the French launch of the Humanist Anthropocene, or: There is hair in my soup- and it's delicious!4/3/2016
Wow- unless I’m missing the irony, or the book is significantly different from the excerpt published here, there is a new preposterous and reactionary book, “Eat this book” by Dominique Lestel, from Columbia University Press. From the preview, the logic is as skewed as a sword forced through a drunk Hephaestus’s forge, and the complete disregard for contemporary theory is astounding. Take this quote featured on CUP’s website: “Vegetarians systematically overlook the fact that eating meat has a fundamental significance and that it teaches us a lesson about humility in that it reminds us of the interdependence of all living beings.” Of all the lessons in humility, this is the weirdest! Hasn’t Tim Morton taught us to blur the boundaries between inside and outside, to realize we live in a mesh, and thus that to suggest that for a human to eat an animal reminds us of our interconnectedness is any different from a human eating, say, a handful of dirt, an old sock, or his neighbor, is ridiculous, for it simply reifies the human, re-asserts “Nature” rather than ecology. Indeed: I hope the author “eats his book” and feels a sense of interconnectedness. Then, there might be something to discuss. Time to learn a bit more about salt. “The salt on your sidewalk, or on your eggs, could be millions of years old.” Indeed. We eat the Exterranean..... (A suivre....) Spent a pretty fabulous morning (alas curtailed) at a cartography seminar at Harvard University’s’ Radcliffe Institute, organized by the amazing team of Tom Conley and Katharina Piechocki.
Theodore Cachey (Notre Dame) shared excellent work about the cartographic impulse in Dante, Boccaccio, and Petrarch. Camille Serchuck (Southern Connecticut State University) talked about the “painterly” in/of early modern maps, esp. Guillaume Le Testu’s Cosmographie, of which Frank Lestringant recently prepared an excellent edition. My own, rather different, contribution took this form: “Early Modern Cartography in the Humanist Anthropocene-- Some Thoughts Towards some Questions,” in which I asked, in a nutshell: given that so much work on cartography, since maps stopped being considered purely “scientific” or “objective,” relies on the idea that cartography “reflects” history (Dainville), then what happens if we take Chakrabarty’s “Four Theses” seriously for the history of cartography and relate the history of cartography not only to human history but also to Deep Time? We’re so used—now—to reading humanist cartography for the way it plots, for example, empire, or discovery, or religious fantasy, but what of geological time in all this? What of the planet-as-planet? Key to such thoughts are, inter alia, Ulisse Aldrovandi who coined the term geology in 1603 (see also here). I’m sorry to be missing the other amazing speakers who have all shaped how we understand maps: Neil Safier (of the John Carter Brown Library), Anders Engberg-Pedersen (of Empire of Chance), Marc Shell (of Islandology), Bill Rankin (see his radicalcartography), Carla Nappi, Matthew Edney, Franco Farinelli, Jean-Marc Besse (whose Grandeurs de la terre is essential for its plotting of how the oikoumene comes to be equivalent to the whole planet), and others. MINING SALT FROM THE SEA AND THE LAND: A RENAISSANCE POET, FIEFMELIN, aND SALT FOR ROADS IN 20163/19/2016
Thanks to the Ecole des Mines and the associated Musée de Minéralogie, the Boulevard Saint-Michel is a place of exterranean mindfulness: “Without tantalite, no text messages,” reads one of the signs, referring to the fact that, as the same poster explains in small print, tantalum “turns out to be necessary for the manufacturing of the miniaturized capacitors used in portable phones and laptops.” The s’avère nécessaire (turns out to be) situates the realization in the time of the person stopping to read the sign: “Why yes indeed, it turns out I wouldn't be able to send text messages without this chemical element.” The other posters make similar points for other elements. This first exterranean awareness goes hand-in-hand with another slightly different one: just a few steps further along the boulevard, mined matter, turned into the very building of the Ecole des Mines, in its geological depths, carries the traces of human history in the form of bullet holes from World War II (see photo). Standing here, the flâneur becomes aware both that the phone in his pocket can't take photos and upload them without small bits of tantalite; and that other mined matter, in the form of the building, serves both in the wall and in the memorial plaques attached to it, serves to wind together geological history and memory in an uncannily similar way.
