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Chad Augustine Córdova, "Toward a Premodern Posthumanism: Anarchic Ontologies of Earthly Life in Early Modern France" (Northwestern UP, 2025)
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Chad Cordova
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Gina Stam
Hello and welcome to the New Books Network French Studies Channel. I'm your host, Gina Stam, Associate professor of French at the University of Alabama, and with me today is Chad Cordova to discuss his monograph Tord of Pre Modern Anarchic Ontologies of Earthly Life in Early Modern France, out this year from Northwestern University Press. Dr. Cordova is assistant professor in the Department of Romance Studies at Cornell University, where he is also affiliated faculty in the Department of Environment and Sustainability. In addition to this new book, he's the author of many articles on figures and concepts that appear in this manuscript, such as Montaigne, Kant and Heidegger, most recently in essay Revue Interdisciplinaire du Menite and the comparatist. Dr. Cordova, thank you for being with us today.
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Chad Cordova
Thanks so much for having me.
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Gina Stam
So to start off with your subtitle is Anarchic Ontologies of Earthly Life in Early Modern France. So can you start off by telling us what is an anarchic ontology for you and how does this relate to a post humanist framework?
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Chad Cordova
Great, great, great. Sure.
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Gina Stam
Yeah.
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Chad Cordova
This kind of super long title, not the most elegant, I think, makes this inherent claim that the book tries to flesh out, which is a proposal for how we kind of think about post humanism. So in part, to kind of direct an understanding of post humanism away from something that would be, like, merely content oriented, so to studying plants or ecology as we usually understand it. But to say that posthumanism implicates, or must implicate kind of metaphysics and thinking or the need to rethink what we understand.
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Being to be and being in time. So in the wake of Heidegger, in a way that push backs against what across history is a kind of humanist or anthropocentric tendency at the heart of metaphysics, of course, in various iterations and various variations that take different forms from Aristotle or so on and so forth. So the book is proposing a theory of posthumanism in. In the very notion of the anarchic ontology. And there's, I guess, maybe three different routes that I kind of take or that I try to show are related to thinking about the anarchic. There's on the one hand, kind of what we might say, the post Heideggerian or kind of deconstructive tradition. So there I'm thinking about, like Rainer Schurman, Lebinas, maybe Deida, to a certain extent, where Western metaphysics is understood with Heidegger as to be a kind of system of interpreting being that is by and large kind of teleocratic, so structured around principles and aims. This, again, takes various different forms. So on the one hand, anarchic ontology is kind of an intensification of what we might say. Deconstruction is up to moving beyond or trying to think outside or finding a kind of escape from within of that tradition. On the one hand, there's also the kind of ecological sense of the anarchic. So, you know, if we think that ecological thinking tries to encourage us to think about the primacy of relationality over, say, individual forms and to kind of think about symbiosis, symbiogenesis with, say, Donna Haraway and kind of related thinkers around her work. So, you know, part of anarchic ontology where the notion is gesturing toward what I think kind of a lot of ecological thought is asking us to kind of try to understand. So in that sense, the anarchic anthology is a kind of inherently relational, relational way that beings kind of come together, that life happens without a structuring ground or a structuring aim. And then, of course, finally, the kind of political, you know, absolutely essential here, political valency of. Of the anarchic as a Alternative or an other to a dominant Western tradition of thinking of kind of equating rather the political with sovereignty or a structure of power that is somehow grounded in some notion of wholeness or oneness that is dominant, an archaic ontologies of earthly life kind of is trying to show how this project of post humanism, if we want to think about it like that, inherently is on the one hand, political, ecological, ontological, and even temporal.
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To a certain extent. And just to touch on that temporal aspect, I mean, the title is the pre modern post humanism.
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Is also in the notion of the anarchic or the anarchic ontology. If we're taking kind of this Heideggerian tradition seriously, that humanism has in many iterations, the Western trajectory of metaphysics allows us to think that if that's true, then already in antiquity we can, you know, ways of contesting that tradition. And already before, you know, what we usually think of as the posthumanist kind of turn or framework, which would be very contemporary, that there might be resources, possibilities in pre modern and ancient texts.
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Gina Stam
So you've talked a little bit about your goals for this volume here. Could you tell us how you came to this project and a little bit about how you developed your corpus and your theoretical approach?
