Nature, limits and form-of-life

Sustainable development, ecological modernisation, eco-efficiency and the like have reframed material limits to growth as conventional barriers. Even in arguments for degrowth limits recede to the background in favour of self-limitation. To reclaim limits as the grounds for an effective environmental politics, I reconstruct how the case for the limits to growth was reversed into a case for the growth of limits, and how foundational boundaries were increasingly blurred. Arguing that lifestyle politics is unlikely to be effective against the growth machine, I elaborate on the notion of form-of-life. If not understood as a solipsistic self-mastery but as the mutually formative encounter of living entities – provided with their own dispositions yet sharing a common destiny – this notion highlights how freedom and equality are premised on, rather than hampered by, limits. I conclude with four reasons why a radical theory and politics for the environment should make use of the notion.