“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
A month or so ago Routledge asked me if I'd like to write a book for them, in a theory series. A few weeks ago I said yes, but can I just send you some writing rather than a proposal? I don't do proposals. Luckily I'm at a point where I don't have to do them, either.
I hate them. They've never worked. Chat GPT might do them for me better than I could possibly do, because I just don't know what I'm going to say before I say it, especially at this point, after twenty five or so books where allowing your unconscious mind a wide berth is the whole deal.
I hate fellowship applications and book proposals. I've hardly ever been given a fellowship, because I just don't know how to say what I want to say on those damn forms.
But I do know how to write and last night I wrote the whole thing in a thirty-page scope.
It's a theory of drama. Why, you ask, would an eco philosopher have one? Why indeed...it is indeed an ecological theory of drama.
CNN reproduced some screenshots of his videos, and on the far left you can see "Agenda 21 injections." Injecting people with Agenda 21? Agenda 21 as an injection?
The covid shot was seen as the mark of the Beast.
What is Agenda 21? It's section 21 of the Biodiversity document produced in Rio in 1992, the Earth Summit. America didn't sign on, even. All that paragraph says is, nations should cooperate to promote biodiversity.
The extreme right takes this to mean that a world government of bla bla insert-antisemitic-trope-here will keep the Aryan race from thriving.
Almost every extreme right organization in the USA has a genealogy that can be traced back to hostility to Agenda 21.
George I's America didn't sign on to the document--but you see how not signing on actually fueled the ultra right conspiracy theory? That America was going to be overrun/defeated/etc?
There's more than you'll read on CNN. Why did this bastard think of sailing to the Pacific islands? He assumed they wouldn't mandate the covid shot. Why?
I believe what Derrida liked the most about my first book, Shelley and the Revolution in Taste, was how it discusses the Pacific islanders in the racist imaginary of Europe, how they were seen as embodying the template of the perfect human, an amalgam of Adam and Apollo, Eve and the Venus de Medicis. In other words, discovering whiteness in the pacific, as if to vindicate white supremacy.
The "guru" jerk who did this to actual human beings was most definitely intoxicated with this, I claim.
...along with The Stuff of Life, I'm working on quite a different kind of book. Different, I mean, from every other one I've published. I really didn't know for whom I was writing it, which is a first, and come to think of it, I really didn't know what I was writing either!
This isn't showing off. I write like I sneeze. Often I've had a thought just before I type it. Occasionally I've had thoughts simultaneous with typing them.
But a lot of this book, I kid you not, was typed before I thought the idea. I know people describe writing as a form of reading (I do), but this was ridiculous. Like reading someone else.
It's a book I've written "with" William Blake. "About" seemed wrong. I've been trying to write a "Blake book" since I was nineteen. it took me until last year to figure out that "about" wouldn't work. How could I sit in judgment, however slight, over Blake? Or, how could I write a book filled with the verbal equivalent of arrows: "Now check out this line, it's totally rad!"
Besides, this is a book about the underworld. OOO believes that everything has an underworld. Having an underworld, come to think of it, is a prerequisite to existing at all.
Underworlds require a guide. It's true in Homer, Virgil, Dante, Milton and Blake himself. And any number of religious traditions such as the rolog tradition in Tibet, where people give accounts of near-death experiences.
And I have a companion too: Laura Mvula, my absolutely very very favorite contemporary lyricist and singer. Much analysis of her work in here.
It's called Hell: How to Dance with the Devil on Your Back.
Race is a foundational topic. Race and ecology.
Columbia University Press love it, in fact they loved on it harder than anyone on anything else I've ever done.
They say that among many other things, it's actual theology. (!!!!!) They're going to promote it in all kinds of religious fora along with the regular ones.
Yeah, this is my Fragile Absolute.
Expect more and more on this. I'm really really into it.
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