“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Sunday, February 14, 2016

Humankind 6

Ahhh, that's better. I'm on such a good rhythm with this book that when for some reason I don't fulfill my daily writing task, I have this sensation of discomfort until I've done it. It's not a lot of writing but doing it is really significant, psychologically speaking.

I couldn't write my four pages on Friday, because I was listening to two really interesting lectures, one by one of my Ph.D. students, Sophia Hsu, the other by my esteemed Romanticist colleague Alexander Regier. After that I was kinda distracted, in a good way, and I'm also firing up my new computer, and that was taking rather a lot of my mind on Friday. So I waited until today.

The latest is that I have a nice little logic square going of different possible views on Marx and the nonhuman. It's fun to sketch it out, and I don't think it's ever been done before, so I give some reasons why we haven't yet been able to see the big picture. It has to do with the fact that while you may consciously hold that the issue isn't important, even in that case the unconscious importance is intense.

No comments: