Immanence suggests co-implication, the implication of one thing in another (spirit in matter, mind in body, movement in repose, humans in nature), nonduality, the vitality of becoming rather than the stasis of being, the sufficiency of life in its generative relational flux, its vessels of light scattered for our gathering in each moment of darkness.<\/p>\n
Philosophers of immanence, from Heraclitus and Nagarjuna<\/a> to Spinoza<\/a>, Whitehead<\/a>, and Deleuze<\/a>, find inspiration in the middle of things, the moment-to-moment movement of thought, awareness, connection, action, rather than in large, transcendent, ventriloquistic forces (such as ideologies, ultimate causes, or apocalyptic narratives).<\/p>\n Immanence suggests a continuity and empathic resonance rippling between things. \u201cWhen we try to pick out anything by itself,\u201d John Muir<\/a> wrote, \u201cwe find it hitched to everything else in the universe.\u201d This could have well been written by Nagarjuna or by Jacques Derrida<\/a> in an errant wander outside the text (as his later writings often did). Derrida may be popularly known for saying that “il n-y a pas d’hors-text,” or “there is no outside-the-text,” but his writings on ethics, religion, politics, and animality make clear that this “no outside” is more akin to a Zen koan or Nagarjuna’s “emptiness” than to a denial of bodies, spirits, and whatever else. Like Muir, both Derrida and Nagarjuna posit a world of what Buddhists call “codependent arising<\/a>” (and see here<\/a>), where things, ideas, and selves arise and make sense only in relation to others in a process of ceaseless becoming, the rhizomic connectivity of “and… and,” as Deleuze and Guattari put it, rather than the binarism of “either\/or.”<\/p>\n This blog, like that process, will seek connections between environmental philosophy, cultural theory (especially in its poststructuralist and postconstructivist variants), and sciences and philosophies of the east, the west, and the ne(i)ther (the postcolonial, the fourth world, et al) — connections to help make sense of the world in its current states of unrest, swerve, systemic shift, transition, and (r)evolution.<\/p>\n (“Really, (r)evolution toward what?” you ask. How about to a socially and ecologically sustainable, post-carbon, self-renewing, radically democratic, globally just, and bioregionally diverse society. Murray Bookchin, I think, had spoken about utopianism being a necessity in our time. That would be effective, informing, inspiring, as opposed to pie-in-the-sky dreamy utopianism.)<\/p>\n An ethic of immanence is one of responsiveness shimmering across animate bodies to feel the collective breathing, the communion of subjectivity.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Immanence suggests co-implication, the implication of one thing in another (spirit in matter, mind in body, movement in repose, humans in nature), nonduality, the vitality of becoming rather than the stasis of being, the sufficiency of life in its generative relational flux, its vessels of light scattered for our gathering in each moment of darkness. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":99,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[688977],"tags":[4411,4410],"class_list":["post-1008","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-geo_philosophy","tag-connolly","tag-immanent-naturalism"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4IC4a-gg","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":1012,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2008\/12\/14\/immanence-transcendence-religion-imagination-politics\/","url_meta":{"origin":1008,"position":0},"title":"immanence, transcendence, religion, imagination, politics","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"December 14, 2008","format":false,"excerpt":"On the surface, \"immanence\" would appear to favor certain religiosities (paganisms, pantheisms, animisms, earth spiritualities) over others (transcendentalist monotheisms, rigid dualisms, Buddhist \"extinctionism,\" et al). But its resonance works within traditions as well: towards panentheistic strains of Christianity, where the Christ is seen as in-dwelling, where Easter is the rebirth\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Eco-theory"","block_context":{"text":"Eco-theory","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/ecophilosophy\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":2100,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2011\/01\/03\/planes-of-immanence\/","url_meta":{"origin":1008,"position":1},"title":"Planes of immanence","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"January 3, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"\"Concepts are like multiple waves, rising and falling, but the plane of immanence is the single wave that rolls them up and unrolls them. ... Concepts are the archipelago or skeletal frame, a spinal column rather than a skull, whereas the plane is the breath that suffuses the separate parts.\"\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Philosophy"","block_context":{"text":"Philosophy","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/geo_philosophy\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2011\/01\/blb31-400x266.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":1024,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2009\/01\/24\/atheism-and-immanence\/","url_meta":{"origin":1008,"position":2},"title":"atheism and immanence","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"January 24, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"Here's an interesting conversation developing on nature and immanence on an atheist blog. Incidentally, I liked Obama's nod to non-Christians and \"non-believers\" in his inauguration speech. It felt like a refreshing breath of fresh air in the constricted atmosphere of American public religious discourse. With the recent growth of religious\/spiritual\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Spirit matter"","block_context":{"text":"Spirit matter","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/religion-spirituality\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":6415,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2013\/01\/07\/immanence-goes-to-scoop-it\/","url_meta":{"origin":1008,"position":3},"title":"Immanence goes to Scoop.it","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"January 7, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"The Immanence Shadow Blog -- that space where I scoop up little things of interest found on the internet -- has been reinvented and reloaded as scoop.it\/t\/immanence. You can subscribe to it here. The latest piece I've added is the following bit of prescient (or perhaps eternally relevant) American humor:\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Blog stuff"","block_context":{"text":"Blog stuff","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/blog_stuff\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/img.youtube.com\/vi\/CLjNJI54GMM\/0.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":1386,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2010\/12\/03\/welcome-to-immanence-2-0\/","url_meta":{"origin":1008,"position":4},"title":"welcome to immanence 2.0","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"December 3, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"This is the new, improved version of Immanence. If you came here from the old one and had been a feed subscriber, blogroll linker, or just a regular reader of that one, I would love it if you'd do the same here. I'll still be tweaking things here and there\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Blog stuff"","block_context":{"text":"Blog stuff","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/blog_stuff\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1493,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2010\/12\/10\/immanence-seeks-poetry-editor\/","url_meta":{"origin":1008,"position":5},"title":"immanence seeks poetry editor","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"December 10, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"With its migration and re-emergence on a new (and improved) server, it's a good time for this blog to diversify and transubstantiate, like water into a good Mediterranean wine. To that end, Immanence seeks a poetry editor, someone to collect and\/or produce textual and visual poetry as an accompaniment and\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Blog stuff"","block_context":{"text":"Blog stuff","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/blog_stuff\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2010\/12\/vancouver-zen1-240x175.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1008","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/99"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1008"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1008\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1008"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1008"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1008"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}