{"id":2605,"date":"2011-02-11T12:09:33","date_gmt":"2011-02-11T17:09:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/?p=2605"},"modified":"2011-05-27T08:54:56","modified_gmt":"2011-05-27T13:54:56","slug":"examining-life-trash-radical-nature","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2011\/02\/11\/examining-life-trash-radical-nature\/","title":{"rendered":"Examining life, trash, &amp; radical nature"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span class=\"embed-youtube\" style=\"text-align:center; display: block;\"><iframe loading=\"lazy\" class=\"youtube-player\" width=\"500\" height=\"282\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/iGCfiv1xtoU?version=3&#038;rel=1&#038;showsearch=0&#038;showinfo=1&#038;iv_load_policy=1&#038;fs=1&#038;hl=en-US&#038;autohide=2&#038;wmode=transparent\" allowfullscreen=\"true\" style=\"border:0;\" sandbox=\"allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-popups allow-presentation allow-popups-to-escape-sandbox\"><\/iframe><\/span><\/p>\n<p>I enjoyed Astra Taylor&#8217;s film <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nfb.ca\/film\/examined-life-trailer\">Examined Life<\/a> when I first saw it a couple of years ago, and, having just watched it again, I&#8217;m glad to see that it bears re-viewing.<\/p>\n<p>As one might expect, some segments are more lasting than others. Slavoj Zizek wearing an orange safety vest talking about ecology at a London trash heap (above) is the most brilliantly conceived segment, and one gets to hear the full (and in its own way brilliant) <a href=\"http:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2009\/11\/24\/zizek-and-his-others\/\">incoherence<\/a> of his position on the topic. &#8220;The true ecological attitude is to hate the world: less love, more hatred,&#8221; as he puts it in the full interview (available in the\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/books.google.com\/books?id=-qX-Q281tzkC&amp;pg=PA155&amp;lpg=PA155&amp;dq=%22examined+life%22+slavoj+trash+ecology&amp;source=bl&amp;ots=75KIEhnEBD&amp;sig=x8-ZQsU1sVBpDHlZy8fv3G6AV9E&amp;hl=en&amp;ei=o0hVTd-IM8fUgQfg3YCcDQ&amp;sa=X&amp;oi=book_result&amp;ct=result&amp;resnum=6&amp;ved=0CDcQ6AEwBQ#v=onepage&amp;q&amp;f=false\">book-of-the-film,<\/a> p. 180).<\/p>\n<p><!--more-->The complete interview shows that Taylor didn&#8217;t let him off the hook easily, but that, realizing they won&#8217;t arrive at any agreement on ecology, she wisely tried to move on. When pressed, and despite himself, Zizek of course ends up saying things we can all agree on, such as that his &#8220;ecology without nature&#8221; is one in which &#8220;You are aware that you are in an open process where the consequences of your acts are ultimately unpredictable.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Zizek &#8212; and <a href=\"http:\/\/ecologywithoutnature.blogspot.com\/\">Tim Morton<\/a> and others who&#8217;ve taken up that argument &#8212; are right that nature, in the age of Disney, has become too soppy-sentimental, too &#8220;harmonic.&#8221; But the long tradition of so-called &#8220;nature writing&#8221; (a term I&#8217;ve never\u00a0 liked), from Thoreau and Muir to Loren Eiseley, Annie Dillard, and Terry Tempest Williams, is all about radical openness to what happens, not about the kind of predictable smoothening of life&#8217;s edges that Zizek disdains. Critiquing the first (Disney nature) is fair and useful, but pretending the second (radical nature) isn&#8217;t there is sloppy. Radical nature includes dark nature <em>and<\/em> bright nature, alongside inexplicable nature,\u00a0 crossed-out nature, nature <em>sous rature<\/em>, <span style=\"text-decoration: line-through\">nature<\/span>. To the extent that nature is conceived <em>not<\/em> as part of a duality set against culture, with one or the other triumphing in the dyadic boxing ring, but as the sense of how things are in their reliable groundedness (the kind that underpins mortality in its joys and its sorrows) <em>and<\/em> radical unencompassability, to that extent it&#8217;s still a useful concept.<\/p>\n<p>Next to Zizek, <em>Examined Life<\/em>&#8216;s best segments are Cornel West extemporizing from the backseat of a taxicab and Judith Butler strolling with artist and disability rights activist Sunauara Taylor through San Francisco&#8217;s Mission District. Timothy Stanley provides nice summaries of the film&#8217;s ten or so segments <a href=\"http:\/\/timothywstanley.com\/blog\/examined-life.html\">on his blog<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I enjoyed Astra Taylor&#8217;s film Examined Life when I first saw it a couple of years ago, and, having just watched it again, I&#8217;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 London [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":99,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","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":[688977,689354],"tags":[4420,352,17807,4470,16824,377],"class_list":["post-2605","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-geo_philosophy","category-image_nation","tag-ecology","tag-film","tag-morton","tag-nature","tag-philosophy","tag-zizek"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4IC4a-G1","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":1160,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2009\/11\/30\/more-on-zizek-natures-discontents\/","url_meta":{"origin":2605,"position":0},"title":"more on \u017di\u017eek &amp; nature&#8217;s discontents","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"November 30, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"It's interesting to watch a topic spin itself out rhizomically across the blogosphere. Picking up on \u017di\u017eek's ecological