Earth, Milky Way: punctum books, 2018. 176 pages, illus. ISBN-13: 978-1-947447-9-50. DOI: 10.21983/P3.0237.1.00. OPEN-ACCESS e-book and $21.00 in print: paperbound/5 X 8 in.

“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.”

~ Kyle Powys Whyte, Timnick Chair in the Humanities, Michigan State University

“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.”

~ Sarah Gridley, author of Weather Eye Open and Loom

“Read The Wind to experience a language of being … [ – ] a gust finds fellowship with other gusts …. [A]rtists will find [in] The Wind … associations on self, otherness, connection, ownership, and collective possibility in our current historical conjuncture.”

~ Caroline Woolard, visual artist and Assistant Professor of Sculpture, University of Hartford

The Wind ~ An Unruly Living

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.

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