Jemma Deer, "Radical Animism: Reading for the End of the World" (Bloomsbury, 2020)

Summary

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New Books Network: Jemma Deer on "Radical Animism: Reading for the End of the World”

Host: Natalia Espilova Said

Guest: Jemma Deer

Date: November 16, 2025

Book: "Radical Animism: Reading for the End of the World" (Bloomsbury, 2020)

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Episode Overview

This episode of New Books Network features a conversation with Jemma Deer, a researcher in residence at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society in Munich, about her book Radical Animism: Reading for the End of the World. Deer explores the intersections of literature, language, and the environment, arguing that new forms of reading and understanding literary texts can help us confront the challenges of the Anthropocene and climate crisis. The conversation connects concepts from psychoanalysis, philosophy, and modernist literature to environmental thought through a radically animist lens.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. Jemma Deer’s Background and Genesis of the Book [02:11–04:14]

• Interweaving Literature & Environment: Deer describes her academic journey, starting in English literature, and how her concerns about climate change prompted her to reorient her doctoral work:
  • “This book actually grew out of my doctoral work … I had this real strong worry about climate change and the environment. And it just felt like doing a literature PhD was, you know, pointless.” [03:04]
  • Her return to academia hinged on finding a way to merge her literary and environmental interests.

2. Defining Radical Animism & The Anthropocene [04:51–09:14]

• Animism Reconsidered: Deer reclaims animism from its colonial and “primitive” framing:
  • “Animism ... was a word ... to designate so-called primitive systems of thought that see life, personhood or agencies beyond the human. ... In the context of climate change and the Anthropocene, this notion of agencies and life beyond the human or beyond the organically living starts to look quite logical rather than primitive.” [04:59]
• Fourth Blow to Human Narcissism: Drawing on Freud’s concept of “blows to human narcissism”, Deer argues climate change is a fourth, material blow:
  • “Climate change and the Anthropocene comes as a fourth blow to human narcissism, and it comes as a direct result of the failure to take into account the previous three blows.” [08:19]
  • This fourth blow starkly reveals humanity’s interconnectedness and lack of agency.

3. The Place and Power of Literature [09:14–13:09]

• Animism of Language and Texts:
  • “I’m interested in the way that language and literary texts can be seen to have a certain life of their own.” [10:13]
  • Even texts not explicitly about climate change (e.g., Virginia Woolf, Kafka, Lewis Carroll) acquire new meanings in the Anthropocene.
• Transformative Reading: The contemporary context transforms both how we interpret classic texts and our sense of what’s at stake in reading.

4. Etymology, Derrida, and the Secret Life of Words [13:09–17:28]

• Attention to Etymology: Deer frequently traces word origins to reveal language’s “evolutionary history”:
  • “By thinking about etymology, I’m drawing attention to the fact that… words have this history, this evolutionary history … the way that they give rise to meaning can really live in literature.” [14:10]
  • Memorable example: the etymology of Charles Darwin’s name literally means “man, animal, kin”. [16:24]
• Derrida and Metaphoricity: Language’s fundamental metaphoricity and instability is central; there is always a “carrying of meaning” beyond direct reference.

5. Generalized Notion of Text in the Anthropocene [17:28–21:13]

• Textuality Everywhere:
  • Derrida’s “generalized notion of text or trace”: geological marks, genetic code, and semiotic processes in nature all become textual.
  • “Everything is textual in a certain sense. … The Anthropocene, quite literally, marks or traces into the planet, marks that will remain in the geological record and that we are reading and interpreting.” [18:47]
  • The world and life itself are writable and readable in a broad sense.

