THE MEMORY OF THE WORLD virtual event with ASLE and Ted Toadvine, Jennie Case, Sarah Giragosian, and Many-Suzanne Wong
February 21 @ 1:00 pm – 2:00 pm EST
Ted Toadvine will virtually join the ASLE Spotlight Series on Friday, February 21 at 1:00 p.m. EST to discuss his new book, The Memory of the World: Deep Time, Animality, and Eschatology, alongside Jennie Case, Sarah Giragosian, and Many-Suzanne Wong.
This event will be held on Zoom and requires registration.
The Memory of the World argues for a new philosophy of time that takes seriously the multiple, pleated, and entangled temporal events spanning cosmic, geological, evolutionary, and human durations. Ted Toadvine contends that our obsession with the world’s precarity relies on a flawed understanding of time that neglects the past and present with the goal of managing the future, misleading sustainability efforts and diminishing our encounters with the world and with human and nonhuman others.
“The Memory of the World brings philosophy down to Earth in a book bursting with profound insights for our times and future life on this planet. Ted Toadvine first digs down through phenomenological strata of everyday perception to show how our evolved bodies mesh with and dredge up the deep time past of our planet; he then burrows sideways through deep time, now, to offer an innovative ‘biodiacritical’ account of our kinship with other animals; finally, he tunnels back up through the immense scales of deep time to show how they haunt our apocalyptic imaginings of future planetary crises. This is a superb and daring book, one that makes important contributions to phenomenology and philosophy of nature and life—but also to work on climate, the Anthropocene, animal studies, environmental humanities, and more.”—David Morris, author of Merleau-Ponty’s Developmental Ontology
“The Memory of the World achieves two important things: it steers our understanding of Merleau-Ponty toward a temporal interpretation of his thought and, at the same time, it uses that reading to make a critical intervention amongst theories of environmental apocalypse. Ted Toadvine’s concept of ‘biodiacritics’ should lead to a reorientation of the ‘eschatological imagination,’ producing effects in knowledge that are as insightful as they are impactful. This is a wonderful book that is a pleasure to think alongside.”—John Ó Maoilearca, author of Vestiges of a Philosophy: Matter, the Meta-Spiritual, and the Forgotten Bergson
“Toadvine has made a serious, concerted effort in answering a question that has not previously been raised. How do we relate to deep time, and has our disparate, scientific approach been adequate? ” —Philosophy in Review
