73 Emmanuel Levinas argues that the reality of Being is “strangeness”: see Existence and Existents, trans. Alphonso Lingis, foreword by Robert Bernasconi (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1988), 9.
74 OS, 106.
75 Donald Rumsfeld, Defense Department Briefing, February 12, 2002, defenselink.mil/transcripts/transcript.aspx?transcriptid=2636.
76 OB, 93; see TI, 24, 39, 40, 50–51, 75, 187–193, 197–201; “Interview,” in Animal Philosophy: Ethics and Identity, ed. Peter Atterton and Matthew Calarco (London: Continuum, 2007), 49–50; OB, 12–13, 49, 69, 87–88. On several occasions, Levinas leaves the door open for nonhuman beings, explicitly or implicitly (for instance, in explorations of the caress and of carnality): TI, 156, 199, 213–214, 256–259, 270, 272, 276–277.
77 Mary Anning (1799–1847) discovered the skeleton of an ichthyosaur at Lyme Regis, Dorset, England, in 1811.
78 “Natural beauty, purportedly ahistorical, is at its core historical.” Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. and ed. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 65.
79 William Van Orman Quine, “Identity, Ostension, and Hypostasis,” Journal of Philosophy 48, no. 22 (October 1950): 621–633 (621–622).
80 OS, 63.
81 “Laws of Variation,” in OS, 108–139.
82 See Richard Dawkins, The View from Mount Improbable (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2005); AT, 602.
83 Pallab Ghosh, “Gene Therapy ‘Aids Youth’s Sight,’” BBC News, April 28, 2008, news.bbc.co.uk /1/hi/health/7369740.stm.
84 AT, 190; EP, 175.
85 DDI, 98–100.
86 DM, 30–32.
87 DM, 32–34.
88 Darwin, Expression, 87 (Erkman’s note).
89 Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man (London: Harper Perennial, 1975). AT travels backward “toward” common ancestors (or “conces-tors”). Stephen Jay Gould argued that if one were to “wind back and play the tape” of evolution forward again, humans wouldn’t necessarily appear. This isn’t as strange as it may seem. See DDI, 300, 305–307, 321.
90 EP, 30.
91 The most ruthless discussion is John Carey, What Good Are the Arts? (London: Faber and Faber, 2005).
92 Quoted in DDI, 62. See Gillian Beer in OS, xxvii–xviii.
93 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Coleridge’s Poetry and Prose, ed. Nicholas Halmi, Paul Magnuson, and Raimona Modiano (New York: Norton, 2004).
94 I base my argument about “thereness” on Levinas, Existence and Existents, 51–60.
95 DM, 687.
96 Two prominent recent theorists of “coexistentialism” are Levinas and Luce Irigaray. See TI; Luce Irigaray, The Way of Love, trans. Heidi Bostic and Stephen Pluhácek (London: Continuum, 2002).
97 I support a Levinasian reading of Coleridge’s poem. Though Life-in-Death is a misogynist image, there is an aspect that might help the ecological thought. This aspect is the femininity of the face, in its horrifying combination of cosmetics and rotten flesh. This femininity is weakness and vulnerability, and it is this that the Mariner cannot face. See my analysis on the Romantic Circles blog, in particular rc.umd.edu/blog_rc/?m=200808 and rc.umd.edu/blog_rc/?m=200807.
98 See TI, 37, 88.
99 This poem, along with Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, is from Wordsworth and Coleridge’s radical collection, Lyrical Ballads.
100 The most powerful writing on this aspect of the poem, and its ecological and philosophical, not to mention political, ramifications, is Marjorie Levinson, “Romantic Criticism: The State of the Art,” in At the Limits of Romanticism: Essays in Cultural, Feminist, and Materialist Criticism, ed. Mary Favret and Nicola Watson (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 269–281.
101 OB, 18.
102 “Strange distortion” is Shelley’s phrase for the emergence of Rousseau as if from a tree root in The Triumph of Life (183). Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, ed. Donald H. Reiman and Neil Fraistat (New York: Norton, 2002).
103 John Clare, Major Works, ed. Eric Robinson and David Powell, intro. by Tom Paulin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).
104 “Sexpools” are holes full of water formed during the cutting of turf.
