Toward a Critical Theory of Nature Capital, Ecology, and Dialectics
Produktdetaljer
Biografisk notat
Carl Cassegård is Professor in the Department of Sociology and Work Science at The University of Gothenburg, Sweden, where he is currently researching environmental activism.While the Dialectic of Enlightenment is often dismissed for its supposed pessimistic dead-end, this book shows how Adorno’s approach allows one to scrutinize environmental catastrophes in a critical and reflexive manner while highlighting the political and ethical implications contained therein.
Alexander M. Stoner, Assistant Professor of Sociology, Northern Michigan University, USA
Catastrophic climate events are already happening. Cassegård finds in Adorno a critical theory of nature that highlights our destructive behaviour even as it reminds us that we are part of the nature that we are destroying. He asks us to struggle on the side of nature to tame capitalism.
Deborah Cook, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy, University of Windsor, Canada
Cassegård's work represents an important correction in a debate that knows so little about critical theory.
Soziopolis (Bloomsbury Translation)
Challenging the normalization of a capitalist reality in which environmental destruction and catastrophe have become ‘second nature’, Towards a Critical Theory of Nature offers a bold new theoretical understanding of the current crisis via the work of the Frankfurt School. Focusing on key notions of dialectics, natural history, and materialism, a critical theory of nature is outlined in favor of a more traditional Marxist theory of nature, albeit one which still builds on core Marxist concepts to confirm humanity’s central place in manufacturing environmental misery. Pre-eminent thinkers of the Frankfurt school, including, Georg Lukács, Ernst Bloch, Theodor Adorno, and Alfred Schmidt, are highlighted for their potential to diagnose the interpenetration of capitalism and nature in a way that neither absolutizes nor obliterates the boundary between the social and natural.
Further theoretical claims and practical consequences of a critical theory of nature challenge other contemporary theoretical approaches like eco-Marxism, social constructivism and new materialism, to situate it as the only approach with genuinely radical potential. The possibility of utopian idealism for understanding and responding to the current climate crisis is carefully measured against the dangers of false hope in setting out realistic goals for change. Environmental change in turn is seen through the prism of recent cultural currents and movements, situating the power of a critical theory of nature in relation to understandings of the Anthropocene; concepts of apocalypse, and postapocalypse. This book culminates in a powerful tool for an anti-capitalist critique of society’s painfully extractive relationship to a deceptively abstracted natural world.
Preface
1. Introduction: What is a critical theory of nature?
2: Marx’s three materialisms
3: Natural history and the primacy of the object
4: Capitalism and the domination of nature
5: Marx, value and nature
6: Constellations and natural science
7: Eco-Marxism’s return to Marx
8. World-ecology and the persistence of non-Cartesian dualism
9: New materialism and dark ecology
10: Utopia, the apocalypse and praxis
References
In a time marked by crises and the rise of right-wing authoritarian populism, Critical Theory and the Critique of Society intends to renew the critical theory of capitalist society exemplified by the Frankfurt School and critical Marxism’s critiques of social domination, authoritarianism, and social regression by expounding the development of such a notion of critical theory, from its founding thinkers, through its subterranean and parallel strands of development, to its contemporary formulations.
Editorial Board:
Amy De’ath, Contemporary Literature and Culture, King’s College London
Bev Best, Sociology, Concordia University
Cat Moir, Germanic Studies, University of Sydney
Charlotte Baumann, Philosophy, Sussex/TU Berlin
Christian Lotz, Philosophy, Michigan State University
Claudia Leeb, Political Science, Washington State University
Dimitra Kotouza, Education, University of Lincoln
Dirk Braunstein, Institute of Social Research, Frankfurt
Duy Lap Nguyen, Modern and Classical Languages, University of Houston
Edith Gonzalez, Humanities, Universidad Intercultural del Estado de Puebla, México
Elena Louisa Lange, Japanese Studies/Philology and Philosophy, University of Zurich
John Abromeit, History, SUNY, Buffalo State, USA
Jordi Maiso, Philosophy, Complutense University of Madrid
José Antonio Zamora Zaragoza, Philosophy, Spain
Kirstin Munro, Political Science, University of Texas, Rio Grande
Marcel Stoetzler, Sociology, University of Bangor
Marina Vishmidt, Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths University
Mathias Nilges, Literature, St Xavier University
Matthias Rothe, German, University of Minnesota
Moishe Postone†, History, University of Chicago
Patrick Murray, Philosophy, Creighton University
Rochelle Duford, Philosophy, University of Hartford
Sami Khatib, Art, Leuphana University
Samir Gandesha, Humanities, Simon Fraser University
Verena Erlenbusch, Philosophy, University of Memphis