Nature and Its Unnatural Relations

<P>Consisting of contributions from a host of international scholars (in fields as diverse as literature architecture philosophy and education) Alain Beauclair and Josh Toth’s <I>Nature and Its Unnatural Relations: Points of Access</I> intercedes in ongoing debates about accessing defining and respecting a world humans continue to misuse and misunderstand—and that as a result is becoming increasingly inhospitable. The chapters shuttle between a variety of aesthetic and philosophical concerns—from theology and Biblical interpretation to colonialism hermeneutics phenomenology worlding posthumanism and speculative realism. These varied approaches are united by a single aporetic thread: efforts to surmount the problem of “human access” invariably risk repeating (ever more blindly) the violence and immorality of anthropocentrism. We seem trapped in the <I>cul-de-sac</I> of the Anthropocene. To discover potential new exits the contributors consider whether it is possible or advisable to abandon so-called “correlationism”—of art of literature of technology. If it is then how? If not how might we more ethically reembrace our innately corruptive relations with a world of non-human others? How might we free “nature” (finally) from the demands of human action and human thought without mendaciously reinscribing humanity’s distance from it or denying a proximity that is only traversable by artificial means? </P>