Exterranean

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Phillip John Usher
Keyword(s):  
The Self ◽  
Environmental Humanities ◽  
Bruno Latour ◽  
Michel Serres ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Ecological Thought ◽  
Opening Up

Exterranean is a book about the extraction of stuff from the Earth, a process in which matter goes from being sub to exterranean. By opening up a rich archive of specifically nonmodern texts and images, this work offers a bracing riposte to several critical trends in ecological thought. Eschewing the self-congratulatory claims of posthumanism, instead engineering conceptual clashes between the materially situated homo of nonmodern humanism and the abstract and aggregated anthropos of the Anthropocene, arguing against the omnipresence of Earthrise-like globes in attempts to think at planetary scales, and shifting emphasis from emission to extraction, this book pleads for an alertness to the material and immaterial connections between the Earth from which we extract, the human and nonhuman agents of extraction, and the extracted matter with which we live daily. Divided into three sections (“Terra Global Circus,” “Welcome to Mineland,” and “Hiding in Exterranean Matter”), each of which approaches this entanglement from a different perspective, this book gives shape to a sense of the exterranean via readings of authors from France, Germany, Poland, and elsewhere as well as via discussion of mines, objects, engravings, and architecture. In dialogue with Michel Serres, the recent thought of Bruno Latour, and the interdisciplinary turn to the Environmental Humanities more generally, both historicist and speculative in approach, Exterranean lays the groundwork for a comparative ecocriticism that reaches across and untranslates theoretical affordances between periods and languages.

‘A pinch of unseen, unguarded dust’: The World and Self in Thomas Hardy's Poems

2018 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 49-66
Author(s):  
Monika Szuba
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
The Self ◽  
Phenomenological Philosophy ◽  
The Earth ◽  
The World ◽  
The Universe ◽  
Recurrent Theme ◽  
Body Subject

The essay discusses selected poems from Thomas Hardy's vast body of poetry, focusing on representations of the self and the world. Employing Maurice Merleau-Ponty's concepts such as the body-subject, wild being, flesh, and reversibility, the essay offers an analysis of Hardy's poems in the light of phenomenological philosophy. It argues that far from demonstrating ‘cosmic indifference’, Hardy's poetry offers a sympathetic vision of interrelations governing the universe. The attunement with voices of the Earth foregrounded in the poems enables the self's entanglement in the flesh of the world, a chiasmatic intertwining of beings inserted between the leaves of the world. The relation of the self with the world is established through the act of perception, mainly visual and aural, when the body becomes intertwined with the world, thus resulting in a powerful welding. Such moments of vision are brief and elusive, which enhances a sense of transitoriness, and, yet, they are also timeless as the self becomes immersed in the experience. As time is a recurrent theme in Hardy's poetry, this essay discusses it in the context of dwelling, the provisionality of which is demonstrated in the prevalent sense of temporality, marked by seasons and birdsong, which underline the rhythms of the world.

Pèlerinages barrésiens

2013 ◽  
pp. 116-123
Author(s):  
Claire Bompaire-Evesque
Keyword(s):  
Large Scale ◽  
The Self ◽  
Joan Of Arc ◽  
The Third ◽  
National Importance ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Third Stage ◽  
The Dead

This article is a inquiry about how Barrès (1862-1923) handles the religious rite of pilgrimage. Barrès stages in his writings three successive forms of pilgrimage, revealing what is sacred to him at different times. The pilgrimage to a museum or to the birthplace of an artist is typical for the egotism and the humanism of the young Barrès, expressed in the Cult of the Self (1888-1891). After his conversion to nationalism, Barrès tries to unite the sons of France and to instill in them a solemn reverence for “the earth and the dead” ; for that purpose he encourages in French Amities (1903) pilgrimages to historical places of national importance (battlefields; birthplace of Joan of Arc), building what Nora later called the Realms of Memory. The third stage of Barrès’ intellectual evolution is exemplified by The Sacred Hill (1913). In this book the writer celebrates the places where “the Spirit blows”, and proves open to a large scale of spiritual forces, reaching back to paganism and forward to integrative syncretism, which aims at unifying “the entire realm of the sacred”.

scholarly journals Self-Organization of Water Molecules Over 11-Year Solar Cycle

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Igor Shevchenko
Keyword(s):  
Solar Activity ◽  
Water Clusters ◽  
The Self ◽  
Self Organization ◽  
Water Molecules ◽  
Annual Variations ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Rate Of Hydrolysis ◽  
Rotation Of The Earth ◽  
Northern And Southern Hemispheres

Abstract The variations of solar activity and distribution of solar energy due to the rotation of the Earth around its axis and around the Sun exert a strong influence on the self-organization of water molecules. As a result, the rate of hydrolytic processes with the participation of water clusters displays diurnal, very large annual variations, and is also modulated by the 11-year cycles of solar activity. It also depends on the geographic latitude and can be different at the same time in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres. This phenomenon is well accounted for by the influence of muons on the self-organization of water molecules. Muons are constantly generated in the upper atmosphere by the solar wind. They reach the surface of the Earth and can penetrate to some depth underground. Buildings also absorb muons. For this reason, the rate of hydrolysis outside and inside buildings, as well as underground, can differ significantly from each other.

