Monthly Archives: July 2020

David Wills (bio)Brown University A review of Krell, David Farrell. Derrida and Our Animal Others: Derrida’s Final Seminar, The Beast and the Sovereign. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2013. Over the past twenty years David Krell has often eschewed the standard format of scholarly publications in favor of, for example, philosophical fiction (Son of Spirit; Nietzsche: A […]

Rick Elmore (bio)Appalachian State University A review of Lorimer, Jamie. Wildlife in the Anthropocene: Conservation after Nature. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2015. Jamie Lorimer’s Wildlife in the Anthropocene is a bold, provocative, and compelling rethinking of wildlife conservation in the age of the anthropocene. Lorimer’s book is driven by the conviction that “the Anthropocene […]

Ellie Anderson (Bio)Muhlenberg College A review of Despret, Vinciane. What Would Animals Say If We Asked the Right Questions? Trans. Brett Buchanan. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2016. Vinciane Despret’s lively book offers an introduction to issues relevant to the field of animal studies. Interdisciplinary in nature, What Would Animals Say If We Asked the […]

Jennifer Wenzel (bio)Columbia University “The mouth of this river forms the best harbour I have yet seen; being wide, deep and free from shoals, with a fine situation for a town and fortifications where ships may lie close along the shore, the land high, with a good air and fine streams of water”: so observed […]

A Conversation with Brent Ryan Bellamy, Stephanie LeMenager, and Imre Szeman Brent Ryan Bellamy (bio), Stephanie LeMenager (bio), and Imre Szeman (bio)University of Alberta “The world itself writes oil, you and I write it.” —Stephanie LeMenager, Living Oil I sat down with Stephanie LeMenager and Imre Szeman to talk about “Resource Aesthetics,” the topic of […]

Jonathan Beller (bio)Pratt Institute Abstract The selfie and fractal celebrity have become the obverse of what Sylvia Federici calls the system of global apartheid. These results of a financialized attention economy index a shift in the character of both labor and the commodity form towards screen mediated code-work and networked valorization. We can thus rewrite […]

Jeff M. Diamanti (bio)McGill University Abstract This essay isolates the relationships between energy deepening, economic elasticity, and social plasticity as the key matrix driving a petroeconomy otherwise imagined as free from material constraints, and claims that energy deepening establishes itself in spatial forms, or the physical setting, of a fully saturated fossil fuel society. By […]

Carolyn Elerding (bio)The Ohio State University Abstract This essay interprets digital petroculture’s aesthetic of invisibility in two ways. First, the ubiquitous intangibility of software simulation in everyday life is framed in terms of the Marxist concept of “realization” in circulation. Second, the “cloud’s” remote storage and processing of data is understood as a system of […]

Amanda Boetzkes (bio)University of Guelph Abstract This essay argues that efforts to recuperate the ecological damage of industrial waste as a profitable resource obscure the broader procedures by which human bodies, substances, energies, and desires are also yielded as resources in an economic model of indefinite expansion. The “cradle-to-cradle” proposition for a zero-waste society thus […]

Brent Ryan Bellamy (bio), Michael O’Driscoll (bio), and Mark Simpson (bio)University of Alberta On May 10, 2016, as the May Day wildfires ravaged the city and environs of Fort McMurray, Alberta, and neighbouring municipalities swelled with the 90,000 residents forced to flee their homes, Postmedia News (Canada’s go-to media source for neo-liberal spin) ventured to […]

Nicole Shukin (bio)University of Victoria Abstract After Fukushima, a tiny handful of “refuseniks” defied the government’s orders to evacuate a twenty-kilometer zone around the damaged reactors in the region. Rather than relocating to temporary shelters, several refuseniks remained in the zone to care for livestock who had been abandoned, and whose market value had been […]

ELLIE ANDERSON is Visiting Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Muhlenberg College. She is co-author of “Feminist Perspectives on the Self” in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and has previously published on Simone de Beauvoir in the Journal of Speculative Philosophy. BRENT RYAN BELLAMY is a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow at Memorial […]