Chapter 9 Becoming Common – Ecological Resistance, Refusal, Reparation
Abstract
This chapter thinks through international law and
posthuman theory by way of an example of ‘posthumanist
commoning’. It explores the posthumanist and the
commoning dimensions of the legal and political collective
actions at hand. It does so by telling the story of the
‘insurgent lake’ of Rome – the ‘lago bullicante’. Bullicante
is an archaic Italian term that signifies both ‘to boil’
(bollire) and ‘to get agitated’ (agitarsi). The ‘lake that boils
and gets agitated’ refers to the artificial/natural lake that
was accidentally created in 1992, when an underground
parking lot was illegally constructed and inadvertently hit
an aquifer, thereby flooding the construction site and
nearby area, creating a one-hectare large lake in the heart
of the city. With the lake, an insurgent political subjectivity
emerged to resist and care for its preservation. Both the
subjectivity and the struggle are articulated and practiced
in non-liberal, non-individualistic, and in-human (or more
and less than ‘human’) terms, thereby giving rise to a
distinctive mode of ‘becoming common’. Drawing on the
lago bullicante, I argue that this mode of ‘posthumanist
commoning’ enacts particular practices of ecological
resistance, refusal, and reparation. The transversal
alliances forged within networks of transnational resisting
collectives help exploring how posthuman theory can
inform international law. It does so by availing methods of
reconfiguring the categories of the human, the land, and
its living ecology, while also revealing critical blind-spots
and methodological/conceptual limitations of both
posthuman theory and international law.