The Poverty of Life: The return of Cynic philosophy in the Age of the Anthropocene

As part of the 2025 Melbourne Critical Theory Winter School on Forms of Life, Professor Vanessa Lemm will deliver a public lecture on "The Poverty of Life: The return of Cynic philosophy in the Age of the Anthropocene".

Abstract:
One of the key issues we are facing today in the Anthropocene is the belief that the enhancement of the human species can only be achieved by means of technological progress fuelled by capitalist economies that draw on the extraction of resources from our planet and its inhabitants. In my talk, I would like to focus specifically on the economic dimensions of this predicament. We know that an economy based on the extraction and exploitation of nature is deadly, as it ends up destroying the very life it claims to preserve. It widens the gap between nature and human civilization and turns the latter against the former. Capitalist and extractivist economies have also, as is well known, generated global social and economic inequalities that are now exacerbated by the impact of climate change. The global deployment of AI generated technologies and “solutions” further estrange us from nature and the environment.

In contemporary debates on the devastating impact of the Capitalocene on our planet, we can distinguish between at least three different approaches to the critique of capitalism: first, there is the view that global economic inequalities call for a radical redistribution of wealth and that the latter would also benefit the environment. Second, there is the view that we need to “degrow” our economy and invest in recirculation rather than the continuous growth of wealth. And, thirdly, there is the view that we have so far failed to properly monetize the use of the global commons such as air, water, land, but also data, etc. At the centre of these three debates stands the question of wealth – its redistribution, recirculation and taxation – but perhaps we need to step back and question the very meanings of wealth that are deployed in these debates.

From my point of view, we need to rethink what wealth means and consider wealth from the perspective of poverty. I propose that true wealth can always only derive from poverty – that is the wealth of poverty - and vice versa that what we currently or commonly refer to as wealth is nothing but a derivative of poverty that does not generate wealth – that is the poverty of wealth. The paradox of the wealth of poverty is that the one who does not own anything has more to give than the rich. This paradox was perhaps best exemplified by the famous encounter between Diogenes the Cynic and Alexander the Great but has also been taken up by contemporary philosophers such as Jacques Derrida and Giorgio Agamben. In my talk, I will discuss the Cynic’s life of poverty as a practice of common use in dialogue with contemporary philosophy that may offer a way out of the tragedy of the commons that underpins our current eco-economic predicament.

Speaker Bio:
Vanessa Lemm is Deputy Vice-Chancellor and Provost, University of Greenwich, UK. Her recent books include Homo Natura: Nietzsche, Philosophical Anthropology and Biopolitics (2020) and The Viral Politics of Covid 19: Nature, Home and Planetary Health (2022, co-edited with Miguel Vatter).

Optional Reading:
- Lemm, Vanessa. “Community and Animality in the Ancient Cynics”, The Biopolitical Animal, eds. Carlo Salzani and Felice Cimatti, 40-57. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press 2024.
- Lemm, Vanessa. “The Embodiment of Truth and the Politics of Community: Michel Foucault and the Cynics,” in The Government of Life: Michel Foucault, Biopolitics and Neoliberalism, 208-223, eds. Vanessa Lemm and Miguel Vatter. New York: Fordham University Press, 2014.

Please also join us on Thursday 24 July for a lecture by Claire Colebrook (Monash), Negation, Negative Dialectics and Utopia: Why Sex Matters.