The phenomenon of global warming cannot really be perceived, or it can only be perceived because it is firstly and foremostly explained by science. But it is not only a scientific fact: it is also an event that impacts and even transfigures our everyday being-in-the-world. It seems to me that global warming is not only an event in the world, but also an event that forces us to fundamentally revise the phenomenological concept of being-in-the-world. It undoes the traditional phenomenological way of considering the world as a familiar homeworld and situates existence directly in unhomely planetary “unworld.” To properly conceive of the change of being-in-the-world by global warming, we should comprehend the way in which our lifeworld has grown into planetary dimensions.
I will first briefly remind how “world” was thought in terms of “homeworld” by Husserl and Heidegger. Then I will show how Derrida pushes this conception to its limits in a thinking of “worldlessness,” and finally, how Claude Romano thinks world in terms of the “event” that disarticulates the world altogether. But I think that none of these world concepts is sufficient to explain the kind of un/world experience opened by global warming.
I propose to analyze the world of global warming in terms of a paradoxical inauthentic event that reveals world as planetary techno-nature. I will also show that in order to think the world as a planetary dimension, it is necessary conceptualize locality as displace, historicity as deep history, and transcendence as bio-technicity. Finally, I will show how, in order to conceive of ethics and politics at the height of the event of global warming, phenomenology must come to terms with this the paradoxical inauthentic event happening to the inauthentic crowd.