scholarly journals Plant Life and More-than-human Agency in Zainab Amadahy’s Resistance

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
pp. 79-91
Author(s):  
Paula Wieczorek
Keyword(s):  
Human Agency ◽  
Speculative Fiction ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Bruno Latour ◽  
Donna Haraway ◽  
Cultural Violence ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Plant Life ◽  
As If

For centuries humans have acted as if the environment was passive and as if the agency was related only to human beings. Both Indigenous and non-Indigenous writers, scholars, and artists express the need to narrate tales about the multitudes of the living earth, which can help perceive the Earth as vibrant and living. The following paper discusses Black/Cherokee Zainab Amadahy’s speculative fiction novel 2013 Resistance as an example of a story resisting the claim about human beings as the ultimate species. The paper initially scrutinizes the phenomena of “plant blindness” and then explores how Zainab Amadahy illustrates plant life in her book. Unlike in traditional literary depictions of botany, the writer presents tobacco as an active and responsive agent that influences the characters, which, consequently, opposes anthropocentrism. The article also addresses the cultural violence and disregard that has dominated the Western perception of animistic cultures and expresses the need to rethink the theory of animism. This paper draws from posthumanist writings by scholars including Donna Haraway, Bruno Latour, Jane Bennett, and Stacy Alaimo. It also refers to some of the most influential contributions to critical plant studies made by Indigenous thinkers such as Robin Wall Kimmerer’ s Braiding Sweetgrass (2013).

Ecological Time: Natures that Matter to Activism and Art

APRIA Journal ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 166-183
Author(s):  
Monique Peperkamp
Keyword(s):  
Time Scales ◽  
Human History ◽  
Bruno Latour ◽  
Cultural Assumptions ◽  
Donna Haraway ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Works Of Art ◽  
Sense Of Time ◽  
Agent Of Change

The term 'Anthropocene' brings together a range of interrelated ecological catastrophes and relates human history to the time scales of the Earth. While dominant modes of thinking maintain technocratic notions of nature and time, art has (re)presented alternative proposals and practices that radically shift perception. To foreground and strengthen the power of art to challenge core cultural assumptions and motivate change, this text maps out the implications of philosophical positions often referred to by artists. I consider the ideas of Donna Haraway, Bruno Latour, Andreas Malm, Naomi Klein and T. J. Demos, and perform a more indepth inquiry of the aesthetics proposed by Timothy Morton. Two works of art are at the beginning and at the end of this inquiry: Progress vs. Regress (Progress II) and Nocturnal Gardening, both by Melanie Bonajo. A material sense of time appears to be pivotal for art as an agent of change.

Opening Up The Earth

2017 ◽  
pp. 129-162
Author(s):  
Wilber J. Scott
Keyword(s):  
The Earth ◽  
Opening Up

Introduction The Fundamental Debate: Michel Serres the Ecocritic vs. Luc Ferry the Ecoskeptic

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-20
Author(s):  
Jonathan F. Krell
Keyword(s):  
World View ◽  
Symbiotic Relationship ◽  
Bruno Latour ◽  
Modern Humans ◽  
Michel Serres

The current ecological debate in France may be summarized by the contrast between philosophers Michel Serres and Luc Ferry. Serres condemns the war on nature that modern humans, desiring in the Cartesian tradition to “master and possess” nature, seem to be waging. He aspires to a “natural contract” between humans and nature, which would entail a symbiotic relationship between the parties. Ferry accuses Serres of being antihumanist—a radical, deep ecologist—and mocks the very idea of a natural contract. While Serres’s world view is ecocentric, placing humans on the same plane as the rest of nature, which should possess legal dignity, Ferry embraces an anthropocentric world view, in which humans are clearly separate from and superior to the rest of nature. Bruno Latour, a student of Serres, accuses Ferry of being mired in Kantian modernism.

From the Sacred to the Sacred Object

2012 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 105-122 ◽  
Author(s):  
Edwin Sayes ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Network Theory ◽  
Actor Network Theory ◽  
Social Thought ◽  
Bruno Latour ◽  
Actor Network ◽  
Rene Girard ◽  
Michel Serres ◽  
Sacred Object ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship

The philosophy of Bruno Latour has given us one of the most important statements on the part played by technology in the ordering of the human collective. Typically presented as a radical departure from mainstream social thought, Latour is not without his intellectual creditors: Michel Serres and, through him, René Girard. By tracing this development, we are led to understand better the relationship of Latour’s work, and Actor-Network Theory more generally, to traditional sociological concerns. By doing so we can also hope to understand better the role that objects play in structuring society.

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