Prof Federico Ferretti -Ba
email: federico.ferretti6@unibo.it

Yi-Fu Tuan

Edward Relph

Anne Buttimer

Claude Raffestin

Jean-Marc Besse

Alexandre Chollier

Eric Waddell

Keywords: Naturphilosophie, (Post)Phenomenology, Affect, Myth, Materiality

This paper reassesses and rediscovers the intellectual legacy of French geographer Eric Dardel (1899-1967). First discovered by geographers in the 1970s and 1980s, Dardel's book L'Homme et la Terre was considered as a work predating alternatively humanistic approaches and postmodern critiques of positivism, which justifies why it passed substantially unperceived when it was first published in 1952. Yet, most of these authors have manifestly only read that book despite Dardel's production was much larger, labelling Dardel as a 'phenomenologist' in a quite reductive way. Drawing upon recent literature on material agency and on phenomenology/post-phenomenology in geography, and based on the analysis of Dardel's complete body of work, I argue that the contribution of the French geographer cannot be reduced to matters of phenomenology and subjective perception. To this end, I especially focus on Dardel's references to the nineteenth-century tradition of Naturphilosophie that argued for a consubstantiality of 'humankind' and 'nature'. Hence, I show how Dardel's willingness to take seriously the materiality and agency of 'the Earth' through his notion of géographicité [geographicity or geographicalness] can give new and original insights to current geographies dealing with materiality, affect, human-nature hybridity and relational ontologies. Questioning dualisms such as humankind/nature, subject/object and nature/culture, early geographical understandings of the planet as a complex living being can foster the relevance of geography for both the 'material turn' advocating for plural agencies and for critical debates denying the principle of human supremacy over the planet.

impressive bibliography showing the breadth of Dardel's interests, which exposes the need to address his full contribution and its historical, biographical and cultural contexts rather than only focusing on HT as a sort of isolated masterpiece as most commentators did.

It is worth noting that Dardel's most important professional experience as Principal of the Montmorency High-School from 1945 to 1965 took place within an 'experimental school '. 11 An example of alternative education, this 'pilot Lyceum' was managed according to principles of 'freedom' and 'self-discipline' following Dardel's principle that 'education should prevail over instruction'. 12 Dardel co-founded that institute with Gustave Monod, a pedagogue who took part in French Resistance and co-signed the 'Manifesto of the 121' to assert the right of conscientious objection during the Algeria War (1954-1962). Therefore, these contexts allow for locating the Montmorency Lycée in the field of political progressivism.

Based on a detailed analysis of Dardel's production and of its contexts and places, I contend that reading Dardel as merely and unproblematically 'a phenomenologist' was a limitation to be remediated through renewed engagement with his work. By going 'beyond dualisms', I refer to the broad consensus currently existing in scholarly debates on the need to overtake dichotomies between 'humankind' and 'Earth', 'nature' and 'culture', 'subject' and 'object'. F. Ferretti, 2023 "Géographicité, material agency and the thickness of the Earth: rediscovering Eric Dardel beyond 'nature/culture' dualisms" cultural geographies [early view] https://doi.org/10.1177/14744740231215510 Spinoza's concepts such as 'vital forces' 20 and the Earth as a 'composite individual' 21 to make sense of dynamic becomings. All these notions can be easily traced in works of nineteenthcentury geographers inspired by Naturphilosophie such as Ritter and Reclus. 22 As Dardel's work exemplifies, in geographical traditions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries there were lines of non-dualistic thought that should not be neglected if we wish to understand the current potentialities of geography.

Second, Dardel's intellectual legacy reinforces constructive dialogues between phenomenological and post-phenomenological/post-humanistic views, 23 through Dardel's notion of géographicité (geographicalness, or geographicity) 24 of human beings, expressing their complex, affective and not unidirectional relationality with 'earthily forces'. This includes considering the active qualities of the Earth itself including its 'thickness', that is the chthonic dimensions later popularised by Donna Haraway's works on the Chthulucene. In Dardel's work, terrestrial materialities exert relationally their agency, which relativises and destabilises human roles in original and potentially unexpected ways.

In the first part, I discuss current scholarly trends variously overtaking 'dualisms', as well as renewed conversations between phenomenology and post-phenomenology, to stress the relevance of Dardel's work in these discussions. In the second part, I address Dardel's notions of 'geographical space' and geographicité in the light of their rediscovery and late abandonment in international (Anglophone, Lusophone, Francophone and Italophone) geographical scholarship. In the third part, I discuss Dardel's ideas on the relations between history, geography and myth, highlighting their potential for nourishing current debates. 20 Ruddick, 'Rethinking', 121. 21 Ruddick, 'Rethinking', 128. 37, 2013, 10-26. 24 Given the impossibility of finding an English translation which fully expresses the idea of géographicité, this notion is mentioned through the original French word all along this paper. Textual citations from works in French have been translated by the author. The term that Dardel used to identify humankind, 'homme', has been translated as 'man' in textual citations and should be evidently contextualized in a historical period in which notions of inclusive language as we conceive them today did not yet exist. F. Ferretti, 2023 "Géographicité, material agency and the thickness of the Earth: rediscovering Eric Dardel beyond 'nature/culture' dualisms" cultural geographies [early view] https://doi.org/10.1177/14744740231215510

