“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


Thursday, June 1, 2017

You Can Pre-Order Humankind

If you're in the USA, the UK or elsewhere I think you can do it on Amazon. I haven't looked at other places yet.

Look at the nice blurb (that's what the description is in fact called; an endorsement is in fact traditionally a puff!):

A radical call for solidarity between humans and non-humans

What is it that makes humans human? As science and technology challenge the boundaries between life and non-life, between organic and inorganic, this ancient question is more timely than ever. Acclaimed Object-Oriented philosopher Timothy Morton invites us to consider this philosophical issue as eminently political. It is in our relationship with non-humans that we decided the fate of our humanity. Becoming human, claims Morton, actually means creating a network of kindness and solidarity with non-human beings, in the name of a broader understanding of reality that both includes and overcomes the notion of species. Negotiating the politics of humanity is the first and crucial step to reclaim the upper scales of ecological coexistence, not to let Monsanto and cryogenically suspended billionaires to define them and own them.

4 comments:

amanda vox said...

D. E.M. said...

Cryogenically suspended billionaires!!!!
Nice!
I'm so buying this. And putting it on my Moby-Dick course

Ximena said...

Now that through objects (this) we can transcend space & time, has identity become a state of combined human non-human potentiality, impermanent & unlocalised?

karen said...

Sounds fab. I really must catch up with your books Tim. Clearly, I am one of those people that has recognised you as a guide to the new epoch, as this guardian article puts it. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/jun/15/timothy-morton-anthropocene-philosopher.

I am not sure if you ever received a copy of the work of mine that was published in 2015; that includes a chapter on your thinking? Here's a link: http://trove.nla.gov.au/work/208075194?selectedversion=NBD57437185

So good to see the serve of the UK conservatives has been broken, as you so aptly put it.