Blog / After Us

Climate Nihilism (and Charles Baudelaire)

July 18, 2022 - By Maurizio Ferraris

(Photo of Charles Baudelaire: Nadar, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons)
 

"A theory of true civilization.
It rests not in gas, nor in steam, nor in table-turning.
It rests in the diminution of the traces of original sin."

The table-turning ("tables tournantes") was that of spiritualist seances, and the apothegm is Charles Baudelaire’s, from My Heart Laid Bare (1897, translation by Rainer J. Hanshe, 2017). What Baudelaire intends here is a denunciation of tekhnē and the Promethean arrogance of his age,...

Westerners Have a Way. . .

April 3, 2022 - By Noy Holland

Editor’s note: On March 28, 2022, in Bowker Auditorium at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, the UMass School of Earth & Sustainability, in partnership with the Fine Arts Center and the MFA Program for Poets and Writers convened a unique meeting of artists, climate and social scientists, and activists working at the intersection of climate change, literature, and social justice. Noy Holland, from the MFA Program introduced and moderated this discussion.

Westerners have a way of talking about climate, nature, the environment as though it is over there. Something apart, something other. But we are nature and nature is us and we are making a mess of ourselves and everything that lives. Nature is storm surge and dengue, beetle-kill and Lyme. It is...

The Last Letter in the Alphabet Of Lies

April 1, 2022 - By Geneviève Piron

Pure fabrication, interpretation, and lies. Where is the line between these different types of distortion of truth? And how deep have we sunk?

In Russian, there is a word that suggests there is indeed a distinction: the word “vranio” means something between baloney and untruth, it is used to refer to a storyteller who distorts or exaggerates, even creates myths. We like it in Russian culture; it gives colour to life. The word “lies” in the Russian language has a different connotation, with a more active, performative dimension. There is an expression which alludes to this moral aspect: “To live not in accordance to lies”. It was used by dissidents to encourage people to resist State lies and to stand for...

A Week with Zhadan (7)

March 30, 2022 - By Serhiy Zhadan

Editor's note: There are many ways to show solidarity with the people of Ukraine, and to stand for civilization, against barbarism. Over the last seven days, we've offered you a poem from Serhiy Zhadan, so that you will think of his words, and of his struggle today in Kharkiv, and of all the other heroic souls whose voices we have not heard, or heard sufficiently, as well as those we will never hear again. This final post of the series features a three-part poem where medieval history and postmodern warfare collide. We can only hope that life, for once, stops imitating art.

(To get together and talk... )

(...

A Week with Zhadan (6)

March 29, 2022 - By Serhiy Zhadan

Editor's note: There are many ways to show solidarity with the people of Ukraine, and to stand for civilization, against barbarism. For the next seven days, we've decided to offer you a poem from Serhiy Zhadan, so that you will think of his words, and of his struggle today in Kharkiv, and of all the other heroic souls whose voices we have not heard, or heard sufficiently, as well as those we will never hear again: "incanting over every single / lost soul."

(To get together and talk... )

(Sun, terrace, lots of green...)

(...