Didier Debaise - Imaginative Territories: Teaching with Ghosts, Designing with Dependencies

First of all, thank you very much for accepting our invitation. This interview is part of a series of conversations published within the Speculative Urban Futures (SURF) research program. SURF is an Erasmus+ funded initiative that brings together different educational institutions to speculate on how speculative methodologies in-form alternative futures of urban design and pedagogies. The questions we’re raising are interdisciplinary and extend beyond architecture itself, in general, how we might think and act otherwise in the face of planetary, ecological, and political urgencies.
As part of our contribution to this program, we conducted a design studio in Naples, which included a workshop titled SII: Sensing, Intuitive Imagining. The structure was inspired by Gilbert Simondon’s recently translated text Imagination and Invention (2022). We draw upon his dynamic loop of motor images, perceptual images, symbolic images, and ultimately, invention images as a kind of speculative design protocol. Each stage of our workshop corresponded to one of these phases, beginning with embodied motor images and moving through perceptual and symbolic layers, finally asking, how can we activate thinking and designing toward invention, particularly within situated and socio-material contexts? That’s the background of our current work. Gert would you like to add something?

I think that’s perfect. Just to add, the acronym SUrF also carries a kind of associative undercurrent, evoking the act of surfing itself, a way of engaging with the environment, of navigating and responding to it dynamically. That’s the kind of notion we’re working with.

I think it’s also very much about dislodging the representational function of the image, which has long been dominant in architectural pedagogy and practice. We're trying to challenge that, to think about how images might move beyond representation and function instead as speculative devices. That’s one of the core aspects we’re aiming to explore.

Exactly. I’d like to begin by discussing the distinction you made in your presentation today between territory, territorialising, and region, regionalising. Could you briefly explain why you made that distinction? My understanding is that regionalising allows for a certain degree of openness or flexibility, whereas territorialising, precisely because it involves a level of regulation, becomes more approachable, and perhaps more susceptible to being ‘contaminated,’ challenged, or speculated upon. To break this regulation, to speculate within it.

Maybe I can approach it differently than I did during the conference, by referring to a piece of work I did on the invention of the concept of nature — and more specifically, the function of nature. Scholars like Lorraine Daston and Bruno Latour suggest that we should move beyond the notion of nature, especially in the context of ecological transformation. In my previous work, I tried to localise the invention of the concept of nature, and by localise, I mean temporally. My hypothesis, if I may call it that, is that this concept was invented in the 17^th century, in experimental laboratories, in the ways scientists conducted experiments on bodies. So, it’s about localising, temporally, identifying a specific moment when what we now call ‘nature’ was invented. Of course, there were other notions of nature before, but the modern concept was invented in the 17^th century. And to regionalise it means to say that this happened in particular laboratories, particularly in Europe, even though, of course, there were many shared spaces. Still, it’s about localising and regionalising, that’s why it’s so important. I developed a hypothesis, that the moderns invented the concept of nature as a way to inhabit the Earth. The Earth, understood here as a kind of general, immanent reality that includes all beings, all elements, and so on. But the moderns invented ‘nature’ to articulate all of this, and then forgot that it was merely a way of articulating. They began to identify their concept of nature with the Earth itself, and imposed their version of nature everywhere. So, they claimed others were ‘inhabiting nature,’ but they themselves were the only ones who could interrogate it, because to interrogate nature is to interrogate the invention of a reality that only the moderns were able to question. At the same time, it was a very contingent, very specific invention. They forgot, or rather, ‘forgot’ is too kind; they actively forgot, that it was an invention, a particular and original invention, and they universalised it. In doing so, they colonised the spirit of others by forcing them into a framework that was entirely modern. This is the problem of regionalising, localising, and so on.

When it comes to the question of territories, I use a concept from Bruno Latour, what he calls ‘life territories.’ It’s a very methodological, very practical idea. If you take any object or element, you can make a kind of territory around it. This is not an administrative territory, and we are constantly shaped by spatial and administrative thinking. We should put that aside. Please, don’t reproduce that. You can take any object, particularly anything living, a part of a living being, yourself, a body part, or even a physical object, and trace the full network of its dependencies. That network is what is required for that object to exist. Nothing exists in isolation. Every object exists through a set of attentions, of labor, and of resources. That’s something I think architects often forget. I say this because I work with an architect friend, and we’ve run some workshops together.

