Ep. 71 – Jedidiah Purdy, After Nature

In this episode, Emily and John welcome John’s colleague Gary Kroll for a discussion of Jedediah Purdy‘s After Nature: A Politics for the Anthropocene. We map the contours of the book, asking questions about the scope of the argument and both the promises and limits of its framework. Throughout we interrogate the concepts of the Anthropocene, humanism, the posthuman (are they incompatible??), and democracy, and ask what work the environmental imaginary does. In classic Always Already fashion, notions of scientific authority appear along with our favorite questions: what of capitalism, and wherefore art the feminist lens? And, how would an engagement with Indigenous cosmologies and politics transform Purdy’s own environmental imagination? Tune in to help us welcome our first guest holding the very official title Mother of Dragons! 

Requests for texts for us to discuss? Dreams for us to interpret? Advice questions for us to answer? Email us at alwaysalreadypodcast AT gmail DOT com. Subscribe on iTunes or Spotify. Follow us on Twitter. Like our Facebook page. RSS feed here. Patreon here. Thanks to Bad Infinity for the intro music, “Post Digital,” from their album FutureCommons; always already thanks to B for the outro music. For the mp3 of the episode click here.

Links:

• Purdy talk about After Nature at Duke in 2015
• “The New Nature” forum at Boston Review
• Dina Gilio-Whitaker, As Long as Grass Grows: The Indigenous Fight for Environmental Justice, from Colonization to Standing Rock
• Kyle Whyte, “Indigenous environmental justice: Anti-colonial action through kinship“
• Collected Murray Bookchin writings at the Anarchist Library
• William Cronon, Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature
• Past AAP episodes of note: James’ interview with JT Roane on plotting the Black Commons and the racial capitalocene; discussion of Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter

https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674368224

https://www.law.columbia.edu/faculty/jedediah-s-purdy

Ep. 56 – Donna Haraway, When Species Meet

In this episode Emily, James, and John discuss Donna Haraway‘s When Species Meet (2008), a personal and at times intimate figuring/figuration of human-companion species relations. We plot this work within Haraway’s journey from her essay “A Manifesto for Cyborgs” (1985) to her recent book Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (2016), as well as think through its placement within the academic discourses of posthumanism and critical animal studies. Following Haraway’s playful writing style, we eventually arrive upon the terms companion species and ethics of flourishing and we flesh out how Haraway reconfigures these points of reference and in so doing reconfigures the “Great Divide” that separates the ontology of human-animal encounters. How can one capacious reading of Haraway lend itself to banter about prison dogs, Catholicism, homo ludens and epistemologies of play, demons, etymology, Marxist value theories, and (perhaps most-irreverently), Derrida’s doubly naked body, materially nude and existentially undressed by the lingering gaze of his cat? Moreover, how does all of the preceding reside in an episode that also features an emergent drinking game that tries to distill the essence of the royal wedding? Companions, Become all of this together with us as you listen along!

Support us on Patreon to help us upgrade our recording equipment, potentially provide episode transcripts, and more – plus, you may have the chance to jump your request to the top of the request queue. Requests for texts for us to discuss? Dreams for us to interpret? Advice questions for us to answer? Email us at alwaysalreadypodcast AT gmail DOT com. Subscribe on iTunes. Follow us on Twitter. Like our Facebook page. RSS feed here. We are part of the Critical Mediations network. Thanks to Bad Infinity for the intro music, and always already thanks to B for the outro music. For the mp3 of the episode click here.

 

Links

• Haraway lecture, “From Cyborgs to Companion Species” (2003)
• Haraway lecture, “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene: Staying with the Trouble” (2014)
• Haraway’s 2016 book, Staying With the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene
  
• McKenzie Wark’s Public Seminar essay on Haraway and the Chthulucene
• Haraway’s “A Cyborg Manifesto“
• Short clip of Haraway on “speculative fabulation”

 

Haraway and her dog Cayenne; image via Wikimedia Commons licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

 

 

Emily’s companion, Ripley

 

Derrida, with his cat (apparently named Logos) https://twitter.com/thelitcritguy/status/840148505398247424

 

Ep. 42 – Queer Inhumanisms

In this week’s episode, Emily, B and Rachel dig into GLQ‘s special issue, “Queer Inhumanisms,” edited by Mel Y. Chen and Dana Luciano. We begin by discussing the editors’ introduction to the issue, entitled “Has the Queer Ever Been Human?” followed by Jeanne Vaccaro‘s piece, “Feelings and Fractals: Woolly Ecologies of Transgender Matter,” and conclude with Karen Barad‘s “TransMaterialities: Trans*/Matter/Realities and Queer Political Imaginings.” Our myriad topics of discussion include parsing the contributions to queer theory of scholarship on animacies, post-humanism, and animal studies, what we can learn from quantum physics about the way we conceptualize (or fail to conceptualize) the human and the subject, and the sticky role of language in creating and hindering new ways of thinking queerness. Listen in as we delve through this rich set of texts!

Remember to support us on Patreon to help offset/reimburse the cost of our fancy new microphone, which we have named Lacan. Requests for texts for us to discuss? Dreams for us to interpret? Advice questions for us to answer? Email us at alwaysalreadypodcast AT gmail DOT com. Subscribe on iTunes. Follow us on Twitter. Like our Facebook page. RSS feed here. Thanks to Leah Dion and to B for the music. Get the mp3 here.

Links!

• Read all the articles on GLQ’s site at Duke University Press
• Chen’s book, Animacies
• Our episode on Animacies
• Butler’s “Your Behavior Creates Your Gender”
• Connolly on New Materialism
• Feminist Theory Keynote: Karen Barad, “Re-membering the Future, Re(con)figuring the Past: Temporality, Materiality, and Justice-to-Come“