Beyond Presence: A No Compromises Approach to Re-Enchanting the Lunar Common

Résumé En

There is at present minimal popular outcry about the coming expropriation of the moon, and even less regarding the terrestrial implications of uneven lunar development.This paper explores this indifference and presents a no-compromises case for protecting the lunar commons. It focuses on the disenchantment of the moon, doing so by plunging into the longer history of our ideas regarding the value and significance of the extraterrestrial. It suggests that global accounts of the secularization of the world are misleading: they fail to account for the ultimate unsecularizability of the cosmos; and likewise fail to acknowledge the particular process of secularization and becoming worldly that has occurred with respect to the moon. Re-situating the secularization narrative beyond heaven and earth, this paper suggests that while deeper space has become a modernized version of the ancestral heaven, the moon has become the most disenchanted place in the cosmos, while Earth, thanks to the magical experiences generated by the moon missions, has begun to be re-enchanted. Drawing on work by Federici (2019) and Dardot and Laval (2020), the paper explores how practices of terrestrial “re-enchantment” can be used to protect the lunar commons, finding some possibilities, but also some dangers, including a tendency towards a fetishization of presence that comes from the earth and which may undermine efforts at lunar protection, and a belief in magical techno-solutionism that mirrors ideas derived from speculations on the deeper heavens.