Planetary Idealism: The Technics of Nature in German Romanticism
Under contract with Stanford University Press
Planetary Idealism stages an unlikely encounter between German Idealism and concerns over the environmental impact of new technology. Under contract with Stanford University Press, it takes its cue from Dipesh Chakrabarty’s suggestion that “If Hegel were alive to plumb the depths of our sense of the present, he would notice an awareness of the planet and of its geobiological history.” While this awareness is often traced back to twentieth century technological developments like GPS or cybernetics, this book uncovers an understanding of the reciprocal determination of nature and technical media already at the end of the eighteenth century. Turning to writings from Hegel, Goethe, Schelling, Novalis, and Hölderlin, Planetary Idealism explores how this incipient awareness of the intercalation of technics and the environment provokes an early effort to develop modes of inhabiting the planet that might withstand the rising tide of the Anthropocene.
Negentropic Orientations: Bernard Stiegler and the Future of the Digital
Co-edited volume with Mark Hansen
Negentropy and the Future of the Digital brings together some of the world’s leading scholars in media history, computation studies, and cultural theory to reflect on the impact and legacy of Bernard Stiegler’s work in a variety of fields, ranging from media and film studies, the history of science, to cultural and political theory. Since the 1994 publication of Technics and Time 1: the Fault of Epimetheus, Stiegler has emerged as one of the most prominent and certainly one of the most prolific scholars of media and technology. Stiegler’s writings have come to span over two dozen volumes, many of which have been translated into multiple languages, including German, Polish, Portuguese, Chinese, and Japanese. His books include Technics and Time 3: Kant and Cinema, which analyzes the history of cinema and the making of industrial modes of perception, the two-volume series Automatic Society, which reflects on the impact of digital automation on human labor and traditional knowledge production, and the Symbolic Misery series, which analyzes the impact of new technology in transforming the relationship between politics, new media, and the phenomenology of perception over the course of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In some of the last volumes that appeared in English, such as The Age of Disruption and The Negenthropocene, Stiegler began exploring the role played by digital capital in the current state of ecological and political crisis around the globe. This concern for the future of the planet led Stiegler to organize the “Friends of the Greta Thunberg Generation” Institute at the Centre Pompidou and write The Lesson of Greta Thunberg, his final solo monograph.
*This edited volume is currently under review at Edinburgh University Press.
Planetary Thinking in the Age of Goethe
special issue of Modern Language Notes with Daniel Carranza
In recent years, critical discourse in the humanities has embraced what Amy Elias and Christian Morary have called a ‘planetary turn,’ appearing at the intersection of ecological, cosmological, and poetic concerns. While contributions to this mode of thinking have focused largely on the present, a number of theorists have turned to the Age of Goethe to begin excavating the complex entanglement of environmental, technological, and postcolonial issues evoked by our planetary present. Was not the “awareness of the planet” to which Chakrabarty refers already apparent in Karoline von Günderrode’s poetics, for example, or in the travel writings of Alexander von Humboldt? This special issue of Modern Language Notes constellates diverse contributions that trace the incipient contours of this planetary thinking in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, focusing on a diverse array of poetic, scientific, ecological, and political concerns and figures.