137 Timothy Morton, The Poetics of Spice: Romantic Consumerism and the Exotic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 8–9. Fernand Braudel, The Perspective of the World: Vol. 3. Civilization and Capitalism (New York: Harper & Row, 1984).
138 Arthur Rimbaud, letter to Paul Demeny, May 15, 1871, in Rimbaud: Complete Works, Selected Letters: A Bilingual Edition, ed. Seth Whidden, trans. Wallace Fowlie (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 374.
139 Percy Shelley, Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, ed. Donald H. Reiman and Neil Fraistat (New York: Norton, 2002).
140 Daniel C. Dennett, “Cognitive Wheels: The Frame Problem of AI,” in PAI, 147–170 (158).
141 “Neanderthals Speak Again after 30,000 Years,” ScienceDaily, April 21, 2008, sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/04/080421154426.htm.
142 See Fernández-Armesto, So You Think You’re Human? 129–130.
143 Steven Mithen, “The Evolution of Imagination: An Archaeological Perspective,” SubStance 94/95 (2001): 28–54 (43–44). For a counterargument, see Fernández-Armesto, So You Think You’re Human? 24, 135.
144 “‘Complexity�� of Neanderthal Tools,” BBC News, August 26, 2008, news .bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7582912.stm.
145 Fernández-Armesto, So You Think You’re Human? 132–133.
146 Herbert A. Simon, The Sciences of the Artificial (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 51–53.
147 Hubert L. Dreyfus and Stuart E. Dreyfus, “Making a Mind versus Modeling the Brain: Artificial Intelligence Back at a Branch-Point,” in PAI, 309–333 (328); some AI research approaches the assertion that we can program prejudice, such as a sense of family and nationality (328–329)—who knew?
148 Ibid., 328, 331.
149 Fernández-Armesto, So You Think You’re Human? 65.
150 See Jared Diamond, The Third Chimpanzee (New York: Harper Perennial, 2006).
151 Mike Scully, “Beyond Blunderdome,” The Simpsons, dir. Steven Dean Moore (Fox, September 26, 1999).
152 DM, 210.
153 AT, 469.
154 William Golding, The Inheritors (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1955), 223–233.
155 Jean M. Auel, The Clan of the Cave Bear (New York: Bantam, 2002).
156 Like “Old Man Travelling,” “The Idiot Boy” first appeared in Wordsworth and Coleridge’s radical, experimental collection, Lyrical Ballads. My discussion is informed by Avital Ronell, Stupidity (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002).
157 DM, 100; OS, 169.
158 Ronell, Stupidity, 252–253.
159 The decisive study is David Simpson, Wordsworth, Commodifi cation, and Social Concern: The Poetics of Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
160 For a compelling discussion of the Müsselman, see Slavoj Žižek, “Neighbors and Other Monsters: A Plea for Ethical Violence,” in Slavoj Žižek, Eric L. Santner, and Kenneth Reinhard, The Neighbor: Three Inquiries in Political Theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 134–190; and David Simpson, 9/11: The Culture of Commemoration (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 162–165.
161 George W. Bush, Presidential Debate, October 3, 2000, debates.org/pages/trans2000a.html.
162 OED, “render,” v.IV.17.a.
163 Stephen Foster, Stephen Foster Songbook, ed. Richard Jackson (New York: Dover, 1974).
164 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Coleridge’s Poetry and Prose, ed. Nicholas Halmi, Paul Magnuson, and Raimona Modiano (New York: Norton, 2004).
165 I disagree with Gregory Bateson here: Gregory Bateson and Mary Catherine Bateson, Angels Fear: Towards an Epistemology of the Sacred (New York: Macmillan, 1987), 76.
166 See Jacques Derrida, “Economimesis,” Diacritics 11, no. 2 (Summer 1981): 2–25; Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band, “Pena,” Trout Mask Replica (Straight Records, 1969).
167 For fireworks as an aesthetic mode, see Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. and ed. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 81.
168 See OB, 15, 48, 55, 75, 92–93, 113–115; see Thomas Carl Wall, Radical Passivity: Levinas, Balchot, and Agamben (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999), 31–64.
