By Bob Johnson
Candis Callison. How Climate Change Comes to Matter: The Communal Life of Facts. Duke University Press, 2014. 316 pp.
Bookshelves (well, at least virtual bookshelves) burst, like breached reservoirs, with new literature on climate change. Only a few years ago, our climate scholarship suffered from a long drought, fed only by a limited stream coming out of the natural sciences and political sciences.
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By Heather Davis
Bruno Latour. An Inquiry into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns. Trans. Catherine Porter. Harvard University Press, 2013. 489 pp.
In the wake of the terrifying fifth assessment report (AR5) issued by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Bruno Latour’s latest book, An Inquiry into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns, makes a rather odd request: he asks his readers to stop, slow down, and reconsider the values of modernity.
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By Emanuele Leonardi
Timothy Morton. Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World. University of Minnesota Press, 2013. x + 203 pp.
In the numerous debates concerning the multifarious threats posed by global warming, it is frequent to be exposed to arguments about the inability of human thought to grasp the enormity of such threats, their incalculability, their unprecedented magnitude.
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By Miriam Tola
Antonio Negri. Spinoza for Our Time. Columbia University Press, 2013. xix + 125 pp
Hasana Sharp. Spinoza and the Politics of Renaturalization. University of Chicago Press, 2011. xii + 241 pp.
Nowhere has the capacity of Baruch Spinoza’s philosophy to enable radical politics been asserted more forcefully than in Antonio Negri’s The Savage Anomaly. Published in 1981, the book marked a turning point in Spinoza scholarship by establishing Spinoza as a thinker of revolutionary immanence.
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