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Chad Cordova
Yeah, I mean, somewhat mysterious. I was thinking about this the other day. I mean, on one end, I think that, not to go like too far into my prehistory, but I think I've always been interested in kind of connections and resonances across time periods, across genres. I've never really felt like super at home in the kind of disciplinary formations I think we're asked to kind of manifest and, you know, kind of master as professors, as academics. So in my earlier work, in the dissertation, I was working on the notion of kind of anti humanism. And I wanted to show how anti humanism, which we usually associate with, like post war philosophy in France, Altusse, this kind of stuff should really be thought of as a style of thinking that accompanies humanism from the beginning. So we can find it in the Renaissance and we can think about Pascal and Montaigne and so on and so forth. So I was already kind of thinking about what is this type of reading between centuries, you know, how do we think through that? Is it just blatant anachronism? Is it just bad reading? You know, But I always been struck by kind of resonances and correspondences. And I think as I then left the doctorate and became a professor, I kind of had my own little mini, I guess, Eco turn to a certain extent. And for me, that kind of solved this problem of, or at least posed the question of, okay, if there's this kind of maybe dialectic that hues humanism and anti humanism together, what is beyond that? What is the outside of that? So what is post humanism, in a sense? What does that really mean? And what is ecological thought? But how is it possible in a way that doesn't just kind of reproduce humanism and its discontents and so on and so forth? So that's kind of how I came to within the kind of positive, what I guess today is called like eco deconstruction in this science sort of stuff. And in terms of the temporal aspects of this kind of inherently anachronic way of seeing King.
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I became a little more sure, a little more confident in trying to not only perform, but theorize this. And in part that was kind of via Heidegger that I began to think differently about the very concept of time. What is the notion of time, that structures are disciplinary formations, the notion of period, and so on and so forth. And so the book also, one basic kind of goal is to try to bridge what I see as a gap between, say, early modernists who are very, and I think rightly so, to a certain extent conscious of what they might call anachronism. Right. And maybe more contemporary and more kind of card carrying theoretical scholars who don't necessarily ascribe to that notion of history, but ironically might not be as interested in early modern texts. And so there's that kind of aspect of the theoretical or the methodological aspect of the book that is trying to kind of put those two types of readers into communication. In terms of the corpus. I mean, you know, in part, kind of these are thinkers or texts that have always fascinated me.
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And in part, you know, I was writing a 10 year book, so it had to be somewhat about early modern France to a certain extent. But it also, and maybe this is not as drawn out or as explicit as it could be the corpus kind of, and the trajectory corresponds to a larger kind of task that I set myself, which was to, by engaging with Kant, and I think we'll probably talk more about Kant later, to allow what we think aesthetics to be, to kind of show itself to be much more capacious and ambiguous and kind of messy and interesting than the modern paradigm might allow us to suppose. So the chapters in the corpus kind of.
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Ramify or open up the Kantian kind of concept of the aesthetic in different directions. So we have kind of ways of Rethinking art practice with, say, Montaigne, da Vinci, a way of rethinking what the sublime is beautiful, so on and so forth, or even with Rousseau, about thinking about natural science in a way that kind of removes it from what we understand science, the production of concepts or whatever to be. So there's also this kind of tacit dialogue with Kant that is intended to both kind of rethink the aesthetic and also take the aesthetic kind of into already kind of ecological territory. Aesthetic territory, and so on and so forth.
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Gina Stam
Yeah. And you've talked about just now the importance of aesthetics to your analysis of these texts. And so in your prologue and introduction, you frame your project as a rehabilitation or reevaluation of aesthetics in an age of ecological turmoil when it hasn't perhaps been at the forefront of ecological thinking. So why do you see aesthetics as specifically valuable to a post humanist project?
