Progressive Geographies

Adrian J. Ivakhiv, Shadowing the Anthropocene: Eco-Realism for Turbulent Times – Punctum Books, 2018

available in paperback or pdf download (minimum price $5; free after six months)

Update: reader’s guide

A spectre is haunting humanity: the spectre of a reality that will outwit and, in the end, bury us. “The Anthropocene,” or The Human Era, is an attempt to name our geological fate – that we will one day disappear into the layer-cake of Earth’s geology – while highlighting humanity in the starring role of today’s Earthly drama. In Shadowing the Anthropocene, Adrian Ivakhiv proposes an ecological realism that takes as its starting point humanity’s eventual demise. The only question for a realist today, he suggests, is what to do now and what quality of compost to leave behind with our burial.

The book engages with the challenges of the Anthropocene and with a series of philosophical efforts to address them, including those of Slavoj Žižek and Charles Taylor, Graham Harman and Timothy Morton, Isabelle Stengers and Bruno Latour, and William Connolly and Jane Bennett. Along the way, there are volcanic eruptions and revolutions, ant cities and dog parks, data clouds and space junk, pagan gods and sacrificial altars, dark flow, souls (of things), and jazz.

Ivakhiv draws from centuries old process-relational thinking that hearkens back to Daoist and Buddhist sages, but gains incisive re-invigoration in the philosophies of Charles Sanders Peirce and Alfred North Whitehead. He translates those insights into practices of “engaged Anthropocenic bodymindfulness” – aesthetic, ethical, and ecological practices for living in the shadow of the Anthropocene.

“What can process philosophies teach us about the Anthropocene? In Shadowing the Anthropocene, Adrian Ivakhiv  shows how a new eco-realism untangles several traditions of thought and practice to come to terms with the contemporary condition. The author himself takes huge steps in the direction needed.  A rich, bracing, and illuminating book!” ~ William E. Connolly, author, Facing the Planetary: Entangled Humanism and the Politics of Swarming

Antoine Bousquet, The Eye of War: Military Perception from the Telescope to the Drone – University of Minnesota Press, October 2018 (and website here)

Andy Merrifield on Marx, Beckett and more…

Laurence Lampert, What a Philosopher Is? Becoming Nietzsche (U Chicago Press, 2018) – reviewed at NDPR

It’s a very critical review of what sounds like a fascinating book. I suspect there is something of the clash within North American approaches to Nietzsche playing out here. Here’s the press description:

The trajectory of Friedrich Nietzsche’s thought has long presented a difficulty for the study of his philosophy. How did the young Nietzsche—classicist and ardent advocate of Wagner’s cultural renewal—become the philosopher of Will to Power and the Eternal Return?

With this book, Laurence Lampert answers that question. He does so through his trademark technique of close readings of key works in Nietzsche’s journey to philosophy: The Birth of Tragedy, Schopenhauer as Educator, Richard Wagner in Bayreuth, Human All Too Human, and “Sanctus Januarius,” the final book of the 1882 Gay Science. Relying partly on how Nietzsche himself characterized his books in his many autobiographical guides to the trajectory of his thought, Lampert sets each in the context of Nietzsche’s writings as a whole, and looks at how they individually treat the question of what a philosopher is. Indispensable to his conclusions are the workbooks in which Nietzsche first recorded his advances, especially the 1881 workbook which shows him gradually gaining insights into the two foundations of his mature thinking. The result is the most complete picture we’ve had yet of the philosopher’s development, one that gives us a Promethean Nietzsche, gaining knowledge even as he was expanding his thought to create new worlds.

Book Launch: ‘The New Enclosure’ by Brett Christophers

University College London, October 30, 6pm – free, but booking required. Details of the book itself, published by Verso, are here.