Climate Machines, Fascist Drives, and Truth

In this new installation of his work, William E. Connolly examines entanglements between volatile earth processes and emerging cultural practices, highlighting relays among extractive capitalism, self-amplifying climate processes, migrations, democratic aspirations, and fascist dangers. In three interwoven essays, Connolly takes up thinkers in the "minor tradition" of European thought who, unlike Cartesians and Kantians, cross divisions between nature and culture. He first offers readings of Sophocles and Mary Shelley, asking whether close attention to the Anthropocene could perhaps have arrived earlier had subsequent humanists absorbed their lessons. He then joins Deleuze and Guattari's notion of an abstract machine with contemporary earth sciences, doing so to compare the Antique Little Ice Age of the late Roman empire to contemporary relays between extractive capitalism and accelerating climate processes. The final essay stages a dramatic dialogue between Alfred North Whitehead and Michel Foucault about the pursuit of truth during a time of planetary turbulence. With Climate Machines Fascist Drives, and Truth, Connolly forges incisive interventions into key issues of our time.

• In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise of Antidemocratic Politics in the West (The Wellek Library Lectures)
• The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming
• Aspirational Fascism: The Struggle for Multifaceted Democracy under Trumpism (Forerunners: Ideas First)
• Savage Ecology: War and Geopolitics at the End of the World
• Democracy May Not Exist, but We'll Miss It When It's Gone
• The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power
• 99 Theses on the Revaluation of Value: A Postcapitalist Manifesto
• For a Left Populism
• Assembly (Heretical Thought)
• Climate Leviathan: A Political Theory of Our Planetary Future