1.Between materiality and (post)phenomenology

From Naturphilosophie to the 'material turn' Thanks to his familiarity with both French and German philosophical traditions, Dardel assimilated ideas of human-nature consubstantiality from German Naturphilosophie that had been quite common among nineteenth century's geographers as an alternative to Kantianism. 25 This tradition was later overtaken by modernistic and positivistic ideas of human supremacy and primacy of 'culture' over 'nature', implying what David Livingstone defines a 'chasm between world and mind'. 26 According to Chenxi Tang, Naturphilosophie strongly impacted geography when 'the followers of [Friedrich] Schelling's Naturphilosophie, Humboldt and Ritter [launched] modern human geography addressing the complex ways in which a human being is shaped by terrestrial nature'. 27 Applying Spinoza's notion of 'system of forces' to human-nature relations, Naturphilosophie thinkers concluded to 'an unbroken continuity between terrestrial nature and human culture' 28 and consequently 'the unity of subject and object'. 29 These concepts exerted a strong influence on French-speaking geography 30 and were famously relaunched by Elisée Reclus. 31 Now, some geographers claim for the rediscovery of authors such as Humboldt, Reclus and Kropotkin as inspirers of critical Anthropocene debates questioning human supremacy, by arguing that these debates: 'Build on insights posed by geographers of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries: unity of nature, humans as nature made conscious, humans as nature's conscience '. 32 This means exactly that current questionings of human-nature dualisms and claims for material agency were variously predated by these critical geographical traditions. As for Dardel, the title of his most famous book was an explicit tribute to Reclus's L'Homme et la Terre (1905), where ideas on consubstantiality of 'humankind' and 'nature' were developed since the famous exergue in which Reclus stated that humankind is: 'Nature becoming conscious of itself'. 33 Dardel's idea of knowledge included both the emotional and rational spheres, starting from 'enchantment', 34 eventually a component of what Claudio Minca calls the 'bargain' of Humboldt's idea of landscape, providing a liminal space between modernistic rationality and epistemologies in which the subject is immersed in the world. 35 Thus, intellectual tools for questioning dualisms were already available in Dardel's intellectual genealogies, including theories such as Naturphilosophie that need to be rediscovered.

Recent scholarship investigating the geographies of material worlds seems to be not so far from Naturphilosophie concerns. Among others, Engelmann and McCormack discuss the interdisciplinary interest for the 'elements', including (material and metaphorical) 'atmospheres' as notions that question traditional Western philosophies by highlighting 'the transformative agency of anthropogenic activity in relation to the composition of the Earth' as well as 'the limits of this agency' 36 . These authors argue that: 'Worlds are formed from multiple associations between and attachments across humans and non-humans [which] allows us to avoid privileging either of the latter two terms'. 37 Thus, elements plurally interact with (human and non-human) living beings within milieus that are 'layered with culture, society and politics in ways that make those milieus "intra-active, naturalcultural" phenomena' 38 in terms of relational ontologies. Furthermore, Dardel's ideas of living geology and human-nature consubstantiality can foster dialogues with current notions of affect that include non-human agency. 39 In Dardel's work, living earthily forces exert multiple effects on humans, who are often described as: 'Taken by 33 E. Reclus, L'Homme et la Terre, vol. 1 (Paris:Librairie universelle, 1905), 1. 34 Dardel, Ecrits, 108. 35 C. Minca, 'Humboldt's compromise, or the forgotten geographies of landscape' Progress in Human Geography, 31, 2007, 179-193. 36 40 Humans can exert voluntary agency but can also be 'disoriented' 41 and overwhelmed by these forces. While this recalls elements of Emmanuel Levinas's philosophy as recently discussed by Brazilian scholarship, 42 notions of more-than-emotional effects of material conditions plurally speak to ideas of affect that are discussed in postphenomenological and NRT (non-representational-theory) scholarship.

According to Nigel Thrift, affect does not have a stable definition as 'it can mean a lot of different things ', 43 being open for a plurality of potential connections. Yet: 'In a Spinozan interpretation [affect] refers to complex, self-referential states of being, rather than to their cultural interpretation as emotions'. 44 Thus, affect is something more than mere relationality, as noted by Ben Anderson and Paul Harrison arguing that: 'The social is affective and it is often through affect that relations are interrupted, changed or solidified'. 45 This includes both emotional and material conditions. 46 As Anderson discusses in several papers and in a book dedicated to this concept 47 , affect understood as embodied and relational 'affecting' takes place 'alongside processes of expression and qualification that construct space-times of experience'. 48 In these spaces, contrasted experiences of hopeful human agency (recalling Dardel's narratives of 'hopeful' humans dealing with earthily forces) interact with spaced and timed feelings that are affected by processes resulting 'in the disclosure of space-time as a sphere of heterogeneities and pluralities' 49 in the frame of the multiple possibilities that are opened up by unpredictable relational encounters. 40 McCormack discusses relations between ANT and affect to address interactions that are not limited to feelings but are expressed by materialities and embodiments. McCormack argues that the issue is not to define how much there is of human or nonhuman in an event, but to think 'about the human as a fragile achievement sustained by all kinds of circumstantial encounters, relations and forces'. 50 While the fragility of the individual facing the impressiveness of the world is a notion that was quite familiar to Dardel, McCormack stresses how ANT can contribute to merge different approaches reconsidering human agency. In Dardel's geography, elements such as air and water are considered as constitutive of 'geographical space', being both matter and dynamic agents that plurally affect living beings. Thus, variously applying to both feelings and materialities, affect can contribute to the agenda of connecting phenomenological and post-phenomenological approaches. As I discuss in the next section, this agenda should not neglect precedents such as Dardel.

Reengaging phenomenology and post-phenomenology

Dardel's ideas of 'lived history as concrete presence in the world' 51 or 'lived space' were generally equated to Heideggerian phenomenological notions of 'being-in-the-world'. Yet, one can claim that Dardel's notions such as géographicité and espace géographique cannot be limited to mere phenomenological concerns with human subjectivity and perception as conceived by most humanistic geographers. First inspired by philosophers such as Husserl, Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, phenomenology is a complex field whose applications to geography are quite contentious, 52 and it should be noted that even Dardel did not style himself as a phenomenologist. It can be broadly said that geographers first used phenomenology to emphasize the importance of perception and subjectivity in times of positivist hegemony. Then, after the 'material turn' inspired by notions such as socionatures and ANT, authors inspired by post-phenomenology and post-humanism lambasted phenomenology for its excessive emphasis on the centrality of the human subject in the construction of knowledge. In association with non-representational theory and notions such as affect and atmospheres, post- 50 McCormack, 'Is ANT capable', 181. 51 Dardel, Ecrits, 81. 52 R. Johnston, and D. Sidaway, Geography and Geographers (Abingdon:Routledge, 2016); J. Pickles, Phenomenology, science and geography (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press), 1985. F. Ferretti, 2023 "Géographicité, material agency and the thickness of the Earth: rediscovering Eric Dardel beyond 'nature/culture' dualisms" cultural geographies [early view] https://doi.org/10.1177/14744740231215510 phenomenology and post-humanism emphasized material agency, circumstances and the 'material situatedness' [START_REF] Williams | Practising post-humanism[END_REF] of the social sphere, decentring human agency and subjectivity.