But it's even more the case with part of the living, each part of our body requires oxygen elements around it, and so we should call territory, not the Special Administrative dimension, even if it's important for political reasons. So, we should understand territory not as a spatial-administrative unit, though that still matters politically, but as a life territory: the network of dependencies required to maintain and sustain the endurance, the very existence, of all entities, whether living or physical. These are the enabling constraints, but also the resources, that make something be. And the reason this is so important for me is because every reality is linked to a chain of other realities. If you remove one part of that chain, the whole chain collapses. When we talk about the disappearance of species or forms of reality, we usually quantify it, we say, ‘Oh, there’s less of this, less of that.’ But we forget what the ethologist Thom van Dooren in Australia describes so well: that each disappearance reflects a whole chain of dependencies. If one living thing disappears, it’s not just that one — a whole network, potentially many other forms of life, vanish with it. The same is true for physical and living entities across the board. So, those are the two concepts: regionalising and territorialising. But I use territorialising specifically in the sense of mapping networks of dependency.

The language you use seems to be focused on dependency. It is focused on material dependency. So, I’m interested in the dependency on forces. Forces that are also a combination of material and direction. How would you describe the relationship between those two? I understand the biological analogy that you're using, but maybe some other way of thinking about forces, which I think for us as architects, is sometimes a little bit more relatable, particularly because of the economic regime in which we sit and so on. 

I think that the materiality of things is very important. And it was even more important in the 1960s, when Deleuze and Guattari used it, the assemblage of materialities was a central concept. But I think today we also have to integrate other dimensions of the environment and the situation. You are right. I think, for example, a beautiful expression comes from François Jullien, he talks about the propension of things. It’s not about the things themselves, but their propension, their direction, their vectorisation, their tendencies. And the tendency is even more important than what is present in its factuality; it’s about where it goes, its virtuality.

All of this, this non-visible, non-touchable reality, I would call it, or rather, I think we need to give more attention to it: an ecology of the invisible. There is an ecology of materiality, but also of all that is invisible. This invisibility is everywhere. You see an object, but there is a virtuality in what it indicates. You see a part of a situation, but there is also what it is appealing to, and all of these dimensions include, of course, vectors, virtualities, but also kinds of entities that the moderns didn’t want to take care of.

What I’m inspired by in Whitehead, what I call the bifurcation of nature, is the idea that the moderns invented proper qualities of things that can be analysed through extension, spatiality, materiality. And they... we moved from nature all the other dimensions: aesthetics, tendencies, values. And we forgot that what we call nature, and the division between nature and culture, was not originally an opposition. It was, at the beginning, a bifurcation. You take an object, and you remove from it the aesthetic dimension, the attachments that you have, etc. What you remove, you call the subjective dimension, and what you leave inside is the objective dimension. And all of modernity was a kind of pathetic attempt to constantly articulate what we had already separated. So, one of my ideas is that we should stop separating, and instead, we should put aesthetic values, politics, inside the sense.

Could we say that to territorialise is a top-down organisation, and to regionalise is a bottom-up? One attains some kind of context-independency, being affective from a distance in a way; while the other is context-sensitive.

Yes, right. For example, the moderns invented a complete nature that occupies everything. So, it’s regionalised in some respects, but with the specificity of occupying all places. Okay, it’s to regionalise a kind of abstraction, a kind of sensibility, a kind of experience...

This is what I mean by 'a kind of' today. There is an anthropologist, Philippe Descola, who says that what we call nature, culture, objectivity, subjectivity, symbolism, etc., all belong to a regional ontology, which is the modern one, and he qualifies it as naturalism. And in contrast to that, he says that the Amazonian, Chinese, etc., have other ontologies, analogism, or what is sometimes called perspectivism, etc. I don’t agree with the classification he proposes, but I do think it’s very important to differentiate, on an equal plane, how we organise the world, and how we create ontologies.

I don't know why. For some reason the discussion makes me think... We had a panel discussion; one of the speakers was speaking about tipping points. So, tipping points are, for instance, when the permafrost in Russia melts and releases all the methane, and it becomes a runaway process, you know? So, we keep on releasing methane, or whatever — or the North Atlantic current switches, or stops. And when you get these inflection points, the system maintains — and then it changes.

For some reason, that came back to me when you were talking about the flow of material. And then I kind of introduced the notion of directionality. And I think this — I want to deal with climate — climatic denialism, or nihilism, you know? On one hand, people completely reject it, on the other hand, they become completely nihilistic. But in a way, these are... these are forces.

