Timothy Morton. The Ecological Thought. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2010. ISBN: 978-0-674-04920-8. Price: US$39.95

The zoologist Ernst Haeckel derived the term ecology from the Greek oikos. This “household,” the subject of ecology, reminds Timothy Morton of a gothic mansion harboring secret rooms and haunted by specters. Like the governess in James’s The Turn of the Screw, we who take residence in this household, the Earth, are initially sure of our innocence and of the objectivity of our vision. Only later do we notice our own signature in the obscurity and violence we had attributed to an alien presence. Morton writes critical eco-noir, in which our earthly domicile turns out to be no less uncanny (unheimliche, un-homely) than those other domestic spheres, the family and the nation, founded on the illusion of identity, the metaphysics of presence, and the repression of the past. In The Ecological Thought, as in Ecology Without Nature (Harvard 2007), Morton identifies how environmentalists and green-minded humanists perpetuate that age-old sleight-of-hand whereby Nature is transformed into Necessity. Organicism begets fascism, natural limits underwrite Puritan asceticism, and the Malthusian struggle justifies distributive asymmetries. The trick goes like this. First, nature is externalized as the constitutive outside of human civilization—“something over there,” as Morton likes to say. Thus hypostatized, nature may be domesticated, a source of both authorizing social norms and consumable resources. With an imperceptible motion, the performer may transform nature into superego or id, the proper place of Heideggerian dwelling or a sublime wilderness. Nature is cute enough to cuddle, tasty enough to eat, and yet sufficiently distant that its aura may sanction any course of action. Pity and sadism, preservation and exploitation, consecration and instrumentalization all follow from the same basic gesture of setting-apart as a prelude to assimilation. Morton sees any invocation of nature—whether nostalgic, localist, or apocalyptic—as an invitation to bad faith: a denial of the vertiginous openness of our earthly condition. The ecological thought, by contrast, shows us that our home is a “mesh,” consisting of “holes in a network and threading between them” (28), and that our neighbors are “strange strangers,” beings “whose existence we cannot anticipate” (42). Ecological thinking, as Morton practices it, demystifies nature not by proliferating such neologisms but by negation. Like a Zen kōan, “the ecological thought opens onto ‘un-thinking’” (77), revealing that presence and the present are illusions, that our world is neither a system nor an economy (which is another implication of oikos), and that it lacks discernible individuals. Negative ecology is a critical practice but also a viral “infection,” with the same inevitability as linguistic deferral (19). Thinking non-identity is thinking, however, an infinite regress of dislocating self-consciousness. Its scene is not a wild forest, where phenomenological immersion in an animate world, with an ambiance so unlike a city street, would induce fantasies of nature’s tangible existence. Incidents such as Thoreau’s well-known account of existential vertigo on Ktaadn, “this matter to which I am bound has become so strange to me,” are rare. Describing his own circling of Kailash, Morton reports on the vastness of space as seen from the Tibetan Plateau but includes no similar instance of epiphanic de-realization. For Morton, ecological thinking, as critical negation, proceeds by way of evolutionary science and aesthetic self-reflectivity. The ecological thought is Darwinian and is difficult for the same reason the theory of evolution seems so counter-intuitive to us Platonists and Aristotelians: its anti-essentialist and non-teleological understanding of creation. Like commodity fetishism, or the unconscious, or différance, evolution is almost unthinkable because of the gaps between its content and its form, its synchronic structure and its diachronic history. The …