Has the idea of the end of the world captured your imagination? Ted Toadvine’s book The Memory of the World: Deep Time, Animality, and Eschatology contends that a preoccupation with the world’s precarity relies on a flawed understanding of time that neglects the past and present with the goal of managing the future. Toadvine integrates insights from phenomenology, deconstruction, critical animal studies, and new materialism to argue for a new philosophy of time that takes seriously the entangled temporal events spanning cosmic, geological, evolutionary, and human durations. Here Toadvine is joined in conversation with David Morris and Benjamin Décarie-Daigneault.

Ted Toadvine is Nancy Tuana Director of the Rock Ethics Institute and professor of philosophy at The Pennsylvania State University.

David Morris is professor of philosophy at Concordia University in Montreal.

Benjamin Décarie-Daigneault is a graduate student of philosophy at The Pennsylvania State University.

REFERENCES:

Maurice Merleau-Ponty (body of works including Phenomenology of Perception)

Immanuel Kant

Dipesh Chakrabarty

Michel Serres / The Incandescent

Martin Heidegger

Jacques Derrida

Jean-Luc Nancy

Jerome Miller

Henri Bergson

Edmund Husserl

James Playfair

James Hutton (Hutton’s Unconformity)

John Sallis / Stone

Adam Frank, Marcelo Gleiser, and Evan Thompson / The Blind Spot

Jane Bennett

Donald S. Maier / What’s So Good About Biodiversity?

Ferdinand de Saussure

Émile P. Torres / Human Extinction

Rachel Carson / Silent Spring

Kyle Powys Whyte

Alfred North Whitehead / The Concept of Nature

The Memory of the World: Deep Time, Animality, and Eschatology is available from University of Minnesota Press.

“The Memory of the World achieves two important things: it steers our understanding of Merleau-Ponty toward a temporal interpretation of his thought and, at the same time, it uses that reading to make a critical intervention amongst theories of environmental apocalypse. Ted Toadvine’s concept of ‘biodiacritics’ should lead to a reorientation of the ‘eschatological imagination,’ producing effects in knowledge that are as insightful as they are impactful. This is a wonderful book that is a pleasure to think alongside.”

—John Ó Maoilearca