Yet, recent scholarship has stressed the continuing links and uncertain frontiers between what is called 'phenomenology' and what is called 'post-phenomenology', highlighting how the latter still engages with several concepts of the former. [START_REF] Ferretti | Travelling in scholarly lifeworlds: new perspectives on (post)humanism, situated subjectivities and agency from a travel diary[END_REF] Thus, the idea that there can be plural relations between humans and material worlds, including decentred agencies, is a potential bridge between these contrasted traditions. Respected authors in post-phenomenological geographies such as James Ash and Paul Simpson mention a possible 're-engagement with phenomenology through post-phenomenology', [START_REF] Ash | Geography and Post-phenomenology[END_REF] as post-phenomenology does not mean 'abandoning the key insights of phenomenology' but rather 'refiguring and expanding phenomenology's analytic and conceptual boundaries'. 56 Reengagement with phenomenological notions is suggested by recent scholarship addressing empirical cases very close to Dardel's preoccupations, such as walks and landscapes' perceptions. Engaging with John Wylie's works on landscape, [START_REF] Wylie | A landscape cannot be a Homeland[END_REF] Lynne Pearce wonders on how there can be any provisional fit 'between self and world'. [START_REF] Pearce | Finding one place in another: post/phenomenology, memory and déjàvu[END_REF] In my paper, I extend this literature by showing how Dardel's works contribute to these dialogues by going beyond phenomenology through Naturphilosophie's relational ideas of 'humankind' and 'nature', in which the Earth is considered as the only necessary term of any relation as it pre-exists humans.

Additionally, Dardel's ideas of human relations with places should not be confused with conservative notions of dwelling as simple attachment to the native land, because he explicitly defined these relations as 'love of native soil or sake for disorientation', [START_REF] Dardel | L'Homme et la terre[END_REF] far from mere statements of centrality and stability of human subjectivity. F. Ferretti, 2023 "Géographicité, material agency and the thickness of the Earth: rediscovering Eric Dardel beyond 'nature/culture' dualisms" cultural geographies [early view] https://doi.org/10.1177/14744740231215510 Engelmann and McCormack explicitly contend that concepts such as 'elemental worlds' originate from 'phenomenological traditions of thinking' that were used by geographers before being criticised for their: 'Inadequacy for dealing with contemporary ecological problems whose scale vastly exceeds human worlds'. 60 While these authors use the notion of 'world' in post-phenomenological sense, this does not exclude 'particular modes of anthropocentric affective attachment'. 61 This entails complex assemblages and entanglements of human and non-human lifeworlds, a concept that belongs in itself to humanistic geographical traditions. 62 It can be argued that these debates implicitly recall Dardel's use of elements such as air, water and land to define 'geographical spaces', a category that included 'material spaces', 'telluric space', 'aquatic space', and 'aerial space', as I discuss in the next section.

Dardel, Géographicité and geographers

A still neglected book

Opening HT, Dardel famously stated that: 'Geographical anxiety precedes and brings about objective science. Either love for the native soil or sake for disorientation, quest for sensation of foreign places, a concrete relation is established between man and land, a géographicité as a mode of human existence'. 63 While most commentators emphasized the subjective, intimate and perceptive aspects of géographicité, I would instead highlight the material (and historical) aspects of this relation, that are substantiated by the categories through which Dardel understood the idea of geographical space, strictly associated with that of géographicité. Dardel discussed disorientation (dépaysement) in the context of the historical events that he experienced: 'In the dark days of 1940, the roads of France saw masses of refugees, who were indifferent to direction, demanding only one thing to the road-flight'. 64 63 Dardel, L'Homme, 1-2. 64 Dardel, L'Homme, 17. F. Ferretti, 2023 "Géographicité, material agency and the thickness of the Earth: rediscovering Eric Dardel beyond 'nature/culture' dualisms" cultural geographies [early view] https://doi.org/10.1177/14744740231215510 Dardel, human perceptions spring from the 'acknowledgement of the terrestrial reality in its materiality' marked by feelings of fear or marvel constituting an 'affective vocabulary '. 65 This included 'influence of climate and relief',66 although Dardel was far from considering himself as a 'determinist'. However, Dardel understood geographical space as something more material than metaphysical. Espace géographique did not mean 'geometrical space … which is unique, and has a proper noun'67 being 'the abstract space of the geometer' rather than the space of the geographer. For Dardel, space is: 'The blue of the sky … the emptiness of the desert, space for death; the frozen space of the ice floe … even silence or desolation are still a reality of geographical space'.68 Thus, geographical space includes materiality and concreteness before perception, consistently with works in the history of French geography stressing the heterogeneous uses of the definition espace géographique before its positivistic naturalisation in the 1970s. 69 Dardel materially classified this space through definitions such as 'material space', 'telluric space', 'aquatic space', 'aerial space', 'constructed space' and 'landscape'. While material space defines constraints associated with distance and concrete obstacles to human activity, telluric space crucially defines the 'thickness' of the Earth, which is not limited to its 'surface':

'Being matter, it implies a depth, a thickness, a solidity and a plasticity that are not immediately given by the intellect'. 70 This 'intimate materiality'71 of the world is expressed in human terms by the emotion of experiences such as climbing and speleology. There, the solidity of the earth acts, like in the case of mountains which, for Dardel: 'Favoured freedom'. 72 Likewise, water spaces were defined by Dardel through terms indicating water's agency. For instance, flowing water are: 'Movement and life, that derides [geometric] space' also by F. Ferretti, 2023 "Géographicité, material agency and the thickness of the Earth: rediscovering Eric Dardel beyond 'nature/culture' dualisms" cultural geographies [early view] https://doi.org/10.1177/14744740231215510 'singing'. 73 Moreover, the 'mobile space of the sea' was defined by Dardel as a protagonist of history that: 'Brough' the British and the Dutch overseas; 'Refused the Empire to Napoleon I'; becomes 'accomplice of human destinies'; 'Links peoples and continents'. 74 Basically, the materiality and variety of spaces matters a lot to human histories and geographies, while the realm of subjective experience, limited to seize 'the phenomenon',75 did not suffice to explain the world. Additionally, the aerial dimension of space made Dardel claim that 'geographical space is atmosphere', 76 which was both a metaphor, in the sense of the 'magic atmosphere'77 and a statement of acting matter, given that: 'Aerial space is a carrying space where clouds run, from which the rain falls',78 matching McCormack's definition of atmosphere as metaphor and materiality.

