faulker058

What with all the lectures and all, I've hardly had time o mention this simple thing. You can get it from MIT if you're in America . Everyone else can get it from Penguin. Look at the little ad I made on the right!

...or Hyperobjets I should say! So many things happening, I'd only half realized this came out! I did 17 lectures in the spring as well as teaching my normal full load of classes, PhD advising etc etc, not to mention the Marfa exhibition. So I totally forgot about this! Here's the press's page about it .

Have you ever read Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind , by Shunryu Suzuki? If you haven't do so at once lol...it gives you the best best best mediation instruction, no matter what contemplative lineage you're in (or not). And somewhere in the middle is the most wonderful mysterious thing: two blank pages, with a life-size drawing of a fly on the upper right hand corner of the double-page spread. That's the moment of mind transmission right there! I'm not spoiling it by telling you. That's the amazing lovely thing about meditation: it proves that you can surprise yourself, aka that the future is possible, and new things can happen. I read it when I was 17. I was so upset...then I read this book and it totally changed my life. As we head into global warming space ever further, I can't insist enough on you having some kind of healing centering self-soothing practice that you do, whether it be making yourself a nice sandwich or meditating or donating to your favorite cha...

I continue to count my OOO blessings! My life started to go so right when Levi Bryant pointed out that my “strange stranger” (the term I use for lifeforms in The Ecological Thought ) was identical to what OOO means by “object.” Here's what I wrote on the back of Graham's latest tome: An essential guide by the foremost philosopher of our age. This book will educate and delight both aficionados and those unfamiliar with the first major philosophical movement of the twenty-first century. If you haven't yet read a guide or introduction to something by Harman, you're in for a treat. I make my undergrad and grad students smile when I show them how he gives you everything you need to understand Heidegger (super complex weirdness) on page 2 of his Heidegger Explained .

Do you have a copy yet? It's awesome. Here's what I wrote about it: Tristan Garcia demonstrates how at the most encompassing level of contemporary social roles lives the Romantic consumerist, forever seeking spiritually heightened experiences: what he like Pater calls intensity. We’re all Baudelaires now. Ecological ethics and politics ignores this at its peril: all that talk of efficiency and anti-consumerism seems to want to bypass this inconvenient truth. An ecological future must voyage through intensity…and for that we need maps. Garcia establishes some key coordinates for such a mission.

Two great things this weekend: a very good festival on sustainability and the Italian translation of Being Ecological is in the shops along with the Italian Hyperobjects . That means there are twelve books in translation and I think nine of them appeared this year. Next year, French  The Ecological Thought  and Russian Being Ecological .

...as of today, and altogether my stuff has been cited over 6000 times as of today.

Amazingly, to me at least, who only rises to extreme confidence once in a while, Ecology without Nature now has 1600 scholarly citations, and The Ecological Thought 1200. Hyperobjects is about to reach 1000. Which all means that fairly soon my stuff in general will have been cited 6000 times. But the maddest thing that's ever happened remains the fact that in the first week when Realist Magic was published online (before the print edition showed up), it was downloaded 10 000 times.

Iperogetti is a word even more extradinary than hyperobjects and I think the lettering on the cover, which looks like cigarettes standing on end, is fantastic. Here's a piece about it in Esquire .  Spanish Hyperobjects (Mexican press) is also out, right about now. The Dutch translations of Being Ecological and Dark Ecology  have been out since about April.

...in Danish, scuse the translation: The film operates here both psychologically and biologically and physically in a form of 'dark ecology', as the ecophilosopher Timothy Morton has called it. Because according to dark ecology, everything is constantly changing, including the subject, it's unwise to try to distinguish between the hidden one on one side and the world out there on the other side. As Morton points out, "we" should not, as in earlier and more traditional ecological purposes, elevate "the natural" (plants, animals, moles and rocks) to a noble design as something pure and unchangeable. Instead, we should completely drop the idea of "the natural" and instead look at the world as one big and always variable size, which is not only in constant motion, but also always is "us" and vice versa.

...into English! Coming out with Bloomsbury. Here's my endorsement: The ecological emergency is so systemic and so vast that the human imagination—the feel of our thinking powers—is frozen like someone afraid of heights, terrified of her capacity to visualize what seems to be a tragedy or a nightmare. One response is to freeze the future, the idea that things could be different, as around the world people consent to fascist-paranoid politics that relieve them of the burden of thinking and visualizing. Christian Roy’s lovely translation of Charbonneau’s masterpiece is like allergy medicine that allows us to un-freeze, and for the sake of all lifeforms on Earth, staying fluid in the struggle is now exactly what William Blake meant by “mental fight.”

Humankind: Solidarity with Nonhuman People by Timothy Morton (Verso Books) – Considered by many to be among the top philosophers in the world, especially among those tackling issues related to human effects on our environment, Morton herein provides an important, spirited, and sometimes frenetic analysis of the foundational assumptions of Marxism and other -isms with regard to nature and culture (whilst also wanting to redefine those terms). Morton makes a compelling case for how our existing ideologies must adapt or change radically to repatriate ourselves with a world in which we are entangled physically but which we have convinced ourselves we are estranged from, or stand apart from, in our minds. If that sounds wordy, it’s because this is a complex topic and Morton is better than I am at expressing complex concepts in ways that are useful to a layperson.-- The Millions

As of today!

This was so good because Federico is so good. We did it on August 21; the book was published on August 22.

Stuart Jeffries does such a lovely job here . Isn't the cover just so good? Look how it seems like the designer used real bubbles on real cut paper... The design has to do with maybe the deepest concept in the book, the set-theoretical one.

“It’s not just true that there is a time for everything, as it says in Ecclesiastes (‘a time to reap and a time to sow . . .’); it’s the case that from grasses to gorillas to gargantuan black holes, everything has its own time , its own temporality.”

When you watch one person on stage trying to surmount their fate only in that very action to embody it, it's called a tragedy. When you see a lot of people doing it on stage, it's called Fawlty Towers.  Discuss.

“Kant described beauty as a feeling of ungraspability: this is why the beauty experience is beyond concept. You don’t eat a painting of an apple; you don’t find it morally good; instead, it tells you something strange about apples in them- selves. Beauty doesn’t have to be in accord with prefabricated concepts of ‘pretty’. It’s strange, this feeling. It’s like the feel- ing of having a thought, without actually having one. In food marketing there is a category that developed in the last two decades or so called mouthfeel . It’s a rather disgusting term for the texture of food, how it interacts with your teeth and your palate and your tongue. In a way, Kantian beauty is thinkfeel . It’s the sensation of having an idea…”

Very recently I found out The Ecological Thought will be in Chinese by next year. There's also a Chinese translation of an essay I wrote coming, "Art in the Age of Asymmetry." Dark Ecology will be in Dutch and Croatian soon. There are a lot more things on the go, but it's hard to keep track! I'll make some inquiries.