Currently at a fabulous conference in Paris, organized by Frank Lestringant and Alexandre Tarrête, about islands in early-modern literature, I’m thinking this evening about the Marshall Islands in the Pacific, which are sinking. There are already many climate-change refugees from these islands, many of whom are now in—or trying to get to—Arkansas. As a CNN report puts it: “Climate change is real, and people see it happening now.” If the seas continue to rise due to climate change, then the Islands will all disappear completely. And it’s happening now: “Neighbors told me they woke up floating.” As another report (see video below) notes: the Marshall Islands remind us that life is “precarious.” The conference today didn’t intend to address such questions directly, but many of the papers underlined how, in the early modern period, islands were just a fragile—the threat was generally from other peoples and nations, but in a sense that is perhaps also the case, albeit “via” climate, of climate change. (Image from Porcacchi, source here) My own talk, on the way that Ronsard depicts the island of Crete in the Franciade, could have been written differently for a different context. I could have argued that Ronsard, who is clearly very close to the isolario tradition, creates a Crete similar to the Marshall Islands. Q: How does Francus end up there? A: There is a storm. Q: And the storm is weather or climate? A: Clearly climate, for the storm here is epic and part of long-term divine trends. Q: A hyperobject, as Timothy Morton would put it? A: Its manifestation, yes. Q: What happens when Francus gets to Crete? A: He is welcomed by a Cretan prince, but must battle a Cretan giant. Q: And that giant is climate change? A: Perhaps, sort of: he’s the Other, he “guards” the island with no respect for the island, for he entraps the inhabitants and threatens them. Q: Is he, then, the climate? The rising sea? A: One could, perhaps, say that, yes. Q: What about the Venetians, for Crete was Venetian at this point in history? A: Precisely. In this narrative, they create the conditions for bad climate. Q: They are the gas-guzzlers? A: One could say that. Q: So really, Ronsard already imagined the fate of the Marshall Islands? A: Of course.
The Guardian announces today that "BP [is] to end Tate sponsorship after 26 years": "Oil firm blames ‘challenging business environment’ and says decision was not influenced by climate activists’ protests." Below: Guardian video from June 15, 2015, about the protests in the Turbine Hall.
The MLA's new forum titled "Ecocrititicsm and the Environmental Humanities" and whose executive committee is made up of Sharon O’Dair, Stacy Alaimo, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, and Stephanie LeMenager (all professors of English) defines ecocriticism, astonishingly, as "a scholarly practice within English Studies." As one person, Beatriz Celaya, comments: "I am not in English Studies, should I not be interested in ecocriticism? I hope the mistake was involuntary." Indeed. No further comment necessary.
A fabulous discovery: the work of Stephanie Posthumus, who speaks as follows of her current work on her faculty webpage:
"Constructing an ecological perspective for examining 20th and 21st Century French literary texts has been the main goal of her work since she finished her doctoral thesis in 2003. As she has argued in several articles, ecocriticism, while based on a concern for global environmental problems, is not transferable from one national literature to another. The traditions, philosophies and representations of the non-human world that influence and are influenced by literature create important cultural differences that do not allow for a global ecocritical perspective. Working to develop a French ecocriticism, she draws on ideas such as l’esthétique environnementale (Nathalie Blanc), la nature-culture (Bruno Latour) and le contrat naturel (Michel Serres). Her recent articles demonstrate a move from this theoretical foundation to its possible application in the analysis of landscapes in contemporary French literary texts (see her articles on Jean-Christophe Rufin, Michel Houellebecq, Marie Darrieussecq and Michel Tournier). Her work in this field was recently acknowledged as being both original and important when she was awarded the prize for the best article published in 2009 by a member of the APFUCC (Association des professeurs de français aux universités et collèges canadiens). A second branch of her work looks at representations of animals in contemporary French literature. Whereas ecocriticism remains on the periphery of French literary studies, the animal question has garnered much critical attention. Researching different disciplinary work on animals, from philosophy (Derrida, de Fontenay, Lestel) to ethology (Cyrulnik, Chapouthier), from literary criticism (Desblache, Simon) to animal ethics (Vilmer), Prof. Posthumus aims to define the animal question with respect to the French contemporary context. At the same time, she is interested in comparing this context to that of other European countries as the European Union has become an important ruling body for establishing laws about animal well-being and rights in Europe. The relationships between local, regional, cultural differences in a global landscape are at the heart of Dr. Posthumus’s work on ecocriticism and animal studies." As someone who works in a French department, of late on questions that rarely observe national or linguistic boundaries, it's a joy to come Posthumus who is clearly grappling with what it means to think about literature's relationship to environmental questions from an academic "home" whose definition seems to make such questions seem too big, or out of place. Posthumus clearly draws the lines a bit differently to me, focusing on Francophone theorists and French literature, whereas I perhaps make different boundaries: I seek to be in the early modern, as a place to be situated, while allowing different languages to blow in on the winds. In any case, let's all go read Posthumus! |
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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