The ecosophic act of feeling: poetry, animism and speculative thought

Felix Guattari’s ecosophy highlights the importance of aesthetic practices as offering a range of experimental techniques through which one might grasp processes of subjectivation in ways adequate to the multiple enfolding crises of mental, social and environmental domains. Through the staging of an encounter with the work of poet and artist Sophie Herxheimer, and with reference to recent theorisations of animist subjectivities, this chapter speculates on the production of ethico-aesthetic subjectivities under what Guattari termed the new aesthetic paradigm. It argues for the speculative gesture of art as an immanent and experimental composition that affirms the present as a way to begin renewing our attachment to this world.