169 See Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama. (London: NLB, 1977), 200–233.
170 See Stephen Crawford, “On Freud’s ‘Mourning and Melancholia,’” talk given to the Islington Churches Bereavement Service, London (n.d.).
171 See Judith Butler, “Melancholy Gender / Refused Identification,” in The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), 132–50; see esp. 4, 138–40; Timothy Morton, “Queer Ecology,” PMLA (forthcoming).
172 See Erich Fromm, To Have or to Be? (London: Continuum, 2007), 160.
173 René Descartes, Meditations and Other Metaphysical Writings, trans. and intro. by Desmond M. Clarke (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1998, 2000), 19.
174 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987), 113.
175 See TI, 217–218.
176 OS, 198.
177 See Slavoj Žižek in Sophie Fiennes, dir., The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema (Amoeba Film, Kasander Film Company, Lone Star Productions, Mischief Films, 2006).
3. FORWARD THINKING
1 Rachel Carson, Silent Spring, intro. by Linda Lear, afterword by E. O. Wilson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2002).
2 Gregory Bateson and Mary Catherine Bateson, Angels Fear: Towards an Epistemology of the Sacred (New York: Macmillan, 1987), 76.
3 Emmanuel Levinas, interview with François Poirié, in Is It Righteous to Be? Interviews with Emmanuel Levinas, ed. Jill Robbins (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), 23–83 (49).
4 For example, see James Lovelock, The Revenge of Gaia: Earth’s Climate Crisis and the Fate of Humanity (New York: Basic Books, 2007).
5 See Slavoj Žižek, Parallax View (London: Verso, 2005) 17–18.
6 Karl Marx, Capital, trans. Ben Fowkes (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990), 1.452–453. See also Fredric Jameson, “Notes on Globalization as a Philosophical Issue,” in The Cultures of Globalization, ed. Fredric Jameson and Masao Miyoshi (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 54–79.
7 EwN, 122–123.
8 U.S.A. for Africa, “We Are the World” (Columbia, 1985).
9 Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991).
10 For “full spectrum dominance,” see Rahul Mahajan, Full Spectrum Dominance: U.S. Power in Iraq and Beyond (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2003).
11 Laurie Anderson, “O Superman,” Big Science (Warner Bros., 1982).
12 See EwN, 29–78.
13 Talking Heads, “The Overload,” Remain in Light (Sire Records, 1980).
14 Keith Rowe quoted in David Toop, Haunted Weather: Music, Silence, and Memory (London: Serpent’s Tail, 2004), 239–240.
15 Julia Kristeva has explored the relationship between the “genotext” and the “phenotext”: “[Genotext] will include semiotic processes but also the advent of the symbolic. The former includes drives, their disposition and their division of the body, plus the ecological and social system surrounding the body, such as objects and pre-Oedipal relations with parents. The latter encompasses the emergence of object and subject, and the constitution of nuclei of meaning involving categories: semantic and categorical fields”; see Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Margaret Waller, in The Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril Moi (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), 89–136 (120). We could argue that ambience was the “extended phenotext.” This is appropriate, since the genotext includes the ecosystem.
16 See, for example, Bill McKibben, interview in Elephant, Summer 2007, 56.
17 Percy Shelley, A Defence of Poetry, in Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, ed. Donald H. Reiman and Neil Fraistat (New York: Norton, 2002), 535.
18 See Timothy Morton, “The Dark Ecology of Elegy,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Elegy, ed. Karen Weisman (Oxford: Oxford Universit
y Press, forthcoming).
19 Peter Sacks, The English Elegy: Studies in the Genre from Spenser to Yeats (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), 24–25.
20 I borrow the phrase “happy-happy-joy-joy” from “Stimpy’s Invention,” an episode of John Kricfalusi’s The Ren and Stimpy Show (Games Animation; Nickelodeon, 1991–1996).
21 This is Giorgio Agamben’s phrase, found in The Coming Community, trans. Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 49.
22 See Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (London: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1973), 217–251 (222–223).
23 “Unworking” is Scott Shershow’s translation of désoeuvrement: see The Work and the Gift (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 193–205; Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community, trans. Peter Connor et al. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991).
