Geografia e rivoluzione

Abstract

This article reflects on the ontological relationship between geography and revolution. Starting from Hannah Arendt’s seminal essay On Revolution, it analyses the link between the ‘gesture’ of ‘writing the Earth’, as a gesture constitutive of each and every social order, and the original conceptualizations of the term revolution. By engaging with Carl Schmitt’s oeuvre, and his spatial thought in particular, this essay speculates at length on the importance of interrogating – from a geographical perspective – the foundational relationship between pouvoir constitutif and pouvoir constitué in order to appreciate the profound revolutionary potential inherent to geographical thought and geographical practice. Placing particular emphasis of the figure of the refugee and on the related irreversible crisis of the nation state – following in this Giorgio Agamben’s work on the same topic – the article concludes with a series of consideration on the need for a geographical revolution, that is, a new spatial ontology associated to new geographical imaginations capable of moving beyond the territorial traps at the origin of the two most urgent crises affecting today all western societies: the refugee crisis and that associate to global climate change.

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