6. Reading Practices in the Anthropocene [23:12–25:40]

• Anthropocene Reading—Three Meanings:
  1. Reading the geological traces left by humanity.
  2. Reading all texts with environmental consciousness.
  3. Understanding the Anthropocene as reading and redefining humanity.
  • “We can’t read the same text that we used to 100 years ago … We have to read in a way that understands this transformed relation that we have to the world around us.” [24:20]

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Engaging Literary Readings and Examples

7. Virginia Woolf and the Copernican Revolution [25:40–29:05]

• De-centering and Rescaling:
  • Woolf’s To the Lighthouse and The Waves exemplify narrative decentering, attending deeply to non-human forces.
  • “Into the Lighthouse, there’s that middle section … ‘Time Passes’ in which the house is left to the forces of entropy and decay. … So you see very much that kind of de-centering of the human. She’s asking what might narrative be without humans there?” [27:21]
  • Woolf’s rhythms and cosmic/minute scales create “an animistic and post-Copernican” mode.

8. Alice in Wonderland, the Animal-Human Boundary, and Meat [31:21–36:52]

• Darwinian Blows and Language’s Nonhuman Vitality
  • The baby-to-pig transformation in Alice in Wonderland lays bare processes of dehumanization and animal commodification:
  • “We’ve gone from ‘it would be murder to leave it behind’ to ‘it would be absurd to carry it any further’ in this transition from baby human animal to pig, pork.” [33:51]
  • This scene, and others, expose the ease with which we objectify other species—resonant today given the scale of industrialized meat production and its environmental harms.
  • Childhood readings differ radically from environmental readings shaped by the present context.

9. Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Freudian Agency [36:52–40:37]

• Language’s Unconscious Agency:
  • In analyzing Hamlet and Freud’s writing about the “fort-da” game, Deer identifies echoes and repetitions that suggest language’s uncanny life:
  • “He [Freud] writes these four O’s… These four O’s seem to echo or mimic Hamlet’s last words before he dies … I’m showing again how language has this kind of life of its own. So consciously or unconsciously, it can make us think certain things.” [38:30]

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On animism in modern context:
  “The more that we learn about the world, the more this kind of distinction between humans and other beings, between living and non living, all these distinctions start to crumble the closer we look.” — Jemma Deer [05:53]
• On climate change as a Fourth Blow:
  “Climate change shows us very forcefully that we’re not the center of the universe, either symbolically or materially.” — Jemma Deer [08:52]
• On language as animate:
  “Language really dictates our thoughts in a certain sense. We think within language and it has a kind of life of its own within our minds.” — Jemma Deer [10:47]
• On the etymology of Darwin:
  “His surname Darwin comes from Old English. Dior, which meant beast or animal of any kind. And wyn meant friend or kinsman. His first name, Charles, comes from Old Norse khal, meaning man. His name literally translates as man, animal, kin … which I then suggest is an etymology that kind of plays out in his life’s work.” — Jemma Deer [15:39]
• On Anthropocene reading:
  “The Anthropocene is doing the reading. It is reinterpreting what we are as the human species.” — Jemma Deer [25:16]
• On Woolf’s writing and rhythm:
  “She says that the rhythm of writing is very profound and that it goes far deeper than words. She calls it the most primitive of instincts. … She’s aware that… the rhythm of language, which she sees as this wild force that is outside of her, is to an extent dictating what she says.” — Jemma Deer [29:38]

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• Introduction and Deer’s Background – [01:32–04:14]
• Defining Animism and the Fourth Blow – [04:51–09:14]
• Animism in Literature and Language – [09:14–13:09]
• Etymology, Derrida, and Language’s Secret Life – [13:09–17:28]
• Generalized Textuality, DNA, and the Anthropocene – [17:28–21:13]
• Reading Practices in the Anthropocene – [23:12–25:40]
• Virginia Woolf and Decentering – [25:40–29:05]
• Lewis Carroll, Animals, and Anthropocentrism – [31:21–36:52]
• Freud, Hamlet, and Agency – [36:56–40:37]
• Reading for/at the End of the World—Hope and Etymology – [40:49–42:52]
• Deer’s Current and Future Projects – [43:31–45:17]

