Say goodbye to nature is the best way to save it. Running counter to the prevalent idea of nature in contemporary culture means adopting a relaxed attitude towards the ecological policies and philosophies that should underlie them. This is essential for critical reflection on the contemporary world, which finds it increasingly difficult to find adequate spaces for inquiry, and even a raison d’être for itself.

We live in an age of disarming naturalism: wherever you look – religion, scientific research, philosophical thought, or the mass media – you find pursuit of an improbable natural, material, ontological basis for thoughts, actions, emotions, desires, society, and even ethnic difference. Beneath the apparent conflicts between universalism and relativism, creationists and Darwinians, Catholics and secular thinkers – all committed to an idea of naturalness without any logical and anthropological basis – lies the real challenge of contemporary thought: that of recovering the social, anthropological, intersubjective and historical bases of body and language, space and technologies, passions and knowledge.

This book highlights the glaring contradictions inherent in the various facets of contemporary naturalism, arguing for a renewed interest in cultures and their continual, inevitable translations.