Black, Indigenous and otherwise minoritized communities of color are amongst the most vulnerable to the adverse consequences of environmental crises and the solutions proposed to remedy them. The participation and subsequent erasure of non-White youth activists and organizers within environmental sustainability struggles, and their subsequent erasure in global media coverage on climate activism has complicated any neat hierarchy of single concerns facing humanity. How is it that White and Western climate activists come to be the faces of the global youth (...) climate movement? This essay examines the salience of race to the education and framing of environmental and sustainability efforts. It suggests that the separation of environmental concerns from the socio-political (and thus racial) contexts that produce them not only further marginalizes the contributions of non-White activists and the communities that they represent, but also engenders a violently White, and thus narrow, vision of a global, Green future. (shrink)

Christian Gilliam argues that a philosophy of 'pure' immanence is integral to the development of an alternative understanding of 'the political'; one that re-orients our understanding of the self toward the concept of an unconscious or 'micropolitical' life of desire. He argues that here, in this 'life', is where the power relations integral to the continuation of post-industrial capitalism are most present and most at stake. Through proving its philosophical context, lineage and political import, Gilliam ultimately comes to (...) outline and justify the conceptual importance and necessity of immanence in understanding politics and resistance, thereby challenging the claim that ontologies of 'pure' immanence are either apolitical and/or politically incoherent. (shrink)

In the current literature addressing the Foucault/Deleuze relationship, there is a clear tendency to either replicate and expand Foucault’s over-simplified rejection of Deleuzian desire as already caught in a discursive trap or play of power; or to replicate Deleuze and Guattari’s over-simplified reading of Foucault’s dispositif, in which power and resistance are deemed opposed and thus understood via a structure of negativity. In either case, each thinker is accused of referring to an asocial or essentialist multiplicity, typically in the form (...) of a real transcendence, which is deemed ‘inconsistent’ with their post-structuralist yearnings. This article argues that there is in fact a real and enduring consistency between the two thinkers, which is to be found in the mutual use of an ontology of ‘pure’ or ‘disjunctive’ immanence – as derived from and developed through Nietzsche’s method of genealogy – as a way to construe power/subjectification, with pleasure/desire taken as the affective inside of this power. That said, the somewhat semantic difference between desire and pleasure being proposed does lead to a slight, though tangible, divergence in politico-ethical and practical possibilities. This article concludes that it is this divergence that should from the real basis of debate. (shrink)

Focusing on the oft-overlooked herbaceous layer of eastern forests, this volume combines perspectives from different levels of biological organization and forest types into a synthesis of our knowledge of the ecology of this important forest layer. This is the first book of its kind to synthesize information concerning herbaceous layer structure, composition, and dynamics of a variety of forest ecosystem types in eastern North America. With over 1,200 references cited in the 14 chapters, this book represents the most comprehensive review (...) of literature on the ecology of the herbaceous layer. (shrink)

The premise of this article is that the political import of Deleuze and Guattari’s “micropolitics of desire” has been obscured and as such remains underdeveloped. The micropolitics of desire is here reproduced to provide a Nietzscheo-Marxian critique of capitalism and resistive politics of the future. This entails an entirely different understanding of the nature of power and resistance, as compared to prevalent views. Power is not negative or anti-energy, but a socially productive force operating on, with and through the productivity (...) of desire, delineating an immanent, quantitative and “fusional multiplicity” of a producing-production. Resistance is a matter of recomposing this producer-produced relationship in a manner problematic to and in excess of the very productive core of capitalism. In terms of praxis, this amounts to experimental practices that resonate into a viral though non-teleological “revolutionary-becoming”, delineating a form of a-systematic and post-identity resistance. The underlying thesis is that we must change our “desire”, before we can hope to change our politics. (shrink)

