“Memory”
In his article for the special section “Living Lexicon for the Environmental Humanities,” Tom Bristow unpacks the concept of memory and the idea of the archive.
In his article for the special section “Living Lexicon for the Environmental Humanities,” Tom Bristow unpacks the concept of memory and the idea of the archive.
In this commentary piece, Donna Haraway calls for the stretching and recomposition of kin and kinship, as all earthlings are kin in the deepest sense. She feels it is past time to practice better care of kinds-as-assemblages (not species one at a time).
In this commentary piece, the six authors attempt to “reboot” or reinstitute a concept close to the heart of the Moderns, namely the assumption that the traditional concept of nature, as developed through modern European history, would no longer be adequate to a future beset by environmental crises.
James Hatley’s article for the ‘Living Lexicon for the Environmental Humanities’ section discusses the horizon of the ‘Aion’ (as formulated in the four geological eons), and the fact that every species is linked in genetic kinship.
In this review essay, Jennifer Hamilton responds to Michael Marder’s book, Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life (2013), exploring three of Marder’s concepts, plant “nourishment,” “desire” and “language,” through readings of Gabrielle de Vietri’s installation The Garden of Bad Flowers (2014), the story of Daphne from Ovid’s Metamorphoses (8 CE) and Alice’s encounter with talking flowers in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There (1871).
In the special section titled “Living Lexicon for the Environmental Section,” Hugo Reinert writes about the history of sacrifice and parses it as violence.
In looking back at Henri Bergson and Samuel Butler through contemporary art, Susan Ballard suggests that in the art gallery can provide an opportunity to locate ourselves in the place of others. She argues that sympathy read alongside machinic evolution can offer a new approach to the ecological disaster of species extinction.
The authors introduce a special section of Environmental Humanities on manifestations of deep time through places, objects, and practices, focusing on three modes through which it is encountered: enchantment, violence, and haunting.
The authors put forward the idea of “speculative geology” to explain the violence inherent in volcanism, drawing on three volcanic episodes and the more recent unexpected striking of magma in Iceland’s Krafla volcanic caldera.
In the context of current concerns within the environmental humanities to challenge the idea that humans are somehow irreducible to nature, the authors in this article take up the much-neglected history of the idea of human exceptionality itself, arguing that this form of humanist discourse often forgets its own contingencies and instabilities, and its comprehensively violent inheritances.