French Natures sponsored the US-première of Bruno Latour’s lecture-performance Inside, directed by Frédérique Aït-Touati. Staged and filmed at the he Romulus Linney Courtyard Theatre, 480 W. 42nd Street. Details here. Video below. Videos are now visible online of the "French Natures" conference that I co-organized at NYU with Frédérique Aït-Touati.
Click here to view the following: The World on Fire Peggy McCracken (University of Michigan) Dialectics of Meteors Frédéric Neyrat (University of Wisconsin-Madison) Sensing the Nature of Northern French Smokestacks from the 1860s to the 1880s Daniel Finch-Race (Bristol University) The Unbearable Lightness of Ecology Pauline Goul (Vassar College) Being on Earth, or The Cosmic Agriculture Emanuele Coccia (EHESS) Queer Ecology and the Modernist Beach Hannah Freed-Thall (NYU) Pamela H. Smith, Making and Knowing: Material Imaginaries of the Early Modern (Columbia) Reading of Olivier Kemeid’s Aeneid. Directed by Judy Miller (NYU) and Rachel Watson (NYU) Theatrical Natures Roundtable. Chair: Judy Miller (NYU) Featuring: Frédérique Aït-Touati (CRAL [EHESS, CNRS]), Una Chaudhuri (NYU), Sarah Cameron Sunde (director, New York). Paysages de France et paysage français dans la littérature (française) du XX ème siècle Eugène Nicole (NYU) Theological-Political Arborescences: Louis Dorléans’s La plante humaine Rose Gardner (Columbia University) Wild Diplomacy. Cohabiting With the Others Among Us Baptiste Morizot (Université Aix-Marseille) On the Exterranean Phillip John Usher (NYU) French Zoopoetics: Animals at the Intersection of Nature, Language, and Ethics Anne Simon (CRAL [EHESS, CNRS]) Ferality in the Arts: Visualizing the Next Nature Bénédicte Ramade Reading Ecologically with Posthuman Cultures Stéphanie Posthumus (McGill University) NB. The video of Latour's "Inside" will be available soon. Phillip John Usher and Frédérique Aït-Touati are co-organizing "French Natures," a two-day conference-festival at NYU, on October 26-27, 2018 featuring the US première of Bruno Latour's "Inside" (now sold out except last-minute availabilities at the box office). For more details see frenchnatures.org.
EXTERRANEAN: EXTRACTION IN THE HUMANIST ANTHROPOCENE, FORTHCOMING FROM FORDHAM, SPRING 201910/25/2018
Exterranean: Ecologies of Extraction in the Humanist Anthropocene(New York: Fordham UP, 2019).
Pre-purchase available here via Amazon This volume is published as part of the "Meaning Systems" series edited by Bruce Clark and Henry Sussman alongside works by scholars such as Barbara Cassin, Bernard Siegert, and Frédéric Neyrat. Summary: Exterranean concerns the extraction of stuff from the Earth, a process in which matter goes from being sub- to exterranean. By opening up a rich archive of nonmodern texts and images from across Europe, this work offers a bracing riposte to several critical trends in ecological thought. By shifting emphasis from emission to extraction, Usher reorients our perspective away from Earthrise-like globes and shows what is gained by opening the planet to depths within. The book thus maps the material and immaterial connections between the Earth from which we extract, the human and nonhuman agents of extraction, and the extracted matter with which we live daily. Eschewing the self-congratulatory claims of posthumanism, Usher instead elaborates a productive tension between the materially-situated homo of nonmodern humanism and the abstract and aggregated anthropos of the Anthropocene. In dialogue with Michel Serres, Bruno Latour, and other interdisciplinary work in the environmental humanities, Usher shows what premodern material can offer to contemporary theory. Examining textual and visual culture alike, Usher explores works by Ronsard, Montaigne, and Rabelais, early scientific works by Paracelsus and others, as well as objects, engravings, buildings, and the Salt Mines of Wieliczka. Both historicist and speculative in approach, Exterranean lays the groundwork for a comparative ecocriticism that reaches across and untranslates theoretical affordances between periods and languages. Pre-Publication reviews: “For anyone who might be suffering from Anthropocene fatigue, this is a book to jolt you from your slumbers. What happens to the globe when we shift attention from the outward projection of emissions to extraction ? The Earth we thought we knew, and were already mourning, takes on a stunning new critical light.” (Claire Colebrook, Pennsylvania State University) “Usher’s brilliant study is a richly argued, erudite yet lyrical ode to the stuff of which the Earth is made. Exterranean engages with the record of human earthly entanglements in early modern European humanism, but always with a view to counterbalancing current distancing and idealizing views of a globe that is all surface, and no depth. By channeling the voices and agencies of Earth’s nonhuman subterranean elements in all their omnipresent intimacy, Usher thus reconnects us not merely to the history of knowledge and beliefs about the Earth and its contents, but to our own fragile planet.” (Karen Raber, University of Mississippi)
Just recently the MLA awarded Serenella Iovino the Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Italian Studies for her book Ecocriticism and Italy: Ecology, Resistance, and Liberation, a 20th and 21st centuries (Bloomsbury, 2016). For those of us working on ecological/ ecocritical approaches to non-Anglophone literature, this is good news! There have similarly been some exciting developments in the field of French Studies. There’s (already!) too much to summarize—but the below are some of the main stop-off points so far.