105 Rem Koolhaas, “Junkspace,” October 100 (Spring 2002): 175–190.
106 TI, 130–132 (131), 141–142.
107 TI, 132.
108 TI, 74.
109 TI, 139.
110 EP, 200, 233–234; AT, 193–198.
111 OS, 194.
112 Georges Bataille, “Animality,” in Animal Philosophy, ed. Atterton and Calarco, 32–36 (34).
113 Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1953), 17:218–252 (237).
114 Section 1 of Levinas’s TI is strong on this (33–105).
115 AT, 551.
116 AT, 552.
117 The Cure, “A Forest,” Seventeen Seconds (Elektra/Asylum, 1980).
118 Christopher Bollas defines “normosis” as the opposite of psychosis. In psychosis, there is only the inner life; in normosis, the inner life has been evacuated. The Shadow of the Object: Psychoanalysis of the Unthought Known (London: Free Association Press, 1996), 135–156. Modern life codes for normosis.
119 See Clara Van Zanten, “John Ashbery and the Weather of History” (PhD diss., University of California, Davis, 2010).
120 Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. Tom Conley (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 5.
121 See Timothy Morton, “Waste of Time,” ecologywithoutnature.blogspot. com/2009/06/waste-of-time.html.
122 Timothy Morton, “Fiddlers on the Roof,” ecologywithoutnature.blogspot .com/2009/03/fiddlers-on-roof.html.
123 Timothy Morton, The Poetics of Spice: Romantic Consumerism and the Exotic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 105–106.
124 Timothy Morton, “Environmentalism,” in Romanticism: An Oxford Guide, ed. Nicholas Roe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 696–707 (699); Morton, The Poetics of Spice, 8–9, 32, 51–55, 104.
125 Kim Stanley Robinson, Green Mars (New York: Bantam, 1994), 3.
126 Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 15–87 (26).
2. DARK THOUGHTS
1 See EwN, 181–197.
2 Stanley Kubrick, Dir., 2001: A Space Odyssey (MGM, 1968).
3 OS, 5.
4 EP, 59–60.
5 AT, 218.
6 OS, 51.
7 OS, 53.
8 AT, 266–267.
9 OS, 141.
10 OS, 251.
11 OS, 100.
12 Derrida only left a few tantalizing phrases about Darwin. Colin Milburn, “Monsters in Eden: Darwin and Derrida,” Modern Language Notes 118 (2003): 603–621.
13 See, for example, Felipe Fernández-Armesto, So You Think You’re Human? A Brief History of Humankind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 4.
14 See DDI, 266.
15 OS, 34; Gillian Beer, Introduction, OS, xix.
16 OS, 163.
17 AT, 309–313.
18 AT, 316–317.
19 See AT, 319–320. Dawkins admits as much but is wary of the conclusion.
20 OS, 34–35.
21 William Van Orman Quine, “Identity, Ostension, and Hypostasis,” Journal of Philosophy 48:22 (October 1950): 621–633 (621–622).
22 OS, 44. Darwin calls this the problem of “incipient species.”
23 DDI, 100.
24 OS, 9.
25 OS 109, 131, 133.
26 OS, 94.
27 DDI, 281.
28 AT, 405.
29 AT, 406.
30 OS, 352; see also 162–163.
31 OS, 387.
32 OS, 351. Darwin’s observation contradicts the beliefs of the Nature Philosophers, such as Oken. Paradoxically, protoplasm or
Urschleim is the substance of idealism. See Slavoj Žižek, In Defense of Lost Causes (London: Verso, 2008), 444, 452.
33 AT, 325–329.
34 OS, 364.
35 OS, 367.
36 Sigmund Freud, “A Note upon the Mystic Writing Pad,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth, 1953), 9:225–232. See Jacques Derrida, “Freud and the Scene of Writing,” Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978), 196–231.
37 Charles Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, intro., afterword, and commentary by Paul Erkman (London: Harper Collins, 1999); AT, 197.
38 See OS, 259.
39 OS, 160.
40 OS, 165.
41 OS, 164–165.
42 See OB, 23, 42. “Monstration” doesn’t exactly oppose Levinas’s “face,” because then a metaphysical inside–outside distinction would arise. See Jean Greisch, “The Face and Reading: Immediacy and Mediation,” in Re-Reading Levinas, ed. Robert Berlasconi and Simon Critchley (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 67–82 (77).
