„Matter & Desire“ is the attempt to rewrite Biology as a poetics of the yearning to get in touch in a dance of mutual transformation, to abandon oneself to the other and through this to imagine oneself-through-other in a constant birth. „Matter & Desire“ paints a new picture of „Nature” as embodied desire to connect, a yearning to be realized through the bodies of living beings and to become through reciprocity. Nature is no longer a substance or a projection by our culture. It is a call. And it calls to us through the body desiring to blossom. Nature is the experience to be the world’s desire, from the inside, as a sentient, vulnerable, yearning body. The sage blossoms of my appenine home meadows are not different in this respect from our breath, our human way of yearning for being tenderly stroked and hence granted being and metamorphosis. 

Nature is the embodied desire to connect. ...something continuously yearning to be realized through the bodies of living beings. These bodies transmit (...) the desire to become through reciprocity. Nature is no substance. It is a call. And it calls to us through the body. Center for Humans and Nature, Being Nature (Andreas Weber)

Love is a call for vulnerability. To let yourself be loved is to show all your vulnerability, because one who truly loves you wants you to be true. To be who you are. That’s the essence of it. And this is why the poppy is leading the way. It is encouraging us to be all we already are. It is a fundamental way of loving. Andreas Weber, Essay on the The Nature of Citites Website, June 2017

The ways of the fox seem as necessary as the angle in which the moonlight carves the shadow of his elongated body onto the grass before my eyes. The fact that sometimes we can get so close seems like a promise that we may touch our own soft-furredness, the living animal within us. If the fox can prosper in the city, perhaps we can become more fully human. Andreas Weber, The Fox and the Moon.

Towards Cultures of Aliveness. Politics and Poetics in a Postdualistic Age – an Anthropocene Manifesto

The current ideology of dead matter, mechanical causality, and the exclusion of experience from descriptions of reality in ecology and economy are responsible for our failure to protect aliveness in our world.

The challenge of the “Anthropocene” and the end of dualistic enlighten- ment-style thinking is to install a new “bios” into our concept of reality, putting aliveness, the world as a living process of mutual transforming relationships, subjectivity, and expression, at its center: an “Enlivenment” view.

The scope of the “Enlivenment” perspective equals the shift in modern physics realizing that any observer is entangled with the system being observed. Biological entanglement happens emotionally and experientially through sharing aliveness with and relating existentially to other living subjects.

Findings in the life sciences, par- ticularly in biosemiotics, cognition research, and developmental biology, show that it is necessary to view organisms as goal-directed agents, who bring meaning and experience into the world as physically relevant powers.

We need a “policy of life” as a new political–philosophical attitude to make “deep sustainability” possible. It will supplant the idea of reality as iteration of “empirical facts” by an “empirical subjectivity” of shared aliveness and a “poetic objectivity” of describing and practicing related- ness and mutual transformation.

Updated english language version of the original manifesto by Andreas Weber and Hildegard Kurt, Lebendigkeit sei! Für eine Politik des Lebens. Ein Manifest für das Anthropozän, presented with a public reading of the manifesto on 19 May 2015 at the Prinzessinnengärten urban gardens, Berlin.

The manifesto acts as a prelude to our "explorations into cultures of enlivenment". A series of enlivenment workshops will soon follow, to which you are warmly invited!