The Wind ~ An Unruly Living
Jeremy Bendik-Keymer
Published on December 14, 2018 by punctum books
- Pages
- 176 pages
- Languages
- English
- Dimensions
- 5⤫8 in.
- ISBN (Paperback)
- ISBN: 978-1-947447-95-0 (Paperback)
- ISBN (PDF)
- ISBN: 978-1-947447-96-7 (PDF)
- LCCN
- LCCN: 2018963429
- BISAC subject codes
- BISAC: PHI049000
- Thema subject codes
- THEMA: QDHR, RNA
Barely moving a solid thesis, the creative essay is atmospheric. Yet the wind, although it slips through fingers, grasps at them, a fluid hand on our hands.
A process begun in Pisa, Italy in April of 2016 during a workshop on political theory in the Anthropocene, The Wind ~ An Unruly Living is a philosophical exercise (askêsis, translated, following Ignatius of Loyola, as “spiritual exercise”). In his exercise, Bendik-Keymer throws to the void: the ideology of self-ownership from a society of possession. By using the Stoic kanôn, the rule of living by phûsis, he follows an element. Unhappily for the Stoic and happily for us, the wind is unruly. A swerve of currents through a social fabric, it’s full of holes, all holely. Stretch and stitch as you want, it might settle more shapely tattered into light, but it will never become whole. The wind’s only holesome.
Biographies
Jeremy Bendik-Keymer(opens in new tab), hailing from Central New York, still Haudenosaunee land, and Ohio, works as the Beamer-Schneider Professor in Ethics(opens in new tab) at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. He is the author of The Ecological Life(opens in new tab) and Solar Calendar, and Other Ways of Marking Time(opens in new tab) and co-editor of Ethical Adaptation to Climate Change(opens in new tab). Two in-progress books articulate the planetary conditions for anthroponomy (collective self-governance) in an era of planetary environmental change, and a third explores the conditions of democratic life and moral reasoning in the operation of wonder.
Endorsements
Kyle Powys Whyte
Timnick Chair in the Humanities
Michigan State University
Among Bendik-Keymer’s achievements is to get us to philosophize directly out of the more-than-human world – this time, starting with wind. The Wind offers motion and intimacy, self-ownership and community, vulnerability and turbulence, and what it means to be a relative in a complex world.
Sarah Gridley
author of Weather Eye Open and Loom
Part primer, part parable, part elegy for the depth and decency we sacrifice daily to the order of self-possession, The Wind invites us to enjoy it inventively. A philosopher coming up against the limits of philosophy’s forms of communication (“Philosophy, without being in touch, is always abstract”), Bendik-Keymer courts a thoughtfulness in which wonder practically circumvents theory. Energized by “utopian anger,” he invokes the clearing, shaking energies of wind against the violent social rigidities we accept as normal. The wind, impersonal, is the figure through which to keep the dynamic inter-personal in view. I admire this book’s inventiveness, its willingness to break with discipline in pursuing a wider vision of accountability.
Caroline Woolard
visual artist and Assistant Professor of Sculpture
Harvard University
Read The Wind to experience a language of being – a gust finds fellowship with other gusts. Artists will find in The Wind associations on self, otherness, connection, ownership, and collective possibility in our current historical conjuncture.
Additional resources
Interview with the author
Usage metrics
Funding
Genres
- Anthropocene
- Philosophy
- Thought Experiments
Keywords
- ecology
- eco-philosophy
- elemental thinking
- environmental philosophy
- ethics
- subjectivity
- wind studies