Jemma Deer - Radical Animism

Radical Animism

Radical Animism

Reading for the End of the World

Jemma Deer

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC

Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

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First published in Great Britain 2021

Copyright Jemma Deer, 2021

Jemma Deer has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work.

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ISBN: HB: 978-1-3501-1115-8

ePDF: 978-1-3501-1116-5

eBook: 978-1-3501-1117-2

Series: Environmental Cultures

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Environmental Cultures Series

Series Editors:

Greg Garrard , University of British Columbia, Canada

Richard Kerridge , Bath Spa University

Editorial Board:

Frances Bellarsi , Universit Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium

Mandy Bloomfield , Plymouth University, UK

Lily Chen , Shanghai Normal University, China

Christa Grewe-Volpp , University of Mannheim, Germany

Stephanie LeMenager , University of Oregon, USA

Timothy Morton , Rice University, USA

Pablo Mukherjee , University of Warwick, UK

Bloomsburys Environmental Cultures series makes available to students and scholars at all levels the latest cutting-edge research on the diverse ways in which culture has responded to the age of environmental crisis. Publishing ambitious and innovative literary ecocriticism that crosses disciplines, national boundaries, and media, books in the series explore and test the challenges of ecocriticism to conventional forms of cultural study.

Titles available:

Bodies of Water , Astrida Neimanis

Cities and Wetlands , Rod Giblett

Civil Rights and the Environment in African-American Literature, 18951941 , John Claborn

Climate Change Scepticism , Greg Garrard, George B. Handley, Axel Goodbody and Stephanie Posthumus

Climate Crisis and the 21st-Century British Novel , Astrid Bracke

Colonialism, Culture, Whales , Graham Huggan

Ecocriticism and Italy , Serenella Iovino

Ecospectrality , Laura A. White

Fuel , Heidi C. M. Scott

Literature as Cultural Ecology , Hubert Zapf

Nerd Ecology , Anthony Lioi

The New Nature Writing , Jos Smith

The New Poetics of Climate Change , Matthew Griffiths

Reclaiming Romanticism , Kate Rigby

Teaching Environmental Writing , Isabel Galleymore

This Contentious Storm , Jennifer Mae Hamilton

Forthcoming Titles:

Cognitive Ecopoetics , Sharon Lattig

Ecocriticism and Turkey , Meliz Ergin

Eco-Digital Art , Lisa FitzGerald

Environmental Cultures in Soviet East Europe , Anna Barcz

Imagining the Plains of Latin America , Axel Prez Trujillo Diniz

Weathering Shakespeare , Evelyn OMalley

How ist with you,
That you do bend your eye on vacancy,
And with thincorporal air do hold discourse?
Shakespeare, Hamlet

Contents

I owe much to Nicholas Royle, who has been an inspiration since I was an undergraduate and later became a mentor and friend. This book would not have been written without his continued support. I am grateful to all the friends and family who sustained me over the years I was writing, especially Alex Casey, Hannah Geller, Reuben Golden, Jessica McDiarmid and Rachael Sergeant, who helped me through. There are too many others to name here; you know who you are. I am thankful to the English department at the University of Sussex, where I completed the PhD that was the roots of this project, and to the Harvard University Center for the Environment, where it grew to maturity. Special thanks to Mareike Beck, Sara Crangle, Joe Luna, Michael Jonik, Liz Walker and Di Yang who supported me over the years at Sussex (academically and otherwise), and to Sarah Wood for writing the book that encouraged me to begin this project and for giving the guidance that got me here.

This is for life.

Definitions and etymologies of words, unless otherwise stated, are taken from the Oxford English Dictionary Online .

Scripture quotations are from The Authorized (King James) Version. Rights in the Authorized Version in the United Kingdom are vested in the Crown. Reproduced by permission of the Crowns patentee, Cambridge University Press.

The following pages are concerned with animism or rather with animisms in the plural with the myriad activities and agencies of entities both organic and inorganic. Non-human and non-living forces act, create, read, write and respond in ways that have often been assumed to be exclusively human. In this age of climate breakdown, the disavowal of such forces is becoming increasingly difficult to maintain, as long-held scientific, philosophical and psychological paradigms are challenged by agencies beyond the human. I elaborate a radical new animism for a planet in crisis, recognizing the non-human powers that assert themselves around us, in us and through us. This is not an anthropological study; rather, this book is concerned with sketching a generalized rethinking of animism that is neither mystical nor primitive and that is attentive to forms of animism that are alive even in the most scientific or modern worldviews. I am also very much concerned with the animism of literature : the ways in which literary writing has a strange and active life that has the power to disturb, startle and transform the contexts in which it is received, the futures into which it is born. The work of Jacques Derrida, effecting as it does a sustained deconstruction of anthropocentrism, is essential to my thinking throughout.

My subtitle, Reading for the End of the World, should be understood in two ways. First, it can be read in an apocalyptic vein, as referring to the kind of reading that might be appropriate to this time of catastrophic climate change, a reading for the end of the world. Second, however, it can also be read in an affirmative tone. If we take the etymological sense of the word world as the age of man (coming from the Old Danish w r- ld , meaning literally man-age) and the word for in the sense of in defence or support of; in favour of, on the side of, this would be a mode of reading that is in favour of the end of the age of man a reading that is for the end of the w r- ld . To be clear, I am not advocating for the extinction of the human. On the contrary, I am recognizing that the future of human life in fact depends upon the end of a world in which human beings narcissistically act as if they are separable from or independent of other living things. The end of the w r- ld would be the beginning of a less destructive or pathological relationship between humans and the other forms of life with which we share this planet.