I’m not delusional enough to claim that a novel is going to explode the value systems, politics, economics, and forms of knowledge that have produced the extinction era, nor that literature will not go extinct if humans do. But on good days I do think that fiction—which might not come in the form of a novel at all—works: as in, it performs a type of labor in service of change, for better or for worse. Its effects are not linear, one-to-one, or necessarily calculable, and should not be measured as such. No cause-and-effect equation can account for them. Fictions are myriad small explosions with far-reaching fragments.
Elvia Wilk, Death by Landscape
Elvia Wilk, Death by Landscape
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When I get confused about love, or other things in the world, thinking about Spinozian definitions often helps me because of their clarity. Spinoza defines love as the increase of our joy, that is, the increase of our power to act and think, with the recognition of an external cause. You can see why Spinoza says self-love is a nonsense term, since it involves no external cause. Love is thus necessarily collective and expansive in the sense that it increases our power and hence our joy. Here’s one way of thinking about the transformative character of love: we always lose ourselves in love, but we lose ourselves in love in the way that has a duration, and is not simply rupture. To use a limited metaphor, if you think about love as muscles, they require a kind of training and increase with use. Love as a social muscle has to involve a kind of askesis, a kind of training in order to increase its power, but this has to be done in cooperation with many.
Michael Hardt, ”No One is Sovereign in Love: A Conversation Between Lauren Berlant and Michael Hardt – Heather Davis & Paige Sarlin”
Michael Hardt, ”No One is Sovereign in Love: A Conversation Between Lauren Berlant and Michael Hardt – Heather Davis & Paige Sarlin”
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Beyond the edge of the so-called human, beyond it but by no means on a single opposing side, rather than ‘‘The Animal’’ or ‘‘Animal Life’’ there is already a heterogeneous multiplicity of the living, or more precisely (since to say ‘‘the living’’ is already to say too much or not enough), a multiplicity of organizations of relations between living and dead, relations of organization or lack of organization among realms that are more and more difficult to dissociate by means of the figures of the organic and inorganic, of life and/or death. These relations are at once intertwined and abyssal, and they can never be totally objectified. They do not leave room for any simple exteriority of one term with respect to another. It follows that one will never have the right to take animals to be the species of a kind that would be named The Animal, or animal in general.
Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am
Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am