nature’s own sake as thefountain of life but, rather, about strategies of restoration, manipulation, or development of theenvironment so as to allow human persistence in it. This Fallacy is anthropocentric insofar as
its rhetoric of the integrity of nature is really about saving human existence in nature.
Conversely, “nature,” is not viewed from its own organic integrity in which humanity isrelationally “integrated” but from techniques of human survival. It is anthropomorphic insofar
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as it presupposes that nature a whole conspires for our survival. In such an anthropocentric
condescendence, we “preserve” nature because it needs our preservation. Nature is not thenecessity of our contingency but the contingency in need of preparation, preservation, andmanipulation.
The spiritual traditions have heavily contributed to this situation of the Anthropic
Reversal of necessity and contingency. Again restricting myself to the Western heritage, it
seems that the religious and theological discourses interested in ecological issues are still
implicitly following the divine supremacy before the “ecological death of God” in order toestablish the supremacy of their own orthodoxies. They take the environmental crisis as achance to reintroduce the relevance of one’s own religion. With strategies that want toestablish that the depth of the theological traditions was always “ecological,” orthodoxies arestill following the Anthropic Reversal by claiming that it is humanity’s imperative to“preserve creation.” This so called “stewardship for creation” is, however, less ecological inessence than it is concerned with the survival of humanity. Even in this new context—
ecological interrelationality—the argument from “creation” is still executing the old mindset
for which nature was reduced to a mere background condition of human existence andsalvation. As many traditional texts attest, this nature is not an integral part of salvation but
only humanity’s background in which they repeat the wipeout of the integral pleroma ofinterrelationality transforming it into a mere extension, a place to be filled with humanity. We
still repeat the guilt of the Christian heritage of disrespecting the Earth in her own right; westill make her necessity contingent on humanity’s destiny; we still “subject” her to humanity’snecessity.
The superiority of these “humanisms” was most prominently deconstructed by French
poststructuralists since the 20s of the 20th century—including Barthes, Levi-Strauss, Lacan,
Althusser, Serres, Bataille, Kristeva, Foucault, Derrida, Lyotard, Deleuze, Irigaray,
Baudrillard, Butler, Spivak, and Zizek. In cascading down the ladder of deconstruction, theysuperseded the death of God with the “death of the subject” and “humanism.” The first one
because it is a product of power structures, that is, of subjection; the second because it infects
the world with a hidden claim to the superiority of the colonizing West. To be “human” is thepossession of the one who is able, has the money, power, and means to “subject” the rest of
the world: politically, culturally, technically, religiously. Humanism is about orthodoxies ofsuppression. Its deconstruction has led us a step closer to the composting of the “dead body ofGod.”
8However, the awakening in the midst of an “ecology of power” in which subjects arealways the surface expression of social, cultural, religious power-relations has lead, fairly
unexpectedly, to another omnipotence, not of “God” or “subjectivity” but the omnipotence ofpower. For Foucault, power is not unilateral, a means of suppression of the “better ones,” buta relational, structural, objective infinity in which humans constitute themselves as humans.
Again, as in the economic omnipotence, we end up in a hermetic interiority of transformation,
not of economic objects, but of objects of power, itself remaining deeply (dialectically)
dependent on the rejection of humanism. The problem of the Anthropic Principle is thisinteriority of omnipotence even in its negation of human subject; it negates the necessity of
wildness and empties it into a contingency of human power relations; thereby it deconstructs
nature itself as an essentialist illusion, as a mirage of a mirage; as a Romantic original that has
been lost in all of its infinite reflections—nature as a projection of omnipotent power.

5 Ecology Deconstructed
Still following the cascade of deconstruction of the ecological death of substantialist
omnipotence downward, the appearance of philosophical reflections within the ecologicalmovement was equally problematic. Cases in point are Deep Ecology and Eco-Feminism.
While Eco-Feminism succeeded in deconstructing the Anthropic Fallacy as an androcentric
superiority, it is in danger of “identifying” the suppressed female with suppressed nature—suffering at the hand of unilateral, Western, male powers—such that it not only countersubstantializes the suppressed but remains within the old concept off unilateral power,
overcome by poststructuralism. Its resonance with the Gaia-project—first proposed by James
Lovelock—which has relativized our Anthropic Condescendence in putting emphasis on theinherent integrity of the Earth as a living being in its own right unfortunately also seals ourcomplicity with “nature” as an integrity that must be “preserved” for human survival.
