Essays At The End Of The Age

In this book, activist philosopher and philosophical activist Lieven De Cauter investigates the idea that if we want to avoid collapse, we have to end the Anthropocene - the geological era of the gigantic, devastating impact of our species on planet Earth. It might even be, he argues, that the collapse of our current, growth-maximizing system is the only hope for the biosphere.00Offering case studies on urban activism alongside more general reflections on civic action and social movements, De Cauter moves from the political melancholy caused by the near certainty of climate disaster and meditations on the end of ?the Age of Man?, towards reflections on more hopeful events of our times, like the resurgence of the commons. He hails the rediscovery of this forgotten and excluded third besides public and private, arguing it contains the seeds of another worldview and another politics. From this new perspective identity and heterotopia, other spaces as places for otherness, can be read in a new light. This collection of writings closes with texts on the corona crisis. Biopolitics, the care for the life of the population by the state, has gained a new topicality in this age of pandemics.00The mix of philosophical, theoretical texts and newspaper articles make for a broadly accessible, exciting book of ?activist essays?, in accordance with the basic creed of its author: ?pessimism in theory, optimism in practice?. Even if geologists are not quite sure when the Anthropocene has begun, it is high time to end it.

'Essays at the End of the Age' examines the rise and fall of nihilism in the context of the cycles of intellectual history and suggests ways to go beyond it. The modern era began with Descartes and the attempt to use the 'cogito' to obtain a clear understanding of transcendent being. Unfortunately, the 'cogito' led to nothingness through its resistance to constructs of Òbeing. Then Kant attempted to synthesize nothingness with being in the transcendental aesthetic, with mixed results. Finally, Nietzsche used the power of nothingness itself (or nihilism) to negate any concept of being for the sake of the will to power. But nihilism led to the same nothingness as the 'cogito' did, since nihilism, too, was based on resistance. The limitations of the superman became evident through the art and culture that reflected his negative ideal of absolute resistance to Òthe good--and yet nihilism also indicates the end of philosophy and its attempt to describe transcendent value and the good of happiness. The superman is dead, and philosophy appears to be dead as well. The question now is whether it is possible to go beyond nihilism and find the identity, purpose, and meaning that the human spirit craves. 'Essays at the End of the Age' uses illustrations from literature, music, science, and sacred texts to show why the superman failed to obtain happiness, and to point the way to a new mode of being.

George Orwell set out ‘to make political writing into an art’, and to a wide extent this aim shaped the future of English literature – his descriptions of authoritarian regimes helped to form a new vocabulary that is fundamental to understanding totalitarianism. While 1984 and Animal Farm are amongst the most popular classic novels in the English language, this new series of Orwell’s essays seeks to bring a wider selection of his writing on politics and literature to a new readership. In Why I Write, the first in the Orwell’s Essays series, Orwell describes his journey to becoming a writer, and his movement from writing poems to short stories to the essays, fiction and non-fiction we remember him for. He also discusses what he sees as the ‘four great motives for writing’ – ‘sheer egoism’, ‘aesthetic enthusiasm’, ‘historical impulse’ and ‘political purpose’ – and considers the importance of keeping these in balance. Why I Write is a unique opportunity to look into Orwell’s mind, and it grants the reader an entirely different vantage point from which to consider the rest of the great writer’s oeuvre. 'A writer who can – and must – be rediscovered with every age.' — Irish Times

In Uncanny Rest Alberto Moreiras offers a meditation on intellectual life under the suspension of time and conditions of isolation. Focusing on his personal day-to-day experiences of the “shelter-in-place” period during the first months of the coronavirus pandemic, Moreiras engages with the limits and possibilities of critical thought in the realm of the infrapolitical—the conditions of existence that exceed average understandings of politics and philosophy. In each dated entry he works through the process of formulating a life’s worth of thought and writing while attempting to locate the nature of thought once the coordinates of everyday life have changed. Offering nothing less than a phenomenology of thinking, Moreiras shows how thought happens in and out of a life, at a certain crossroads where memories collide, where conversations with interlocutors both living and dead evolve and thinking during a suspended state becomes provisional and uncertain.