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Radical animism: reading for the end of the world

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posted on 2023-06-09, 06:28 authored by Jemma Deer
Tracing the effects of the Copernican, Darwinian and Freudian paradigm shifts, I elaborate a radical new animism for a planet in crisis, recognising the nonhuman powers that assert themselves around us, in us, and through us. Historically, animism has been understood as a ‘primitive’ belief system that ascribes life, soul, or spirit to the inanimate. Such belief engenders respect for the agency of nonhuman and nonliving entities, and sees humans as neither independent of nor superior to an interrelated field of the living. In the face of anthropogenic climate change and its effects, animism takes on a new significance, describing the uncanny reality of a world in which the ‘environment’ can no longer be thought of as a passive background, something at a material or philosophical distance from humankind. In the Anthropocene, the distinctions upon which ‘enlightened’ civilisation has long been based—distinctions between natural and artificial, animate and inanimate, subject and object, humans and other animals—become ever more untenable. I read climate change as a blow to human narcissism that issues from the earth itself, ushering an increasingly urgent need to respond to phenomena resistant to an anthropocentric perspective, that defy human conceptions of agency, centrality, objectivity and scale. In readings of various literary texts (Lewis Carroll, Clarice Lispector, Franz Kafka, Helen MacDonald, William Shakespeare, Nicholas Royle and Virginia Woolf), I bring to the fore the inherent animism of language, whilst remaining alert to the life of traces and the traces of life that stir beyond or before human words. Guided by the work of Jacques Derrida, I disclose generalised notions of text, reading and writing that are not reducible to human language: a radical animism of being that extends from the subatomic to the cosmological, and from the material to the metaphysical, thinking through the living acts of reading and writing today, on earth.

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  • Published version

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207.0

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  • English Theses

Qualification level

  • doctoral

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  • phd

Language

  • eng

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University of Sussex

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  • Yes

Legacy Posted Date

2017-06-01

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