“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


Thursday, December 10, 2015

Three Secrets: Secret 3

So, what have we got so far?



Hyposubjects: On Becoming-Human, which is like Hyperobjects 2: This Time It's Personal, written Deleuze-Guattari style with Dominic Boyer. Coming out with Open Humanities Press.



Humankind: Solidarity with Nonhuman People, which is “How can we expand Marxism to include nonhuman beings?” Coming out with Verso.



And there is also number three, which is going to be called



BEING ECOLOGICAL



Hahaha...and Penguin invited me to write it for them. I'm so so so honored by this request. This incredible world press just handed me a golden mike for me to try to help people. And their symbol is an Antarctic bird...Their wanting to be at the front of contemporary ecological philosophy is so perfect.



So if you watch my conversation with Olafur, or read what I wrote for the Danish newspaper, you'll see part of the reasoning of this book. It's going to be exploring all kinds of ecological philosophy, in the background, but in the foreground, it's exploring how we can actually live the ecological data, which we've hardly started to do. Hence the title, which made me smile when I came up with it, because it's like Being John Malkovich. So it's not just ecological thought--it's making and doing: praxis. And it's “What kind of phenomenological mode, what style of being and feeling, is attuned to the ecological age?”



The point being, that this mode is logically prior to the search for ecological data, and that humanistic research is a key way to boot up this mode. What we are thinking of trying to do in new networks such as Environmental Humanities is sort of groping towards that mode.