Society and space

Book Forum On an Ungrounded Earth, reviewed by Kai Bosworth, Harlan Morehouse, Rory Rowan and Jordan Skinner

‘The Door to Hell’, burning gas deposits in Derweze, Turkmenistan

Ben Woodard, On an Ungrounded Earth: Towards a New Geophilosophy New York, Punctum Books, 2013, 118 pages. ISBN-13: 978-0615785387. OPEN-ACCESS e-book + $12.00 [€11.00] in print. (http://punctumbooks.com/category/titles/ben-woodard/)

Ben Woodard’s On an Ungrounded Earth is an innovative work of philosophy with a powerful aesthetic allure. It is also a timely book situated at the intersection of two emerging trends in contemporary thought: so-called ‘speculative realism’ in Continental philosophy, and the ‘geological turn’ in the humanities and social sciences. Woodard leads his readers into dark and circuitous corridors, at turns subterranean and cosmic, through the Naturphilosophie of the German idealist F.W.J. Schelling, the mutant philosophies of Georges Bataille, Nick Land and Reza Negarestani, and the uncanny worlds of science fiction populated with Lovecraftian horrors and alien death stars, before resurfacing at a rather unsettling terminus: a planet Earth which is neither ‘whole world’ or secure ‘ground,’ but a clump of decaying matter, enslaved to the sun’s energy and indifferent to the plight of humanity. Continue reading here

Kai Bosworth, Notes towards a Geological Uprising by way of Dark Feminism

Harlan Morehouse, In Space no one can hear you philosophize

Rory Rowan, Undermining the Ends of the Earth

Ben Woodard, Response: Terrestrial Melancholy and the Infinite Sadness

In addition to this forum, Jordan Skinner offers a philosophical topology to locate the genealogy of Woodard’s ideas and forms.

Jordan Skinner, A Philosophical Topology