ecological ethics after the end of the world

8/3/2019 Ecological Ethics After the End of the World

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Ecological Ethics after

the End of the World

Tim Morton


2/31

I am become death,

the shatterer of worlds

Robert Oppenheimer, after

the Bhagavad Gita


3/31

A Quake in Being


4/31

Hyperobjects

Viscous

Nonlocal local manifestation

(Bryant)

Temporal undulation

Phasing

Interobjectivity


5/31

Hyperobjects

Hypocrisy

Weakness

Lameness

Age of Asymmetry


6/31

Hyperobjects

Object-Oriented Ontology

Lifeworld

Metalanguage


7/31

Anthropocene

1790 Carbon Deposits

1945 Great Acceleration

Plutonium


8/31

Anthropocene

Trinity Test at 0.016 Seconds


9/31

Speculative Realism

correlationism

burying the world in nullity in

order to prove it (Heidegger)

only as long as Da-sein is, is

there [gibt es] being it can

neither be said that beings are,

nor that they are not (Heidegger)


10/31


correlationism

tool-analysis

present-at-hand (vorhanden)

ready-to-hand (zuhanden)

withdrawal (Entzug)

execution (Vollzug)

Graham Harman


11/31


present-at-hand (vorhanden)

ready-to-hand (zuhanden)

withdrawal (Entzug)execution (Vollzug)

flat ontology (real / sensual objects)

vicarious causation (aesthetic)

Graham Harman


12/31

End of Modernity

towering through (Heidegger)

All that is solid melts into air

(Macbeth, Marx)

halting

too-early arrival of future (after the

end of the world)

saving power (Hlderlin)


13/31

Hypocrisies


14/31

Self-interest theories

Talking Heads, Once in a Lifetime, Remain in Light

(Sire Records, 1980)

This is not my beautiful houseThis is not my beautiful wife

This is not my beautiful boy

This is not my beautiful streetThis is not my beautiful action

versus the uncanny


15/31

Self-interest theories

Sren Kierkegaard

Inside the hyperobject we are always

in the wrongAgainst God we are always in the wrong

Futurality of hyperobject

Asymmetry: Urgency, passion + irony

versus the uncanny


16/31


17/31

Inside the hyperobject we

are always in the wrong

inside-ness (not spatial)

very large finitude

cure for nihilism within nihilism

getting used to (mathsis)


18/31

Inside the hyperobject

Alphonso Lingis

level

directive

zone (versus world)


19/31

Zones

[N]ot something that just is what

it is, here and now, without

mystery, but something like a

questa tone on its way callingforth echoes and responseswater

seeking its liquidity in the

sunlight rippling across the

cypresses in the back of thegarden.

Alphonso Lingis, The Imperative

(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 29


20/31

Zones

What constitutes pretense is that,

in the end, you don't know whether

it's pretense or not.

Jacques Lacan, Le seminaire, Livre III: Les psychoses

(Paris: Editions de Seuil, 1981), 48


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Zones

Eliane Radigue

Core shattering (Erschtterung) Adorno


22/31

Zones

Yukultji Napangati, Untitled 2011


23/31

Zones

Bridget Riley, Fall


24/31

Zones

grounding Kantian aesthetic judgment

(itself the ground of synthetic judgment)

grounding the reason for dispensing

with authoritarian Burkean aesthetic

nonconceptual but not nothing

not Hegelian A=A (immediacy)

in your face


25/31

Zones

nonconceptual but not nothing

not Hegelian A=A (immediacy)

in your facenot onto-theological

feeling of unreality

(not vorhanden)


26/31

Cynicism doomed

Anything you can do I can do meta

delivery

attunement

doom: decree, ordinance; judgment,law, faculty of judging; opinion,

discernment; fate, destiny, death;

justice, judge

the end of the world

cynicism as hypocritical hypocrisy


27/31

Hypocrisy

delivery, hypokrisis

krinein, to judge, discern (doom)

the end of the world

cynicism as hypocritical hypocrisythe physical as a form of delivery

interobjective

acousmatic

The Liar: This sentence is false.


28/31

Hypocrisy

As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;

As tumbled over rim in roundy wells

Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each

hung bell'sBow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its

name;

Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:

Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;

Selvesgoes itself;myselfit speaks and spells,Crying, What I do is me: for that I came.

Gerard Manley Hopkins


29/31

The Object as Liar

The awful shadow of some unseen Power

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Human Shadow, Hiroshima


30/31

Forms of Cynicism

1+n objects in interobjective space

beliefs about belief

Concept of Nature (yonder)

Gaia hypothesis

holism as mechanism

left cynicism

Romantic period


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ecological ethics after the end of the world

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