Deep Ecology also appears as the recognition of an internal form of the self-value ofnature not only in its individuals as entities of life but even more in more complex living
unities such as species and eco-systems. It overcomes the Anthropic Fallacy by integrating
humanity within nature but, at the same time, remains complicit to it by its use of“subjectivity.” Arne Naess views ecological consciousness as a process of the widening of
Self in which we overcome the egoism of human individualism in a process of identification
with wider contexts: humanity, other species, eco-systems, and, finally with the whole
ecosphere. But its compassionate altruism remains egoism: it becomes a new omnipotent
9interiority of an infinite Self. Despite this identification, Deep Ecology becomes a counterhumanism that is not geared toward the integration of humanity into nature but towards alegal battle of “natural entities” over against humanity. As Arne Naess’s Charta formulates anequality of the right of survival among any species, this approach shifts the discourse again
into the realm of substantialism: Humanity and any other species now appear as equal
subjects of “natural rights” in a fight of survival over against another.
As both approaches imply a substantialism of viewing eco-systems as “subjects”—
nature, Earth, species, eco-systems—they, in fact, only repeat the substantialism that defines
identities against one another: not as relationships but in categories of war; not as mutual
immanence but in terms of legal victory; not as diversity in inherent connectivity but asliberation of suppressed entities that are understood as hermetic units. In fact, thissubstantialism of the “identification” of legal, moral, or ontological unities of worth andaction has pervaded ecological discourse proper and environmental ethics for a long time.
While the “individualistic” approach just reduplicated the anthropomorphic reduction ofhumanity to individuals in viewing nature as an accumulation of individuals to be preserved,
the holistic extended this individualistic view to groups of individuals like species or ecosystems as relationality between individuals. Even in the form of the acceptance of emergent
features of eco-systems over against individuals such an approach remains bound by its
substantialism of properties that are seen as principles or aims of ecological action:
integration, balance, harmony, diversity, wholeness, and health become expressions of the
new hermetic unity of ecological identification and action.
In an Anthropic Transfer, such holistic features of eco-systems widen humancategories of value, integrity, stability, self-realization, or health to ecosystems as a form of
universal “egology” expanded to the world as the body of such substantial properties.
Nevertheless, they all remain problematic in their very substantialist independence. Integrity
becomes static if we think of it as an apriori identity of any given eco-system; it ignoresinterrelationality within and beyond itself and the fact that it is always in its own flux ofidentity. Integrity is always ecologically surprised by novelty in the system such that the new
system will find a new integrity that cannot recast the old identity and, hence, also has nointernal value to be “preserved.” There is no wholeness to an eco-system as its aim (fixed
identity or Idea) that can be used as a criterion of ecological action; it always changes inmutual interaction from diversity within and without.
The same is true for more dynamic properties suspected to define eco-systems as andecological action, like self-realization, diversity, or complexity. Like stability which would
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motivate us to “preserve” a certain “state” as exceptional, natural, or most whole, selfrealization predefines a given substance of Self to be realized and not to be disturbed byhuman existence. This is not Muir’s fountain of life in preserved wildness—which is only asymbol of our contingency—but a call for the independence of such Selves in eco-systems by
a projected human notion of Self-identity with its predominantly Cartesian necessity.
Diversity and complexity, on the other hand, have been contested as aims because their use
implicated the contention that if we let a system become complex enough it will result in acertain “natural” stability of that system like a nascent Aristotelian substance that is still in theprocess to becomes constituted as what it is (if you do not hinder a seed from growing it will
become a tree). Although this teleology is not about a state of things but is open to a processthat we “preserve” and from which we withhold intervention that would disturb it or intervene
to get it flowing again, its aim is still such a state of balance. This is the final deconstructionof the Anthropic Principle inscribed in nature: that there is no fixed, final, or ideal measure;and no such balance of states, processes, and identities.

6 Eco-Nature
Have we reached the bottom of the ecological cascade down from substantialism yet?
And where do we go from here? The first question relates to the deconstruction of worldconquering omnipotence of modes of wholeness, oneness, substantiality, subjectivity, andpower-infliction that structures our conceptual framework and our experience in such a waythat it eliminates any outside—as if the rocket is everything that exists and its propagation isjust a matter of an internal transformation of a hermetic whole so that neither the acquisitionof transformative energy nor the space in which it happens matter and that the propagation
only leaves a wasteland behind that is not of its concern as are the wasted spaces the rocket
transverses. The second question names a different kind of aim that we might have for suchprocesses of transformation: non-substantial, non-static, non-wholistic (all-inclusive),
nonomnipotent. I will answer both questions with a “yes” if we mean that such a new
approach to nature that is beyond the Anthropic Fallacy is eco-natural insofar as it pertains to
the necessity of wildness and human contingency and beyond that, the mutual contingency of
everything within eco-nature such that there is no overarching aim, criterion, or final state
except their mutual immanence.
