HUMANKIND
Solidarity with Nonhuman People
Timothy Morton
First published by Verso 2017
© Timothy Morton 2017
All rights reserved
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
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Verso
UK: 6 Meard Street, London W1F 0EG
US: 20 Jay Street, Suite 1010, Brooklyn, NY 11201
Verso is the imprint of New Left Books
ISBN-13: 978-1-78663-132-9
ISBN-13: 978-1-78663-131-2 (UK EBK)
ISBN-13: 978-1-78663-133-6 (US EBK)
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Morton, Timothy, 1968- author.
Title: Humankind / Timothy Morton.
Description: Brooklyn : Verso Books, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index. |
Identifiers: LCCN 2017011128 (print) | LCCN 2017024047 (ebook) | ISBN 9781786631336 () | ISBN 9781786631329 (hardback : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Philosophical anthropology. | Human beings. | Animals (Philosophy) | Human-animal relationships.
Classification: LCC BD450 (ebook) | LCC BD450 .M645 2017 (print) | DDC 128—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017011128
Typeset in Adobe Garamond by Hewer Text UK Ltd, Edinburgh
Printed in the US by Maple Press
For the Water Protectors
Contents
Acknowledgments
Things in Common: An Introduction
1. Life
2. Specters
3. Subscendence
4. Species
5. Kindness
Notes
Index
I would like to thank my editor Federico Campagna for his brilliant insight and aid. Federico caused such deep and positive changes to my writing that I will be forever in his debt.
My research assistants Kevin MacDonnell and Randi Mihajlovic worked tirelessly helping me to finish the manuscript. Beyond this, Kevin has been my assistant for two years now and my scholarly life is so much better for it. Thank you, Kevin, for everything.
Nicolas Shumway, Dean of Humanities at Rice, deserves a special mention for his untiring belief in what I do. I’m forever in his debt.
So many people shared thoughts and suggestions, kindness and support. Among them were Blaise Agüera y Arcas, Heitham Al-Sayed, Ian Balfour, Andrew Battaglia, Anna Bernagozzi, Daniel Birnbaum, Ian Bogost, Tanya Bonakdar, Marcus Boon, Dominic Boyer, David Brooks, Alex Cecchetti, Stephen Cairns, Eric Cazdyn, Ian Cheng, Kari Conte, Carolyn Deby, Nigel Clark, Juliana Cope, Laura Copelin, Annie Culver, Sarah Ellenzweig, Olafur Eliasson, Anna Engberg, Jane Farver, Dirk Felleman, João Florêncio, Mark Foster Gage, Peter Gershon, Hazel Gibson, Jóga Jóhannsdóttir, Jón Gnarr, Kathelin Gray, Sofie Grettve, Lizzy Grindy, Björk Guðmundsdóttir, Zora Hamsa, Graham Harman, Rosemary Hennessy, Erich Hörl, Emily Houlik-Ritchey, Cymene Howe, Edouard Isar, Luke Jones, Toby Kamps, Greg Lindquist, Annie Lowe, Ingrid Luquet-Gad, Karsten Lund, Boyan Manchev, Kenric McDowell, Tracy Moore, Rick Muller, Jean-Luc Nancy, Judy Natal, Patricia Noxolo, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Genesis P-Orridge, Solveig Øvstebø, Andrea Pagnes, Albert Pope, Asad Raza, Alexander Regier, Ben Rivers, Judith Roof, David Ruy, Mark Schmanko, Sabrina Scott, Nicolas Shumway, Solveig Sigurðardóttir, Emilija Škarnulytė, Gayatri Spivak, Haim Steinbach, Verena Stenke, Samuel Stoeltje, Susan Sutton, Jeff VanderMeer, Lucas van der Velden, Teodora Vikstrom, Jennifer Walshe, Sarah Whiting, Clint Wilson, Tom Wiscombe, Susanne Witzgall, Cary Wolfe, Annette Wolfsberger, Hyesoo Woo, Martyn Woodward, Els Woudstra and Jonas Žukauskas.
And a big thank you to everyone who showed up to classes and lectures in the last two years. Talking with you is my lab, and there’s no way I could know what I know now without you.
Over the years it’s become clear that if it wasn’t for my many encounters with Jarrod Fowler, I probably wouldn’t have written very much; once again I’m beyond grateful to him for his relentless downloading of conceptual quartz crystal powder into something like my head. This book is indebted to the thought of my firned Jeffrey Kripal, whose work on the paranormal and the sacred sparked many thoughts.
While I was writing this book, indigenous people and non-indigenous people in solidarity with them were struggling against the militarized forces of petroculture to prevent the Dakota Access Pipeline in the United States from destroying people of all kinds, whether human or not. They call themselves the Water Protectors. This book is dedicated to them.
There was a time when men imagined the Earth as the center of the universe. The stars, large and small, they believed were created merely for their delectation. It was their vain conception that a supreme being, weary of solitude, had manufactured a giant toy and put them into possession of it …
Man issued from the womb of Mother Earth, but he knew it not, nor recognized her, to whom he owed his life. In his egotism he sought an explanation of himself in the infinite, and out of his efforts there arose the dreary doctrine that he was not related to the Earth, that she was but a temporary resting place for his scornful feet and that she held nothing for him but temptation to degrade himself.
—Emma Goldman and Max Baginski, “Mother Earth”
Gosh, you’ve really got some nice toys here.
—Replicant Roy, Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, dir.)
Things in Common: An Introduction
Whoever severs himself from Mother Earth and her flowing sources of life goes into exile.
—Emma Goldman
A specter is haunting the specter of communism: the specter of the nonhuman.
Humankind will argue that the human species is a viable and vital category for thinking communist politics, a politics that this book takes not simply to be international in scope, but planetary. By this is meant that communism only works when its economic models are thought as an attunement to the fact of living in a biosphere, a fact that I call “the symbiotic real.”
The symbiotic real is a weird “implosive whole” in which entities are related in a non-total, ragged way.