Join 📚Jof’S Book Highlights
A batch of the best highlights from what Jophin's read, .
Sociologist Sarah Bracke reads resilience through Berlant’s cruel optimism: “an attachment to resilience […] effectively prevents us, as individuals and collectively, from going there. Here resilience becomes a symptom of the loss of the capacity to imagine and do otherwise, and cruelty is one of the more politically cautious names for such a condition.”
The Exhausted of the Earth
Ajay Singh Chaudhary
__Without social struggles, the model of constructing counter-hegemony based on technological development is likely to become a project of imposing social transformation ‘from above’__. Intellectuals, technocrats and politicians come up with the ideas for realizing policies as they are supposed to know better in terms of how to effectively manage and mitigate the ecological and economic crisis. They will monopolize the power of decision-making about which technologies to use and how to use them. __Although scientific knowledge is undoubtedly indispensable, centralized and gigantic locking technologies, by their very nature, do not lend themselves to democratic control because they require top-down policies and management.__ Even the mitigation of the ecological crisis becomes a means of subordinating individuals to undemocratic and technocratic command from above. This is why Gorz warned that a project of Promethean modernism would end in the ‘negation of both politics and modernity’ (Gorz 2018: 48). This risk cannot be underestimated after the failure of the avant-garde socialist model in the 20th century.
Marx in the Anthropocene: Towards the Idea of Degrowth Communism
Kohei Saito
“We are not individuals—it is a shocking fact for people to hear this—but we are in fact ecosystems.”
This View of Life
David Sloan Wilson
...catch up on these, and many more highlights
Readwise