CONTENTS
1 Cover
4 Epigraph
5 Foreword
6 Introduction: The ecological crisis as a crisis of sensibility A crisis of sensibility Animals as intercessors The ecological crisis as a crisis of political attention Lack of political attention to living beings Finding a way out Notes
7 Chapter One: A season among the living Episode 1: In the fog of the encounter Episode 2: The barbarian of a beast Episode 3: Millions of years folded into a song Episode 4: All of language unseparated Episode 5: Following the tracks left by song Episode 6: Being part of a gang – whatever the species Episode 7: The art of living variants Episode 8: Translating them in the spring Episode 9: Composing a body for yourself Episode 10: A season in super-faces Episode 11: So many ways of being alive Epilogue: The incandescent alloy Notes
8 Chapter Two: The promises of a sponge Descending from those we are wiping out The futurology of forms of life A speculative biology of humanist virtues Our place in evolution: contemporary developments in the philosophy of biology The banality of miracles Contingency and convergence: life Do human beings occupy a comfortable place in the coral reef of evolution? Burning more than a library Ancestor worship Notes
9 Chapter Three: Cohabiting with our wild beasts Taming the horses of the passions From one map to another: reason/passions vs joy/sadness Relationship with our animal nature, relationship with ourselves An ethology of the self Plato vs. the Cherokees From taming by force of will to diplomacy with your wild animals From the coercive charioteer to the diplomat of the passions Fortifying the white wolf without subduing the black wolf Ascensional ethics Notes
10 Chapter Four: To the other side of the night Nights on the watch Vita incognita Becoming-diplomat Briefing in the open There remains a span of sunlight The threshold of twilight ‘Do not go gentle into that good night’ ‘Before nightfall you must light your torch’ The dark side of the night Going over to the other side Dawn on the other side The political philosophy of night ‘If the night turns dark, make yourself even darker’ Being a guardian of interdependences Thinking like an alpine meadow: profiling alliances The creative dimension of the intercessor Communities of concern You are not born a diplomat, you have the role thrust upon you Being captured together from the point of view of interdependences Composition and struggle Concern for interdependences as care for the self Notes