Form of Life and Landscape

The reflection on modernity thinks from the place of human beings in the world or universe, and is prone to criticize the role of objective thinking or of objectification in representation and in the metaphysics of subjectivity. Life, being no less a ground than a connection of self-relation, cannot be absorbed in the forms of knowledge and power; it is a starting point for questioning. By adapting the concept of form-of-life proposed by Agamben, this paper links the problematic of landscape to the conditions of life. Not only is landscape now considered from a different perspective, but life finds its inseparable form in the existence of landscape. The rhythmic formation of landscape refers to a fundamental and powerful potentiality. Through the force of material imagination, the landscape extends its formal expression to reveal an inner transformation animated by the vital dynamism of the formation of the world. Life itself is tightly inscribed in this process, and so landscape can picture the existential condition of human beings. In this way the coexistence of human species with other species or other material beings will open the cosmic dimension of life itself.