ECOLOGY WITHOUT NATURE: Suicide and Economics

Wednesday, July 1, 2015

Suicide and Economics

...economics being how you organize your enjoyment. And if it's only organized anthropocentrically, you are limiting it already, right? Anyway, I had written that thing about what Juncker so insensitively said to Greece--given that the actual suicide rate has skyrocketed since “austerity” (which sounds so serious, like the way a sadist looks so serious). Anyway, I had literally just read a sentence or two in Bifo's book Heroes. Have you read it yet? It's really really nice. Anyway, Foxxconn--the factory where the Apple stuff etc. happens and where there is a very large number of suicides. The company tried to prevent the suicides by--guess what--cutting off compensation payments to the families. Their propaganda about it? “Life is precious”--aka you can't even kill yourself, your life is precious to us, we own you.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...: Where is the factory located? Were workers killing themselves to get money for their families? Some company life insurance policies can be as much as $100,000. If your life is miserable, "benefit" can take on more shadowy meanings than some in the west might understand.; July 2, 2015 at 9:52 AM

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

Wednesday, July 1, 2015

Suicide and Economics

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