Timothy Morton: Ecology Without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics (2007)

“In Ecology without Nature, Timothy Morton argues that the chief stumbling block to environmental thinking is the image of nature itself. Ecological writers propose a new worldview, but their very zeal to preserve the natural world leads them away from the “nature” they revere. The problem is a symptom of the ecological catastrophe in which we are living. Morton sets out a seeming paradox: to have a properly ecological view, we must relinquish the idea of nature once and for all.

Ranging widely in eighteenth-century through contemporary philosophy, culture, and history, Morton explores the value of art in imagining environmental projects for the future. Morton develops a vocabulary for reading “environmentality” in artistic form as well as content, and traces the contexts of ecological constructs through the history of capitalism. From John Clare to John Cage, from Kierkegaard to Kristeva, from The Lord of the Rings to electronic life forms, Ecology without Nature extends the view of ecological criticism. Instead of trying to use an idea of nature to heal what society has damaged, Morton sets out a new form of ecological criticism: “dark ecology.””

Publisher Harvard University Press, 2007
ISBN 0674024346, 9780674024342
249 pages

Reviews: Keegan (Studies in Romanticism, 2008), Philips (Oxford Literary Review, 2010), Holmes (Journal of Ecocriticism, 2012).

Author’s blog
Publisher

PDF (updated on 2012-10-31)

Tiqqun: Premiers matériaux pour une Théorie de la Jeune-Fille (1999/2001) [French]

Ceux qui ont réussi à s’aveugler sur le fait pourtant massif de la Jeune-Fille n’en sont pas à une cécité près : ouvrez n’importe quel magazine féminin, vous le verrez bien, la Jeune-Fille n’est pas toujours jeune, n’est pas toujours fille. Elle n’est que la figure de l’intégration totale à une totalité en désintégration. Elle « n’est bonne qu’à consommer ; du loisir ou du travail, qu’importe ».On ne la côtoie pas que sur papier glacé ; elle est le vecteur le plus abouti de la nouvelle organisation sociale et la forme la plus sophistiquée de la mutation anthropotechnique, car elle est la nouvelle physionomie du Capital. Le formatage jeune-filliste se généralise. Ainsi, quand d’aucuns protestent contre l’évidence que le monde n’est pas une marchandise, et d’ailleurs, eux non plus, ils feignent une virginité qui ne justifie que leur impuissance. Tiqqun ne veut ni de cette virginité ni de cette impuissance. Il ouvre dans ces Premiers matériaux la voie à une autre éducation sentimentale.

Originally published in Tiqqun 1, 1999
Revised edition
Publisher Éditions Mille et une nuits, September 2001
La Petite Collection series
ISBN 9782842055905
144 pages

publisher

PDF (no OCR)
English edition (2010)
German edition (2009)

Tiqqun journal, 1-2 (1999-2001) [French/transl.]

Tiqqun was a French journal that published two issues in 1999 and 2001. The authors wrote as an editorial collective of seven people in the first edition and went uncredited in the second edition.

“Tiqqun’s poetic style and radical political engagement are akin to the Situationists and the Lettrists. Tiqqun is relatively accepted in the radical, philosophical milieu, the Situationist and post-Situationist groups, in the ultra-left, the squat and autonomist movements, as well as among some anarchists. Tiqqun is strongly influenced by the work of the italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben.” (Wikipedia)

Reading The Cybernetic Hypothesis (article by Joss Winn, July 2010)
Tiqqun at Bloom0101.org (from IA)
Tiqqun.info

Issue 1 (French, more formats at IA)
Issue 2 (French, more formats at IA)
Trans. of selected texts from issues 1 and 2 (English)
Trans. of selected texts from issues 1 and 2 (English, German, Italian, Spanish, Greek, Portuguese)