Description
Book SynopsisJairus Victor Grove offers an ecological theorization of geopolitics in which he contends that contemporary global crises are better understood when considered within the larger history of geopolitical practice, showing how political violence is the principal force behind climate change, mass extinction, slavery, genocide, extractive capitalism, and other catastrophes.
Trade Review“In
Savage Ecology Jairus Victor Grove gives us a weirdly hopeful eco-pessimism. ‘We broke the planet,’ he writes, and ‘now it is our planet.’ Agree or not, the breadth of his archive (neuro-torture, algorithmic warfare, drone strikes, and cybernetic nation-building) and audacity of his thinking (biopolitics is now ‘almost quaint,’ he says, given the geopolitics of the Anthropocene) are simply exhilarating. Your thinking cannot survive this book unchanged. Fortunately, Grove says, ‘the end of the world is never the end of everything’ (though it may well be the end of us).” -- Bonnie Honig, author of * Public Things: Democracy in Disrepair *
“What Beck did for risk society, Hardt and Negri for empire, and Barad for technoscience, Jairus Victor Grove does brilliantly for global violence, delivering an ecology of warfare that is not only a corrosive critique of the three horsemen of our now daily apocalypse—geopolitics, biopolitics, and cybernetics—but a creative strategy for sustaining life now and thereafter. Grove is a philosopher with a hammer, writer with a stiletto, and artist with a spray can.” -- James Der Derian, Michael Hintze Chair of International Security Studies, the University of Sydney
“Savage Ecology is an extraordinarily rich text. . . . Wading through Savage Ecology uncovers a wondrous diversity of thought.”
-- Chase Hobbs-Morgan * Theory & Event *
"Grove offers one of the most robust and erudite examples of a critical ethos of pessimism I have read to date. . . . Rather than distancing total destruction from our current moment in order to propose a redemptive, critical utopia, Grove is immersed in catastrophe as an immanent condition of critique." -- Davide Panagia * Public Books *
“In an oddly provocative manner Jairus Victor Grove has provided an eloquent and impassioned tribute to war and its savage ecology. This book is a twofer, a thoughtful intervention in current policy debate and a scorching critique of mainstream IR theory, with its arrogant pretensions and its plenitude of crucial failures and catastrophic consequences. It will be tragic if activists and the discipline’s leading practitioners fail to read it.” -- John Buell * Informed Consent *
“Grove takes a postmodern approach to the study of ecology in global politics, penning an engrossing if brooding and pessimistic book that is itself a unique expression of this theoretical tradition in IR theory.... [H]e offers an honest realism, one could say, whose rendering is brutal only because the current predicament facing us bears the brutality of the martial logic that brought us here in the first place. -- Shannon Brincat * Perspectives on Politics *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments ix
Introduction 1
Aphorisms for a New Realism 29
Part I. The Great Homogenization
1. The Anthropocene as a Geopolitical Fact 35
2. War as a Form of Life 59
3. From Exhaustion to Annihilation: A Martial Ecology of the Eurocene 79
Part II. Operational Spaces
4. Bombs: An Insurgency of Things 113
5. Blood: Vital Logistics 139
6. Brains: We Are Not Who We Are 159
7. Three Images of Transformation as Homogenization 191
Part III. Must We Persist to Continue?
8. Apocalypse as a Theory of Change 229
9. Freaks or the Incipience of Other Forms of Life 249
Conclusion.
Ratio feritas: From Critical Responsiveness to Making New Forms of Life 273
The End: Visions of Los Angeles, California, 2061 281
Notes 285
Bibliography 317
Index 341
