Extinction: Stories of Unravelling and Reworlding

Extinction challenges our thinking and writing. Such overwhelming disappearance of ways of being, experiencing and making meaning in the world disrupts familiar categories and demands new modes of response. It requires that we trace multiple forms of both countable and intangible loss, the unravelling of social and ecological communities as a result of colonialism and capture, development and defaunation and other destructive processes. It brings forth new modes of commemoration and mourning, and new practices of archiving and survival. It calls for action in the absence of hope, and for the recognition and nourishment of new generativities: new modes of assemblage and attachment, resurgence and reworlding, commoning, composting and caring for country

[Review] Robert Cribb, Helen Gilbert and Helen Tiffen, Wild Man from Borneo: A Cultural History of the Orangutan. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2014

Wild Man from Borneo is a studious and wide-ranging cultural history of the orangutan and an indispensable resource for anyone working on this species or great apes in general. Orangutan stories and encounters have always captivated, from the tales of the Dayak and Batak peoples from Borneo and Indonesia, to the first rumours of early European travellers, and later observations and dissections. The orangutan’s uncanny similarity to humans, both in form and behaviour, made it central to a nineteenth-century debate about the uniqueness of humanity, in a time when few had been seen and Europeans were unsure just what sort of creature it was. Even after knowledge of the species became more settled, orangutans have remained central to explorations of the human/animal border and the place of homo sapiens among the great apes. Yet today, as development-driven deforestation has crippled an already declining population, orangutans are in danger of extinction in the wild. This book serves as a perhaps already forlorn act of remembrance, recounting and affirming the significance and charm of the fabled ‘red ape’

Where warriors wait

Short story17 page(s

The Pauline ellipsis in Foucault's genealogy of Christianity

Paul occupies a curious position in Michel Foucault's genealogy of Christianity. Though focused at first on the archaeology of modernity, Foucault's history of the present eventually dug as far as Greco-Roman and early Christian antiquity. His central target was pastoral power (both ecclesial and secular) and its technologies of confession and spiritual direction. He sought to uncover, prior and counter to the institutional production of obedient and confessing subjects of self-knowledge, spiritual exercises of ethical self-care. But though Foucault discussed numerous elements of Christian thought and practice - from Tertullian to Aquinas, from monasticism to the Counter-Reformation - the apostle Paul is hardly mentioned. The absence of this foundational missionary is remarkable for many reasons. It certainly stands out against the current discursive eruption promoting Paul's revolutionary character. What might be the implications of this submerged and delayed encounter between Foucault and Paul? A proper appreciation of the depth and complexity of Foucault's genealogy of Christianity will be required for us to recognize the productive ambivalence of this elliptical silence.15 page(s

How I learned to keep tidy

A short story by Matthew Chrulew.12 page(s

Suspicion and Love

Recent philosophy has witnessed a number of prominent and ambivalent encounters with Christianity. Alongside the retrievals of Paul and political theology, thinkers such as Žižek and Negri argue that in our era of imperial sovereignty and advanced global capitalism, the most appropriate politics is one of love. These attempts to reinvigorate progressive materialism are often characterised as a break with the relativist tendencies of French philosophy, moving from the negativity and disconnection of postmodern suspicion to a new, constructive politics of creativity and fraternity. Deconstructive critiques have insisted on the exclusions necessary to any such politics of love. Foucault’s genealogy of Christianity—specifically, of the emergence from pastoral power of modern governmentality and biopolitics—sketches a further significant dimension of love’s suffocating history and contemporary risk