Between theoretical reflection and the exploration of the paths of poetic discourse, Zisis Koutionis rereads in Foreigners in the Burning Land the life and actions of earlier heroes of universal culture, placing them retrospectively, with a hypothetical anachronism, against the backdrop of contemporary environmental destruction.
He proposes that we understand them as subjects whose nomadic lives produced a zero environmental footprint and that we see them as a genealogical resource of discourse and work for the preservation of the terrestrial condition.
Empedocles and Diogenes the Cynic, Jesus of Nazareth and Don Quixote of Cervantes in the Mediterranean basin, the poet Kobayashi Issa in Japan, and Friedrich Nietzsche in Central Europe all developed programs of discourse and life practices that were absolutely compatible with the terrestrial condition.
We can view their lives as examples of environmental ethics and sustainability, precisely because they were subjects radically heterogeneous and foreign to the context of the social norms of their time, but also foreign to the dominance of the forthcoming homo economicus.
In a kind of negative theology, "destruction" becomes the untamable eschatological horizon, where each of them appears as a prophet.
They are prophets of a malevolent god, who is humanity, and they are confronted with the impending destruction just before the end of the human world as we knew it.
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