24 For diastic poetry, see eskimo.com/~rstarr/poormfa/diastic.html.
25 Benoit Mandelbrot, The Fractal Geometry of Nature (New York: W.H. Freeman, 1983).
26 EwN, 96.
27 Guy Debord, “Theory of the Derive,” library.nothingness.org/articles/all/ en/display/314.
28 Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (London: Hogarth Press, 1990), 27–28.
29 Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse, ed. Margaret Drabble (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 169–194.
30 See jacketmagazine.com/12/bergvall.html.
31 Sadly, much of La Monte Young’s catalog is currently out of print, but you can learn about it at melafoundation.org/main.htm.
32 A good example is Eliane Radigue, L’Ile re-sonante (Shiiin, 2005).
33 See, for example, Alvin Lucier, I Am Sitting in a Room (Lovely Music, 1990); see EwN, 47–48.
34 Barry Cleveland, “In Search of the Uncommon Chord,” Guitar Player, April 2008, 74–88.
35 I offer the following all too brief selection of Allan Holdsworth’s work: UK, UK (E.G. Records, 1978); Allan Holdsworth, The Sixteen Men of Tain (Globe Music Media, 2003); and Then! (Alternity Records, 2004).
36 Robin Mackay, “Dark Ecologies: Paul Chaney at Goldfish Contemporary Art,” review of Paul Chaney, “The Lonely Now,” at Goldfish Contemporary Art, Penzance (UK), 2008, artcornwall.org/features/paul_chaney_robin_mackay.htm; Paul Chaney, The Lonely Now (Goldfish, 2008).
37 Comora Tolliver, “Pod,” Cranbrook Academy of Art, 2007–.
38 See John Seabrook, “Sowing for Apocalypse: The Quest for a Global Seed Bank,” The New Yorker, August 27, 2007, 60–71.
39 See comoratolliver.com/installation.html.
40 See Timothy Morton, “Ecologocentrism: Unworking Animals,” SubStance 37, no. 3 (2008): 37–61.
41 Andrei Tarkovsky, dir., Solaris (Mosfilm, 1972).
42 See Roger Penrose, The Emperor’s New Mind: Concerning Computers, Minds, and the Laws of Physics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989, 1990), 126.
43 I refer to the 1960s television series The Prisoner.
44 See Žižek, Parallax View, 181–182.
45 Ridley Scott, dir., Blade Runner (Blade Runner Partnership, The Ladd Company, Run Run Shaw, The Shaw Brothers, 1982).
46 Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, ed. Maurice Hindle (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2003), 225.
47 See Slavoj Žižek’s masterful “I or He or It (the Thing) Which Thinks,” in Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 10–44.
48 Mary Shelley succumbed to this interpretation herself in the preface to the 1831 edition: Frankenstein, 5–10.
49 Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), 199–201.
50 OB, 116.
51 See, for example, N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); Hubert L. Dreyfus and Stuart E. Dreyfus, “Making a Mind versus Modeling the Brain: Artificial Intelligence Back at a Branch-Point,” in PAI, 309–333 (309, 315).
52 OB, 128.
53 DDI, 471.
54 Slavoj Žižek, “Neighbors and Other Monsters: A Plea for Ethical Violence,” in The Neighbor: Three Inquiries in Political Theology, ed. Slavoj Žižek, Eric Santner, and Kenneth Reinhard (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 134–190 (159–160).
55 See, in particular, TI, 197–198.
56 Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, ed. Marie-Louise Mallet, trans. David Wills (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 95.
57 Douglas Hofstader, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 707.
58 See Stephen Mulhall, “Marketplace Atheism,” review of Owen Flanagan, The Problem of the Soul, London Review of Books 11 (September 2003): 28–29 (28).
59 Gary Marcus, Kluge: The Haphazard Evolution of the Human Mind (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2008).
60 See Andy Clark, “Connectionism, Competence, and Explanation,” in PAI, 281–308 (305, 296–297).
61 See Agamben, Coming Community, 93; The Open: Man and Animal, trans. Kevin Attell (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), 39–43.
62 Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 45. Derrida has commented extensively on Heidegger’s idea that animals are poor in world (Weltarm): Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 47–57; “‘Eating Well’, or, The Calculation of the Subject,” in Jacques Derrida, Points: Interviews, 1974–1994 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 255–287 (277); Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, 141–160.
