By Telos Press · Tuesday, December 8, 2020 In today’s episode of the Telos Press Podcast, Camelia Raghinaru talks with Telos editor David Pan about his article “Economy and Ecology: Federal Populism and the Devil in the Details of Universal Basic Income,” from Telos 191 (Summer 2020). An excerpt of the article appears here. If your university has an online subscription to Telos, you can read the full article at the Telos Online website. For non-subscribers, learn how your university can begin a subscription to Telos at our library recommendation page. Purchase a print copy of Telos 191 in our online store.
Listen to the podcast here.
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By Telos Press · Monday, December 7, 2020 The new issue of the journal New Political Science features a review symposium on Timothy W. Luke's Anthropocene Alerts: Critical Theory of the Contemporary as Ecocritique, published by Telos Press Publishing. For one week only, save 30% on your purchase of Anthropocene Alerts by using the coupon code ALERTS30 during checkout in our online store.
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By Andrew Reszitnyk · Thursday, May 21, 2020 Andrew Reszitnyk’s “The Descent into Disanthropy: Critical Theory and the Anthropocene” appears in Telos 190 (Spring 2020): Economy and Ecology: Reconceiving the Human Relationship to Nature. Read the full article at the Telos Online website, or purchase a print copy of the issue in our online store. Individual subscriptions to Telos are available in both print and online formats. Ernst Jünger’s Sturm, published in English translation by Telos Press, is also available in our store.
 This essay suggests that the widespread engagement in humanities scholarship with the concept of the Anthropocene—the proposed geologic epoch in which humans figure as a terrestrial force and the planet appears as a human artifact—has given rise to a strain of critical theory that renounces the imperative to engage in politics. I argue that the notion of the Anthropocene has inspired a turn toward what Greg Garrard calls “disanthropy,” the tendency to fantasize about a world in which living human bodies are absent and to render human life into an abstract concept. Through an analysis of the work of Dipesh Chakrabarty and Timothy Morton, I contend that, insofar as they have become disanthropic, many contemporary critical theorists have relinquished the capacity to engage critically with the influential and pernicious politico-economic ideology of neoliberalism. Although many scholars argue that we should view the Anthropocene as a vital provocation that opens up new corridors for environmentalist scholarship, I propose that we remain skeptical about the value of positing the Anthropocene at the center of critical inquiry. I suggest that the growing reputation of the idea of the Anthropocene has caused a significant segment of humanistic scholarship to enter into a political and philosophical détente with neoliberalism, with the effect that critical theory is becoming less and less capable of responding to the questions posed by the world outside the university.
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By David Pan · Monday, March 16, 2020 Telos 190 (Spring 2020): Economy and Ecology: Reconceiving the Human Relationship to Nature is now available for purchase in our store. Individual subscriptions to Telos are also available in both print and online formats.
 Our human relationship to nature defines our economic life. As Marx articulated in the 1844 manuscripts, labor involves an engagement with nature in order to fulfill human ends, the working up of nature as an “inorganic body.” Consequently, the world of work and that of the environment are really two aspects of our relationship to nature, and the shift in academic interest from economy to ecology as the burning issue of the day does not represent any real change in perspective. On a fundamental level, economy is ecology and vice versa. Thus, the issue of climate change is primarily one about the energy structure of our economy. If that structure before the Industrial Revolution boiled down to the way in which we were cutting down our forests, today the issue is how fossil fuels are leading to climate change. The other global natural disaster of our day, the coronavirus, has arisen as a consequence, first, of our treatment of wild animals as food and, second, of economic globalization, whose movements have established the pathways for the rapid spread of viruses.
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By Telos Press · Monday, December 9, 2019 New from Telos Press: Anthropocene Alerts: Critical Theory of the Contemporary as Ecocritique, by Timothy W. Luke. Order your copy in our online store, and save 20% on the list price by using the coupon code BOOKS20 during the checkout process.
 From the late 1970s, Timothy W. Luke has developed critical analyses of significant social, political, and cultural conflicts, with a particular focus on the entangled politics of culture, economy, and nature. Luke’s “ecocritiques,” many of which first appeared in the pages of Telos, advance a critical theory of the contemporary that takes aim at our ongoing ecological crisis, a period marked by rapid climate change, extensive biodiversity loss, and deep ecospheric damage. The essays collected here range across diverse topics, from the politics of the Anthropocene, Paolo Soleri’s urban design experiments, the Unabomber manifesto, the Trump administration’s attacks on environmental protections, and the informationalization of ecological change, to community agriculture projects, deep ecology, the symbolic politics of climate change treaties, Edward Abbey’s ecological writings, and the biopolitics of accelerationism and the Dark Enlightenment. Taken together, this collection documents crucial moments in Luke’s project of ecocritique as well as the commitment of Telos to environmental criticism, political theory, and policy analysis.
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By Ban Wang · Thursday, July 19, 2018 Ban Wang’s “Confucianism and Nature: Ecological Motifs in Kang Youwei’s Great Community” appears in Telos 183 (Summer 2018), our fiftieth anniversary issue. Read the full article at the Telos Online website, or purchase a print copy of the issue in our online store. Individual subscriptions to Telos are available in both print and online formats.
Environmental writers have been turning to Chinese traditions for a harmonious relation between humans and nature. However, treating environmental crises as a metaphysical meditation on how humanity as a whole stands over against nature ignores the critical examination of power relations in the equal relation of production, social hierarchy, and political oppression. As Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno declared, humanity’s domination of nature stems from the domination by some humans over others as well as over human nature. Environmental injustice is social injustice. From this immanent critique, Kang Youwei’s recapture of Confucian cosmology proves to be a critical resource. An influential thinker and reformer in the transition from the empire to a modern nation, Kang Youwei (1858–1927) wrote The Great World Community (Datong shu) and proposed to abolish all boundaries of nation-state, class, hierarchy, gender, and race, in hopes of bringing diverse peoples and nations into a cosmopolitan community. Ecological motifs could be recovered in Kang’s critique of oppressive social, political, and gender relations.
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