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Book’s Dual Tenor: Apocalypse and Hope

• The subtitle "Reading for the End of the World" is both apocalyptic and hopeful:
  • “The word world comes from the old Danish wer, eld, meaning literally man, age … The end of the were eld would be the beginning of a less destructive or pathological relationship between humans and the other forms of life with which we share the planet.” — Jemma Deer [41:29]

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Closing and Future Work

• New Projects: Deer is now working on a book about extinction, broadening its meaning beyond biology, and exploring fungi (“mycomorphism”) as models of interconnection.
• First Book: “Yes, it is my first book, yeah.” [45:19]

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This episode offers a deep, interdisciplinary dialogue about language, literature, animism, and the ecological crises of our age, inviting listeners to rethink how meaning arises and how reading itself might be a vital practice for what comes next.

Transcript

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[Gemma Deer]

Welcome to the New Books Network.

[Natalia Espilova Said]

Hello, I'm Natalia Espilova Said. I'm host of New Books in Literary Studies, a podcast channel on the New Books Network. I'm speaking today with Gemma Deer about her book Radical Reading for the End of the World, published by Bloomsbury academic press in 2020. Jama Dier is a researcher in residence at the Rachel Carson center for Environment and Society in Munich. She's also host of the association for the Study of Literature and Environment podcast Echocast. Hello, Gemma. Thank you for joining me today.

[Gemma Deer]

Thank you so much for having me. It's a pleasure to be here.

[Natalia Espilova Said]

Well, first of all, I would like to ask you this question about your background because your book is so interesting as it combines both literature and environment.

[Gemma Deer]

Yeah, so, I mean, I have, I guess, a very literature focused background. My Bachelor, Master's, and PhD were all technically in English literature, and kind of the environmental interest was initially something outside of that. So this book actually grew out of my doctoral work and I initially was just thinking about the notion of literary animism within some modernist writers. And then I had that perhaps inevitable or at Least very common experience of losing all faith in the notion of my PhD. Not very far in, I might add, about six months into my PhD. So I took a year out and wasn't even sure that I was going to come back. And part of that reason for leaving was that I had this real strong worry about climate change and the environment. And it just felt like doing a literature PhD was, you know, pointless. And so I left and just worked in a quote unquote normal job for a while and yeah, and then when I did finally make the decision to go back, I knew that I really had to bring these environmental concerns into it. And then that's how I ended up bringing these two things. This notion of animism in literature and then also the contemporary context of the Anthropocene and climate change together and kind of seeing how they talk to each other.

[Natalia Espilova Said]

So you kind of explained how your interest in animism evolved and actually it is connected not only with your original professional interest in literature, but primarily with your concern about the current situation with climate change. In the introduction you explained that your book responds to the Anthropocene. Would you specify this relation? Would you also elaborate on human narcissism, which you extensively use in your book?

[Gemma Deer]