MONOGRAPHS IN FRENCH
A number of monographs in French take up ecocritical approaches to (French) literature. A useful summary of recent trends is provided by Claire Jaquier (Université de Neuchâtel) on Fabula. Key works include:
AND ALSO For French/Francophone ecocritical work, it’s worth keeping an eye on:
NB. This is NOT a complete list. And there are numerous more projects in the works. So watch this space.
Sarah Kay (NYU) and François Noudelmann (Paris 8) recently put together a fabulous few days on the Sense of Sound at NYU, of which the full program can be found here (archived PDF version here). As part of this, I found myself very happily on a panel about nonhuman sounds, alongside my medievalist colleague from Columbia, Eliza Zingesser, my writer and Proustian colleague from NYU, Eugène Nicole, and Rachel Mundy from Rutgers who is doing fabulous research on bird song in and/beyond music. My contribution was on "Plant Sound." One might ask: why plants? and why plant sound? Almost every time over the past couple of years when I've given a talk based on my "On the Exterranean" project, about "stuff" that is extracted "ex terra," somebody inevitably asks me (productively): "don't plants come of out the ground too? what's the difference?" Each time the question came, its un-stated assumptions and provocations were different, which has usefully nudged me to read a lot of botanical texts, as well as a lot of plant theory (Nealon and such like), to think about precisely how it is different for plants to grow "ex terra" and for other "stuff" to be taken "ex terra." There are, as I'm finding, many many overlaps, and many many differences, making both more interesting. The focus here on "plant sound" was originally a detour--but I'm starting to think that it won't be! How we "access" the plan and it's plant/vegetal life is essential. In any case, 20 minutes in to the video below are some first thoughts on "plant sound." Happy to have spoken this past week in the "French Seminar Series" at UPenn, invited by two fabulous folks, Nathalie Lacarrière and Hanna Laruelle. It's good to keep talking about the project and to keep getting feedback as I wait for the final readers' reports.
The picture on the poster is incidentally one that I took while visiting Lecorbusier's (now almost dilapidated) Villa Savoye in Poissy, France. There's something about the this view, taken from the roof terrace, whose walls are starting to lose their paint, that seemed in my mind to speak to the idea of taking things "ex terra," of living with things taken "ex terra," all the time while looking on at Terra and terra.
