Peak Everything

Alexander Bove
In his introduction, Cohen immediately sets the stakes high for the collection as a whole in defining the project of telemorphosis. Telemorphosis is the name he gives to a critical project that undertakes to interrogate the ways in which the tradition of Western philosophy and cultural criticism has in fact been complicit in, and even advanced, the language and worldview that brought us to a state of ecological/ economic global crisis. From the outset, Cohen hones in on some foundational history-of-metaphysics concepts that are deconstructed in various essays throughout the whole collection, which works quite well to tie the whole book together. The most powerful of these lies at the etymological heart of the crisis, reflected in the very terms economy and ecology, which come from the common root word eco-, the Greek oikos or home, always already complicit in the western drive for lossless production, expansion, and yet ever-stable homeland security. Another thread that runs through the whole collection is the idea that our civilization has reached some break or limit, exceeding the framework of our traditional critical discourses and therefore demanding new discourses. With respect to this, however, the authors have a wide variety of reactions and responses, and while Cohen claims that the aporia of an era of climate change are structurally different from those that developed on the torsions of Western metaphysics, Im not sure all the authors would agree. Yet there does seem to be a consensus that contemporary theory is caught in a self-destructive loop, circl[ing] back to pre-critical premises from which these essays think through various escape plans.

TElEMORPHOSIS: THEORY IN tHE ERA OF ClIMAtE CHANGE, VOlUME I

Tom Cohen, ed. Open Humanities Press http://openhumanitiespress.org 312 pages; paper, $23.99; free PDF

Not politics, but cognitive or epistemographic zone[s]; not texts, but biosemanti[c] or nanoinscriptive process[es]. These are the domains of the new idiom, the new directions in critical thought suggested by Tom Cohen in his introduction to this powerful and timely recent collection, Telemorphosis: Theory in the Era of Climate Change. The book is timely not only in its unwavering focus on the uniqueness of our present crisis but also in its hyperconsciousness of itself as a radical self-questioning of the position of the theorist/academic in the early part of the twenty-first century. In some ways a bleakly honest vision our era, Telemorphosis consists of a dozen essays (plus introduction) all (or nearly all) intent on recalibrating our whole philosophic and critical discourse in relation to climate change. Its a bold project, but the authors, the list of whom reads like a whos-who of modern theory, are more than up to the task, and the collection ultimately demonstrates an indispensable place for theoretical thought in a time of imminent real world catastrophes.

Telemorphosis is in some ways a bleakly honest vision of our era.

There is also more or less unanimous agreement that destructive anthropogenic climate change is already irreversible. Indeed, it is in part the way in which this hard-to-swallow conclusion is shifted from problem to presupposition that often makes this text so sobering: The mystery is why we did nothing until it was too late? ponders J. Hillis Miller with terrifying after-the-factness. In analyzing how we got to this point, the essayists overwhelmingly identify some pattern of paradoxical inversion of cultural lifedrive into death-drive, most explicitly expressed by J. Hillis Miller as the auto-co-immunity in which a community destroys itself by way of what is intended to make it safe, whole, indemnified from harm, just as autoimmunity in the human bodys immune system turns the body against itself. Hillis Miller traces this auto-co-immunity to the structuring cultural metaphor of the organic unity model (concepts like truth, logos, and ratio leading him back to organicist metaphors of roots, home, and earth) whereas science is finding more and more evidence that the earth is not a super-organism. It is not an organism at all. It is best understood as an extremely complex machine that is capable of going autodestructively berserk, at least from the limited perspective of human needs. Others approach this self-generative/self-destructive dialectic from different angles; Claire Colebrook, for