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Chad Cordova
Right, yeah, yeah. I mean, in part, this. It's an attempt to. To take very seriously the critique of aesthetics in a lot of, I think, a lot of types of thought that I'm drawing from, and then to gesture to how maybe that critique might miss something about aesthetics and then to go kind of further. So aesthetics has been critiqued and as you're saying, rightly so, kind of has been not at the forefront of a lot of current ways of thinking. So in that critique, we could find it in Heidegger. So he sees aesthetics as kind of an epiphenomenon of modern metaphysics. We see it in critical theory, in Adorno, for example, and we see it in ecological thought or eco criticism. We might think about the first Timothy Morton, so the beginning of Morton's career, ecology without nature. Right. Where essentially aesthetics is kind of contaminated maybe by a romantic notion of nature that is ultimately ecocidal or that actually locks us in looking at nature in a certain way that is not productive for environmental thought, or so on and so forth. And the book takes this very seriously because, in part it is absolutely right. And if we think about how interesting it is that Kant is usually credited with being the beginning of modern aesthetics as an autonomous philosophical kind of domain, you know, Kant is also after Descartes, right. The. The very kind of paradigm of this modern metaphysics of the human as subject, and so on and so forth. So, you know, the book doesn't necessarily dismiss this reading, but tries to then go back into Kant and say, well, yes, this is absolutely in part the case, but that there's more going on there, you know, and that if we are taking seriously Also say, you know, what deconstruction asks us to do, which is to see how rereading can find already other possibilities, even in the very heart of metaphysics or humanism. That's kind of what I try to do a little bit with Kant's Third Critique and in particular with the analytic of the beautiful. So, you know, there's been, over the past, I don't know, half century, a lot of kind of theory or philosophical engagement with the analytic of the sublime. And the beautiful remains this apparently kind of outdated or more conservative moment of the Kantian text. And I try to show that actually the beautiful is really where we could find some very interesting ways of kind of showing how Kant's aesthetics already kind of goes beyond the modern metaphysical paradigm that he helps to so influentially kind of instate. And so if we reread the analytica of the beautiful, and also Kant's the second part of the Third Critique, which is about the living and life forms, we find that what Kant is kind of articulating is actually something like a relational mode of being that is not determined by any end, it's not grounded in any concept. It exceeds precisely the human as subject and the non human as object. And so for me, this is kind of in a sort of condensed kind of, I don't know, microcosmic way, a way in which we might begin to articulate an archic ontology that is already relational, quasi ethical, quasi ecological as well. I mean, in the Kant's notion of the beautiful, he says there's a lot of very interesting things that he says, including that the beautiful prepares us to love nature in some way. And so I take very seriously the way in which the beautiful is already articulating something that we might call proto ecological and a mode of responding or relating to the non human being that already exceeds this kind of capture of the human as subject and nature as mere objects. So it's kind of. It's a recuperation of aesthetics, but a recuperation via this kind of difficult reading that tries to show how aesthetics is already kind of going beyond the modern paradigm that it's really rooted in.
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Gina Stam
In addition to Kant, there are a couple of other figures that come up in your framing of your project, where you triangulate your approach in relation to some non early modern thinkers. I guess so specifically Heidegger and Aristotle. Could you situate your argument for us a little bit in relationship to. To these figures?
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Chad Cordova
Yeah, the Holy Trinity. To a certain extent, yeah. I mean, in part it's because of A kind of notion of the history or their paradigmatic role in the history of metaphysics to a certain extent. So we have Aristotle, who represents or is the figure of, kind of the culmination, as Heidegger says, of ancient metaphysics, and then Kant with, with Descartes as kind of this figure of the modern period who initiates arguably the age that we still live in. And then Heidegger as the kind of thinker of the history of that trajectory and also the beginning of its kind of deconstruction. So because the book engages so directly with metaphysics and tries to make an argument about post humanism as entailing this ontological aspect, these thinkers play, on the one hand, this kind of historical structuring role, but on the other hand they precisely kind of help us to begin to think about the pre modern, post humanist aspect. So with Heidegger, I kind of am thinking about how rereading and turning to old texts for possibilities or readings that are not necessarily the most explicit is already potentially in dialogue with, say, contemporary or future oriented thinking. So for example, in Kant, as we were just saying, I think that it is really fascinating that on a certain reading of the third Critique, we can find already in his notion of the beautiful or the aesthetic or what he calls reflective, kind of reflective way of being, something that is very resonant with where Heidegger actually kind of ends up in his trajectory. So with the idea of, for example, of being without why, which he adopts from Meister eckhart in the 50s in the principle of Reason seminar, or in this, for me, super intriguing notion of letting seinlast and letting be Gelassenheit releasement. So already we kind of see in Kant where Heidegger is going with the deconstruction of metaphysics. And this kind of way of rereading then turns Aristotle and Kant into not only these structuring kind of moments in a history, but also opens us up to thinking about how rereading them can help us kind of also disrupt that history and see how it's already kind of undoing itself or going beyond itself.
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Chad Cordova
The flight attendants asked Bronx if he.
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Percy Jackson Narrator
Wanted to see the flight deck and meet Kath and Andrew.
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Chad Cordova
I got to sit in the driver's seat. I grew up in an aviation family and seeing Bronx kind of reminded me of myself when I was that age. That's Andrew, a real United pilot. These small interactions can shape a kid's future. It felt like I was the captain. Allowing my son to see the flight.