Sure. So maybe first what I need to say is what animism is just so that kind of where we're all on the same page. So animism in the sense that we commonly use it now was a word that was used by the Victorian anthropologist E.B. tyler to designate so called primitive systems of thought that see life, personhood or agencies beyond the human. And arguing that in the context of climate change and the Anthropocene, this notion of agencies and life beyond the human or beyond the organically living starts to look quite logical rather than primitive. So seeing it as a way to understand climate change, but also all the kind of, you know, the more that we learn about the world, the more this kind of distinction between humans and other beings, between living and non living, all these distinctions start to crumble the closer we look. And I'm arguing that the animist worldview can help us to understand that concept. And then with regards to human narcissism, so this is a term that I take from a Freud essay in which he studied states that there have been three great blows to human narcissism. And these are firstly, the Copernican revolution when humans realized that they were not the center of the universe. Secondly, the Darwinian revolution, when humans realized that they're related to all other forms of life. And then finally, the third great blow to human narcissism, Freud says, without so much of a hint of irony, is the work of psychoanalysis, that is his own work, in which humans are forced to realize that they are not the agent of a conscious will, but there are unintentional and irrational forces that are directing. Directing our thoughts and actions in incalculable ways. And I suggest that when we look at the history of these three great blows to human narcissism, what we see is not human narcissism kind of being taken down a peg or two, as we might expect, but rather what we have to recognize is the resilience of human narcissism, where we. There's this kind of doublethink where we both know and know, or we know, but we don't take them into account. So we continue to live as if we're the center of the universe, as if we're not dependent on other forms of life, and as if we are agents of conscious, rational wills, even though we know at some level that this is not the case. And so then I argue that climate change and the Anthropocene comes as a fourth blow to human narcissism, and it comes as a direct result of the failure to take into account the previous three blows. And this kind of. It makes them all reverberate materially rather than just intellectually, in the ongoing undoing of the material conditions upon which civilization depends. Climate change shows us very forcefully that we're not the center of the universe, either symbolically or materially, that we are very much dependent on other forms of life, and that irrational and unintentional forces define our history, and particularly they define our response to climate change to this moment. So we. We kind of see this. So, yeah, just to sum up, we. I see climate change as this fourth blow to human narcissism, to this ideal ego that we have of being some special central species. And climate change comes to kind of deconstruct that, Deconstruct that and show us that it's not, in fact, the case.

[Natalia Espilova Said]

Yeah. So I guess I have some generic question because I do have some specific questions about those works that you analyze in your book. So if at the beginning of this conversation you mentioned your concern. Right. About climate change and that for some time drew you away from your PhD. But when we think about this fourth blow that you define, define in terms of literature, so what's the place of literature in this fourth blow? How do we read literature in this context? Is this A response to this fourth blow? Or is it a consequence? So how do you position literature within this context of the fourth blow?

[Gemma Deer]

So it comes down again to the notion of animism. So I think about the animism of language and literature. And so, and I guess this is kind of why I always studied literature for so many years that I'm interested in the way that language and literary texts can be seen to have a certain life of their own. So, you know, words can take on different meanings depending on their context. There's also, I think, try to think a little bit in part of the book about what I call the animism of rhythm. So the way that certain rhythms can kind of infect what we say. And of course we can think about the fact that, you know, language really dictates our thoughts on a certain sense. We think within language and it has a kind of life of its own within our own minds. And so I also, I guess bring this out in the way that some of the texts that I look at certainly aren't about climate change or the Anthropocene. So I'm looking at quite classic texts. I'm looking at a couple of Woolf novels, a Franz Kafka story, at Alice in Wonderland. None of these are really about climate change, but I'm showing how kind of in the contemporary context they transform themselves, they transform their meanings and something analogous, I'm arguing, happens with broader non verbal meanings. So the Anthropocene arrives and changes what it means to be human. So I'm interested in a sense of reading and writing in text beyond verbal language. So then we might think about the text of human beings, the text of capitalism, and how these are re read reinterpreted by the event of climate change. So things that we might once have interpreted as signs of progress and prosperity, such as air travel, now seem to be a kind of marker of our very destructive relationship with the earth. So it's this kind of, it's the way that texts, whether written texts or kind of in this more general sense, are subject to transformation. And I suppose on a micro level, the way that I'm kind of trying to become alert to all these non human and non living forces that have agency in the world. I see those non living and non living and non human forces also at work within literary texts so that they can kind of, they have a life of their own beyond any conscious intention or control of the author. They become a kind of animate living thing as well.

[Natalia Espilova Said]

I have two follow up questions. One will be on language and there are a lot of references to Derrida in your book as well. And what I noticed, you also provide a lot of notes on etymology of words. And I was thinking, is it your gesture which is meant to say something? So I guess my question is, well, why do you include so many references to etymology? And another one will be probably also connected to some extent to this one is about text. So how do you understand text in these terms of animism? So, but I would really like you to start with the language question and with those references to Derrida as well.

