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Dear All,
I just wanted to let you know that my new book, Minimal Ethics for the Anthropocene, has been
published by Open
Humanities Press. Adopting a philosophy-meets-art-meets-cultural
studies
approach, it contains a modest ethical proposal for the (whole)
universe which
is faced with the prospect of climate change, total destruction
and the
extinction of life as we know it. It also contains an image-based
project as an
alternative visual track to the argument presented. I’m pasting
the official
blurb below.
For those who are in London, I’ll be presenting the juiciest bits from the book in the Opening Lecture, introduced by Professor Sara Ahmed, for Goldsmiths' Centre for Feminist Research titled ‘Post-masculinist philosophy, or how to think like a girl: minimal ethics on a universal scale’ this coming Thursday, 9 October, at 5pm in NAB/PSH LG02. If you can make it, it would be nice to see there! Further info:
http://www.gold.ac.uk/centre-for-feminist-research/
The online and pdf versions of the book are available for free:
http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/minimal-ethics.html
Best,
Joanna
MINIMAL ETHICS FOR
THE
ANTHROPOCENE
by Joanna Zylinska
Open Humanities Press, 2014
An imprint of Michigan Publishing, University of Michigan
Library: Ann
Arbor
Series: Critical Climate Change edited by Tom Cohen and
Claire
Colebrook
E-version freely available on an open access basis:
http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/minimal-ethics.html
Also available in paperback
Life typically becomes an object of reflection when it is
seen to be
under threat. In particular, humans have a tendency to engage in
thinking about
life (instead of just continuing to live it) when being confronted
with the
prospect of death: be it the death of individuals due to illness,
accident or
old age; the death of whole ethnic or national groups in wars and
other forms
of armed conflict; but also of whole populations, be they human or
nonhuman.
Even though Minimal Ethics
for the
Anthropocene is first and foremost concerned with
life—understood as both a
biological and social phenomenon—it is the narrative about the
impending death
of the human population (i.e., about the extinction of the human
species), that
provides a context for its argument. “Anthropocene” names a
geo-historical
period in which humans are said to have become the biggest threat
to life on
earth. However, rather than as a scientific descriptor, the term
serves here
primarily as an ethical injunction to think critically about human
and nonhuman
agency in the universe.
Restrained in tone yet ambitious in scope, the book takes
some steps towards
outlining a minimal ethics thought on a universal scale. The task
of such
minimal ethics is to consider how humans can assume responsibility
for various
occurrences in the universe, across different scales, and how they
can respond
to the tangled mesh of connections and relations unfolding in it.
Its goal is
not so much to tell us how to live but rather to allow us to
rethink “life” and
what we can do with it, in whatever time we have left. The book
embraces a
speculative mode of thinking that is more akin to the artist’s
method; it also
includes a photographic project by the author.
A
spirited, eloquent,
original, and interdisciplinary manifesto for ethics, which
takes seriously, on
the one hand, a non-anthropocentric perspective and the
challenge to human
exceptionalism; and, on the other hand, the possibility of the
extinction of life
in the Anthropocene epoch. The book presents a serious
meditation on the
meaning of the old ethical preoccupation – “how to live a good
life?” – in an
age when life itself is threatened with extinction. (Ewa Ziarek
- Julian Park
Professor of Comparative Literature, University at Buffalo)
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Joanna Zylinska is Professor of New Media and
Communications at
Goldsmiths, University of London. The author of several books—most
recently, Life after New
Media: Mediation as a Vital
Process (with Sarah Kember; MIT Press, 2012) and Bioethics in the Age of New Media (MIT Press,
2009)—she is also a
translator of Stanislaw Lem's major philosophical treatise, Summa Technologiae
(University of
Minnesota Press, 2013). Together with Clare Birchall, Gary Hall
and Open
Humanities Press, she runs the JISC-funded project Living Books
about Life,
which publishes open access books at the crossroads of the
humanities and the
sciences. Zylinska is one of the Editors of Culture
Machine, an international open-access journal of culture and
theory, and a
curator of its sister project, Photomediations
Machine. She combines her philosophical writings and
curatorial work with
photographic art practice.
-- Professor Joanna Zylinska Department of Media and Communications Goldsmiths, University of London http://www.joannazylinska.net Curator of Photomediations Machine http://www.photomediationsmachine.net--------------------------------------------------------