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Chad Cordova
That's how good leads the way.
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Gina Stam
And now, going more strictly speaking, back to the early modern period, your first chapter deals with Montaigne's essays. How do you see them as exemplifying what you call vegetal being?
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Chad Cordova
Yeah. And Montaigne's place is super important not only in the first chapter for kind of chronological reasons, but also and this kind of gets to your question for the way of thinking that the essays are kind of manifesting and which for me is in proximity precisely with the vegetal or vegetal being. So vegetal being plays a large role in this book, and in part because since Aristotle or since antiquity, the vegetal has always this very problematic status vis a vis theories of life and theories of kind of formation or generation. So we find this, for example, again in Aristotle, where the plant form is taken to be less definitive in terms of its teleology and its kind of right to the kind of form of its organic structure. And also that plants possibly reproduce in ways that are not sexual and that are more spontaneous and therefore are kind of outside of this.
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More formal reproductive way of thinking about generation, and are more close to a sort of atelic, profusive exuberance of nature in a way that remains somewhat recalcitrant to, say, Aristotle's thinking. And. And we see this today, I mean, just to jump ahead a little before coming back to Montaigne in, for example, the kind of proliferation of plant thinking, if we think with. About Michael Martyr's work and this kind of stuff, which really focuses on these particular ontological problems or aspects of the vegetal as pointing to new ways of thinking about life and so on and so forth. So the essays in the chapter.
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And specifically entering into them via this essay called A wide ost la.
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I'm trying to argue that they approach not only in their content, what they're interested in. Montaigne is interested in, say, the grotesque and monsters and things that kind of have an eco vibe to them, but really in the ontology of their form and in the process of their creation and generation that they resemble or they approximate. This kind of relational or assemblage like structure that has often been seen as that of the plant. And this specific teeny essay that's super fascinating of idleness is a theory also of the generation of the very writing praxis in Montaigne that shows how that writing praxis kind of exceeds any possible aim or ground and is somewhat vegetal, or to use Bataille's term, and foam to a certain extent. And so I'm interested in the essays as form and also the relationality between us as readers and the essays. So, you know, it's very. And still extraordinarily peculiar what Montaigne is really up to with this form of writing that never really comes to an end. I mean, he dies while he's still doing another. Another kind of iteration of them. And that don't really try to compel you to arrive at any specific argument or any specific conclusion, but they kind of show you thinking in interrelations. We might think of Montaigne's citational practice, for example, how he kind of interrelates.
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Ideas without necessarily an overarching aim or a kind of ground. And so there's something profusive or vegetal, a kind of generous in this sense about this thinking, that places the reader also in what we might say, this relational or anarchic rapport with the text. And just to zoom out, the kind of overarching idea here is to think about the essay as one possible kind of form for posthumanist thought in all of those kind of vegetal or grotesque ontological aspects.
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Gina Stam
Thank you. And in keeping with the aesthetic nature of your project, you compare the essays to not only to this vegetal being that you just described, but also to self portraiture and to the enterprise of drawing in general. What kind of understanding of the artistic process does Montaigne manifest here?
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Chad Cordova
Yeah, so in part, this chapter or the first chapter is responding to a long tradition of reading Montaigne that does make a lot of sense, because Montaigne kind of is the instigator of it, which is to think of Montaigne's essays as a form of self portraiture. So in the very beginning of the essays, the address to the reader, Montaigne very famously says, c' est moi que Japan. It's myself that I am painting, that's myself that I depict. And this is, whether explicitly or not very often what is guiding readings of Montaigne, that the book is about himself, it's a form of self expression, so on and so forth. It therefore fits very nicely in a narrative of modernity, where art becomes more and more about the subject, becomes more and more about human psychology, and so on and so forth. So this style of reading Montaigne, which is what we might call a kind of humanist reading of Montaigne, is very appealing because it puts him, maybe even at the outset, right before Descartes, of a kind of tradition of thinking and art making that is ultimately reducible to, say, subjectivity and it's kind of intentionality, or we might say, with Derrida kind of logocentrism. And so the chapter is kind of responding to this by not necessarily, again, saying, oh, it's total nonsense, but more like trying to show how that paradigm, which is an ontology of selfhood, of mimesis or art, or so on and so forth, misses or obscures at least this other Montaigne or other kind of art making, other thinking that's going on in the essays that is far more provocative and cannot neatly be put into that narrative of modernity as something about the subject, but is something even inhuman to a certain extent, is something that is beyond intentionality, that is a process that, to use the kind of governing term here, is anarchic in a certain sense, and exceeds a lot of the. The different ways that we might think about what art is, its aims, its relationship to subjectivity, and so on and so forth. And so the chapter kind of tries to remove the self portrait as this kind of modeling paradigm for how we think about the essays, and to put in its place.