63 Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch, The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 90, 152.
64 Žižek, Parallax View, 163. See Luce Irigaray, The Way of Love, trans. Heidi Bostic and Stephen Pluhácek (London: Continuum, 2002), 120. Derrida goes so far as to claim that Darwin provides the greatest humiliation: The Animal That Therefore I Am, 136.
65 See DDI, 100.
66 AT, 569–570.
67 Irigaray, The Way of Love, 91.
68 See Derek Parfit, “Experiences, Subjects, and Conceptual Schemes,” Philosophical Topics 26, no. 1–2 (Spring and Fall, 1999): 217–270.
69 EP, 187–191.
70 Levinas is thus a scientific realist: see OB, xxiii.
71 DDI, 498–499.
72 There is some marvelous deconstructive thinking on this in David Wood, The Step Back: Ethics and Politics after Deconstruction (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005), 172–173; and Timothy Clark, “Towards a Deconstructive Environmental Criticism,” Oxford Literary Review 30, no. 1 (2008): 45–68.
73 Terry Gilliam, dir., Twelve Monkeys (Atlas Entertainment, 1995).
74 Garrett Hardin, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” Science, December 13, 1968, 1243–1248.
75 Timothy Morton, The Poetics of Spice: Romantic Consumerism and the Exotic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 59, 104, 11, 214–215.
76 Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 384–390, 419–441 (432–433).
77 John Vucetich and Michael Nelson, “Abandon Hope: Live Sustainably Just Because It’s the Right Thing to Do,” The Ecologist 39, no. 2 (March 2009): 32–35.
78 EwN, 135–43.
79 See EwN, 100–101.
80 I am thinking in particular of Derrida’s The Animal That Therefore I Am, 3–11.
81 Felipe Fernández-Armesto, So You Think You’re Human? A Brief History of Humankind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 48.
82 Ibid., 51.
83 Levinas approaches something like this in TI, 37, 88. See DDI, 426.
84 See DDI, 426.
85 DDI, 486.
86 See Žižek, In Defense of Lost Causes (Lond
on: Verso, 2008), 446–447.
87 See Bruno Latour, Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004).
88 Agamben, Coming Community, 32, 86–87. Agamben stresses absolute potentiality, symbolized by the image of the tabula rasa (37).
89 Erich Fromm, To Have or to Be? (London: Continuum, 2007), 35.
90 See TI, 37–38. See also Levinas, interview with François Piorié, in Is It Righteous to Be? 53. The Pascal quotation forms one of the epigraphs to OB (vii).
91 Irigaray, The Way of Love, 77.
92 Agamben, Coming Community, 65.
93 See Fromm, To Have or to Be? 79.
94 TI, 39, 80.
95 Thomas Carl Wall, Radical Passivity: Levinas, Blanchot, and Agamben (New York: State University of New York Press, 1999), 1–12.
96 Agamben, Coming Community, 103.
97 See Fromm, To Have or to Be? 164.
98 Irigaray’s The Way of Love explores this theme. See especially 36, 47–49, 51–53, 115. Irigaray is one of the few “Continental” thinkers prepared to acknowledge biological continuity, for example, in the form of the mother’s body (74–75). Her view is rather more Romantic than mine—she prefers “another world here beside me” to “the remote verticality of other planets,” whereas I see these two ideas as intertwined.
99 See TI, 69, 72, 89.
100 TI, 150, 151, 155.
101 TI, 179; Erich Fromm, To Have or to Be? 2.
102 TI, 150, 152–153, 163–165. Levinas puts it this way: one needs the comfort of a place to live before one can look out onto the infinite.
103 See TI, 179–180.
104 TI, 256–257 (256).
105 Emmanuel Levinas, Existence and Existents, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2003), 93.
106 TI, 259, 256.
107 TI, 259.
108 TI, 306.
109 See OB, 182.
110 Sigmund Freud, Interpreting Dreams, tr. J.A. Underwood (London and New York: Penguin, 2006), 131.
111 Ridley Scott, dir., Alien (Brandywine Productions, 1979).
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