Moreover, one of the geographical notions that are most directly associated to subjective perception, that is landscape, was deemed by Dardel as something that 'is not made to be watched, being man's insertion in the world … the place of a struggle'. 79 In this struggle, the Earth acts as a factor that awakens and shatters human consciousness. Coming 'before all objectivation, it meddles with all kind of [human] awareness'. 80 It creates the 'circumstances'81 in which human life unfolds, and yet resists all human attempts to dominate it, metaphorically and materially. For Dardel: 'It is from the Earth understood as chthonian depth that we grab stones. But the terrestrial element of stones resists our efforts to penetrate its nature … Whenever we want to reduce geography to pure, objective knowledge, the properly terrestrial elements of earth disappear'. 82 It is therefore in the mutual permeation of the subject and the object that we should understand Dardel's géographicité.

In the second part of HT, dedicated to the history of geography, Dardel criticised positivism and linear progress. 'Mythical geography' was the first case addressed, not as the first step in F. Ferretti, 2023 "Géographicité, material agency and the thickness of the Earth: rediscovering Eric Dardel beyond 'nature/culture' dualisms" cultural geographies [early view] https://doi.org/10.1177/14744740231215510 chronological sense, but as a qualitative attribute of geographical reflection. As I further detail below, mythical geography accounts first for the chthonian aspects of the Earth: 'Grounding the cults of chthonian divinities, there is the feeling that the Earth is living and vivifying' and exerts a 'universal maternal function'. 83 While ideas of Mother Earth are variously rediscovered by decolonial scholarship in association with notions such as the Pachamama, 84 it was based on the etymologic kinship of humus and humanus that Dardel discussed the: 'Mutual and ceaseless exchange between man and Earth'. 85 The further historical steps highlighted by Dardel were Géographie de plein-vent, roughly translatable as 'fieldwork-based geography', and 'scientific geography', which Dardel criticized by arguing for the need of considering 'life' beyond a 'short-sighted positivism'. 86 Dardel carefully avoided discarding French geographical traditions, presenting his ideas as standing in continuity, rather than in opposition, with heterogeneous 'noble ancestors' such as Reclus and Vidal de la Blache. Yet, he proposed clear theoretical challenges to the traditional disregard for theory of the post-Vidalians,87 innovatively contending that 'objectivity is not a guarantee of truth'88 and that one cannot 'eliminate the standpoint'89 of the observer.

A point that was overlooked by most commentators is Dardel's insistence on the social and ecological evils that human action can entail in 'completely disfiguring the natural aspect of a region for interested aims'. 90 In this vein, Dardel blamed humankind's attitudes to 'dispose of the Earth as an absolute master'. 91 Importantly, Dardel attributed these social and environmental evils to a main responsible: the colonial 'West', which 'busies itself in submitting all the Earth to its power through science and industry'. 92 Finally, what Dardel's geography challenged was the 'indifference and distance of scholarly geography'. 93 As there F. Ferretti, 2023 "Géographicité, material agency and the thickness of the Earth: rediscovering Eric Dardel beyond 'nature/culture' dualisms" cultural geographies [early view] https://doi.org/10.1177/14744740231215510 is an 'intimacy' between humankind and earth, one must be aware that geographers are not external to studied realities and should interact with these, as I discuss below.

A too ephemeral rediscovery

HT was published in 1952 without leaving any visible trace in French-speaking geographical debates of the following three decades. As Labaste and Pinchemel note, HT: 'Did not attract the attention of the French geographical community at all; no book review of it was published -sad example of blindness'. 94 Amazingly, it was in Anglo-American circuits that Dardel's work was literally discovered by geographers in the 1970s. This discovery occurred in the intellectual context of 'humanistic geographies', which are generally known for having challenged positivism and the 'quantitative' hegemony over Anglo-American geography.

Indeed, the theoretical and methodological innovations that authors like Buttimer, Tuan, Relph, Seamon and others provided to later developments in cultural geographies and plural critiques of positivistic modernities are still valued. 95 One of the most representative 'humanistic geographers', Buttimer, recollected how: 'It was from the rediscovery of writers such as Marsh, Vidal de la Blache, Braudel, Wright, and Dardel … that much of the enthusiasm for a "humanistic" movement emerged in the 1960s and 1970s'. 96 While Buttimer's (mostly) phenomenological and existentialistic inspiration is undeniable, it is intriguing to note how she paid substantial tribute to figures such as George Perkins-Marsh and Paul Vidal de la Blache, whose approaches to geography were clearly more naturalistic than phenomenological. For the Irish geographer, the research lines that Dardel and the French School inspired were: 'Sense of place, regional personality, landscape morphogenesis, and bioecology'. 97 As noted above, Dardel did not discard completely Vidalian legacies, recognizing for instance Vidal's notions of genre de vie as a basis for engaging with geographical materialities. Thus, Buttimer's references were far from being limited to 94 A. Labaste and P. Pinchemel 'Eric Dardel 1899-1967', in M.C. Robic, J.L. Tissier and P. Pinchemel (eds.), Deux siècles de géographie française (Paris:CTHS, 2011), 233. 95 F. Ferretti, 'Between radical geography and humanism: Anne Buttimer and the International Dialogue Project', Antipode 51, 2019, 1123-1145; D. Seamon, Life takes place: Phenomenology, lifeworlds and place making (Routledge:London, 2018). 96 Buttimer, 'Geography', 7. 97 Buttimer, 'Geography', 18. F. Ferretti, 2023 "Géographicité, material agency and the thickness of the Earth: rediscovering Eric Dardel beyond 'nature/culture' dualisms" cultural geographies [early view] https://doi.org/10.1177/14744740231215510 was firstly published in this book and later translated into French for the Cahiers de Géographie du Québec. The book edited by Copeta, who considered that she owed her disciplinary positioning as a geographer to her encounter with Dardel, had the function of agglutinating a transnational circuit of geographers from Italy, Switzerland, France and Ireland whose members would have played important roles in fostering cultural, historical and broadly nonpositivistic approaches to geography in the respective countries. 127 In the next section, I extend all these rich insights to understand further openings of Dardel's ideas of intersection between history, geography and myth.