If we begin with mutual immanence, as suggested earlier in Whitehead, the limitationsof omnipotence we can discover are threefold: First, the approach to eco-nature is such that11

we always find a multiplicity of becomings that are neither reducible to one another nor to any
one pre-given origin or final state, and hence, to any kind of state at all. Second, nothing in
eco-nature is isolated or, conversely, everything is in a mutual process of becoming that is as
much unification as it is diversification; simplification and complexification, reduction andunfolding—always both at the same time. Third, no synthesis, element, moment, property,
feature, concept, or character is absolute in the sense of being complete; rather everything we
discover about the process of mutual becoming of multiplicities is a relationality that isalways incomplete so that no conceptuality can ever be closed because of perfection. We canrestate these three criteria as: the irreducible multiplicity of becoming in a process of mutual
reciprocity, determination, and incompleteness. The ideal of eco-nature is infinite becoming
without any fixed measures of relationality, criteria for aims, and presupposed directions ofharmony.
Whitehead’s vision of eco-nature is that of its “perfect incompleteness,” that is,“complete” immanence in its becoming in which it never does become encompassing orcomplete but demonstrates a “necessity of universality” that is that of “relationality” (PR 4)
beyond which there is no relationality that is not already part of the openness of relational
becoming towards novelty. In the framework of Gilles Deleuze “transcendental empiricism,”
this formulates the conditions of a world in which novelty is possible such that the universal
incompleteness of relationality is also its rationality, the measure by which we can understandeco-nature.
While William James in his Pluralistic Universe had already stated that the universe isplural in such a way that any unification is always a simplification of its multiplicity in which,hence, something always escapes, Whitehead, in reading James, was maybe one of the first
philosophers to create an eco-philosophy of the entanglement of eco-relations and eco-events,
eco-systems and eco-chaos in the mutual oscillation between organisms and environments.
His “organic philosophy” proposes that all relations are in becoming, in the rhythms ofrepetition and differentiation such that they create events of novelty and structures ofrepetition as they vibrate within and between processes of synthesis and deconstruction likeswarms or clouds of mutually compromising complexities. In always creating and recreating
multiplicities on multiplicities, such processes condensate to social structures with reparativeand competitive characters of survival and pleasure of organism within ever wider fields ofenvironments in which they become what they are and in which define their rules of ascension,
existence, and fading as much as they define the processes of their environments to which
they are always related in complex ways.
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Eco-nature, for Whitehead, is a vast interrelated multiplicity of entangled organisms
and environments such that every organism is an environment for other organisms that, in its
own turn, is enveloped by environments, which are themselves organisms in otherenvironments. As all of these organisms are not related to one another as layers of an onion
but rather in always immediately cutting through all layers, having all layers inherent to one
another, all organisms and environments influence their mutual becoming. Insofar, however,as these organisms and environments also do not form one super-organism in which
everything is balancing itself out so as to create a super-structure or super-symmetry, theseorganisms and environment are externally limiting each other as a matter of mutualenrichment by the always surprisingly unexpected other and, with equal importance, bystruggling against each other for survival, attention, and satisfaction of life. The basic“relation” in Whitehead's eco-nature is neither mutually external nor mutually internal but
prehensive, that is, re-enactive and creative of its relata; in other words: Eco-nature is aprocess of always new configurations of multiplicities of becoming as transformation ofdivergences into contrasts of novelty. This is the driving appetite of eco-nature: its
creativeness as processes of intensification of contrast and harmonization of contrast ofcontrasts, infinitely recreating each other.
Beyond the Anthropic Principle, this eco-cosmos is, as Deleuze says about
Whitehead's eco-nature, a chaosmos that is not defined by any substantiality as sublimation orderivation of human proportions for measuring everything. In the ever disbalanced becomingof new constellations of multiplicities of incomplete organisms and environments, humanity
is interwoven as a product of serendipitous processes of precisely such constellations of thecreative disequilibrium of intensity and harmony but also unhappy constellations of
disintegration and chaos that together are eco-nature. To this eco-process humanity is neither
an exception nor a peak; neither an isolated entity with unique rights nor unworthy to exist.
Within the necessity of the wildness of eco-chaosmos, humanity is but a contingency: aserendipitous event of intersecting environments without necessity or exception fromchaosmic rhythms of becoming and fading.

7 Becoming Animal
While deconstructing the Anthropic Exception of humanity in its relational
embededness in eco-nature, we still need to address the experience of nature within us assubjects of experience of such nature. The question is: Do we, indeed, experience eco-nature
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and, if so, how do we understand the emergence of the Anthropic Principle? While anyclassical anthropology has differentiated humanity by either its capacity to think, reflect, andunderstand or its subjective inwardness or its ability to differentiate itself consciously fromnature, the binaries of mind and body, form and matter, master and slave are attesting to thisfact; the poststructuralist deconstruction of these binaries, however, has left us with adisappearance of nature into our cultural games of omnipotent power. How do we account foreco-nature in our experience as human beings and how can we overcome the binaries suchthat we do not diffuse eco-nature in the fiction of a new omnipotent “subjection” to power inwhich humanity becomes absolute again?