musings, Levi Bryant seems more or less in agreement with what I had argued here last week, as does Michael Austin, while Ben Woodard criticizes the narrowing of the \"ecology of concepts\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;Philosophy&quot;","block_context":{"text":"Philosophy","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/geo_philosophy\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1159,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2009\/11\/24\/zizek-and-his-others\/","url_meta":{"origin":2605,"position":1},"title":"\u017di\u017eek and his Others","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"November 24, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"Speaking here at the University of Vermont last Friday, Slavoj \u017di\u017eek responded to a student query about where to study Lacanianism by lauding our Film and Television Studies Program as the only one anywhere at which Lacanians are actually \"in power\" -- the current chair, former chair, and at least\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;Philosophy&quot;","block_context":{"text":"Philosophy","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/geo_philosophy\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"images.jpg","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2009\/11\/images.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":1358,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2010\/10\/25\/on-buddhism-objects-zizek-morton-etc\/","url_meta":{"origin":2605,"position":2},"title":"on Buddhism, objects, Zizek, Morton, etc.","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"October 25, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"I've been meaning to catch up on the discussions over Buddhism and objects\/relations, Slavoj Zizek's critique of \"Western Buddhism,\" and related topics, which have been continuing on Tim Morton's Ecology Without Nature, Jeffrey Bell's Aberrant Monism, Skholiast's Speculum Criticum Traditionis, and elsewhere. I haven't quite caught up, but here are\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;Politics&quot;","block_context":{"text":"Politics","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/politics_postpolitics\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":2174,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2011\/01\/08\/religious-returns-in-the-wake-of-global-nature\/","url_meta":{"origin":2605,"position":3},"title":"Religious (re)turns in the wake of global nature","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"January 8, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"I'm reorganizing the piece I wrote for the School of Advanced Research workshop on science, nature, and religion so that part of it will fit into the introduction of the book we are producing (which I'm co-writing with the workshop organizer and chair, Catherine Tucker) and the rest will make\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;Cultural politics&quot;","block_context":{"text":"Cultural politics","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/cultural_politics\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1241,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2010\/04\/14\/archive-fire\/","url_meta":{"origin":2605,"position":4},"title":"archive fire","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"April 14, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"Michael at the wonderfully named Archive Fire blog has been posting about a lot of the same topics that I try to cover here. (The top five categories in his tag cloud are Ecology, Power, Praxis, Sentience, and Theory.) In his words, Archive Fire explores issues \"from critical theory, fringe\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;Blog stuff&quot;","block_context":{"text":"Blog stuff","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/blog_stuff\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":14251,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2025\/09\/05\/love-land-war-and-ecology-ukrainian-style\/","url_meta":{"origin":2605,"position":5},"title":"Love, land, war, and ecology, Ukrainian-style","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"September 5, 2025","format":false,"excerpt":"The nearly 400-page, richly illustrated anthology Terra Invicta: Ukrainian Wartime Reimaginings for a Habitable Earth, which I conceived and edited as part of a Fulbright award held in Berlin (originally meant to be held in Ukraine, but displaced due to the war), is now available for pre-ordering. Please encourage your\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;Eco-culture&quot;","block_context":{"text":"Eco-culture","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/ecoculture\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv-ukrtaz\/files\/2025\/09\/Screenshot-2025-09-04-at-12.51.50%E2%80%AFPM-680x1024.png?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv-ukrtaz\/files\/2025\/09\/Screenshot-2025-09-04-at-12.51.50%E2%80%AFPM-680x1024.png?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv-ukrtaz\/files\/2025\/09\/Screenshot-2025-09-04-at-12.51.50%E2%80%AFPM-680x1024.png?resize=525%2C300&ssl=1 1.5x"},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2605","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=2605"}],"version-history":[{"count":18,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2605\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4283,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2605\/revisions\/4283"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2605"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2605"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2605"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}