Shadowing the Anthropocene: Eco-Realism for Turbulent Times. Cover.
Shadowing the Anthropocene: Eco-Realism for Turbulent Times. Cover.
Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0 International License.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Ivakhiv, Adrian. Shadowing the Anthropocene: Eco-Realism for Turbulent Times. California: punctum books, 2018.
A spectre is haunting humanity: the spectre of a reality that will outwit and, in the end, bury us. “The Anthropocene,” or The Human Era, is an attempt to name our geological fate – that we will one day disappear into the layer-cake of Earth’s geology – while highlighting humanity in the starring role of today’s Earthly drama. In Shadowing the Anthropocene, Adrian Ivakhiv proposes an ecological realism that takes as its starting point humanity’s eventual demise. The only question for a realist today, he suggests, is what to do now and what quality of compost to leave behind with our burial.
The book engages with the challenges of the Anthropocene and with a series of philosophical efforts to address them, including those of Slavoj Žižek and Charles Taylor, Graham Harman and Timothy Morton, Isabelle Stengers and Bruno Latour, and William Connolly and Jane Bennett. Along the way, there are volcanic eruptions and revolutions, ant cities and dog parks, data clouds and space junk, pagan gods and sacrificial altars, dark flow, souls (of things), and jazz. (Text from punctum books)
punctum books is an independent, not-for-profit, open-access publisher based in Santa Barbara, California. They operate a Graduated Open Access platform, whereby published books are made freely accessible six months after their release. All works published by punctum books are licensed under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0 International License.
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