“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, April 29, 2011

Plastic Bodies against Phenomenology

Bill Benzon, Uncanny Tulip

If that's not the name of a band I want to know why. Tom Sparrow is having it philosophically large on his blog recently and I'm inspired that he's into that part of Ecology without Nature that tries to locate a certain symptom of ecophenomenology, the ambient poetics.

I feel as if I skipped too hastily over phenomenology. It's easy to do with the neon lights of Derrida flashing away in my neck of the humanities. Graham's work convinced me that like many I had not given enough thought to the weirdness of Husserl's discoveries. And intuitively I like using my experience as a heuristic tool.

Now I believe that we need to acknowledge the strangeness of those discoveries, akin in my thinking to Einstein's discovery of spacetime and Freud's discovery of a non-topographical unconscious. At least to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past.

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