“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, November 11, 2016

Humans without Humanity

Well I've done ecology without Nature, but what about the other half of the false Nature-humanity dyad?

That's why I've written this book for Verso. It's called Humankind: Solidarity with Nonhuman People, and it's almost ready.

I thought you might like the blurb I just wrote:

A specter is haunting the specter of communism: the specter of the nonhuman.

The left is correctly wary of talk about nonhumans in the key of Nature and its spiritual partner, humanity. But if we don't talk about something like them, on the scale where physically vast beings such as global warming exist, we cede this scale--the one on which a planetary ecological politics can happen--to big corporations and their representatives in government.

Humankind is an attempt to think the human species without Nature and without humanity. Smugly titled "brief histories" of this conceptual space are designed precisely to cover over the nothingness Morton calls the symbiotic real--the terrestrial biosphere as such. Humankind is to be found in that nothingness.

Along the way, Morton develops a new non-theistic holism and a theory of revolutionary action not wedded to religion. Humankind also remixes the debate within ideology theory between the earlier and later Marx.

3 comments:

Katy said...

Yay! This looks awesome. Are you going to touch on efforts to establish legal standing/personhood for nonhumans, as in New Zealand's Te Urewera Act, Ecuador's Rights of Nature, the UN's recent report on earth jurisprudence?

angela2a22 said...

Are the Hosts in Westworld strange strangers?

angela2a22 said...

Are the Hosts from Westworld strange strangers? are we programmed just like the Hosts and how do we know we are not?