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A other sort of art practice, which is drawing or specifically sketching, and specifically sketching as practiced by Da Vinci. So Da Vinci, who was wildly original in a lot of ways, we might think, if we don't know his work that well, we immediately think of super mimetic exact representations of human anatomy, for example, but in his style of sketching, and specifically this type of sketch that he called componimento anculto, which I kind of daringly translate as the barbaric sketch, is a form of kind of experimentation on paper and is not predetermined by a name or of representation, and is not also a type of drawing that is subservient to a final painting or a final aim, but is really a kind of thinking in drawing, or drawing as thinking, and vice versa. And so for me, this kind of analogical reading between them helps us see Montaigne's style of writing as something very, very, very strange. And that remains provocative and strange and removed from what we usually think of as books, as self expression and so on and so forth. And the upshot of this is not necessarily to like, drive a huge wedge between, say, drawing and painting, or between philosophical kind of treatise and then the Montaigne style essay, but to actually show or to think about how sketching, for example, or drawing represent this kind of obfuscated potentiality within even the most, say, Cartesian style treatise, or the most kind of perfect style painting. That that these forms, the essay and the sketch are actually the kind of potentiality that is maybe in a form of stasis or fixed in the painting or the treatise, but that this style of reading that we are practicing, you might want to call it deconstructive, is in part about kind of finding and reactivating that hidden dynamism that's even in these apparently fully fixed or fully formed forms.
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Gina Stam
And to come back to this idea of the anarchic and also to the idea of potentiality which you just evoked, what is anarchic phusis for you? And how does its spontaneity generate political structures or law in the worldview you develop from Aristotle?
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Chad Cordova
Yeah, this is one of the more important kind of concepts that's trying more quasi concepts that the book is trying to think to. So phusis being the Greek way of thinking or naming what we call nature. But it's not exactly a wonderful translation. But the verb that fus comes from means kind of to beget, to birth, but also things like to appear, to pop up, to come forth, or Heidegger will say, to presence. So it's an interesting term because we can translate it as nature, but it clearly ontologically exceeds kind of nature boundaries that we usually would associate. And anarchic phusis, this term that's being kind of elaborated in the book is an attempt to name.
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A sort of spontaneity that I'm most recovering from Aristotle as a kind of way of thinking about nature or being or happening that is removed from any principle. So the term arche in Greek means principle or ground or commanding.
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Cause, and removed from any end. And so anarchic phusis is a kind of very old, but maybe new term for nature for being that is irreducible to what, in humanist metaphysics, nature is. So if you're thinking in ancient metaphysics, the counterpart to human technology, or in, say, modern metaphysics, the kind of mere material or means for our ends, anarchic fuse is something that exceeds or a process or a way of being that exceeds these two.
- [34:12]
Ways of kind of metaphysical capture. And as a kind of larger aim of that, the use of that concept or that name, it's an attempt to also think about what we might call nature. In a time when nature is kind of becoming unnatural to a certain extent, then. So with the onset of climate change, or rather the consciousness of climate change today, right, Nature ceases to be this eternal repetition of the same or an endless source of resources, right? Nature is kind of becoming unnatural in some sense. And so we need some new ways of thinking about what nature is. And so anarchic fusis is, as I said, a kind of intentionally very old but new way of thinking about this. And.
- [35:01]
It emerges in the book, in particular, in rereading Aristotle's notion of spontaneous generation. And this is, for me, one of the more interesting parts of the book. So Aristotle's model in his natural science, thinking about how beings come to be and how they reproduce, is very interestingly, a sexual mode of generation.
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In which, in particular, the kind of paternal form oversees the process in A sense and provides both the formal and final. And I guess the efficient cause for this. And the female involvement is minimal, is reduced to being mere matter. And what is fascinating about spontaneous generation is that here it is not reducible to sexual reproduction, but rather it's the possibility of the emergence of a form of life through kind of contingent processes and entanglements of matter in a way that we might say is inherently relational, is kind of queer, and is something that really escapes from the notion of what life is in other parts of Aristotle and shows the emergence of life to be inherently kind of entangled. And so, for me.
