“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Friday, December 4, 2015

My Irigaray Tendencies

A reader just wrote in:

someone on my Academia network bookmarked your paper "This Biosphere which Is Not One" and I wanted to say how much I appreciated it especially in the first part explaining agrilogistics.  As an ex-academic trained in anthropology with years of work among indigenous people  I have longed for someone to catch on to the implications of the last 10,000 years in terms of phenomenology and ontology, but it's disappeared even from anthropology now .... great work!  And glad to have come across it.


My reply: 

That's really kind of you. It's tragic that really highly trained people who are not anti-intellectual have been trained to oppose what they label immediately as "essentialism" or "primitivism"--leaving these sorts of arguments in the hands of truly conservative people who aren't helping, e.g. hostile to feminism, "theory" etc. So I really appreciate what you have to say, because it's like, this huge ecological emergency is happening, and really intelligent humanistic scholars have been really disempowered to think about it properly.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Yeah! Like I basically backed into this whole eco-realism thing through being an ex-anthropology-student who was studying ecological agriculture and finding it too scientific––and scientistic, which is a whole other thing––for me, who then tried ecological design (permaculture et al.) and found it just as materialist and anti-theory (and therefore as blinkered) as the other thing. I think this OOO thing has more promise outside of the field of philosophy than within it, actually.