Glenn Willmott.
Miasma, which appears most often in Greek tragedy. Unhealthy pollution of polis and habitat << error of judgment of protagonist and his or her misconstrual of habitat relations.
Ecocriticism: confrontation with miasma.
Yet justice is not clearly resolved by Aristotelian tragedy, nor is knowledge of nature successful.
Unsuccessful epistemology renders violence fatally unavoidable.
Exploring the bases of justice rather than prescribing a version of it.
[Me: it's that old time epistemology bell again]
A "dark generic unity" to today's ecocriticism
Relations of human-human and human-nonhuman are continuous
Marx on labor stored in production. Modernity embodies the labor of others. To forget this is to reify lives as products.
Hidden labor and fuels consumed, plants, animals. Spectral economy and ecology has ethical implications.
>> ecocriticism unsurprisingly can't help but be ethical. Yet without a normative prescription for justice, there is always a limitation to the provisional.
Even if such knowledge can never be grasped wholly.
>> ecocritical ethics must affirm effects of nonhuman charisma. Interfaces that inspire charismatic authority, value, leadership. Seduction of the exemplary.
Poe's detective: solves the rue Morgue killings << thinking outside the human and economic and also because the signs and traces of the orangutan inspire wonder. Suspension of norms. Tragedy of the ape is like Oedipus.
>> affirmation of fantasy and metafiction as inevitable supplements of realism. Weak thought (Vattimo): the true is rooted in language, interpretation. This is compatible with OOO, which has a kind of wonder. [Hm, I'm not sure, said Tim to himself, at least not the epistemology bit]
Interiorities of animals, objects, plants. Some futures can only be indicated by fantasy, metaphor. Thus there is always the plague, the Sphinx, the Sibyl.
Beauty and horror. Realist or clean nature always a deus ex machina.
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