ECOLOGY WITHOUT NATURE: Anti-Nihilism Death Ray

Thursday, December 22, 2011

Anti-Nihilism Death Ray

...from within nihilism itself. That's the line I'm running in Hyperobjects. Philosophies, like elections, have consequences. Trying to negate nihilism by running towards what Heidegger calls Erlebnis (lived-experience) only doubles down on the nihilism. You have to tunnel through it.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...: Tim,

This anti-nihilism death ray sounds too familiar to me ;-) though, i really don't see how you would engage it with 'Hyperobjects' (not that i already know what the hell a 'Hyperobject' is, neither that am really keen to know, honestly). But i just wanted to share that negating nihilism would not double down on it. There is no really way to tunnel it (what ever that might mean). Negating nihilism can only lead to one thing (not an object, please).

I leave this as homework for you to think rather to run your 'Hyperobjects'. Just take notice in which sense the aritmetics of your lived-experience are failing here. Why?

cheers :-); January 9, 2012 at 12:50 PM

Timothy Morton

Timothy Morton is Rita Shea Guffey Chair in English at Rice University. They have collaborated with Laurie Anderson, Björk, Jennifer Walshe, Hrafnhildur Arnadottir, Sabrina Scott, Adam McKay, Jeff Bridges, Justin Guariglia, Olafur Eliasson, and Pharrell Williams. Morton co-wrote and appears in Living in the Future’s Past, a 2018 film about global warming with Jeff Bridges. They are the author of the libretto for the opera Time Time Time by Jennifer Walshe. Morton has written All Art Is Ecological (Penguin, 2021), Spacecraft (Bloomsbury, 2021), Being Ecological (Penguin, 2018), Humankind: Solidarity with Nonhuman People (Verso, 2017), Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence (Columbia, 2016), Nothing: Three Inquiries in Buddhism (Chicago, 2015), Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (Minnesota, 2013), Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality (Open Humanities, 2013), The Ecological Thought (Harvard, 2010), Ecology without Nature (Harvard, 2007), 8 other books and 250 essays on philosophy, ecology, literature, music, art, architecture, design and food. Morton’s work has been translated into 10 languages. In 2014 they gave the Wellek Lectures in Theory.

“Outstanding.”
—Slavoj Zizek, In Defense of Lost Causes

“Dark ecology has the potential to be the punk rock or experimental pop of ecological thinking.”
—Kasino A4

“It isn’t [nature] itself that needs trashing — we’re doing a fine job of that already; it’s our way of thinking about it that needs to be structurally realigned ... it's an important book that, in a scant 205 pages of main text ... frames a debate that no doubt will be carried on for years to come.”
—Vince Carducci, Pop Matters

“He practices what he theorizes: nothing is wasted in his argumentation.”
—Emmanouil Aretoulakis, Synthesis

“Picking up where his most obvious predecessors, Gregory Bateson and Felix Guattari, left off, Morton understands mental ecology as the ground zero of ecological thinking, as that which must be redressed before anything else and above all. Morton goes beyond both his forebears, however, in repairing the rift between science and the humanities, which the Enlightenment opened up and against which Romanticism reacted. Perhaps most pleasantly surprising, given its erudition, is that in its stylistic elegance The Ecological Thought is as satisfying to read as it is necessary to ponder.”
—Vince Carducci

ECOLOGY WITHOUT NATURE

Thursday, December 22, 2011

Anti-Nihilism Death Ray

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