Elemental Difference and the Climate of the Body

Description: Political hierarchies and ecological crises are often considered to be two different problems. For example, many speak in the present of parallel concerns: climate change and racial injustice. Emily Anne Parker argues rather that these concerns share a common cause in the polis. Polis is an ancient Greek term for the city-state, from which the English term political derives. But polis is more than a term. It is a philosophy according to which there is one complete human body, and that body is meant to govern all other things. In that sense there are not two concerns, but instead one concern: to perceive the ways in which this tradition of the polis constrains the present. Emily Anne Parker bridges the insights of social constructionism and new materialisms to create a philosophy of elemental difference. Difference, rather than needing to be either dismissed based on its social construction or reified in keeping with the hierarchies of the polis, is crucial for addressing contemporary crises of the polis.

Review Quotes: "Elemental Difference and the Climate of the Body stages a fascinating encounter between two powerful trends in contemporary theory, each of which leans into one side of a tenacious nature-culture dichotomy. How to affirm new materialist insights into the efficacy of nonhuman (material) agency without also relying upon universalizing, racially-unmarked, phallo- and Euro-centric figures of 'the human'? How to practice a critical constructivist's exquisite attentiveness to racialized abjection without ignoring the performativity of earth-wind-fire-air? Parker forges this original and creative path forward -- an ecological philosophy of elemental difference. A subtle and timely analysis." -- Jane Bennett, author of Influx & Efflux: Writing up with Walt Whitman