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The theory of spontaneous generation in Aristotle is really. Can be reread today as a pretty marvelous, interesting lesson in ecological thought and helps us think about symbiosis, for example, and what it means that life is relations rather than individuals. And the implications of this, for me, are pretty large. So if we think that metaphysics as such, and in particular, and Aristotle is very systematic and his metaphysics and his physics and his ethics and his politics are interrelated, once we kind of retrieve this notion of anarchic fusis from spontaneous generations, or life as emerging without principle, without form, inherently relational, it provides an interesting way for kind of deconstructing his own politics. And so the reading of the politics then becomes important to kind of see, where is this spontaneous generation? Where is this spontaneous formation and coming together of forms present or faced from the political? And what would it mean to think about politics rather than on the traditional Western way derived from Aristotle and politics as a form that is coherent, that is a form of hierarchy and coercive power? What would it mean to think differently about politics in terms of this kind of anarchic coming together that we see already at play in the notion of spontaneity?
- [38:00]
So the role of anarchic crucis is kind of pretty enormous in the book, even when it's not being mentioned. It's kind of one of the main goals that I set myself was trying to show its importance and its influence.
- [38:16]
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- [39:16]
Gina Stam
Help follow up this thread of generation or reproduction, in chapter three, you point to the ways in which Nietzsche attempts to reinvest the beautiful with the erotic or the embodied. Could you talk a little bit about how he does this and how you understand this to come from his reading of the French moraliste tradition?
- [39:35]
Chad Cordova
Yeah, yeah. So this kind of taking up well known.
- [39:42]
Kind of insult directed towards Kant that Nietzsche, I guess he did many of, but where he pits Stendhal in particular against Kant in Beyond Good and Evil. So Stendhal was for Nietzsche kind of paradigm of the artist, hedonist who must know much more about beauty than Kant. And Nietzsche is taking exception in particular to Kant's notion of disinterest. So the beautiful has disinterest and so on and so forth. And whereas Nietzsche finds this much more compelling, Stendhal says that the beautiful is a promise of happiness, promise de bonheur.
- [40:19]
So and on the one hand the chapter kind of or this part of the book takes up Nietzsche's invitation to say, okay, the tradition that culminates with Stendhal, the moralists. So we have Montaigne, Nietzsche really liked Pascal as well. He kind of had a love hate relationship with Pascal that we can look back to them and perhaps find some notion of the aesthetic and of the beautiful in particular that is much messier than what Kant set out to do, which was to kind of circumscribe the limits of the beautiful, to create a kind of autonomous discourse about aesthetics and so on and so forth, to purify, as it were, the beautiful from other sorts of discourses. So on the one hand we have the moralist tradition where the beautiful is always kind of in close proximity in its kind of logical form and its ontological form toward love, towards the erotic, towards.
- [41:17]
Ways of being or events that, that escape intentionality, that cannot be kind of pre programmed and that certainly do not resonate with the lack of interest, but actually some sort of highest interest, as it were. So, on the one hand, the chapter tries to undertake a kind of look back into concepts of beauty in the Molis tradition, where we find, kind of prefigured both the Kantian notion of beauty and also the Stondhalian notion of beauty as a promise of happiness. But on the other hand, kind of in that tradition, I try to show that kind of, against Nietzsche, maybe going beyond his critique of Kant, that the beautiful, or in proximity to the erotic and even to the soteriological. So the kind of theological notion of salvation or of grace is hardly reducible to the psychological subject. So we can make fun of Kant for kind of purifying beauty too much, but we should also not necessarily understand the promise of happiness as saying that, okay, so ultimately the beautiful is merely about psychology or merely about the subject's psychological desire. So this kind of to and fro moment is also trying to exceed, in some sense, both the Kantian notion and the Nietzschean critique, and to show how the interest involved, if there is interest involved in the aesthetic, the erotic and proximity is something that goes. It's not disinterested, but rather it goes way beyond any interest that would be reducible to the subject, whether a psychological subject or a thinking subject. So there's kind of to and fro that we get with the Mohawi's tradition.
- [43:13]
Gina Stam
And when discussing the ways in which ecological phenomena can exceed our grasp, as with Timothy Morton's idea of the hyperobject, you take us back to Dunedin, Diderot's philosophy, where you find the idea of what you call a natural historical sublime. So could you explain a little bit about what you mean by that and also about how landscape painting is particularly important for Diderot in developing this.