And I think a lot of it has to do with the way we territorialise. You know, you mentioned how this connects to Descola... You mentioned Viveiros de Castro in your talk, and so… I think — so how do we relate those things and those worldviews? What can we learn from those worldviews? And how do we embrace the epoch, actually?

Because there's no turning back the clock. These are things that are now happening, and we have no other way of thinking about them. So, how do we take that into something generative, rather than something purely catastrophic? How do we use that as a generative force?

I think there are two parts to your question. There is a further diagnosis on what happened to us, and the ‘us’ here is the modern, because — and I like the fact that Rosi Braidotti criticised him (Latour) — I think he's very honest. Latour says: “I'm a modern. I have a problem. What is - how do we solve this?” And he doesn't want to speak for the ‘other’. We can speak in front of the ‘other’, as we say, we cannot speak in that place. So, the we is a very difficult thing, because this we is a very complex concept with a lot of debate, opposition, etc.  But for me, the we is the inventor of the bifurcation of nature. We invented the bifurcation of nature, and the disasters that we are facing are also the disaster of our mode of thought and our mode of sensibilities. And everything finds its roots in this bifurcation. This bifurcation of nature produced an insensibility to nature, because everything that was important was not in nature. It was on the other aspect, the secondary qualities, which are culture, politics, subjectivity, etc. And we put nature as something that is in front of us, that is there, like a resource, like something we can explore, etc. That's a diagnosis. And the modern became very insensible to their dependencies. They valorised; they celebrated their insensibility to their dependencies, and they refused any attachment to their dependencies, etc. So that is the diagnosis. And for me, philosophy has a task, to make an inquiry into our mode of abstraction, our mode of perception, and our mode of sensibility, and to make a diagnosis of that. We are confronted with a complete transformation of everything, which is a new regime, the intrusion of Gaia, Isabelle Stengers would say, which means a power that we cannot face with the categories that we have, and that we cannot predict what will happen.

For months now, we have had rain all the time, which is a very strange phenomenon due to the climate transformation of the oceans, etc. And we don’t know. We can’t do anything. We don’t know what the consequences will be, because everything is going in so many different directions. So, what we have to learn is, —from the ‘others’, — is the way by which they take care of their resources, they take care of their dependencies. Which doesn’t mean that we can imitate them, of course, but we have to think: what was the very specific adventure of the moderns? The fact that they are facing something that is completely opposed to everything, that their mode of thought was partly responsible for this situation. Because there is a connection between colonisation, capitalism, and the bifurcation of nature. I think you cannot have colonisation without the bifurcation of nature, because all the time, it qualifies the body, the fact that bodies are without any value if it's just a biological dimension. So, everything is linked to this moment. And so, I think that we have to learn from the ‘other’, but learn from a specific point of view, which is that we are crossing the disaster of specific inheritances. But how we will learn. That is still an adventure. But I think that at least one very important point is the generative dimension of our situation. We know now, without any doubt, that the resources are not infinite, that we are not independent of them, and that we have to cultivate other ways to be in relation to things. And that's a strong change of perspective.

So, a friend of mine, who is a professor in the Department of Architecture in Brussels, — he also has an architectural practice called V+, — told me once that, a while ago, when he was teaching all the professors told the architects (the students), now you draw and you make a design of a building, and every student was working, — I will put some stones there, I will put some iron there etc. And he said, No one says there isn’t infinite material there, so you cannot do as you want and put stone, iron, etc.  And what he did, he changed the way of teaching architecture completely. Because now they have two phases: the first time, they have to go to the sites. They conduct an inquiry into the specificity of the place, the kind of resources they have, how things are produced. So, they have to do a kind of inquiry into specific spaces.

And after that, the building proposition does not come from nowhere, to be put somewhere. It’s an articulation of forces that are already there, material and immaterial. Also, all this invisible that I wanted to mention before, we exist also because we are attached to some values, to some realities that are not material.