[Gemma Deer]

Yeah, so my interest in etymology is kind of really about revealing the materiality of language and revealing words to have this kind of, this history, this evolutionary history, we can say in the same way that living beings have an evolutionary history. And so by thinking about etymology, I'm drawing attention to the fact that, you know, we kind of read a text and we. We don't really see the words, we just kind of absorb the meaning somehow. But by refocusing our reading microscope, let's say, and actually noticing the strangeness of words on the page and the way that they give rise to meaning can really live and literature. And I guess that thinking about etymology is one way to do that. And yeah, and I guess that also kind of answers at least part of the Derrida question in that he is very alert to these kind of deeper meanings as well, particularly in a text which I quote from white mythology, where he's talking about how metaphor is very kind of deeply ingrained in all language, but we act as if that's not the case, as if certain terms and concepts are purely non metaphorical, as if they really refer directly to the thing. But actually when you start to look a little closer, you realize that all words have a certain metaphoricity in that they are not the thing that they're naming or referring to. There's always this kind of transfer or carrying of meaning. And just one more thing about etymology, I suppose as well. There's something about the words having this kind of secret life of their own. So I can perhaps give an example from the book. I look at the etymology of the name of Charles Darwin. And his surname, Darwin comes from Old English. The beginning comes from this word Dior, which meant beast or animal of any kind. And wyn meant friend or kinsman. While his first name, Charles, comes from the Old Norse khal, meaning man. So his name literally translates as man, animal, kin or man, beast, friend, which I then suggest is an etymology that kind of plays out in. In His. In his life's work, presumably unconsciously. Who knows? Maybe he looked it up himself. But, you know, the idea that this kind of the theory of evolution already had his name on it in a very literal sense. So. Yeah, and I just. For me, there's just something kind of magical and very fascinating about that. And that's. It's really kind of just how I instinctively read. I'm always, like, looking deeply into the words, and I'm often surprised about the things that grow out of them. And sorry, please repeat about the.

[Natalia Espilova Said]

About the text. So I guess it can somehow be connected with how you understand language in general on this very basic, basic, fundamental level. And in this connection, I would like to mention the COVID of the book, which is beautiful. And I think that it's such a wonderful reference to the main concept that you analyze in this book. You mention also the etymology of the word radical and you take it back to the word root, I believe, and there is this wonderful picture of the roots, almost like. But they are on the surface. They are not under the. The surface. They are on the surface.

[Gemma Deer]

So.

[Natalia Espilova Said]

Which is a wonderful, probably allusion to what you analyze in your book. So the text.

[Gemma Deer]

Sorry, what about the text?

[Natalia Espilova Said]

Yeah, the text. How you are. How does text function in the Anthropocene? How do you read the text? How can we. Because what you describe about language and text in general, for me, resonates with some postmodernist concepts as well.

[Gemma Deer]

So I guess, I mean, this is again, another reason why Derrida is so important in this work is what he refers to as the generalized notion of text or trace, and kind of realizing that everything is textual in a certain sense. And especially when we start to think about the Anthropocene, which is quite literally marks or traces into the planet, marks that will remain in the geological record and that we are reading and interpreting. And so that's kind of one way we see a generalized notion of text. It's also, of course, true when we think of organic life. This is, at bottom, text or code in DNA. And actually, the notion of the evolution of language comes before the notion of the evolution of organic life. And Darwin himself kind of found it quite strange how similar the two forms of evolution are. And then kind of, you know, fast Forward into the 20th century and the realization of the genome kind of makes that similarity make sense in that they are both textual. So, yeah, it's just about kind of seeing this more generalized notion of text in the world at large in effects. It also comes down to the notion of bio semiotics, which is the way in which all living beings, from a cellular level right up to the macroscopic level, all make use of a certain semiotic. That is, they interpret signs, they give meanings to them. And so when we see the world in this way, with this generalized notion of text, it kind of shows that the way that literary texts or even nonfiction texts, the way that they produce meaning, is not something distinctively other. It's rather just a different species of the same genus of textuality. Let's say.