instance, interprets it in terms of traditional sexual difference, which underlies a paradoxical suicidal logic of survival, the drive for species procreation concealing in fact a suicidal self-enclosure that has precluded a sense of life beyond oikos, polity, organism, sense and man. I found myself asking very early on: If concepts like politics and text are superseded in the time of peak everything (Cohen), what of concepts like ethics and the (human) subject and the other?concepts, of course, having long undergone deconstruction but still sustaining their critical force, perhaps now more than ever. At first these concepts may appear to be the bugbears of telemorphosis. Cohen particularly seems to show an anxiety about some of them, suggesting that the idea of Levinasian others preclude telemorphosis as such and that the ethical attention to otherness relies on the same metaphorics of the home and hospitality that can only play on the borders of the bounded. But upon further reflection, these concepts open onto some of the most exciting, strange, promising, and unpredictable aspects of the book, precisely because of their variable and unstable position in telemorphosis. Justin Read, for instance, in his remarkable and oneiric theoretic journey into the Unicity (an internalized border, but one that works to territorialize the entire planet as absolute exteriority), gives us a techno-Deleuzean vision of a virtually subjectless/otherless world in which each subject (Self) is merely a density of information (a knot) with respect to another knot (Other), where there are only relations between informational densities. And J. Hillis Miller replaces the organic unity model of Western metaphysics with his linguistico-machine model composed of mechanical sign-systems. For Hillis Miller, the subject/other relation is not jettisoned but reticulated into a series of systems that decenter it from the organic unity model (more like iPods than I-Thous): Together [these systems] make an all-inclusive

Bove continued on next page

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Bove continued from previous page ecotechnological non-integrated whole into which each one of us is plugged. A few theorists stand out as being less vexed by the theoretical heritage (or debt) that has lent us terms like ethics, otherness, and subjectivity, as well as by their role in critiques of capitalism, such as Mike Hill in his dazzling Ecologies of War, and perhaps Robert Markley in his adept reading of the different conceptualizations of time as kronos and kairos (meaning both opportunity and weather), which underlie the idea of sustainability and risk tragically repeating the idea of a preternaturally resilient ecology. Two authors that engage this heritage in particularly productive ways are Bernard Stiegler and Martin McQuillan. For those not familiar with Stiegler, his essay Care, which describes late capitalist subjects as beings whose attention and care have been expropriated from them, is an excellent introduction to his oeuvre. Stiegler addresses the current crisis in terms of a libidinal economy that has been co-opted by market capitalism, resulting in a world where the libido has been destroyed, and where the drives it contained, as Pandoras box enclosed every evil, henceforth are at the helm of beings devoid of attention, and incapable of taking care of their world. As a strategy of escape from this self-destructive capitalist deathdrive, Stiegler invites us to shift the investment of culture and thought from an energy of subsistence to an energy of existence. McQuillans essay, Notes Toward a Post-Carbon Philosophy, chimes well with Stieglers in that the signifier energy exceeds its economic/ecological referents and the speculative structure of a carbon economy is, like philosophy, always a death drive. Speculation, therefore, presents a telemorphic nodal point in deciphering the relation of carbon consumption to the dematerialization of money and to faith, credit, debt, and literature. But perhaps the most surprising aspect of this book is the emergence of a new kind of literary criticismvery different from, perhaps even opposed to, something like ecocriticism. J. Hillis Miller gives a Derridean reading of Odradek (from Kafkas Cares of a Family Man) as a virus-like copying machine that auto-deconstructs the very ideas of organic creation/creature; Read gives a DNA-inspired interpretation of Augusto de Camposs cidade/city/cit that reveals the order/disorder dialectic of the Unicity; and McQuillan explores how the film There Will Be Blood (2007) works through a series of theo-thanato-econo-carbo exchanges and substitutions that test the faith of those involved in them, to name just a few. What emerges from these collective readings is that telemorphic criticism (if I can so dub it) does not so much take literature as an object of analysis but as the driving energy of a new critical discourse, one which opens unforeseen vistas in the critical prospects of our era and plumbs the depths of the crises and aporia of our times with undaunted imagination and force.

Alexander Bove is an assistant professor in the English Department at Pacific University in Oregon. He is currently working on a book on counterrepresentation and illustration in the works of Charles Dickens.