Deleuze has proposed this question in the form of his provocative imperative that wemust become animals again. Becoming animals, however, does not mean to literally revoke
human existence as animal rationale (Aristotle) or the animal that knows death (Heidegger) inorder to become indistinguishably united with nature—this would contradict the mutual
incompleteness of multiplicities in eco-nature. Rather a “becoming-animal always involves apack, a band, a population, a peopling, in short, a multiplicity” (TP 239) that overcomes thedualistic differentiation between res cogitans, which is always distinctly human, and res
extensa, which is always erasing our chaosmic, organic, and environmental heritage, such that
this eco-transfer can no longer be demonized as a diabolic state of perversion—as some,
especially Western, orthodoxies suggest. Becoming wolf, becoming whale, becoming
multiplicities!
I will mention three aspects of what Whitehead calls the mutual “pollution” of mind
and body in becoming multiplicities/animals again (cf. RM 87). First, it is an appeal to adiffusion of the symbolic stasis of differences between humanity and nature in the form ofrecongizing of our internal pre-symbolic multiplicity that always supersedes our well-defined
identities. Julia Kristeva has argued that our human difference from nature is the product ofour birth into a world in which we seek through symbolic acts of longing, language, andstabilization to actually find our pre-natal state again. Expelled from its pre-symbolic, bodily,material cycles of being multiple, we always substitute the impossibility to reverse thisprocess with differenciations from it that cope with existential feelings of abjection: becoming
subject, becoming substance, becoming omnipotent. She suggests that we will only overcome
this move toward subjection and substantiation when we allow for the porosity in theseprocesses of absolutism, if we grant ourselves an absolution for being abjected from the presymbolic ream of chaosmic multiplicity and invite it in in the form of poetic inconstancy in its
material indirectivity. In the poetic break of continuity that excludes this Platonic khora of14

mutual immanence and incompleteness, we will get a taste (aesthesis) of multiplicity beyond
and before human identity.
Second, Whitehead addresses the same problem of exclusion from and of multiplicity
in terms of our projective epistemologies in which, since Aristotle and with Kant, we haveclosed the human mind of from the pollution of the eco-chaosmos and isolated it from econature with the help of its omnipotent thought-figure found in the divine realm of Ideas andBeing. In breaking through such immunization tactics of omnipotence, Whitehead suggeststhat such isolation is an emergent in the evolutionary process for reasons of survival,
orientation, and directionality of organisms. However, it becomes toxic when it closes itself offrom its primary inclusion within a realm of feelings of the multiplicity of nature in us suchthat it actualizes ourselves within eco-nature always before, within, beyond, and across any
constitution of subjectivity, intellectuality, and superiority. In criticizing this binary isolationfrom multiplicity Whitehead suggests, as Derrida would later, that we need to reconnect withthe enveloping nature beyond all of our endeavors to constitute independent “presentational
immediacy” (isolating self-presence) within ourselves, in which we become “one” overagainst eco-nature (as multiplicity in despair), elevating ourselves to the controlling kings ofour desires and the eco-chaosmos. It is precisely releasing this feeling of connectivity thatleaves “us a prey to vague terrors respecting a circumambient world of causal operations,”
where we become multiplicity, finding “ourselves in a buzzing world, amid a democracy offellow creatures” (PR 50).
In the dark there are vague presences, doubtfully feared; in the silence, the irresistiblecausal efficacy of nature presses itself upon us; in the vagueness of the low hum ofinsects in an August woodland, the inflow into ourselves of feelings from enveloping
nature overwhelms us; in the dim consciousness of half-sleep, the presentations ofsense fade away, and we are left with the vague feeling of influences from vague
things around us. (PR 176)
Third, George Bataille in his Theory of Religion develops the intense suggestion that
our whole human world is an excess of the inability to reenter the animal ream in which wewere and now feel, in painful absence, to have been “like water in water” (TR 19), that is, in
an intimacy that is permanently lost. Instead, the human world became one of the divisions ofsubjects and objects in the search for meaning, although all we find are devoid of aims thatare only means again. This creates our world of wars and empires as it creates religions in thethe place of meaning with subjectivity inscribed to objects, spirits, and gods. Meaning, which
15resides only in the directionless intimacy of animality, can only be returned to if we
consciously, that is, through our human difference revoke the difference of subject and object
and allow ourselves to be part of the animal kingdom in the depth within us as a multiplicity
of becoming; not as the “romantic object” of a paradise—this is for him the “Poetic Fallacy ofAnimality” (TP 20)—but in all of its variety of mutual immanence and the monstrosity ofmutual devouring.

