This post continues the ethical and political thinking I have shared in some of my eco-theoretical manifestos and asketological writings (including parts of Shadowing the Anthropocene). Its interest in ‘non-fascist life’ takes its lead from critical analysts of fascism including Wilhelm Reich, Erich Fromm, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, and more recent writers […]
Posts Tagged ‘nature’
Toward a non-fascist ecocultural activism
Posted in Manifestos & auguries, Politics, tagged activism, anti-fascism, ecocultural activism, ecocultural identity, ecoculture, fascism, nature, non-fascism, process-relational politics on August 16, 2022 | 3 Comments »
SAR “Nature, Science, Religion” volume out
Posted in Eco-culture, Science & society, Spirit matter, tagged anthropology, cosmopolitics, nature, religion on May 20, 2012 | 1 Comment »
I received my copies in the mail this week of the book that arose out of the School of Advanced Research seminar on “Nature, Science, and Religion: Intersections Shaping Society and the Environment.” It’s a handsome volume, whose contents provide a level of cross-cutting conversation that, I think, is rare among edited collections. Catherine Tucker […]
Nature vs. Grace?
Posted in Cinema, Philosophy, tagged Bakhtin, film, life, Malick, nature, Peirce on July 11, 2011 | 2 Comments »
The latest issue of Precipitate: Journal of the New Environmental Imagination — which looks like an excellent issue — includes a review of Terrence Malick’s “The Tree of Life” that reminds me how important it is to pay attention to the dialogical and heteroglossic texture of Malick’s films, and how easy it is to lose […]
Malick’s tangled bank
Posted in Cinema, Process-relational thought, tagged film, flow, life, Malick, nature on June 27, 2011 | 3 Comments »
It will take some time before I can say anything very intelligible about Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life. But here are some initial thoughts, for what they’re worth. (1) This is the film in which Malick just lets it go, and lets it flow…
The idea of Nature, refigured
Posted in Eco-theory, Philosophy, Spirit matter, tagged nature, Whitehead on May 4, 2011 | 6 Comments »
In defiance of the idea that Nature — the thing, or the idea (capitalized or not), or both — is either dead or unnecessary, I feel like posting some favorite passages from “Nature Alive,” the second of A. N. Whitehead’s two 1933 lectures on nature, published in Modes of Thought (1938/1968), which you can read […]
Religion & the Japanese tragedy
Posted in Eco-culture, Media ecology, Spirit matter, tagged animism, eventology, imagination, Japan tsunami, nature, paganism, pantheism, religion, ritual, Shinto, spirituality on March 16, 2011 | 7 Comments »
Just as the Haitian earthquake was followed by a welter of religious interpretations (fundamentalist Christians blaming sinful Haitians for it, Vodoun practitioners weighing in on the events, etc.), so the Japanese quake-tsunami-meltdown trilogy is offering evidence of humanity’s interpretive propensities. You may have already seen the YouTube troll video satirizing right-wing Christian responses, which scandalized […]
Examining life, trash, & radical nature
Posted in Philosophy, Visual culture, tagged ecology, film, Morton, nature, philosophy, Zizek on February 11, 2011 | 6 Comments »
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iGCfiv1xtoU I enjoyed Astra Taylor’s film Examined Life when I first saw it a couple of years ago, and, having just watched it again, I’m glad to see that it bears re-viewing. As one might expect, some segments are more lasting than others. Slavoj Zizek wearing an orange safety vest talking about ecology at a […]
pictures of light
Posted in Cinema, Visual culture, tagged Iceland, nature, visuality on April 29, 2010 | 2 Comments »
There are some beautiful photographs of Eyjafjallajokull accompanied by the Northern Lights here. (Thanks to Politics Theory Photography for posting on it.) They remind me of one of my favorite films about nature, seeing, and light, Peter Mettler’s Picture of Light (with music by Jim O’Rourke). http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=scUUJWWE34o&hl=en_US&fs=1&
the Event (or, ‘nature at its finest’)
Posted in Cinema, Eco-culture, Media ecology, tagged dark vitalism, event, eventology, Herzog, Iceland, landscape, nature, volcanoes on April 18, 2010 | 5 Comments »
Volcanic eruption films aren’t plentiful enough to make their own genre. Most of them fall into the disaster genre or the straight documentary video. Werner Herzog’s 1977 film La Soufrière, about the anticipated eruption in 1976 of an active volcano on the island of Guadeloupe, is different. Like his quasi-science-fictional films — Fata Morgana, Lessons […]
the horror…
Posted in Cinema, Spirit matter, Visual culture, tagged nature on March 8, 2010 | 2 Comments »
I went to see Lars von Trier’s Antichrist a few days ago. Of the reviews I’ve read, Brent Plate’s captures the way in which the film’s images persist in haunting one’s consciousness. Plate, aptly I think, compares the film to Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will, the film that Adolf Hitler called “an incomparable glorification […]
weird life, shadow biospheres, dark signs… & quakes
Posted in Media ecology, Philosophy, Spirit matter, tagged cosmos, nature, Peirce, semiosis, theology on February 27, 2010 | 23 Comments »
The Biology Blog’s post on shadow biospheres intrigued me in part because I’ve been reading Charles Sanders Peirce, for whom semiosis is writ large (and small) throughout all things. Musing philosophically about the search for life on other planets, the author, cyoungbull, writes, “Unless we know how to interpret the signs of such life, we […]