So, I have a friend, Vinciane Despret, she’s a philosopher of ethology and wrote an incredible book on the relation of people to their dead.¹ It’s a beautiful book. And she told me, before she wrote the book, that she was inspired by an anthropologist who went to Romania. A lot of anthropologists go there to study the relationship with vampires. And these anthropologists would go to the local people and ask, ‘Do you believe in vampires?’ And people would say, ‘You do? You think we are complete idiots? Of course, we don’t believe in vampires.’ And she referred to an anthropologist who changed the regime of the question. He went there and instead of saying, ‘Do you believe?’, which is a trap; you should never ask someone if they believe in something, because believing is a very modern way of disqualifying something, it’s a process of disqualification, instead of asking, ‘Do you believe in vampires?’ this anthropologist asked, ‘How do you explain that there are fewer vampires at the moment?’ And people completely changed. They had many explanations, many narrations, because they were attached to an invisible power. And this anthropologist gave them the space to articulate an ecology of the invisible. And so, she was inspired by this anthropologist, and she did it here in Europe, more in Belgium and France. Sorry to say ‘here in Europe’ in front of a Greek, I don’t mean that Europe is just Belgium and France, but she did it around where she lives. And she asked people not, ‘Do you believe in ghosts or the return of the dead?’ Because if you ask that, you put it in the brain of the person, which means you reduce the possibility to have contact with another power. And instead, she asked: ‘Why might this woman believe? Explain how her husband who is dead is coming back,’ or ‘What kind of presence does he have?’ And she described all the relationships people have with their dead, with invisible powers. And I think it’s a very interesting other kind of ecology.

When you make architecture, you cannot ignore that. For people, there are not just walls around. There are other presences, presences of the past, presences of catastrophe, of different kinds, presences of trauma, they are there. And so, there is a kind of specific place with a specific, we should call it with Derrida, hauntology.² What is haunting the places. I have a friend who works in Fukushima, for example, and the presence of invisible realities is very strong there, and the question becomes: how do you relate to those realities, and how do you make a connection with them?

In a discussion I had with Chris L. Smith, professor at the University of Sydney, and he told me that during a design course, he asked his students to design a crematorium where, in a few weeks, it would be their own mother being cremated. 
We were discussing about sensitivity as a soft skill to be trained in design pedagogies. How do we make students in design studios sense? How do we engage students in a mode of sensing from a distance? So, the question does not refer only to actual, immediate sensory experience, which is of course very important, but also in terms of experience as something broader. As mediated; evolving through a collective memory. A crematorium carries a collective memory. Or better we carry an anticipatory image of that. Or even better, an anticipatory image of that, carries us, as designers.

And it's particularly true in Australia, because there is an Indigenous presence and the destruction of a lot of culture — like in America, like in Canada, like in other places. So, you cannot do things without paying attention to this reality of these invisibles that are insisting all the time. And if you don't do it, they come back by another place. So, I think it's very important.
But your question is: how do we do this? I think that, in fact, because you talk about speculation, I will make a link with a master’s program that I created in a school of art in Brussels. And this master is called Speculative Narrations. I did it with some friends who are teaching art. And the idea is that speculation is a sense of the possible. But the sense of the possible, we can talk a lot if you want, just to make a short version: a sense of the possible that is not, in general, an abstraction of a situation, but the sense of possibility in a specific situation. That is what I tried to say during the talk. The scars of things, all elements, all objects, all reality, have a lot of kinds of potential narrations: the narration of how it was built, why it's there, how it happened, etc. So, speculation, for me, is not, ‘Now we make an exercise from nowhere and we try.’ This is utopia. And utopia is never the best way to do things. Speculation is more the sense of possibility embodied inside the reality. And to do that, you have to, all the time, make a kind of pass around. And we invented this speculative, narrative speculation, which was to narrate around what would have been a situation if something happened in a different way. It's also what some scientists call counterfactual narration. The Uchronia.³ You take something, and you imagine, and you narrate, how the situation would be if it was a little bit different. For example, you take a situation, an ecological situation, and you try to imagine what this reality would be if some living being was not there, if a resource was not there. And so, you can, there is a free movement of the imagination. We come from a field. We jump into the imagination of what might be, how it would be if something was different, if something was missing, something was there that is not there. And you come back to the same situation, but full of the new narration. And I think there is this movement that I call speculative. Whitehead has a metaphor. I say that it's a metaphor of flying. You take off from a specific field, you have complete freedom in the imaginative process, and you come back. ⁴

I want to stay on the symbolic as act, as a returning, as you frame it. Could we think of speculation as a movement where a question is temporarily displaced from its original context, simplified or abstracted, and then reintroduced in another context? The question remains the same, but the shift in context allows different possibilities to appear. From this perspective, symbolism would not simply organise meaning or represent something already known. It could also function as a condition that allows imagination to begin operating within a situation.