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[Natalia Espilova Said]

It's interesting to think about how we engage with texts. And of course, the way we engage with texts today differs from the way we engage with texts, let's say 200 years ago. And not only because of some technological advancements, right? So Would you comment a little bit on this difference? Because in the introduction part, you also mentioned how writing and reading also contribute to this change and how writing and reading also respond to the climate change as well.

[Gemma Deer]

So I guess this kind of touches a little bit on this phrase that I use of Anthropocene reading, which I say can be read in three different ways. So, first of all, Anthropocene reading would be the reading of the Anthropocene, that is, the noticing of the geological traces that we are leaving in the earth. The second form of Anthropocene reading would be reading verbal texts, reading human texts in a way which is appropriate to or conscious of the current context. This is following on a little bit on the work of people like Tim Clark who recognize that, you know, we can't, because reading happens within the context of what it means to be a human being, what it means to have agency. We can't read the same text that we used to 100 years ago or whatever. In the same way, we have to read in a way that understands this transformed or mutated relation that we have to the world around us. And the fact that climate change, it really is an effect of leaving traces into the earth. It's an effect of a certain form of writing is also kind of transforming that notion of reading. And then the third form of Anthropocene reading is, I suggest, kind of involving reading that phrase the other way. So seeing the Anthropocene as the thing doing the reading that is the Anthropocene is reading us. It is reinterpreting what we are as the human species.

[Natalia Espilova Said]

Yeah, I really like how this Anthropocene reading brings texts back from the past to the present, and it also opens up new perspectives on how we can read the texts. I would like to talk a little bit those specific texts that you analyze in your book Name. Particularly intrigued by your reading of Virginia Woolf's works. Would you talk about how her works respond to your main claims, how you read Virginia Woolf from this Anthropocene perspective?

[Gemma Deer]

Yeah. So Virginia Woolf appears in the chapter on which I focus on the Copernican revolution. So the book is organized around those three blows to human narcissism that we talked about. So the Copernican Darwinian and Freudian Freudian revolutions, and there's a chapter for each of them. So Woolf appears alongside the Copernican revolution, which I identify as having two distinct aspects in the way that it deals its blow to human narcissism. So these are decentering. So showing that Humans are no longer the center of the universe, but also rescaling. So when we realized that the Earth was not the center of the universe, it actually revealed that the universe was also much vaster than we had previously supposed. And so this revolution kind of disturbs the place and prominence of humans, both materially and symbolically within the universe. And I find that Woolf's work, I'm particularly looking at two of her novels, to the Lighthouse and the Waves. And in these two novels, novels, I really see her as a animistic and post Copernican writer, particularly in these senses. So she's very concerned with non human agencies, but also particularly she's concerned with these movements of decentering and rescaling. So kind of being attentive to the non human forces. Of course, very famously, into the Lighthouse, there's that middle section of the book, Time Passes in which the house is left to the forces of entropy and decay. And of course, there are no, or almost no human characters within that whole section. So you see very much that kind of de centering of the human. She's asking kind of what might narrative be without humans there? And in terms of rescaling, just to give a couple of examples, she's also very. She's concerned with the astronomical, but she's also concerned with the. With the minute, with the nano, kind of with the revelations that were contemporary of the time of quantum physics. And so kind of with these both, by representing kind of images from both ends of the scale, we sort of zoom away from the human characters or see them within this much vaster and tinier whole. So she's really kind of attentive to those scales beyond the human.

[Natalia Espilova Said]

Are there different manifestations, let's say, of this reading when we compare, for example, to the Lighthouse and the Waves, or there are more similarities than differences?