Reengaging (decolonially) with history and myth

In 1946, in the aftermath of the Second World War and six years before publishing HT, Dardel published Histoire science du concret [HSC]128 . Like HT, HSC was inserted in the PUF Nouvelle Encyclopédie Philosophique, aiming at establishing new theoretical bases for historical sciences, similarly to what Dardel will try with geography six years later. Pinchemel observed that: 'There is something impressive in this double ambition. But … Dardel considered his reflection on géographicité and historicity as inseparable'. 129 While HT was rediscovered by geographers only some decades later, HSC seems to have been completely ignored by historians. Yet, it remains impossible to understand géographicité independently from the historicity discussed in HSC.

In this work, Dardel challenged positivistic approaches to history based on chronology, linear progress and 'naïve realism'. 130 He eventually refused all historical teleology, arguing that: 'Philosophy always wants to impose to historical reality an intelligibility that it does not have'. 131 This scepticism toward finalistic views was inspired by the terrible experiences of the World Wars and of the Holocaust, that widely questioned the idea of progress based on scientific advances, as science and technology were used for extermination and warfare. For F. Ferretti, 2023 "Géographicité, material agency and the thickness of the Earth: rediscovering Eric Dardel beyond 'nature/culture' dualisms" cultural geographies [early view] https://doi.org/10.1177/14744740231215510 Dardel, among their 'ruins progress lies'. 132 Thus: 'History should remain unaccomplished … historians shall refuse the misleading promises of a philosophy of history, because all philosophy of history tends to bring the historical account to an end'. 133 Furthermore, Dardel lambasted history understood as 'chronology' and mere 'erudition', which led scholars to an idea of 'neutrality' and 'objectivity', that is 'the annihilation of historians'134 who become unable to express their own views. In this polemics, Dardel quoted Italian antifascist historian Gaetano Salvemini who argued that: 'The one who believes to be impartial is in most cases a dumb … impartiality is an illusion, probity is a duty'. 135 While it is difficult to identify exactly the target of Dardel's polemics in French historiography, already dominated by the Annales at that time, what is significant is that not only he took on positivism and chronology, but on the very idea of linear progress and civilisational superiority that informed Euro-centric histories. This was done specifically by taking seriously and giving value to histories and geographies of myth as an alternative to Western rationality. Today, scholarship on decoloniality and the pluriverse is calling for remediating epistemicide136 by rediscovering different epistemes, such as indigenous worldviews and ethics, questioning Western linear time and disembodied theories. 137 While it would be anachronistic to 'enrol' Dardel in this mood, Dardel's idea of giving up pretentions of civilisational superiority, recalling eminent precedents such as Reclus, further confirms the existence of other geographical traditions based on empathy and on the assumption that there are no absolute or superior standpoints.

Furthermore, myth as a geographical object has recently been the focus of studies calling for further engagement with mythical geographies. While Maximilian Hepach claims for rediscovering the dimension of myth in historical geography addressing notions of climate F. Ferretti, 2023 "Géographicité, material agency and the thickness of the Earth: rediscovering Eric Dardel beyond 'nature/culture' dualisms" cultural geographies [early view] https://doi.org/10.1177/14744740231215510 from ancient Greek myths,138 Maja Essebo argues for 'a deepened and mutually beneficial relationship between geography and myth'. 139 To this end, for Essebo, we should: 'Revise our very idea of myth, going beyond seeing it as belonging to more primitive times or peoples '. 140 Essebo reviews definitions of myth from ideas that myths precede written history to their current mobilisation for concrete political purposes such as the Greek myth of Europe grounding EU public communication strategies. Dardel made something similar, discussing myths from both ancient and contemporary extra-European peoples and concluding by deconstructing the political myths that had grounded wars and totalitarianisms in his day.

Against classical positivist readings of history deeming myth as an archaic, non-scientific and irrational concept, Dardel considered the 'nightly time of myth' 141 as a sort of reciprocal and co-constitutive term of 'concrete' history, that he considered to lie 'half-way between the mythical word and the logical word' and to express knowledge that encompasses 'the intellective and the affective'. 142 Key was the understanding that this ceaseless mutual relationship can imply the inversion of the traditional roles of subject and object, as in mythical conceptions it happens that: 'What we call subjectivity is transferred to geographical realities, and it is man that feels himself as an object, product or toy of [external] forces'. 143 Importantly, perception cannot be considered as the centre of knowledge processes given that land is 'no longer limited to the visible surface of things'. 144 For instance: 'A ship which exits [visible] space is only irreal in our geography. For a Melanesian, it still conserves its potential reality'. 145 Anticipating French cultural geographers such as Joël Bonnemaison, 146 Dardel gave full geographical citizenship to worldviews that were then considered only matters for anthropologists studying 'primitive customs'. F. Ferretti, 2023 "Géographicité, material agency and the thickness of the Earth: rediscovering Eric Dardel beyond 'nature/culture' dualisms" cultural geographies [early view] https://doi.org/10.1177/14744740231215510 Whites',168 which opens the problem of the colonial condition. While Dardel evoked the feelings of despair 'at the arrival of the Whites among Oceanian peoples',169 he argued that works of anthropologists and philosophers including Leenhardt showed the effectiveness of the principle of a 'huge human unity through space and time'. 170 This resulted in a 'human sympathy'171 that should prevent chronological hierarchies that despise 'primitive' thought.

