“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


Friday, February 20, 2015

Blackmail

"Either you are a feminist, critical race theorist, postcolonialist.

"Or you talk about nonhumans.

"With us--or against us?"
With all good wishes as ever,
Critical Inquiry


3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I hate it.

It happens in the animal-liberation world all the time. Those of us who work to better conditions for farm animals are always called out for being "welfarist" (a horrendous moniker in our circles), when we do so much of the heavy lifting. Compromising with the meat industry is horrific, but it gets the animals some semblance of life.
Oh, and there's no outside to this fuckedup inside (as hyperobjects argues).


I'm rambling. I just don't get the drawing of battle lines when we're all on the same side for the earth & its creatures.

Anonymous said...

Right on. It's why the whole OOO thing is so important. What's going on is that many of the people who consider themselves politically radical are actually thinking well within status quo epistemology, which is basically pre-Copernican as far as our understanding of the place of the human in the world is concerned. The supposedly "radical" rhetoric they use also carries a lot of weight, just as epistemology does in Academia. Thou shalt not contradict or undermine their status quo, or else you're a filthy animal slaughtering colonialist woman-beating white supremacist, and worse...an intellectual. Shudder shudder.

Anonymous said...

Pre-Copernican! Oh that is such a good jab.