Definition-objects In this two part essay I want to interrogate how objects contribute to defining humanity? According to Tristan Garcia in his comprehensive and unique Form and Object (2014), ‘Present day humanity’s relations to animals and to artefacts makes us hopelessly attempt to prove what humanity is as an object’ (238). The ‘hopeless’ is indicative…
Read MoreCOVID AND WORLD RISK SOCIETY
WHAT IS WORLD RISK SOCIETY? World Risk Society (1999) is a book of sociological theory written by German academic Ulrich Beck. Written at the dawn of the new Millennium, it has been an influential text, being regularly referred to by theorists working in environmentalism and ecological philosophy (Morton). I even suspect his language is used…
Read MorePhasing in & out of Subscendent Wholes
My dissertation has been handed in & now I am flooded with mild anxiety. It hadn’t really occurred to me that most people write about authors long deceased. John Wedgewood Clarke is very much alive and active; as are the sources I cite, in large part. Only Heidegger & Derek Parfit are the exceptions. This…
Read MoreThe “Spectrality” of Phytoplankton in John Wedgewood Clarke’s Landfill
In Landfill, poet John Wedgewood Clarke takes the reader on walks along the trekking paths of some of England’s most outstanding areas of natural beauty. One such area is the Greensand Way connecting Surrey and Kent. Clarke, choice picks this location owing to a property of its geological composition: it is made of chalk. Landscapes…
Read MoreDimethyltryptamine
Recently I was provided the opportunity to smoke DMT, one of the most confounding & intense experiences of my life. It is difficult to reconcile the out of body, death-like experience with the simplicity of this ubiquitous compound, found in mammal brains & numerous plants, including acacia. I felt death. On coming out of the…
Read MoreThoughts on Self-Interest Ecology
This week I have been reading a not-so well-known book of philosophy by the British philosopher Derek Parfit called Reasons and Persons. Parfit is flagged up in Tim Morton’s Hyperobjects, in which Morton comments on Parfit’s challenging of ‘long-held prejudices about utility and ethics from within utilitarianism itself.’ that, ‘Parfit showed that no self-interest ethical…
Read MoreBodies
Another poem written after I returned from Korea. This poem is an attempt to realize poetically, Tim Morton’s replacement term for ‘nature’, the symbiotic real. Morton’s reasons for abandoning the word nature & the (capital N) baggage with it, is owing to the erroneous perception that nature is somewhere, or some state, we need to…
Read MoreHuman Flourishing
The title is misleading, sarcastic. This poem is a response to a talk by some guy called Alex Epstein, who started something called The Human Flourishing Project. Alex believes nonrenewable energy sources are the reason for human flourishing. The rise in population (which he seems to think good because that means humanity is flourishing), health,…
Read MoreClose Reading of Amitav Ghosh’s ‘Gun Island’ (2019)
My close reading, examines the chapter ‘High Water’ from Amitav Ghosh’s Gun Island (2019). In this chapter, Deen and Cinta are in Venice. They visit the gentrified Punta della Dogana (Customs House Point), which Cinta remembers was a ‘dilapidated old place’[1] when she was a child. It has become ‘like every other building in…
Read MoreFuture
I was browsing through the 30 or so poems I wrote—& agonized over the quality of—on my return to England & this one feels cogent to the circumstances we currently find ourselves groaning under. I have been writing about access to futures through the lens of queer theory and ecology. They share a common problem:…
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Daniel Paul Marshall 