Like Essebo and Hepach, Dardel contended that myth does not exclude rationality. Despite widespread commonplaces, so-called primitives do not act following 'obscure forces'.

'Conversely, [the Primitive] has clear ideas of the relations between the world and himself' and does not tell of gods or heroes, as 'his language is informed by seriousness',172 while irrationality rather characterised contemporary myths such as 'progress' or war. This disenchantment with positivistic ideas of history and 'myths' of progress completes Dardel's understanding of historical and geographical myths, which further reinforce his idea of consubstantiality between humankind and nature, which refused all 'naturalisation of man and of history', declaring the '[co]constitution of man within nature [as] its humanity'. 173 Consistently with Naturphilosophie, this implied also the consubstantiality of historical and geographical approaches, as: 'The historian cannot avoid to be a bit of a geographer'. 174 Thus, the close connections existing between HSC and HT confirm the need of considering Dardel's work as a whole rather than only focussing on his most cited (yet still neglected) book.

Conclusion

This paper has demonstrated that, after the diverse waves of (re)discovery of Dardel's thought that occurred since the 1970s and 1980s across linguistic barriers, Dardel's works remain a powerful contribution to scholarship variously challenging the modernist and positivistic divorce of 'nature' and 'mind', which I called 'going beyond dualisms'. I did so by taking into consideration the entirety of Dardel's texts and contexts, unlike previous scholars who, in most F. Ferretti, 2023 "Géographicité, material agency and the thickness of the Earth: rediscovering Eric Dardel beyond 'nature/culture' dualisms" cultural geographies [early view] https://doi.org/10.1177/14744740231215510 cases, limited their analysis to just one book, HT. Then, I demonstrated how Dardel's work can still speak to at least a couple of key scholarly strands.

The first are critical debates on hybridity, the 'material turn' and Anthropocene which likewise question human almightiness over the planet and especially focus on human-nature interdependences, challenging dualisms toward new planetary understandings of relational inbecomings. 175 On this, the key contribution that Dardel's work can give is rediscovering the lessons of Naturphilosophie on human-nature consubstantiality to help responding current questioning about 'agency … sentience and inhuman matter, and how material agency with and without subjectivity is thought'. 176 As discussed above, Anthropocene concerns are giving new force to 'old' ideas periodically resurfacing. Simon Dalby intriguingly refers that today, in geography, the idea of 'the Earth as our home' 177 is commonly attributed to Tuan, while it is a quotation by Ritter, relaunched by Reclus 178 and implicitly reworked by Dardel. Without absolutely diminishing the great importance of authors like Tuan, this should suggest more consideration for alternative geographical traditions. Eventually, Naturphilosophie should be further rediscovered by geographers in the current context of anthropo(s)cenic anxieties 179 for the future of both humankind and the planet.

The second are conversations on possible reengagements with humanistic and phenomenological traditions which are fully cognizant of the critiques to human subjectivity's centrality that were levelled by scholars inspired by post-phenomenology, post-humanism and NRT. This is further exemplified by Dardel's discussions on the spatial/historical dimension of myth, in which going beyond rationality does not mean only addressing subjectivity, and by Dardel's idea of 'thickness' of the Earth, which challenges cartographic reason and prefigurates the chthonian dimensions evoked by Haraway and others. This suggests again that critical and humanistic geographical traditions should not be discarded in making sense of the relations between living and non-living beings. In Dardel's work we find a complex and entangled set of plural relations and affects where non-human agency is highlighted by the personification 175 Ruddick, 'Rethinking'. 176 Yusoff, A Billion, 9. 177 S.Dalby, 'Thinking through the Anthropocene', Dialogues in Human Geography, 12(3), 2022, 482. 178 Ferretti, 'Anarchism, Geohistory'. 179 N.Castree, 'Changing the Anthropo(s)cene', Dialogues in Human Geography 5, 2015, 301-16. F. Ferretti, 2023 "Géographicité, material agency and the thickness of the Earth: rediscovering Eric Dardel beyond 'nature/culture' dualisms" cultural geographies [early view] https://doi.org/10.1177/14744740231215510 of the Earth as a geographical and historical protagonist, suggesting that it is not only relationality that matters, but also 'worlds'.

  22 F. Ferretti, 'Anarchism, Geo-History and the origins of the Annales: rethinking Elisée Reclus's influence on Lucien Febvre', Environment and Planning D -Society and Space 33, 2015, 347-365; G. Nicolas-Obadia, 'Introduction, in C. Ritter, Introduction à la Géographie Générale Comparée (Paris:Les Belles Lettres, 1974); C. Tang, The geographic imagination of modernity: geography, literature, and philosophy in German romanticism (Stanford:Stanford University Press, 2008). 23 K. Simonsen, 'In quest of a new humanism: Embodiment, experience and phenomenology as critical geography', Progress in Human Geography

  Dardel, Ecrits, 265. 41 E. Dardel, L'Homme et la terre (Paris:CTHS, 1990), 17. 42 F.C. Nascimento, 'A paisagem como rosto: uma confluência entre Geografia de Dardel e a Filosofia de Lévinas'. Geousp -Espaço e Tempo 24(1) 2020, 104-116. 43 N. Thrift, 'Intensities of Feeling: Towards a spatial politics of affect'. Geografiska Annaler Series B Human Geography 86, 2004, 59. 44 N. Thrift, Non-Representational Theory: Space, politics, affect (London: Routledge, 2007), 221. 45 B. Anderson and P. Harrison, Taking-place: Non-Representational theories and geography (London:Routledge 2010), 16-17. 46 B. Anderson, 'Becoming and being hopeful: towards a theory of affect', Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 24, 2006, 733-752 ; P. Harrison, 'Corporeal Remains. Vulnerability, proximity and living-on after the end of the world', Environment and Planning A 40, 2008, 423-445. 47 B. Anderson, Encountering affect: Capacities, apparatuses, conditions (London Routledge, 2014). 48 Anderson, 'Becoming', 737. 49 Anderson, 'Becoming', 746. F. Ferretti, 2023 "Géographicité, material agency and the thickness of the Earth: rediscovering Eric Dardel beyond 'nature/culture' dualisms" cultural geographies [early view] https://doi.org/10.1177/14744740231215510

Finally

  , Dardel's work contains examples of respectful approaches to non-European peoples and cultures, taking seriously what decolonial scholarship defines as different epistemes, considered as more respectful of the planet in relation to traditional Western ones. Also on this point Naturphilosophie matters: contesting human-nature hierarchies is clearly consistent with contesting hierarchies between peoples and cultures.

