Stenger’s intrusion “at the heart of our lives” cannot, we are sure, come solely from the outside; indeed, if there anything is to be taken away from this essay, it is that we, all of us—scientists, critics, and curators alike—are of Gaia and thus carry her “inside” of us as much as she (much more evidently) carries us. From this perspective, Gaia is at least as much an erratic, disruptive neuroecological force as she is an environmental, planetary-scaled macrophenomenon beyond our apprehension.⁸⁰ To think the irrepressible force of ethical comportment among entities—in spite of and against the positivist technoscientific assemblage that helped fashion our colonial naturalist predecessors—we do not require an idealized moral universality, nor any subject-centric consciousness-raising. Instead, to think the intrusion of Gaia upon the “heart of our lives,” through each and every act of inquiry, would mean to rediscover, in this soiled and often repulsive legacy of the will to knowledge, a line of flight that is both ofand for Gaia.⁸¹ Emboldened by this minor history, why would we continue to assign to a science worthy of the name a repressive function in relation to such constituent intrusions? As Déborah Danowski and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro have contended in their own reading of Stengers’ Gaia provocation, “the relation between humanity and the world can begin to be thought as the relation connecting the one side of a Möbius strip to itself: as a non-orientable figure in which the inseparability of thought and being, animate and inanimate, culture and nature is […] a complete and real consubstantiality or oneness, precisely like the surface of the Möbius strip.”⁸² Emphatically, for Danowski and Viveiros de Castro, this is possible because, “Humanity and the world are literally on the same side; the distinction between the two terms is arbitrary and impalpable: if one starts from humanity (thought, culture, language, the “inside”) one necessarily arrives at the world (being, matter, nature, the “Great Outdoors”) without crossing any border andconversely.”⁸³ In the kaleidoscopic profusion of nature that characterizes the tropics, invasive moments of uncertainty could be mistaken for some fractured European morality, but such a reductive account would fail to articulate a politics of scientific inquiry. Instead, the irruption of Gaia as neuroecological dissonance (leading to the proliferation of reverse hallucinations as attempts to neutralize such psychoturbations) can be understood as a confrontation—at once psychological and ecological—between thinking-being inand of nature as such. What is required of non-positivist scientific practice inand for the Anthropocene is therefore the cultivation of an intimacy with the “section of chaos” under consideration, which is as “internal” to the process of subjectivation as it is disruptive to any long-feigned objectivity.⁸⁴

The American artist Catherine Lord has also explored the effect of tropical light on white men and their attendant justifications for violent, hallucinatory programs in the torrid zone.⁸⁵ Following Lord, there seems to be an equatorial effect that led European men of science to egregiously double-down on their epistemic efforts among the tropical islands under colonial possession during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. We can use the neologism heliopsychosis to precisely name this effect, specifically in order to make an essential link between exposure to the tropical solar zenith—with its excessive clarity among the high peaks and shape-shifting edges of its watery archipelago—and the will to knowledge that blinded the colonial naturalists laboring under this potent star as they surveilled a transgressive and puzzling equatorial abundance. While we are certain this colonial disposition cannot (and should not) be reduced to any kind of meterological determinism, the frequency and consistency of reverse hallucinations in the tropics is indisputable. Thus, as the planet continues to warm, and as the tropics begin to spread perilously toward the temperate zones of the Earth, this phenomenon might be worth thinking—in our sciences as much as ourselves—because our neuroecological disposition to the new weather will have considerable bearing on the hospitality we might extend toward such intrusions.⁸⁶Virginia Woolf was no stranger to this uncanny climatic inflection: “Whatever the sun touched took on a fanatical existence.”⁸⁷ As the accelerating build-up of atmospheric greenhouse gases fervently amplifies sublunar fanaticisms, we might do well by attending more closely to the hallucinatory, positivist paroxysms that accompanied colonialists as they tried to apprehend the vexing multiplicity we call archipelago.