Within a modernistic view, symbolism seems to be more about quantifying or maybe about structuring a qualitative description of an image rather than a speculative leap towards an image yet to come. So, maybe, based on what you’ve said, could it be through transdisciplinarity that a speculative act takes on form. Form not as the image of something already imagined but as a structuring of the conditions for imagination to start occupying space. What you described reminds me of the epigenetic landscape, which in our discussion on speculative design seems to be a grasp of what is possible. A conditioning of a problematic field that doesn’t guide the ball towards a specific direction but neither allows it to just roll uphill. It is ‘free’ to follow certain paths, some more likely or attractive than others; some blocked; others are open. In that sense, we also have, and I’m just speculating here, a kind of transdisciplinary potential. Extracting something, without needing to carry over all the disciplinary ‘knowledge,’ and placing it into another field. Reframing it. Asking the question differently. Letting that ball roll in unexpected fields, and we speculate through this very rolling.

If I make it philosophical, yes, you're very much saying that you are very close to a project which I’m attached to; Latour’s project, An Inquiry into the Modes of Existence. It's not interdisciplinary or non-disciplinary. We say that the project is, in fact, that the moderns were always interested in one layer, materiality, matter, the real, reality... it's another way to re-narrate what we said before. The moderns invented one layer, a layer of reality, and they set aside all the rest. They didn't know where to put it, so they placed it in the subjective, the symbolic, etc. And now we see that this one-layer view doesn’t work anymore, because we have a lot of ecological dimensions, a lot of things that we have to account for. And so Bruno Latour says, take any situation, we can take this situation here, and if we reduce it to one layer, we say the real reality of our discussion is the material dimension. And all the rest, the fact that I’m using philosophy, etc., — just go in this layer. But to resist this one layer, we can take the same reality and see the different layers it has, the different kinds of entities that are there: technical objects, language, law by some aspects, art by some aspects.

And Latour said we should take all the dimensions, not to make a kind of common dimension, but that the more we increase the levels of reality, the more we densify reality. And by doing this, we make it stronger. So, we don’t have to find one layer. We have to keep adding layers all the time. Yes, you made an addition of realities, exactly the anti-modern gesture. The moderns wanted to reduce everything, all the time. We remove layers and layers and layers. “You believe in ghosts? It's your brain. It’s a neurotic organisation. You are attached to the sound of a bird because you receive a photo in your eyes through the neuroanalytic system. But the beauty of the bird, and the song is in your brain, is not in nature.” The song of the bird is a beauty within nature. This beauty is there, it’s a factor of reality, the scientific explanation of it is another layer. One is not true against the other; it’s another layer. The fact that someone is narrating it, like I do now in a philosophical discussion, is another layer. And the same thing, — I'm sorry for the pathetic example, bird singing is joy because there is a sun there. — You can reduce everything, and Whitehead says it's immoral. You reduce it to a novon and organisation. How you add the fact that the joy of the bird is inside the situation. The joy is there, the beauty is there, the fact that the scientist is looking around, can describe it through formula and equation, is an addition to the situation. And the reality is not one level. It's a multi-level, multi-layer dimension. But as soon as you add a dimension, you have an intercessor; people who are attached to that. They are experts or amateurs of the song of the birds, and they have knowledge of that. But the moderns, all the time, say that it's fake knowledge. What is real knowledge? Is the knowledge of reality? As soon as you add a layer, you will have a lot of practice of knowledge, attentions, etc., that will come with it. So, the specialist, for example, song of birds, which is something very strange. There are people who know a lot about that. They are attached to that. So, it's a reality. There is no real and something (out)there. So, I don't agree with Antoinette Rouvroy when she says there is the real and — No, there is no real. The real is all these layers. And if you add another layer, it's another reality inside the reality. And the reality is all of that, nothing else, nothing more, nothing beyond, it’s just that. — I say that reality is, if we want to say something about reality is what resists what we say, but there is no, — you cannot say more about that. So, it's just something resisting, but it requires all these layers of existence. So, I'm not interested in reality by itself. I'm interested in all these layers that are linked to something that will resist them.

Could we think this through a kind of ‘minus one’, not as a reduction, but as a return to the field of conditions from which a situation may begin to vary? In the context of speculative design, could this be understood as a recursive gesture, working from what already exists in order to reopen its field of possible transformations?