  The geographic imagination. 26 D.N. Livingstone, The geographical tradition (Oxford:Blackwell, 1993), 116.27 Tang, The geographic imagination, 100.28 Tang, The geographic imagination, 109.29 Tang, The geographic imagination, 112. 30 Y. Le Scanff, L'origine littéraire d'un concept géographique: l'image de la France duelle.

	Revue d'histoire des
	sciences humaines, 5, 2001, 61-93.
	31 F. Ferretti, and P. Pelletier, 'L'Homme et la Terre, l'aboutissement d'une trilogie', in E. Reclus, L'Homme et
	la Terre, 2015, https://books.openedition.org/enseditions/5166
	32 T.B. Larsen, and J. Harrington, 'Geographic thought and the Anthropocene: What geographers have said and
	have to say', Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 111, 2020, 729.
	F. Ferretti, 2023 "Géographicité, material agency and the thickness of the Earth: rediscovering
	Eric Dardel beyond 'nature/culture' dualisms" cultural geographies [early view]
	https://doi.org/10.1177/14744740231215510

25

Tang,

  More broadly, for 60 Engelmann and McCormack, 'Elemental worlds', 1433. 61 Engelmann and McCormack, 'Elemental worlds', 1433. 62 A. Buttimer, 'Geography, humanism, and global concern', Annals of the Association of American Geographers80, 1990, 1-33.

M. Müller, 'Worlding geography: From linguistic privilege to decolonial anywhere. Progress in Human Geography 45(6) 2021, 1440-1466.

J.Dardel, 'Eric Dardel, biographie', in E.Dardel, Ecrits d'un monde entier (Geneva:Héros-limite, 2014), 28-32.

N. Ginsburger, M.C.Robic and J.L.Tissier (eds.), Géographes français en Seconde Guerre mondiale (Paris:Editions de la Sorbonne, 2021).

Dardel, L'Homme, 7.

Dardel, L'Homme, 12.

Dardel, L'Homme, 2.

Dardel, L'Homme, 10.

M.C. Robic, 'Sur la naissance de l'« espace géographique »',Espace géographique, 21, 1992, 140-142.

Dardel, L'Homme, 19.

Dardel, L'Homme, 20.

Dardel, L'Homme, 23.

Dardel, L'Homme, 27.

Dardel, L'Homme, 29.

Dardel, L'Homme, 31.

Dardel, L'Homme, 32.

Dardel, L'Homme, 32.

Dardel, L'Homme, 35.

Dardel, L'Homme, 44.

Dardel, L'Homme,[START_REF] Wylie | A landscape cannot be a Homeland[END_REF]

Dardel, L'Homme,[START_REF] Dardel | L'Homme et la terre[END_REF]

Dardel, L'Homme,[START_REF] Dardel | L'Homme et la terre[END_REF]

Dardel, L'Homme, 65.

M. de la Cadena and M. Blaser, (eds). A world of many worlds (Durham:Duke University Press, 2018).

Dardel, L'Homme, 66.

Dardel, L'Homme, 133.

Orain, De plain-pied.

Dardel, L'Homme, 126.

Dardel, L'Homme, 121.

Dardel, L'Homme, 123.

Dardel, L'Homme, 127.

Dardel, L'Homme, 127.

Dardel, L'Homme, 128.

C. Copeta, 'Il mio incontro con Dardel, ovvero perché sono geografa', in C.Copeta (ed.), Eric Dardel: L'Uomo e la Terra. Natura della realtà geografica (Milan:Unicopli, 1986), 201-223.

E.Dardel, L'histoire science du concret (Paris:PUF, 1946). From now on, this book will be quoted from the 2014 edition (quoted above) Ecrits d'un monde entire.

Pinchemel, 'Biographie', 179.

Dardel, Ecrits, 35.

Dardel, Ecrits, 42.

Dardel, Ecrits, 41.

Dardel, Ecrits, 144.

Dardel, Ecrits,[START_REF] Dardel | L'Homme et la terre[END_REF]

Dardel, Ecrits, 61.

B. Sousa Santos, Epistemologies of the south: Justice against epistemicide (London:Routledge, 2016).

A. Kothari, et al. (eds.). Pluriverse. A post-development dictionary (New Delhi:Tulika Books, 2019). De la Cadena and Blaser, A world.

G.M. Hepach, 'Ephemeral climates: Plato's geographic myths and the phenomenological nature of climate and its changes'. Journal of Historical Geography 78, 2022,

139-148. 139 M. Essebo, 'Mythical place: A conversation on the earthly aspects of myth'. Progress in Human Geography 43(3) 2019, 515-530 515.140 Essebo, 'Mythical place', 515.141 Dardel, Ecrits, 106.142 Dardel, Ecrits, 107.143 Dardel, L'Homme, 68.144 Dardel, L'Homme, 70.145 Dardel, L'Homme, 71.

Dardel, Ecrits, 109.

Dardel, Ecrits, 111.

Dardel, Ecrits, 113.

Dardel, Ecrits, 120.

Dardel, Ecrits, 121.

E. Dardel, 'L'esthétique comme mode d'existence de l'homme archaïque', Revue d'histoire et de philosophiereligieuses, 45, 1965, 352.

Dardel, 'L'esthétique', 352.

Dardel, 'L'esthétique', 352.

Dardel, 'L'esthétique', 355.

Dardel, 'L'esthétique', 357.

Dardel, Ecrits, 257.

Dardel, Ecrits, 296.

B. Garrett, Bunker: building for the end times (London:Penguin Books, 2020).

Dardel, Ecrits, 305

Dardel, Ecrits, 267.

Dardel, Ecrits, 259.