[Gemma Deer]

Well, they're obviously two very unique texts, but I think the reason why I put them together is because of the way that even though they are written in very different ways, they do enact similar things. So the Waves 2 has the interludes in which we don't see the human characters. And it too again has these same interests in the rescaling. But I guess as well, kind of what is particular about Woolf's writing that I want to bring out, and which I think these texts do do particularly well, is her attunement to the rhythm of language. And so she says that the rhythm of writing is very profound and that it goes far deeper than words. She calls it the most primitive of instincts. And she says that it incites something wild within us. And so it's as if she's aware that when she's writing and the rhythm of language, which she sees as this wild force that is outside of her, is to an extent dictating what she says. And so when we're reading her, I think, I mean, of course we always have the license to do this, but perhaps more than ever we have the license to let the language do things that, you know, she didn't or couldn't have intended.

[Natalia Espilova Said]

And in one of the chapters you read, as you already mentioned, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and through the Looking Glass as well as Shakespeare's Hamlet in other sections. So would you guide us through your reading approach here? And also would you like to mention what you wanted to elicit from these texts by putting them into the context of animism?

[Gemma Deer]

Sure. So the Alice in Wonderland books come in the third chapter, which is the Darwinian chapter. So this is thinking about the double force of the Darwinian blow. So firstly, that there's no rigorous distinction between human beings and other animals. And secondly, that complexity can be produced without intentional agency. So, you know, rather than seeing all of life as a creation of God, we see it as the product of this mindless process of evolution. And in this chapter I'm also really concerned with thinking about how the notion of the life of language might be more than metaphorical. So not only does the automotoric or self driven life of living beings help us to think the life of language, but also the strange and irrepressible life of language beyond any conscious intentional authorial control, can also help us to think the otherness of non human animals. And then where the. So I look at two other texts. First in this chapter, Helen MacDonald's H is for Hawk and Nicholas Royal's Quilt. And I'm thinking about the representation of animals and the kind of the necessity of metaphor in those two texts. And then the Alice books come in really as a way or alongside my engagement with the meat industry within global capitalism. So the ways in which the particular forms of alienation around industrialized meat production, where kind of meat just sort of becomes this plastic packaged product which, you know, entirely conceals the pain and the suffering and the environmental degradation that goes into its production. And I'm looking at the Alice books in this context. And so there's one passage that I read in which Alice sees the cook who has this baby who is screaming, and the cook is like throwing pots and pans at the baby. And Alice is Like I need to save this, this little baby murder to leave it behind. And then she's carrying the, the baby along in her arms and it, and it starts to turn into a pig. And you know, she says, oh, it does have a very turn up nose. And that sounded a bit more like a grunt than a cry. And then during this passage, she stops referring to it as a he and she starts referring to it as an it. And by the end when she says, there's no mistake about it, this is neither more nor less than a pig, she says it would be absurd to carry it further. So we've gone from it would be murder to leave it behind to it would be absurd to carry it any further in this transition between from baby human animal to pig, pork. And you know, the notion of it as food is kind of highlighted from the outset in that we've come from the kitchen, we've got the cook throwing the food at it. And so I show kind of how this scene really encapsulates the way in which human beings really see themselves as distinct from other animals, particularly the kind of animals that they eat as food, which they can really easily objectify. And so, and then this kind of shows. I mean, of course there are many forms of animism within the Alice books, but this kind of transformation and this kind of real resonance that it seemed to have for the current context, because as we know, meat and dairy production are one of the worst forms of greenhouse gas emissions, producing a lot of methane, but also with a lot more environmental effects in terms of the antibiotics that industrialised farm animals are fed on a daily basis, the waste slurry that comes out and pollutes water systems, all of these kind of really quite devastating environmental effects. And suddenly there's this scene in Alice in Wonderland, this children's book that kind of problematizes our objectification and instrumentalization of animals. And you know, in terms of kind of the more general animism of literature. You know, I read this book as a child and certainly didn't see it like that. It was just like, oh, the baby turns into a pig. And then there's this kind of whole like disorienting, like vortex feeling where you read it today. And it seems to have this resonance and this intensity of meaning that, you know, was obviously always latently there. But it takes a certain context in order to bring it out, to bring it to life.