- [43:37]
Chad Cordova
Yeah, so as with some of the other terms, I'm kind of channeling histoire naturel, so natural history in a number of resonances. So on the one hand, we might think about, say, Pliny, his Natural history, where human art is just one type of an enormous tableau of interactions with nature. I'm also kind of inviting us to think with Dorno and Benjamin about naturgesichte, which is a way of thinking that kind of overcomes a facile dualism between history and nature. And then we might think also with more contemporary thought today, where we're thinking in terms of, say, work on deep time, which exceeds our normal notion of history and really kind of brings history into, not dialogue, but really into kind of proximity with natural time as well. And then finally, more kind of close to Diderot is Histoire natural. So the science, 18th century science.
- [44:39]
Which was kind of an umbrella term for a number of different ways of thinking about nature, from comparative anatomy to fossils to all sorts of things, and was really the beginning of grappling with a lot of stuff that we're grappling with today, including things like deep time and a notion of nature as endless process or change or transformation, kind of proto evolutionary theory, and so on and so forth. So the natural historical sublime is that I'm thinking with Diderot is on the one hand, an attempt to kind of critique the more dominant notion of the sublime which comes from cause the Kantian sublime, just very quickly is kind of an ironic form where in the face of what exceeds us radically and kind of puts us in danger as natural beings, the human finds a way still to kind of assert a sort of primacy or superiority as a cognitive and a moral being. So the Kantian sublime is kind of interesting and ironic because ultimately the humans still come out on top, even if we are entirely transcended by nature. Nature. And the reason why this is of any interest today is because.
- [45:59]
A lot of discourse about climate change, about climate catastrophe, could be said to be discourse of the sublime. So we're thinking about floods that are going to overtake all of coastal cities and so on and so forth. So the question is, how do we kind of relate to these ways of thinking or imagine these quasi apocalyptic events without falling back into the Kaito Kantian trap or humanist dialectic of ultimately still positing some sort of human superiority? And so I turned to Diddy was kind of before Kant for this pre and already kind of post Kantian or postmodern sublime. And in particular through his work in natural history, where nature is nothing that could be possibly subsumed under a human concept. Nature is endless transformation is flux, is endless power, and so on and so forth in a way that. That resists any kind of sublime recuperation. And I try to then show how this notion of nature in Diderot's aesthetic writings, in particular on landscapes, kind of informs what he's most interested in and what he finds most compelling in particular in Vernet. And I try to show that Diderot kind of enters into the aesthetics and enters into the Salon in the Louvre with this kind of sense already that he has from Natural History of nature as endless transformation, as deep time, is something that totally exceeds human conceptual mastery or representation. And there are certain Landscapes by Vernet in particular, that appeal to him. And the question being why? And I try to argue that landscape form for Diderot, seen in this kind of natural, historical, or natural historical, sublime way, ultimately become kind of the opposite of what we imagine landscape to be. So landscape, we would usually think, is the kind of embodiment of a certain metaphysical capture of nature in the form of a representation. But I try to argue that Diderot's kind of natural historical sensibility allows him to find interesting in landscapes, gestures towards this natural historical time or power that ultimately kind of exceed representation. So he's interested, I try to argue specifically in landscape representations that put into question the very representability of nature as such.
- [48:28]
Gina Stam
And getting onto your final chapter, you discuss an activity that we might not automatically see as aesthetic or anarchic, which is walking. And you contrast walking for Kant and Rousseau. So how can this activity exemplify the kind of aesthetics you put forward in your book?
- [48:44]
Chad Cordova
Book, yeah. So the final chapter kind of opens up to, we might say, these anarchic ways of being. And I look at late Rousseau and in particular this strange, very strange text, the reverie. So it's unended text at the end of his. Of his career where he tries to kind of improvise a new model of thinking as walking, as reverie, or as promenade. That, and I try to kind of articulate what it is that was so provocative about this. Not only this, say, the displacement of thinking outdoors in medias res, in nature, so on and so forth, so outside of the study, so on and so forth, but also this attempt to practice a atelic, non teleological mode of mobility that is generative for a style of thinking that is again, not reducible to the human subject, to thinking as something that a subject does, and to kind of bring that the resonance of that out or its importance. I go back specifically to Aristotle, to Kant as well, because Kant was also a walker, but for different reasons, but Aristotle, whose peripatetic philosophy is also associated with walking. And I try to show how, somewhat interestingly, in Aristotle, peripatetics, as a way very similar to Rousseau, where we think in walking is actually not really at stake, but rather a notion of walking that is paradigmatic for a notion of movement or process that is teleological. And so Rousseau's notion of walking as promenade, as wandering, and as a wandering form or an errant form of thought, I see as breaking with and repositing a notion of mobility. It doesn't necessarily have to be walking, but of human mobility. And of the mobility of thought that is kind of beyond this Western tradition of metaphysics and of movement as inherently something that is telic or teleological, that we can always say why we are walking and for where. And so Rousseau kind of turns this into a method or an anti method of thinking.