Animer le paysage / Re-animating Landscapes, at the Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature, Paris, 20178/9/2017
In Au fond des images (2003), Jean-Luc Nancy makes the point that any given landscape (i.e. painted, imagined, etc.) obfuscates the land it represents, such that we no longer see the land, the physical reality of the trees, etc. The same point is what drives the exhibition Animer le paysage (June 20- September 17, 2017) at Paris’s Musée de la chasse et de la nature, in which a team of artist-researchers from Science Po’s SPEAP program (founded by Bruno Latour, run by Frédérique Aït-Touati) experiment with new ways of making phenomenologically available the physical realities of territory in the Belval domaine in the Ardennes. Printed on the wall, as one enters, are words from Latour to make the central claim in terms similar to Nancy’s: whereas “nature” is mostly “that which we look at, behind a window, like a spectacle or a landscape” (c’est ce que l’on contemple, derrière une vitre, comme un spectacle ou comme un paysage), “territory” is something quite different, namely “that on which we place our feet, on which we depend, that which we shake at fear of losing” (ce sur quoi on pose les pieds, ce dont on depend, ce que l’on tremble de perdre). In other words, recasting territory as another kind of landscape, there are two forms of landscape: “the one that we look at frontally, in a detached manner” (celui qu’on regarde en face, de façon détachée) and “the other one in which we find ourselves inserted, and which holds on to us” (celui dans lequel on se trouve inséré et qui vous tient). This central message is brought home by the organizing opposition between (a) the (distanced, detached) view of a “natural” domain that one gets from a small wooden belvedere, i.e. a view of Johan Christian Dahl’s View from Stalheim (1842) (Figure 1- in black and white in the exhibition); and (b) the rest of the exhibition, throughout which other means are tested out for accessing territory. As tidy and simple as the notion of “landscape” can be, that of territory here reveals its complexity, its dirtiness, as well as the impossibility of selecting one way of accessing or representing it. I shall not try to summarize the exhibition’s richness. I note only, to give an idea, that as one progresses through Animer le paysage, a collection of verbs serves to delineate some of the ways one might access territory by getting into it, close to it, etc. Thus, the photographer Sylvie Gouraud, drawing on the techniques of farmers and hunters, explores the idea of traquer (to track); Sonia Levy and Alexandra Arènes take up the task of capter (to capture), in order to show how the territory form of landscape is a “heterogeneous assemblage of the different forms of life that inhabit it and of the legal frameworks that construct it” ([un] assemblage hétérogène des differrentes formes de vie qui l’habitent, mais également des institutions de législation qui le construisent); Baptiste Morizot and Estelle Zhong Mengual take up the verb pister (to trail) via an interactive installation in which the museum visitor enters (alone! as per a sign) into a corridor, starts to walk forward on what feels like sand and is then, all of a sudden, surprised by a flashlight, as an animal might be trailed and suddenly shot (by a camera or a gun)—an image (of a trailed animal) then appears, and the visitor is invited thus to identify with, to put him/herself in the place of, that animal; Thierry Boutonnier takes up the terms sillonner (to roam, to criss-cross).
As the new academic year slowly appears on the horizon, there's plenty of good things happening at the SCSC in
Milwaukee. Very happy to be part of these two panels. Friday, October 27, 10.30am-noon. Room: Lakeshore B 48. Corpus Naturalis: Biology and Ecology in Renaissance France Organizer: Robert J. Hudson Chair: Phillip J. Usher Les nouvelles et leurs ‘belles pièces d’hommes’ (Des Périers, nouvelle 3 des Nouvelles récréations et joyeux devis). Les recueils français de nouvelles du XVIe siècle, une littérature humorale? Boutet Anne, CESR A Bodily Route to the Ecological Thought in Guillaume du Bartas’s La Sepmaine Stephanie Shiflett, Boston University Drinking Rhubarb Straight Up: Strong Remedies and Ingested Substances in Montaigne Dorothy Stegman, Ball State University Saturday October 28, 3.30pm-5pm. Room: Crystal 157. Reading French Renaissance Texts in the 21st Century Organizer: Cathy Yandell Chair: Nora M. Peterson Reading La Boëtie’s Discours de la servitude volontaire in 2017 Cathy Yandell, Carleton College Theorizing the Memorial Texts of 16th-Century France David LaGuardia, Dartmouth College Plant Theory and 16th-Century Botany Phillip Usher, New York University Very excited that at some point during Spring 2017 I'll be speaking in this EHESS seminar on "La connaissance sensible," more specifically alongside Philippe Quesne. Drawing on my (currently-being-reworked "On the Exterranean" book) I'll be talking about early modern mining/extraction/mining spirits, to think about the liveliness of that which is underground; Quesne will be offering other takes on the non-inert subterranean via his fabulous "Welcome to Caveland" series at Nanterre, including his play "La nuit des taupes" (The Night of the Moles). This should be a fun and useful dialogue! Watch this space for the date and time. Full poster here. (PDF) |
Project THE HUMANIST anthropoceneis a thought archive and workspace of Phillip John Usher (NYU) at the crossroads of early modern humanism and the problems and insights of the Anthropocene. Main Research Page. Categories
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