Vol. 32, No. 1-2 [2024]
This issue conveys two urgent and co-articulated thematic orientations: first, from philosophy and critical theory, the necessity of sustaining criticality for concepts within specific, if provisional and pragmatic, contexts, structures, organization and systems; and second, from environmentalism, the program both for making sense of and contesting unfolding ecological crises and ecocide. The two words together encompass environment in an ecological sense and also call attention to how thinking itself exists in immanent and material ways integral to nature. Presuming a built world in a profound sense means addressing entanglements of culture and nature in critical concepts like ecology, infrastructure, contagion, infection, contamination, deep time, and, indeed, the very language of critical theory itself. Further, they entail a future orientation to systems and environments that the old humanist legacies and doxas have repeatedly failed. In Critical Environments (1998), Cary Wolfe challenged theory “to renew its commitment to theoretical heterodoxy by confronting its own orthodoxy with . . . the problem of the ‘outside’ of theory”: “What started out as a revisionist theoretical program devoted to breaking down logocentrism and the last vestiges of humanism has instead wound up reinstating ‘a rigid divide between the human and the nonhuman’ that leads to a pervasive ‘cultural solipsism.’” Papers will pursue such questions as the following: What might commitment to a critical environment of theoretical heterodoxy look like? How can we discern an “outside” of theory already inside nature? How might theorizing impasses in humanism think through and contest environmental crises and ecocide without nihilism or quietism or without reinscribing anthropomorphism as a last breath for—or last gasp of—human hubris?
Focus Editors: Aaron Jaffe and Robin Truth Goodman
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