8 The Theopoetic Difference
Eco-nature in us, bursting us inside out, and eco-nature between us, imploding thechaosmic All within us—this is the unconquerable wildness, the necessity of which makes us
its happenings, disowned of our “necessities” of possession. This consummation of humanity
in the dispossession within eco-nature is for Bataille, after the ecological death of God, themystical move of becoming-animal, becoming multiplicity. This unio mystica, however, if it
is not the unification with the omnipotent God that has to have died first in this eco-chaosmic
death of substantialism, is also not a new indifference of the Oneness of humanity and nature
but the consummation of all unity into the ream of multiplicity that, as Luce Irigaray puts it, isdivine precisely by not being One. It is the khoric realm of a paradox where we have to go
through divergences, bifurcations, and antinomies all at once; in which we become empty andthe All at the same time by being, as Deleuze puts it, One-All with multiplicity, infinitely
moving through ever new multiplicities of mutual immanence and limitation, planes ofimmanence and consistency in constant refigurations within an infinite chaosmos oftransformation.
This is the realm of poetics, of the rupture of the continuity of unification where, as for
Kristeva, meaning is indirected. This is the poetics of the unprecedented in which, asWhitehead puts it, “philosophy is mystical. For mysticism is direct insight into depths as yet
unspoken” (MT 174). Where the Romanticism of Bataille’s Poetic Fallacy is avoided byrecognizing the monstrosity of becoming; in which everything, as Deleuze says, reappears“like a single and unique ‘total’ moment, simultaneously the moment of evanescence andproduction of difference, of disappearance and appearance,” “the moment at which difference
both vanishes and is produced” (DR 42). In this mystical in/difference, everything is only in
difference. Its poetics cannot differentiate God as cosmological function anymore. God andthe world become “one” in being not differentiated by any property that would be reserved toGod. As Whitehead says, in this in/difference16

It is as true to say that God is permanent and the World fluent, as that the World ispermanent and God is fluent.
It is as true to say that God is one and the World many, as that the World is one andGod many. …
It is as true to say that God creates the World, as that the World creates God. (PR 348)
If, however, in this khoric ream God and the world are in/different as in the mystics,
that is, if their difference cannot be crafted around any difference of property, why then not
say that God is the world? To be sure, many philosophers would follow such a line ofthought—pantheism as last resort of divine apophasis in the world. Deleuze became aSpinozist and many theologians today feel themselves to be ecstatic naturalists or mysticalnihilists. But if, for many, eco-nature leaves a mystery of luminescent darkness—as for
Nicolas of Cusa—that cannot be reduced to unity, we need still to differentiate between
enfolding (complicatio), which Cusa named “God,” and unfolding (explicatio), which Cusa
named the infinite “world” of multiplicity. We will be speaking of the multiplicities of God
and the world in their mutual immanence, limitation, resonance, incompleteness, anddetermination. We will, with Whitehead, avoid the “identification” of God and world overagainst another not by naming reserved properties but instead will name God and the world as
multiplicities in mutual in/difference, that is, only as mutual embodiment or, as Catherine
Keller says, in mutual inter-carnation of multiplicities. This divine (in) multiplicity will insist
on multiplicity and only “ex-sist” by “in-sisting” in multiplicity.
You may wonder how we got here. What does this have to do with eco-nature? I shallanswer: everything! My answer follows the reasoning of the employed logic of multiplicity,
namely, that in mutual immanence nothing can become complete or omnipotent, not evenmultiplicity. If eco-nature is nothing but the mutual immanence of all becoming relationality,
externally and internally, in beauty and in monstrosity, in war and peace, we need to break
open once again the creeping substantialism of such a statement by differentiating the poetryof breaking open the chaosmos of the creative multiplicity from its closure of omnipotence.
Per se, eco-nature now appears to be a universality of relationality in a twofold danger ofclosure: that of a liberated multiplicity that is given back its own powers of becoming and thatof the monstrous multiplicity that is haunted by the clash of its own powers—because bothclosures live (again) from the omnipotence of power.
This is the reason for a theopoetics within the immanence of multiplicities: that, asWhitehead's says, God is not identical with “creativity”—Whitehead's “ultimate” that is theposse ipsum that empowers the becoming of multiplicities in the fulfillment to all of their17different powers and that also created the monstrosities of power against power. If power is
not absolute, either in the form of Foucault’s power of subjection or in the form of Deleuze’s(and Nietzsche’s) power of becoming multiplicity, the divine multiplicity is not identical withpower. I understand Whitehead’s theopoetic difference between God and creative/destructive
powers as that of power and love. It is the love of multiplicity—polyphilia! It is the love thatcannot be addressed in terms of power. It is the subtractive affirmation of multiplicity thathinders its closure into power. This love is, as Whitehead says, a “reciprocal relation, [inwhich] the love in the world passes into the love in heaven, and floods back again into theworld” so that “God is the great companion [of multiplicity]—the fellow-sufferer who
understands” (PR 351). In its reciprocity, it is the ecotheosis of multiplicity, the mutual
metabolism of the divine companionship with the chaosmos, and the mutuality of compassion
in midst of the powers of multiplicity, the luminescence of dispossession and non-violence in
midst of the wars of mutual digestion.