It is typically held that Sartre is a thinker of transcendence, inasmuch as he retains a subject–predicate structure via intentional consciousness and ruptures an otherwise insular domain through his dialectic of the self. Against such interpretations, this article argues that in following the progression of Sartre’s thought, we will come to see a deepening engagement with, and development of, immanence in the spirit of Deleuze. Specifically, Sartre steadily develops a dialectic in which consciousness, while relating to an ‘outside’, is construed (...) as also thoroughly embedded in that outside through the subject-body of the flesh and relations of desire. From this comes a conceptualisation of the in-itself and for-itself as simulacra or topological variations of a more primordial intertwining or fabric of univocal Being. In this sense, we are immediately taken away from the subject of social contract theory, insofar as this presumes an asocial self, and the notion of identity as the sine qua non of politics, insofar as this presumes the terrain of an inexplicable transcendent Other. This brings with it a take on politics that prefigures and is concomitant with Deleuzian micropolitics, while also serving to complement it through the retention of the ego as a practical function. (shrink)

In 1996, the Land and Water Fund of the Rockies (LAW Fund), a nonprofit environmental lawand policy center based in Boulder, Colorado, released How the West Can Win: A Blueprint for a Clean and Affordable Energy Future. The blueprint found that rapid growth in the West would lead to another round of fossil fuel–fired power plants and the associated environmental impacts unless policy makers changed course toward a more sustainable energy future. The study provided a set of strategies that lawmakers, (...) regulators, and other stakeholders could use to help implement such a course change. It is concluded that the blueprint’s recommendations are even more salient than they were 5 years ago. The article leads off with an overview of changes in the electric industry over the past 5 years in the interior West and concludes with a review of the executive summary of the LAW Fund’s 1996 report, the policy directives of which remain valid today. (shrink)

The concepts and theories surrounding the aesthetic category of the grotesque are explored in this book by pursuing their deployment in the films of American auteurs Tim Burton, Terry Gilliam, the Coen Brothers and David Lynch"--Provided by publisher.

I temi della corporeità, della sporcizia, della materialità, in una ricerca esasperata di realismo.

Photographs by one of French cinema's most influential and enigmatic artists. Any new film and any new book by French filmmaker Chris Marker is an event. Marker gave film lovers one of their most memorable experiences with La Jetée —a time-travel montage set after a nuclear war that inspired Terry Gilliam's Twelve Monkeys. His still camerawork is not as well known, but Marker has been taking photographs as long as he has been making films. Staring Back presents 200 black-and-white (...) photographs from Marker's personal archives, taken from 1952 to 2006. Some of the photographs are related to his classic films, others are portraits of famous faces, but most are pictures of people Marker has encountered as he has traveled the world. The central section of the book contains a series of photographs documenting political protests Marker has witnessed, including the march on the Pentagon in 1967, the events of May 1968 in Paris, and the tumultuous 2006 demonstrations protesting the French government's proposed employment policies. The photographs are accompanied by several unpublished texts by Marker, including the English language text of The Case of the Grinning Cat and Marker's annotations for some of the photos. The book—which appears in conjunction with an exhibition at the Wexner Center for the Arts at The Ohio State University—also includes essays by Wexner Center curator Bill Horrigan and art historian Molly Nesbit. (shrink)

This paper examines various philosophical arguments to do with time travel. It argues that time travel has not been shown to be logically impossible. It then considers whether time travel would give rise to improbable strings of coincidences, or closed causal loops. Finally, it considers whether we could ever be justified in believing someone who claimed to be a time traveller, or whether we would always be more justified in believing that the claimant was either deluded or trying to deceive (...) us. For this last issue the Terry Gilliam film ‘Twelve Monkeys’ is used as an example. (shrink)

"In this book, Evgenia Cherkasova brings the philosopher Kant and the novelist Dostoevsky together in conversations that probe why duty is central to our moral life. She shows that just as Dostoevsky is indebted to Kant, so Kant would profit from the deeply philosophical narratives of Dostoevsky, which engage the problem of evil and the claims of human community. She not only produces a novel reading of Dostoevsky, but also guides us to later, often neglected Kantian texts. This study is (...) written with scholarly care, penetrating analysis, elegance of style, and moral urgency: Cherkasova writes with both mind and heart." Emily Grosholz, Professor of Philosophy, The Pennsylvania State University Social Philosophy (SP), in conjunction with the Center for Ethics, Peace and Social Justice, SUNY Cortland, explores theoretical and applied issues in contemporary social philosophy, drawing on a variety of philosophical traditions. (shrink)