The Memory of the World

"The Memory of the World brings philosophy down to Earth in a book bursting with profound insights for our times and future life on this planet. Ted Toadvine first digs down through phenomenological strata of everyday perception to show how our evolved bodies mesh with and dredge up the deep time past of our planet; he then burrows sideways through deep time, now, to offer an innovative ‘biodiacritical’ account of our kinship with other animals; finally, he tunnels back up through the immense scales of deep time to show how they haunt our apocalyptic imaginings of future planetary crises. This is a superb and daring book, one that makes important contributions to phenomenology and philosophy of nature and life—but also to work on climate, the Anthropocene, animal studies, environmental humanities, and more." —David Morris, author of Merleau-Ponty’s Developmental Ontology

"The Memory of the World achieves two important things: it steers our understanding of Merleau-Ponty toward a temporal interpretation of his thought and, at the same time, it uses that reading to make a critical intervention amongst theories of environmental apocalypse. Ted Toadvine’s concept of ‘biodiacritics’ should lead to a reorientation of the ‘eschatological imagination,’ producing effects in knowledge that are as insightful as they are impactful. This is a wonderful book that is a pleasure to think alongside." —John Ó Maoilearca, author of Vestiges of a Philosophy: Matter, the Meta-Spiritual, and the Forgotten Bergson