9 The Wasp and the Orchid
The insight into an eco-theopoetics of eco-nature after the Anthropic Principle istwofold: it is the recognition of the necessity of its wildness and our contingency in themutual contingency of multiplicities in multiplicities; and it is the differentiation of polyphilia
from power in a commitment to compassion. The first one activates us within eco-nature with
eco-consciousness; the second activates us within eco-nature with ecological conscience.
Gilles Deleuze has conceptualized such an eco-consciousness with the poetic of thewasp and the orchid. Both organisms follow their own paths of generation and regeneration
within their respective environments without having anything in common, except that theyshare the same environment in order to follow their eco-rhythms. They are not developing intheir own stratum of a shared environment, in a parallelism of possession of substantial
identity, so to say, but entirely differently: a becoming-wasp of the orchid and a becomingorchid of the wasp.” It is an “aparallel evolution” (TP 10) of entangled multiplicities without
internal recognition. This is the external side of eco-nature, the entanglement of mutual
differentiation that copies itself only by enacting the other, by “preserving” the other’smultiplicity in its own wildness. This preservation, however, is not that of a patient that is in
need, but of a cross-pollution of each other’s cycles. Its enactment in human action will notlead to any aims defined for the whole of the eco-process but arouses a desire fordifferentiation and complication of different multiplicities in their mutual touch. Their mutual18immanence does not reveal the logos of a divine plan in its pre-established harmony but aneros of touch, of intercourse, of mingling without a common direction, in fact, with adivergence of directions, with an indirection of consummation that is never One.
Aparallel evolution is not necessarily calm—it is wild in the sense that it can lead to amutual occupation of the space of the others’ metabolism. Viruses and bacteria use hostorganisms for their own generation and regeneration by virtually destroying the very
environment of their proliferation. Pandemics are not only a phenomenon of human beings,
they have created strange intersections and interferences between organisms as they havebecome a mutual environment for the respectively other. Such hostile relations are notunnatural or counter the mutual immanence of relationships but rather show the power
character of such relationships that are neutral as to their moral implications, which areusually projected by human beings and their ethical impulses. An organism in its environment
might function as its very nemesis insofar as an environment becomes hostile to an embedded
organism without breaking the rules of external connectivity that grants mutual touch.
Counter-reactions of organisms in their use as environments for the becoming of otherorganisms as well as counter-reactions of environments against destroying organisms are to
be expected and are, in fact, widespread. Hence, the disturbances of any temporalorganization of organisms and their environments into eco-systems is not the destruction of
the value of ecological equilibrium but a necessity of the mutual contingency of all ecosystems in eco-nature—its wildness in constant change. The touch of eco-connectivity is erosand thanatos.
Eco-conscience, on the other hand, will address the internal relationship of eco-nature
in its wild eco-connectivity—as that of mixtures of war and peace—for a post-anthropic
human self-understanding and activation within eco-connectivity. In other words: we ask forthe transhuman measure for a new eco-anthropic intention to live and act within the ecoconstellations of intensity and harmony so as to always lead to their maximal unfolding. In
light of the previous discussion of multiplicities, any intended influence of aparallel evolution
in a post-human or eco-human sense regarding such a transhuman, post-anthropic measure
will be a counter-movement of liberation of eco-multiplicity from substantialism and an
infusion of human life within eco-nature such that its necessary disbalancing (its wildness)
will foster our constitutional contingency within its wildness either by unfolding its
polyphonic powers or by limiting these polyphonic powers by polyphilic love.

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Deleuze has taken the first route in grounding the valuation of the differentiation ofmultiplicity that always avoids a transcendent One in the very affirmation of the All ofpotentials (virtuals) of limited multiplicities in the eco-chaosmos in which its dimensions
come into their own power. Its ethical measure is accompanied by the avoidance of extremes
in order to allow for the multiplicity in its very connectivity to organize itself regarding apolyphony of its internal and intermediate powers with other interfering multiplicities and byinherently including even the faintest potentials (virtuals) in the calculus, not just the
overpowering potentials so as to avoid their occupying and colonizing tendencies. Althoughsuch an ethical impulse will seek to unfold the “creative” powers of eco-connectivity in theirmutual beneficial or destructive determination towards a maximum of intensity and polyphony,it also inherently seeks to unfold the minimum intensities; in other words: it seeks the least,
the powerless, the forgotten, the suppressed.
