But this is a specific definition of what counts as life: not mere survival, but a life that can breathe, one that’s not completely colonized, if you will, by the necrocapitalist imaginary of what makes a life worth living. A life in which what makes a life worth living remains forever unanswered and structurally unanswerable, an open space that

But if such a right — what I would call, perhaps less gracefully, a right to the life of life — may be said to exist, this is precisely because it is grounded. At the very least, it is grounded in the ground, in the recalcitrant environments against which the life of life pushes and strives, finding its meaning in those activities, becoming what we

“We must reclaim the lungs of our world with a view to forging new ground,” he writes — not with a view to continuing to pant away in order to sustain a life that is not living.

But a forced quarantine, he argues, cannot be the answer, because “what we need is a voluntary cessation, a conscious and fully consensual interruption” of the present.

Environment as what-is-living and the life/ libido that animates human striving in the world are not different entities. It’s all life.

failed to live the life that counts as a life worth living according to the dominant culture. It says that summiting need not be about summiting at all, but can also be a call to re-interrogate and thus re-imagine what one really wants to do with one’s time on this Earth. And though answers will vary according on the person, the summiting goal

The message is for all of us, crippled as we are by an everpresent and growing sense of mediocrity, having

She offers examples of top alpinists — Messner among them — as they invoke the vocabulary of meditation, gratitude, transcendence, grace and humility.

mountaineer is exactly the opposite: process-oriented, achieving self-knowledge in the process of transcending her self, and “may show moral responsibility for the welfare of others.”