Melancholy is an inward withdrawal from worldly relations that paradoxically exposes the self to the horizon of dreaded mortality through temporal distortions and the paralyzing horrors of existence, while simultaneously and paradoxically yearning for solace in the unconscious oblivion of death. It warps temporal coherence and reduces speech to the muteness of asymbolia. In antiquity, […]
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The spectre of “the elements” currently haunts the environmental humanities: this quasi-intuitive idea seems well on its way to replace Raymond Williams’ lamented word “Nature”.[1] Indeed, if “Nature” problematically relies on an essentialist dualist framework,[2] and even “environment” arguably seems to refer to that what surrounds the human, one of the allures of the turn […]
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“Diego Rivera, Water, Origin of Life, 1951” © Joaquín Martínez 2012 Flickr under CC BY 2.0 We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.[1] At the time it was written, the assertion of the universal equality of man found in the United States Declaration of Independence (1776) reflected the emancipatory spirit of a […]
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In his essay ‘Butterfly Crossings’, anthropologist Anand Pandian observes how the monarch butterfly, Danaus Plexippus, gradually became a symbol in the protests in North America for the rights of undocumented migrants who try to cross the border between Mexico and the United States: ‘Monarchs are celebrated for their migration. But it isn’t simply how far […]
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