43 See OS, 43.
44 OS, 102.
45 OS, 94.
46 OS, 93.
47 OS, 105–106.
48 OED, “chimera,” n. 2: “A grotesque monster, formed of the parts of various animals.” The word has various biological definitions: see also n. 3.d.: “An organism (commonly a plant) in which tissues of genetically different constitution coexist as a result of grafting, mutation, or some other process.” The dictionary cites a 1968 issue of Nature: “Mouse chimaeras obtained by the injection of cells into the blastocyst.” See DDI, 286–288. See also Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, ed. Marie-Louise Mallet, trans. David Wills (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 23, 41–47.
49 OS, 161.
50 OS, 40.
51 OS, 40, 41.
52 AT, 530; see also 312–313.
53 EP, 156.
54 See Slavoj Žižek, The Indivisible Remainder: An Essay on Schelling and Related Matters (London: Verso, 1996). This idea is related to Deleuze’s reworking of Spinoza, who proved that matter moves of its own accord.
55 AT, 582–594.
56 This is the view of Graham Cairns-Smith. See DDI, 157–158 (the quotation comes from 205); AT, 581–582.
57 Douglas Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 541–543. The viral sentence (known as a Henkin sentence) sounds amazingly like Lacan’s “ilyade l’un.”
58 Przemyslaw Prusinkiewicz and Aristid Lindenmayer, The Algorithmic Beauty of Plants, with James S. Hanan, F. David Fracchia, Deborah Fowler, Martin J. M. de Boer, and Lynn Mercer (Przemyslaw Prusinkiewicz, 2004), available at algorithmicbotany.org/papers/.
59 AT, 273–275.
60 OS, 68.
61 DM, 444–451.
62 DM, 449.
63 DM, 449–450.
64 J. David Smith, “The Study of Animal Metacognition,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 13, no. 9 (September, 2009): 389–396.
65 DM, 89, 92–93, 95–96.
66 DM, 408.
67 DM, 151.
68 We share this with chimps. See DDI, 379–380.
69 Fernández-Armesto, So You Think You’re Human? 54.
70 DM, 375.
71 Alan M. Turing, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” in PAI, 40–66.
72 Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach, 680.
73 See, for example, DM, 244, 246. See also John Bellamy Foster, Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000).
74 Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, trans. E. F. J. Payne, 2 vols. (New York: Dover Publications, 1969), 1.88–91, 1.249.
75 Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch, The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 208–211.
76 Turing, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” 55.
77 John Searle, “Minds, Brains, and Programs,” in PAI, 67–88 (78, 79–80); Margaret A. Boden, “Escaping from the Chinese Room,” in PAI, 89–104 (100).
78 See DDI, 205–207.
79 See DDI, 370.
80 AT, 406.
81 AT, 484–485.
82 Karl Marx, Capital, trans. Ben Fowkes (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990), 1.284.
83 Searle, “Minds, Brains, and Programs,” 80.
84 Stanley Kubrick, dir., The Shining (Hawk Films, 1976).
85 See Malcolm Bull, “Where Is the Anti-Nietzsche?” New Left Review 3, 2nd ser. (May–June 2000): 121–145.
86 Jacques Lacan, Le seminaire, Livre III: Les psychoses (Paris: Editions de Seuil, 1981), 48. See Slavoj Žižek, The Parallax View (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 206.
87 DM, 211.
88 OS, 335.
89 OED, “chimera,” n. 3.b.
90 Werner Herzog, dir., Grizzly Man (Discovery Docs, 2005).
91 Judy Irving, dir., The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill (Pelican Media, 2003).
92 Arne Naess, Ecology, Community, and Lifestyle: Outline of an Ecosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 74.
93 Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. Tom Conley (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 5.
94 William Blake, The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. D. V. Erdman (New York: Doubleday, 1988).
95 Georg Wilhelm Freidrich Hegel, “Jenaer Realphilosophie,” in Fruehe politische Systeme, ed. Gerhard Göhler (Frankfurt: Ullstein, 1974), 201–289 (204).
