Suchergebnisse

Abstract
In this article, Naisargi N. Dave examines the relationship between animals and love in India, animals and love in multispecies anthropology, and between ethics and love more generally. She argues that ahimsa (nonviolence) and love share the characteristic of abnegating moral responsibility beyond the self and its attachments. Thus, Dave argues, against some strains of contemporary political thought, love is not the antithesis to ethical indifference but its very ground. Love is an indifference to all that does not accomplish its lovability. Dave's offering of an alternative interspecies ethic is what she calls indifference to difference—or "being in difference"—and she locates shades of this immanent ethic in precolonial South Asian conceptions of love as well as in a prenationalist revolutionary philosophy of ahimsa. Dave claims that love is an injustice because when we love it is the one or ones who are special to us that we save. She argues instead for an impassioned ethics without love: an indifference to difference.

This Afterword explores the volume's ambivalent relationship to witnessing, and argues for a synaesthetics of seeing. Drawing on literature fictive and otherwise, with an emphasis on animality (fictive and otherwise), it reflects on how sound and touch enable us to see.

This article tries to locate the missing something that enables radical social projects to persevere, in this case, the social project of animal activism in India. The author argues that we will find the missing something buried in and by the tyranny of consistency (or contradiction thinking), which demands that any ethics in an oppositional or oblique relationship to the way things are account for its apparent inconsistencies or contradictions. The tyranny of consistency steals the something actors need by collapsing something with everything, so that what we are left with (because everything is impossible) is nothing, which is both impossible and extinguishing. The author argues through her ethnography that the creative lived response to the tyranny of consistency is immanent ethics, an ethics that is committedly, if inconsistently, inconsistent.

"The idea of the Anthropocene often generates an overwhelming sense of abjection or apathy. It occupies the imagination as a set of circumstances that counterpose individual human actors against ungraspable scales and impossible odds. There is much at stake in how we understand the implications of this planetary imagination, and how to plot paths from this present to other less troubling futures. With Anthropocene Unseen: A Lexicon, the editors aim at a resource helpful for this task: a catalog of ways to pluralize and radicalize our picture of the Anthropocene, to make it speak more effectively to a wider range of contemporary human societies and circumstances. Organized as a lexicon for troubled times, each entry in this book recognizes the gravity of the global forecasts that invest the present with its widespread air of crisis, urgency, and apocalyptic possibility. Each also finds value in smaller scales of analysis, capturing the magnitude of an epoch in the unique resonances afforded by a single word.

The Holocene may have been the age in which we learned our letters, but we are faced now with circumstances that demand more experimental plasticity. Alternative ways of perceiving a moment can bring a halt to habitual action, opening a space for slantwise movements through the shock of the unexpected. Each small essay in this lexicon is meant to do just this, drawing from anthropology, literary studies, artistic practice, and other humanistic endeavors to open up the range of possible action by contributing some other concrete way of seeing the present. Each entry proposes a different way of conceiving this Earth from some grounded place, always in a manner that aims to provoke a different imagination of the Anthropocene as a whole.

The Anthropocene is a world-engulfing concept, drawing every thing and being imaginable into its purview, both in terms of geographic scale and temporal duration. Pronouncing an epoch in our own name may seem the ultimate act of apex species self-aggrandizement, a picture of the world as dominated by ourselves. Can we learn new ways of being in the face of this challenge, approaching the transmogrification of the ecosphere in a spirit of experimentation rather than catastrophic risk and existential dismay? This lexicon is meant as a site to imagine and explore what human beings can do differently with this time, and with its sense of peril."

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Introduction: Messy Eating -- 1. Turning Toward and Away -- 2. Subjectivities and Intersections -- 3. Being in Relation -- 4. The Tyranny of Consistency -- 5. Justice and Nonviolence -- 6. Doing What You Can -- 7. Waking Up -- 8. Entangled -- 9. Disability and Interdependence -- 10. Asking Hard Questions -- 11. Interspecies Intersectionalities -- 12. Living Philosophically -- 13. Taking Things Back, Piece by Piece -- Coda: Toward an Analytic of Agricultural Power -- Coda: Thinking Paradoxically -- Acknowledgments -- Recommended Reading -- List of Contributors -- Index