Minimal Ethics for the Anthropocene (Critical Climate Change)
Joanna Zylinska
Language: English
Pages: 154
ISBN: 1607853299
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Minimal Ethics for the Anthropocene considers our human responsibility for the world, at a time when life finds itself under a unique threat. Its goal is to rethink “life” and what we can do with it, in whatever time we have left—as individuals and as a species. This speculative, poetic book also includes a photographic project by the author.
events from happening. This restricted freedom with regard to his/her own agency, combined with the lack of knowledge about being with others in the world, contribute to the human’s self-diagnosed tragic condition discussed earlier. Lem is less inclined to offer solutions to this state of events, even if he does recognize the role of ethics as a structural device used to contain human aggression and violence. Betrization, a procedure from his novel Return from the Stars which is executed upon all
truths” must remain a-relational and hence a-social because it compels distance from commonplace opinion, introducing a clash between post-evental fidelity and “the normal pace of things” (2001: 54). A rhythmic vacillation is clearly implied here: it springs from the disturbance of the regular order by the irruption of the extraordinary. This is the moment in which we are endowed with a task of having to remain faithful to this event (or, rather, to our naming of it), i.e. having to live the
practice also involves providing an account—verbally, experientially, or aesthetically—of these processes of co-existence and co-emergence. In others words, ethics could be described as a practice of not only becoming in and with the world but also of working out possibilities for what we will decide, through deliberation, policy work and conflict resolution, to be ways ofbecoming better in the world. Once again, this is not to deny that so-called animals are incapable of enacting conventionally
Bennett), how will we guarantee it does not result in the short-termism of goal and the return to organicism she is so keen to escape otherwise? Does her acknowledgement in Vibrant Matter that she shares Epicureanist monism’s “conviction that there remains a natural tendency to the way things are—and that human decency and a decent politics are fostered if we tune in to the strange logic of turbulence” (2010: xi) not assume the existence of a whole group of some rather nice people who will all
ethics thought across a universal scale offers a partial response to Clark’s exhortation to consider scale effects seriously. The preceding argument hopefully explains to some extent why the minimal ethics outlined in this book needs to work on a universal scale. Once again, this is not to say that such ethics needs to beapplicable across all times and locales: it just needs to acknowledge the temporally and spatially unbound perspective of “the universe” that circumscribes how relations,