96 George Morrison, The Weaving of Glory (Grand Rapids, MI: Kregel Publications, 1994), 106.
97 Steven Spielberg, dir., AI (Warner Brothers, 2001).
98 Jonathan Frakes, dir., Star Trek: First Contact (Paramount Pictures, 1996).
99 The Prelude 5.557–591. William Wordsworth, The Major Works: Including the Prelude, ed. Stephen Gill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).
100 This idea is part of Derrida’s concept of différance and of Wolfgang Iser’s literary theory: see Wolfgang Iser, The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), 33.
101 Wolfgang Iser, The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), 206–207.
102 Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology, trans. and ed. Hazel Barnes (New York: The Philosophical Library, 1969), 341–347 (343).
103 TI, 25–27, 51, 62, 80, 150–151, 170–171, 199, 207, 258–259, 290–292. The Dalai Lama concurs (“others are infinity”): “Universal Responsibility in the Modern World,” Royal Albert Hall, London, May 22, 2008; see furhhdl.org.
104 Georges Bataille: “The animal opens before me a depth that attracts me and is familiar to me.” “Animality,” in Animal Philosophy: Ethics and Identity, ed. Peter Atterton and Matthew Calarco (London: Continuum, 2007), 32–36 (35). TI is a landmark of investigation. Mutual recognition is a vital part of the ethics of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller, analysis and foreword by J. N. Findlay (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 110.
105 Luce Irigaray, “Animal Compassion,” in Animal Philosophy, ed. Atterton and Calarco, 195–201 (201).
106 See Jean-François Lyotard, Peregrinations: Law, Form, Event (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 5; The Inhuman: Reflections on Time, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 19.
107 Turing, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence.”
108 See David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder, “Narrative Prosthesis and the Materiality of Metaphor,” in The Disability Studies Reader, ed. Lennard Davis (London: Routledge, 2006), 205–217; “Compulsory Able-Bodiedness and Queer/ Disabled Existence,” in ibid., 301–308.
109 Hegel, “Jenaer Realphilosophie,” 204.
1
10 See TI, 158.
111 TI, 170.
112 TI, 199.
113 See Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London: Routledge, 1990).
114 EP, 156.
115 Scott LaFee, “Online-World Immersion Probes ‘Possibilities of Transformation.’ ” The San Diego Union-Tribune, December 12, 2008, signonsandiego .com/stories/2008/dec/21/1a21virtual162313-online-world-immersion-probes-po/ ?uniontrib.
116 Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild (New York: Anchor, 2007). Sean Penn, dir., Into the Wild (Paramount Vantage, 2007).
117 See TI, 192–193, 200.
118 Joan Roughgarden, Evolution’s Rainbow: Diversity, Gender, and Sexuality in Nature and People (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 27, 34–35.
119 Ibid., 36.
120 Claude Nuridsany and Marie Pérennou, dirs., Microcosmos: Le peuple de l’herbe (Agencie Jules Verne, 1997); DM, 303–304.
121 OS, 76–79; DM, 257.
122 AT, 626.
123 EP, 160.
124 EP, 156; Roughgarden, Evolution’s Rainbow, 26–27.
125 EP, 263–264.
126 Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach, 360–361, 613–614.
127 For further discussion of speciesism, see Cary Wolfe, Animal Rites: American Culture, the Discourse of Species, and Posthumanist Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 33–38.
128 DM, 188–189.
129 DM, 191.
130 DM, 189.
131 See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, “1914: One or Several Wolves?” in A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 26–38. Donna Haraway harries them in When Species Meet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007).
132 See Donna Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003).
133 See G. J. Barker Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).
134 Andrew Stanton, dir., Wall•E(Pixar A nimation Studios, 2008).
135 See Anne-Lise François, “‘O Happy Living Things’: Frankenfoods and the Bounds of Wordsworthian Natural Piety,” diacritics 33, no. 2 (Summer 2003): 42–70.
136 Wo Es war, soll Ich werden (Where Id was, there shall Ego be). Sigmund Freud, Lecture 31, “The Dissection of the Psychical Personality,” New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis (New York: Norton, 1989), 71–100 (99–100).
The Ecological Thought Page 19