Whitehead follows the second path by refusing to accept the omnipotence of powers
even in the form of the powers of multiplicities in their liberation from forced unifications inwhich they always would give up their polyphony for a forced harmony, a pre-stabilizedharmony, or a pre-ordained measure of harmonization. Whitehead's transhuman, postanthropic measure of intensity and harmony is the subtractive affirmation of chaosmic
polyphony—a love of multiplicity—that is not built on power but on its mutual limitation by,immanence in, and determination through theoplicity—divine multiplicity—that is thetransformation of relationality into compassion and, beyond any fixed measure of intensity
and harmony, of the disequilibrium of powers towards ecotheosis in the midst of the potential(virtual) violence of multiplicities. A theopoetics to this effect, I name eco-theopoetics after
the Anthropic Principle.
It will not only be compassionate to the minimum of enfolded powerlessness in the
midst of the polyphony of powers but also open to everything between the minimum of
enfolding and the maximum of unfolding beyond power. This “novelty” cannot be grasped interms of “creativity” but may be faintly approximated with a divine poetics of salvation ofmultiplicities from the potential (virtual) omnipotence of their own powers. It is this divine
poiesis of which Whitehead's says that it does not create—as power—but that it saves incompassion (cf. PR 346). An eco-ethics under the auspices of the eco-theopoetics ofpolyphilia will be the “creation” of the transhuman, post-anthropic world from this sense ofpeace in the midst of the constructive and destructive power of creativeness. Mediated by thissense, eco-human life must become non-violent in the midst of power. In other words: it must
become intermezzo in eco-nature.
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10 Becoming Intermezzo
Eco-consciousness and eco-conscience have an ethical and a spiritual dimension. Bothcan be characterized as “always beginning in the middle.” Deleuze formulates this new
categoreal imperative of eco-ethics as letting “your loves be like the wasp and the orchid” and,without beginning and end, as being “always in the middle, between things, interbeing,intermezzo” (Deleuze/Guattari, Rhizome 17). To begin in the middle always means to follow
multiplicities in their deconstructive complexity within and without, to unsettle the boundaries
and clear borders of forced identities, which are always imposed measures of the One with its
power-installed abstractions of unification and division. To begin in the middle is an ethicalcategory that activates us from the middle of the happening of multiplicities and asks us toalways submerge into their middle, the many folds of connectivity within and beyond, which
always form under the skin of powers of unification and division and only come to life within,across and beyond the boundaries of power. To become inter-being, we need to leave the highstates of unity to become actors of the folds within unties between their moments ofunifications, and between unities in the middle of their artificial isolation. To become “inbetween” means to become intermezzo, that is, less than the abstract unifications that always
feed the Anthropic Imperialism over nature, culture, and (human) Self. It means to become
minor.
To become minor does not mean to reduce to lower unities; it does not mean toatomize reality. It rather means to become uncountable in terms of units, to become
intermezzo within and between all abstractions like Self, Culture, Nature, to undercut“identity” with diverging dimensionality—like a river, a rhizome, a life. It is this access to
becoming within and between culture, nature, and us in which we lose the Anthropic
substantialism and, at the same time, become “events between” and a multiplicity of such
events. However, in becoming a minority we become “universal” in a new sense: bybecoming ecologically connected beyond any structural integrity. We become subversively
distributed among all unifications. For Whitehead, this is the eco-ethical imperative of
becoming multiplicities: In the “self-correction by consciousness of its own initial excess ofsubjectivity“ it is the task of eco-philosophy (organic philosophy) to deconstruct subjectivity’s“selective character” in which “the individual obscures the external totality from which it
originates and which it embodies” in order “to recover the totality obscured by the selection”(PR 15).
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For a post-anthropic eco-ethics, this impulse of becoming minor implies a redirectionof ecological action: With Deleuze, we have to become “molecular” not “molar”—notseeking higher or lower unifications. Hence, an eco-ethical imperative cannot be built on
slogans such as the “preservation” of states—since their presupposed unity and identity is amere abstraction from their becoming; or the “reparation” of an ecological equilibrium—
because it is an abstraction of a certain state of nature as ideal (especially for human survival);
or “eco-justice”—because it presupposes fixed identities with legal responsibilities; not even“sustainability”—insofar as it might already presuppose sustainance like substances. Instead,
post-anthropic eco-ethics will direct us toward the compassionate life with the multiplicities
within and between.
Post-anthropic ethics is a procedure for the emergence of “tragic beauty” in whichhumanity falls in place, the place of khora, the medium of intercommunication that, if it isperused as compassion, always leads beyond any “state” and “desire” into a depth of love ofmultiplicity as such—the “in between” of the wildness of eco-nature and, perhaps, its divineintermezzo. The emphasis on “wildness” does not seek “nature” over against “culture” as the“other” of culture that must be preserved. It is not presupposing any identity of nature orculture; it is in between; it is this in between as necessity in which we realize eco-connectivity
as constitutional contingency.

11. Mutual Suspension
In their eco-spiritual dimension, wisdom traditions must be read from the standpointof their ability of becoming molecular, becoming animal, becoming minor, becomingintermezzo in order to release the molar identities into their molecular connections, thesubversive interaction within and between them. The new spiritual measure for religious
multiplicity, beyond religious identity and plurality alike, into the differentiations of econature between abstractions of self, culture, and nature, and, hence, into the multiplicities
within and between religions, which consciously (or more often suppressed) live from theirmutual incompleteness, reciprocity, determination, and becoming.
Whitehead's differentiation of the world of wisdom traditions in Religion in the
Making is an interesting staring point. For Whitehead, three traditions have reachedlogocentric universality and, hence, Anthropic omnipotence as well as an obvious mutual
limitation, namely, Christianity, Buddhism, and science. Since these traditions are universal
insofar as they give universal answers to cosmological questions (cf. RM 141), they will
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allow us to rediscover the “totality obscured by the selection” (PR 15) they made by
imprinting their “identity” onto eco-nature, that is, the spiritual inter-being of humanity with
eco-nature.
First, there is the odd dynamic of the mutual limitation of science and religion inwhich science has become the new “theology” of the cosmos and a medium of their cosmic,
post-anthropic spirituality: eternal inflation, multiverse, quantum entanglement, chance andnecessity, emergence, evolution—they cannot be ignored by religions. While its very spiritual
impulse is always transcending its methods, it does not overflow into an indeterminate realmof the spirit but is already awaited by wisdom traditions such as Christianity and Buddhism.
Second, there is the mutual limitation of Buddhism and Christianity in their cultural diversity
in which they contextualized themselves as modes of living that we abstractly meet with thetypology of the East and the West. In establishing their counter-identities, their classicalopposition appears in the mutual feeling of superiority regarding their respective
entertainment of a personal and impersonal understanding of ultimate reality. But interfusion
in dialogues and transformations alike has unearthed a mutual incompleteness within andbetween these traditions in their mutual mystical approximation.
Third, there is the mutual limitation of all three traditions in relation to an avoidance of
their omnipotence. In fact, there are the many other wisdom traditions, which are notforgotten but only obscured by the substantiation of these three. Then we can ask: WhichChristianity (there is only a multiplicity)? Which Buddhism (there is only a multiplicity)?
Which science (there is only a multiplicity)? Then, we can begin to see all of these obscured
molecular connections within and between their molar unities and the wisdom traditions
oppressed by their universal claims. This is the realm of eco-spirituality and its multiplicity of
eco-theopoetics.
In such an eco-spirituality, many positions of eco-connectivity can be taken within andbetween wisdom traditions; but all of them will want to begin in the middle of the ecoconnectivity as inter-being, as medium of intercommunication: khora, the Godhead, pratityasamutpada, quantum nothingness, the enfolded multiverse, inter-carnation, ecotheosis. The
ultimacy of such a mystery will appear as natura naturans, as creativity, as wonder ofexistence, as nothingness, as divine multiplicity. In the emptiness of becoming intermezzo, we
might find its characters as wisdom and compassion: as overflow of sunyata, as persons of theinfinite sea of the divine, as modes of creativity—Whitehead's eco-metabolism between theembodiment of God in the world and the embodiment of the world in God. But always,
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ultimacy will be bound back into a mutual suspension of their claims—redirecting us backinto the middle of becoming intermezzo.
If there is a place for eco-theopoetics, that is, for naming the divine in eco-nature, itwill be that of polyphilia, the interval between power. After the ecological death ofomnipotence, the divine will show its ecological traces only as divine (in) multiplicity, as
being in the middle of the multiplicity of power—as love in its many folds: as eros, philia,
agape; as shakti and bhakti. Maybe this is best addressed by the Lotus Sutra: While ultimacy
of becoming intermezzo will harbour skillful means of the mutual suspension of ultimacy inwhich we become in between, a trace of the divine may be much like the appearance ofIndra/Śakti in the midst of the infinite number of Buddhas and bodhisattvas of the infinite
universes—divine but limited; in between Earth and sunyata, a place and a multiplicity (ofmortal devas). If the divine (in) multiplicity is the symbol for such mutual suspension, we
might, in following its traces, become inspired by the desire to become intermezzo in thenecessity of the wildness of eco-nature.
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