[spectre] Science/art/philosophy: new book Minimal Ethics for the Anthropocene: out & available open access

[Joanna Zylinska]

Dear All,

I just wanted to let you know that my new book, /Minimal Ethics for the 
Anthropocene/, has been published by Open Humanities Press. Adopting a 
philosophy-meets-art-meets-cultural studies approach, it contains a 
modest ethical proposal for the (whole) universe which is faced with the 
prospect of climate change, total destruction and the extinction of life 
as we know it. It also contains an image-based project as an alternative 
visual track to the argument presented. I’m pasting the official blurb 
below.

The online and pdf versions of the book are available /for free/:

http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/minimal-ethics.html

Best,

Joanna

*MINIMAL ETHICS FOR THE ANTHROPOCENE*

by Joanna Zylinska

Open Humanities Press, 2014

An imprint of Michigan Publishing, University of Michigan Library: Ann Arbor

Series: Critical Climate Change edited by Tom Cohen and Claire Colebrook

E-version freely available on an open access basis:

http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/minimal-ethics.html

Also available in paperback

Life typically becomes an object of reflection when it is seen to be 
under threat. In particular, humans have a tendency to engage in 
thinking about life (instead of just continuing to live it) when being 
confronted with the prospect of death: be it the death of individuals 
due to illness, accident or old age; the death of whole ethnic or 
national groups in wars and other forms of armed conflict; but also of 
whole populations, be they human or nonhuman. Even though /Minimal 
Ethics for the Anthropocene/ is first and foremost concerned with 
life—understood as both a biological and social phenomenon—it is the 
narrative about the impending death of the human population (i.e., about 
the extinction of the human species), that provides a context for its 
argument. “Anthropocene” names a geo-historical period in which humans 
are said to have become the biggest threat to life on earth. However, 
rather than as a scientific descriptor, the term serves here primarily 
as an ethical injunction to think critically about human and nonhuman 
agency in the universe.

Restrained in tone yet ambitious in scope, the book takes some steps 
towards outlining a minimal ethics thought on a universal scale. The 
task of such minimal ethics is to consider how humans can assume 
responsibility for various occurrences in the universe, across different 
scales, and how they can respond to the tangled mesh of connections and 
relations unfolding in it. Its goal is not so much to tell us how to 
live but rather to allow us to rethink “life” and what we can do with 
it, in whatever time we have left. The book embraces a speculative mode 
of thinking that is more akin to the artist’s method; it also includes a 
photographic project by the author.

/A spirited, eloquent, original, and interdisciplinary manifesto for 
ethics, which takes seriously, on the one hand, a non-anthropocentric 
perspective and the challenge to human exceptionalism; and, on the other 
hand, the possibility of the extinction of life in the Anthropocene 
epoch. The book presents a serious meditation on the meaning of the old 
ethical preoccupation – “how to live a good life?” – in an age when life 
itself is threatened with extinction. (Ewa Ziarek - Julian Park 
Professor of Comparative Literature, University at Buffalo)/

*
ABOUT THE AUTHOR*

Joanna Zylinska is Professor of New Media and Communications at 
Goldsmiths, University of London. The author of several books—most 
recently/, Life after New Media: Mediation as a Vital Process/ (with 
Sarah Kember; MIT Press, 2012) and /Bioethics in the Age of New Media/ 
(MIT Press, 2009)—she is also a translator of Stanislaw Lem's major 
philosophical treatise, /Summa Technologiae/ (University of Minnesota 
Press, 2013). Together with Clare Birchall, Gary Hall and Open 
Humanities Press, she runs the JISC-funded project Living Books about 
Life, which publishes open access books at the crossroads of the 
humanities and the sciences. Zylinska is one of the Editors of /Culture 
Machine/, an international open-access journal of culture and theory, 
and a curator of its sister project, /Photomediations Machine/. She 
combines her philosophical writings and curatorial work with 
photographic art practice.

-- 
Professor Joanna Zylinska
Department of Media and Communications
Goldsmiths, University of London

http://www.joannazylinska.net

Curator of Photomediations Machine
http://www.photomediationsmachine.net

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