In the midst of spiraling ecological devastation, multispecies feminist theorist Donna J. Haraway offers provocative new ways to reconfigure our relations to the earth and all its inhabitants. She eschews referring to our current epoch as the Anthropocene, preferring to conceptualize it as what she calls the Chthulucene, as it more aptly and fully describes our epoch as one in which the human and nonhuman are inextricably linked in tentacular practices. The Chthulucene, Haraway explains, requires sym-poiesis, or making-with, rather than auto-poiesis, or self-making. Learning to stay with the trouble of living and dying together on a damaged earth will prove more conducive to the kind of thinking that would provide the means to building more livable futures. Theoretically and methodologically driven by the signifier SF—string figures, science fact, science fiction, speculative feminism, speculative fabulation, so far—Staying with the Trouble further cements Haraway's reputation as one of the most daring and original thinkers of our time.
Donna J. Haraway is Distinguished Professor Emerita in the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and the author of several books, most recently, Manifestly Haraway.
Table of Contents
List of Illustrations ix Acknowledgments xi Introduction 1 1. Playing String Figures with Companion Species 9 2. Tentacular Thinking: Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene 30 3. Sympoiesis: Symbiogenesis and the Lively Arts of Staying with the Trouble 58 4. Making Kin: Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene 99 5. Awash in Urine: DES and Premarin in Multispecies Response-ability 104 6. Sowing Worlds: A Seed Bag for Terraforming with Earth Others 117 7. A Curious Practice 126 8. The Camille Stories: Children of Compost 134 Notes 169 Bibliography 229 Index 265
What People are Saying About This
In Catastrophic Times: Resisting the Coming Barbarism - Isabelle Stengers
"Staying with the Trouble is written with love and rage, making it felt what it takes not to turn one’s back against the demands of this terrible time which some dare to call the Anthropocene. Donna J. Haraway mobilizes the power of words, images, and tales to shake off the dual temptation of faith in providential technofixes and of bitter 'game over' pseudo-wisdom. Her book forcefully demands that we consent to participate in the ongoingness of the world."
Marilyn Strathern
"Donna J. Haraway asks how to think-with, live-with, and be-with other planetary organisms in a world that does not forget how much ecological trouble it is in. This is not to lament at the world's destruction, but to see afresh what the possibilities of life have always been. Staying with the Trouble is at once a compelling sequel to a series of major works, a manifesto full of intellectual energy to put beside her famous Cyborg Manifesto, and at the same time only a momentary resting place in a life still committed to making us think."