- [51:03]
Gina Stam
And finally you turn not only to plants, which have been with us since the very beginning of the book, but also to fungi and what you call mycorrhizal thinking. And this is part of the coda to your book. And what would you like the readers to take away from this coda?
- [51:18]
Chad Cordova
Yeah, so the coda kind of. So the chapter on Rousseau, the last chapter culminates in his botanical practice. And what is fascinating about Rousseau is he's trying to, in a very operatic fashion, to think about science. Otherwise it would be a science that has no aim, the science of plants that remains attuned to the singularity of non human life. A science of plants that is not for human ends, and so on and so forth. And then Dakota brings us, as you said, plants have been with us since the beginning, brings us into contemporary ecological thought and the kind of.
- [51:53]
Vogue or trend for specifically vegetal thinking that's going on today in order to try to say that this anarchic ontology of earthly life is implicitly or explicitly what this type of thinking is articulating. So on the one hand, it addresses what we might call plant thinking with Michael Martyr, so the vegetal ontology of life, this vegetal notion of community, of ethics even. But it also suggests that somewhat ironically, some of this plant thinking.
- [52:31]
Has a tendency of omitting the relational life of plants themselves. So that is.
- [52:41]
The prevalence, not entirely, but the prevalence of symbiotic relationships between plants and fungi. So the Michael Reisel relation between roots and fungi. And so mycorrhizal thinking, what I could kind of suggest at the end of the book is where kind of ecological thought has. Has taken us to a certain extent. So I'm looking at that part as well, at ecological thought that is taking very seriously fungal and fungal plant relationships as a model for thinking about how life works on Earth and also for thinking about thinking, and in particular a way of thinking that essentially is based on entanglement and that is proliferating kind of.
- [53:34]
Margins relations without necessarily trying to re center any one specific thing. And the book is not saying, is not necessarily proposing this, but it's saying that this is kind of the thinking that is happening, in particular, Anna Singh's work, for example, that this is a direction in which contemporary post humanist thought is going, and that I think that it should be going to a certain extent. So this brings us back up to the contemporary.
- [54:03]
Gina Stam
Thank you so much. And as we come to the end of our time together, do you have any new projects you would like to share with our listeners?
- [54:10]
Chad Cordova
Yeah, so I guess I'll just mention very quickly a few things. So one is I. I wanted to make sure that the kind of philosophical gesture of the book is not lost in the more early modernist readings of literature and philosophy and so on and so forth. So I have a short book that I'm writing that is kind of just about anarchic thesis and trying to kind of propose this in terms of a way of thinking about nature, a way of thinking about nature in the kind of age of climate change, and so on and so forth. But the main second project that I'm working on now is about Montaigne, which might not be surprising. So it's about Montaigne. Post Humanism, current title is Grotesque Life. And this is an attempt to kind of take further some of the work done in the book to articulating really what does post Humanism mean and what kind of form should it take? So it is an attempt to return us to this strange and very promising form of thinking called the essay, to a certain extent, and to think with Montaigne through a number of contemporary philosophical problems, where the style of thinking in the essays, not only their content but their form really can change or disrupt what might seem to be a kind of dead end and propose something other. So one of the chapters deals in particular with post humanist ethics and tries to get outside of the kind of deadlock that we find in, say, anthropocentric ethics versus, say, animal rights discourse, where we try to extend, based on good reasons, beyond the human toward the non human, and tries to show how, with multinu, we can think about an anarchic or a groundless responsibility that already is extended beyond the normal human form. So it's an attempt to. To kind of use thinking with Montaigne, use the essays to disrupt, but also intervene in a lot of. In a few domains of post humanist thought today.
- [56:26]
Gina Stam
Wonderful. Well, I'm sure that gives us all something to look forward to. Thank you once again so much for being with us today.
- [56:33]
Chad Cordova
Thanks so much for having me, Gina.