Yes, it depends on the function that you have, then also, that there is hierarchy. It's pluralistic. I like the expression of William James. We have to live in a pluralistic universe. A pluralistic universe is a universe where the idea that I have of something is real. It's an idea. It makes me act. We are not acting like a body. We are acting because we have hopes, we have ideas, we have representation. I believe that if I live there, there will be something that will happen. So, my ideas are real in the sense of their acting, illusions are real because if I have an illusion, I'm acting in a different way. So, everything that makes action-transformation is real. It's the only definition that we can have of reality. Reality is what makes an action. What’s acting? So, all my ideas, my body, my representation, my desire, my joy, everything, exists exactly at the same level, and we have to just learn to articulate, and this other ontology does it sometimes perfectly well. We are not used to that because we invented the material world, and we put all the rest in the symbolic, in the brain. So, it's in the interiority of the subject, or is outside, and what is outside is just the insignificant, valueless, unaesthetic matter. And so I would like to put everything that the modern put in the brain, in reality.

I have a question that might be a difficult question or a silly question, but what are the implications for ethics? What does this ask of us, you know? All these things stack on top of each other. How do I interact? How do I start approaching it, because everything's real, you know, what kind of question does it ask of us?

First, I think it's a political question, even more than an ethical one. The political question is that when we talk about political questions, we designate some legitimate actors and illegitimate actors. And you think, if we take a very concrete situation, the statute of a river, a resource, how we will treat, for example, the virus that we had during COVID-19. We have the impression that some actors are legitimate. And these actors are legitimate because they can talk. They are intensive entities. So, concerning the virus, we invented the experts, but the expert is adorned the legitimacy, which is terrible because it made the people who are in touch with the virus illegitimate; the nurses, the people who are working in the hospital, who had to take care of that. They had all the inhabitants who may want to be ill, or they don't want to make this choice, or they want to make another choice, and we transformed a lot of dimensions into illegitimate. And so, the political question is in every question. I like this idea of Bruno Latour, a ‘parliament of things’; we have to make new parliaments, local parliaments. You have to put a building somewhere, make a parliament. Ask people who are specialists because they are attached to the dead, or to the ancestor, or to the local situation, ask them to participate in the discussion. You have to, and — I don't. — We cannot say anticipatively what will come from that, but we will produce local democracy all the time. So, I think it's a gesture of re-clarifying the actors that can participate. For example, — And you take a place in a city, of course, there will be some animals around that come sometimes, for example, pigeons in the tube. — I was shocked when I was in Berlin, because all the time, you have iron things. — So, who decided to put this? Why didn't they ask people who are attached to the existence of pigeons how they can treat it in another way, and you will have different, multiple actors, and it doesn't mean a relativist approach. You just say there is a different layer, and everything is possible. No, we have to negotiate, because the interest of some is not the interest of others. So, there will be conflict, but there will be a place to articulate this conflict, and the conflict of the people who are in charge of some dimension of the birds, people who are in charge of the tube, people who are using it, why they are using it, and there will be a lot of conflict.

And that, in itself, becomes productive? An intersection between those interests.

Yes. So, it's an ecology of interests. You have to ask, all around, who has an interest in this question? Not in general, like public comment, where we ask two inhabitants who don't care what they think about a project, that is already realised in the brain of someone. No, you have to ask the people who are really interested in the question. And interest means that you give them a certain competency, and this competency is not a truth. It has to be negotiated with the other. So, it's another political question, and also an ethical one, because I think, — I wrote a text with Isabelle Stengers on the fact, — we describe the modern, the one who doesn't like to be the dupe. We hate to be duped. You know, we want to be aware of things, all the time, and we like to see the ‘other’ and say: “Oh, you believe.” You believe in that, but you are a dupe of something. And we smile, and we are ironic about the fact that they still believe in something. They still believe… This is very unethical, because we put ourselves in a position where we can be very — we can paternalise the ‘others’, and we disqualify everything that they were attached to, because we say that it's not the ‘real’ reality. And so, I think it's an ethic of the relation of people. If someone says to me, I'm attached to this situation, we can articulate something, but I cannot make them a dupe or something. They are attached to something, so take it into consideration.

I think that brings us to a great note to end on. What you’ve shared opens up ways of thinking, sensing, relating, and acting. By understanding that we’re always embedded in a multiplicity of realities, and that each of them calls for their own kind of care, their own kind of response. Thank you so much for this rich discussion and for your time.