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Spanning a decade of Michael Marder’s contributions as a public intellectual, Senses of Upheavals documents a period of exceptional global turmoil. Thrown into mayhem by right-wing populisms and a pandemic, combined with skyrocketing economic inequalities and worsening environmental crises, the world is on the verge of collapse. Could revolutionary practical-intellectual proposals to learn how to coexist from plants or to rethink the very meaning of energy chart the way to a better, more livable, and, perhaps, calmer world? Nonetheless, such proposals themselves constitute nothing short of an upheaval in philosophy, plant sciences, and environmental studies. We are doomed to upheavals, it seems; the point is not to deflect, but to choose judiciously among them.
“This is required reading for anyone who wants to catch our global, national, local vanishing present and to make sense of the alarming future. Politics, culture, the intellect, technology – Marder’s risk-taking interventions have embraced our struggles in these areas over the years. Senses of Upheaval allows us to see the principles holding them together.”
—Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, University Professor, Columbia University, US and educational/ecological activist
A Sense of Upheaval; Part I. Political Upheaval; 1. Rating Sovereignty; 2. The Unfinished Collapse of the Soviet Union; 3. We, the Orphans of October; 4. Incendiary Words and the Volcano of Occupation; 5. Can There Be Poetry after Netanyahu?; 6. Marginalizing Europe; 7. The European Union and the Rhetoric of Immaturity; 8. Trump Metaphysics; 9. The Con Artistry of the Deal: Trump, the Reality TV President; 10. Covid- 19: This Is Not a War; 11. Going Viral, or The Coronavirus Is Us; 12. Can Democracy Save the Planet?; Part II. Cultural Upheaval; 1. On Knees and Elbows; 2. Being in Exile from Oneself; 3. The Muslim “No”; 4. Don’t Keep Calm! And Don’t Carry On!; 5. Uncultured Austerity; 6. A Genealogy of Enjoyment; 7. The Two Suns of Europe; 8. For the Love of a City; 9. What Horse Meat Tells Us about Ourselves; 10. Contagion: Before and after Covid-19; Part III. Intellectual Upheaval; 1. A Fight for the Right to Read Heidegger; 2. Heidegger’s Thinking Today Is, Perhaps, the Possibility of the World; 3. Plus de restes: Remembering Jacques Derrida; 4. The Philosopher’s Beard; 5. Naturalize This! Analytic Philosophy and the Logic of Reactive Neutralization; 6. Jokes and Their Relation to Crisis; 7. Position as a Political Category: Phenomenology and the Eroticism of Power; 8. The Powerlessness of Philosophy; Part IV. Technological Upheaval; 1. Chernobyl as an Event; 2. Nuclear Mourning; 3. The Meaning of “Clean Energy”; 4. Without Clean Air, We Have Nothing (with Luce Irigaray); 5. Poland’s Bialowieza: Losing the Forest and the Trees; 6. Just Randomness?; 7. The Idea of Following in the Age of Twitter; The Upheavals Yet to Come; Notes.