Dardel, Ecrits, 270.

Dardel, Ecrits, 271.

Dardel, Ecrits, 68.

Dardel, Ecrits, 104.

F. Ferretti, 2023 "Géographicité, material agency and the thickness of the Earth: rediscovering Eric Dardel beyond 'nature/culture' dualisms" cultural geographies [early view] https://doi.org/10.1177/14744740231215510 Also in Dardel's mythical geography the Earth should not be understood as something that is merely perceived, but as immanence and materiality. That is: 'The concrete support of the … essence of living beings'. 147 Thus, 'mythical geography is a relation' 148 of a clearly 'qualitative' 149 kind that, historically, started to be questioned by what Dardel called 'prophetic geography', which dethroned the Earth from its role as creator of humankind, as both the Earth and its living (human and non-human) beings became the creation of a God. For Dardel, it was in this phase of the history of geography that the idea of the 'spatialization of space' 150 began.

There, Dardel acknowledged the epistemic violence of monotheistic religions, which pronounced a 'death sentence' 151 against mythical though and polytheism. Importantly, myth should not be confused with mythology, which Dardel associated with another notion, namely 'heroic geography', first represented by the Homeric tales and later by so-called 'geographical discoveries', that is European expansion, modernity and colonialism.

From a historiographical point of view, it can be said that Dardel anticipated ideas of taking myths seriously that were expressed by Annalistes such as Jean-Pierre Vernant 152 and historians of science such as Hertha von Dechend and Giorgio de Santillana, who contested positivistic pretentions to create hierarchies between differ rent historical civilizations on the ground of their economic structures. In their famous Hamlet's Mill, they analysed 'the mammoth clock which constitutes the archaic cosmos', 153 demonstrating the astronomic competences of people who lived before the invention of writing for historical records. Thus, mythical dimensions can make sense to current investigations on plural phenomena, including the rescuing of non-Western epistemes. 154 Dardel especially investigated 'mythic' assumptions within so-called 'primitive' peoples (whom he always mentioned in the most respectful terms) following Melanesia fieldwork of 147 Dardel, L'Homme, 77. 148 Dardel, L'Homme, 90. 149 Dardel, L'Homme, 83. 150 Dardel, L'Homme, 96. 151 Dardel, L'Homme, 97. 152 J.P. Vernant, Mythe et pensée chez les grecs: études de psychologie historique (Paris: Maspero, 1965 Leenhardt (1878-1954). Although he was not directly involved in fieldwork, Dardel's reviews of Leenhardt first-hand ethnographic materials contributed to make sense of his own ideas on myth, history and geography. Crucially, for Dardel, the cyclical temporality of mythic conceptions showed that 'there is not one time, but several times'. 155 To grasp this dimension, Dardel argued that one should make an exercise in empathy, that is 'becoming primitive' to see a world where 'everything is power '. 156 This included agency of physical worlds, where one finds a 'fundamental identity of man and nature', 157 which should not be confused with Eurocentric comparisons between the 'savage' and 'nature' in terms of racial hierarchies, being indeed a way of denying the pretention that non-scientific worldviews are 'backward'. Dardel presented historical successions of ideas in terms that denied linear progress, arguing that the myth 'became legend' when people tried to seek explanations, and developed magics as a 'first form of scientific attitude'. 158 Conversely, for Dardel, history starts with the 'appetite for power': 159 the latest declinations of 'myth', such as nationalistic myths, were the responsible of the war's disaster that broke all the hopes in progress, science and rationality on which Western thought was traditionally based. Some of Dardel's articles help understanding his idea of myth as a phenomenon that was not located chronologically, as it belonged to a philosophical category of thought-aesthetics. While Dardel's idea that aesthetics allows humans to 'understand the world that surrounds them as a way to locate and understand themselves' 160 might have some similarities with Kant's transcendental aesthetics, Dardel refused Kantian notions of a-priori and applied his ideas to very different cases. 'Standing at the antipodes of our Western civilizations, Oceania offers the spectacle of a universe where our categories loose much of their pertinence and value'. 161 For Dardel, this meant deepening and amplifying human understandings of the real world, which is real exactly because its features act and interact at human and non-human levels. Eric Dardel beyond 'nature/culture' dualisms" cultural geographies [early view] https://doi.org/10.1177/14744740231215510 Dardel considered this coupling of aesthetics and mythical though as not limited to so-called primitive peoples. For instance, it characterised the most prestigious of 'European' ancient civilisations, that is early Greece, like in the cases discussed by Hepach and Essebo. For Dardel: 'In its powerful aspiration to the One, that is universal harmony, [Hellenic culture] brought together soul and existence, ethics, aesthetics and cosmology in one movement'. 162 This importantly meant that, with the Ancient Greeks as well as with the Oceanian civilisations studied by Leenhardt, there was 'the feeling of a shared ontological community of all beings', within a vital circulation 'nourishing likewise landscapes, animals and plants' alongside humans, who bring in themselves the 'affective dispositions of cosmic forces'. 163 These are again Naturphilosophie ideas of human-nature consubstantiality, where humans are actively affected by earthily material forces, which allowed Dardel taking distances from Kantian or Cartesian modernities in which 'the world was split up' 164 between nature and mind, prefigurating the aforementioned ideas of affect as both feeling and materiality.

Dardel observed that, beyond the 'relatively recent distinction between nature and super-nature … conceiving the world means participating in the world', 165 which further clarifies his idea that heuristic processes are made of reciprocal agencies and mutual affection. Human subjectivity is not the only form of knowledge, as Dardel clarified that, in mythical universes: 'Unlike the Westerner, who pushes his subjectivity to the extreme limit … the Primitive is full of enthusiasm and emotion for that world which treats him as a son'. 166 Thus, while the myth served to relativize the idea of human almightiness at Dardel's time, after the traumatism of the war, one may argue that it can play similar roles today, when human agency is strongly questioned by anxieties for climate change and destruction. 167 According to Dardel, among New Caledonia Kanaks, 'the very notion of what is human remains ill-defined'. It is worth noting that, for Dardel, Kanaks give human attributes to plants 'but deny these to the