Critical Climate
Kaila Brown
Impasses of the Post-Global: Theory in the Era of Climate Change, edited by Henry Sussman, assemble a diverse set of articles ranging in their specialty and style, offering even seasoned readers in ecocriticism and contemporary critical theory a fresh set of perspectives. In his introduction, Sussman writes that the articles assembled work partially as a collaborative reality-check regarding the current sequence of catastrophes, shocks, and aftershocks. Fittingly, the energetic and at times scathing opening article from Tom Cohen, Anecographics, sets a sharp tempo and trajectory for the subsequent chapters and what he hopes will be new critical orientations. His article seems initially to engage the dubious compatibility of environmentalism and deconstruction, but quickly erupts into a tour de force, exposing the stakes of the so-called Derridawars, arguing for a conceptualization of climate change over

IMPASSES OF tHE POSt-GlObAl: THEORY IN tHE ERA OF ClIMAtE CHANGE, VOlUME II

Henry Sussman Open Humanities Press http://openhumanitiespress.org 312 pages; paper, $23.99; free PDF

In the past decade, ecocriticism and environmentalist response more generally has come under increasing critical scrutiny. Provocative work from Slavoj iek, Timothy Morton, Cary Wolfe, Ben Dibley, and David Wood, among others, has criticized the widespread apocalyptic fetishism, if not lurking anthropocentricism, surrounding the ecological crisis, particularly as embraced by humanist scholars in the wave of poststructuralism. Editors Tom Cohen and Claire Colbrooke have been at the forefront of this emerging recalibration of ecological thought and response. The IC3 project takes very seriously the implications of material and ecological exhaustion on modes of production and contemporary Humanities discourse. Critique must not only address the geopolitical, cultural, and material reality of climate change; it must be thoroughly be changed by it. This means that for the contributors to IC3 series, there burns an intense focus on contemporariness, both in timely publication and responsiveness to current events, as well as a redefinition of disciplinary fields by expanding the subjects of investigation. It is within this framework of change and transformation that the series two-volume publication Theory in the Era of Climate Change emerges with new challenges, provocations, and manifestos to shake the conceptual templates remaining within humanist (and post-humanist) critique. Telemorphosis: Theory in the Era of Climate Change, edited by Tom Cohen, and its companion,
Page 12 American Book Review

Impasses of the Post-Global offers a plenitude of energies and innovations for critical thought.
and against environmentalism and imagining deconstruction without Derrida. Cohen indicts what he terms the prevalent discourse of mourning produced in last decade by writers including Judith Butler, N. Katherine Hayles, James Lovelock, Donna Haraway, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, John Protevi, and so on. His criticism reads best, though, when he articulates what imagined future reader these discourses take for granted. Cohens inventive move to an anecographic thought which is uninvested in any proper name it would ennoble or recuperate as legacy (Derrida) allows for a premise of irreversibility (and the positive apprehension of extinction). Engaging and perceptive, Cohens stunning chapter draws the reader into the IC3 project, expanding what we imagine in our imagining climate change. From Cohens opening chapter to Sussmans conclusion, Auto-Immunity, a scant but apparent logic organizes the book. Beginning with the

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more or less explicit ecological focus of Cohen, Bruce Clarkes straightforward illumination of the overlapping and contesting histories of autopoieses and Gaia theory introduces new readers to the terms of engagement between theories of self-referential systems and climate change. Even seasoned readers will benefit from his clear approach. Yates McKee elegantly reads Subhanker Banerjees photography and brave call for climate justice accounting for the disproportionate responsibilities for greenhouse emissions on the part of corporations, governments, and consumers in the Global North. Balancing Clarke and McKee, Tian Song and James Bunn each submit uniquely stylized contemplative critiques of garbage and water, respectively. Chapters 6 through 9 turn our attention ever so slightly from climate change, conceived Brown continued on next page