[Natalia Espilova Said]

And maybe just a few words about Shakespeare.

[Gemma Deer]

Ah, yes. And so then Hamlet appears in the final chapter which focuses on the Freudian revolution. In which. And this revolution is kind of calling into question the notion of pure or intentional human agency in individual linguistic, social and global scales. And I'm arguing that an apprehension of this is key to understanding the human responses, or lack thereof, to global warming. And so in this, I'm looking at Hamlet alongside Freud's beyond the Pleasure Principle, which is the famous text in which he puts forth his theory of the death drive and the compulsion to repeat. And for people who haven't read the text, this is also the text in which he tells the story about a little boy who is in fact his grandson. He doesn't say it sings his grandson, but it is who plays a game with a spool of cotton at the Fort Dar game. The kind of throwing it away and pulling it back and through putting this, the storytelling that Freud does within this essay alongside Hamlet, which was a very important play for Freud, he frequently references it. He. He gives a reading of it, showing how it's kind of. Or in his reading, it's all about these repressed Oedipal instincts. So he thinks Hamlet is in love with his mother and. And wants to kill his father. And he says that he has really kind of. He's the one who's finally understood Hamlet after the centuries have gone by. But I show how there seems to be, within Freud's telling of his story of his grandson, he seems to be echoing or retelling the story of Hamlet. And we have all these kind of subtle theatrical metaphors coming in. And then there's also this moment in which he writes these four O's. So he kind of says that because his grandson aunts can't actually say the word fort, so the German forgone that he just says oo, oo, oo, oo, and he writes it as four O's. And these four O's seem to echo or mimic Hamlet's last words before he dies. So right at the very end, in the original edition of Shakespeare, Hamlet's last words are oh, oh, oh, oh. And then he dies. And then, well, no, sorry. First he says. The rest is silence. And then there's these four O's. So it's kind of his death throes. And I'm basically looking at the way in which it seems that Hamlet has kind of insinuated itself into Freud's telling of the story of his grandson. And through that I'm showing again how language has this kind of life of its own. So consciously or unconsciously, it can make us think certain things. It can change the way that we think and act.

[Natalia Espilova Said]

So the second part of the title of your book is Reading for the End of the World. Is this a gesture to the apocalyptical reading or there is some hope?

[Gemma Deer]

Yeah, a bit of both. So this again comes from my interest in etymology. So the subtitle can be understood in two ways. So it can be, of course, read in a very apocalyptic vein, as referring to the kind of reading that might be appropriate to this time of catastrophic climate change reading for the End of the World. But it can also be read in an affirmative tone. So the word world comes from the old Danish wer, eld, meaning literally man, age. So that were is the same were that's in werwolf, for instance, and eld meaning age. And then if we take the word for in the sense of in defence, or so support of, in favour of so being for something, this would then be reading for that is. For that is in favour of the end of the age of man, the end of the were Eld. And I'm not saying there that I think that humans should go extinct, but rather trying to recognize that the future of human life, in fact depends upon the end of a world in which human beings narcissistically act as if. If they're separable from or independent of other living things. And so the end of the were eld would be the beginning of a less destructive or pathological relationship between humans and the other forms of life with which we share the planet. And so, in the same way that, I guess the subtitle has this double tenor, I hope as well that that double tenor go throughout the book and that there is this sense of hope alongside the recognition of the direness of our situation.

[Natalia Espilova Said]

Yeah, I'm really fascinated how you put this interest in etymology in many, many levels of your book, in the texts, in your. Your personal writing, in the title of the books.

[Gemma Deer]

This is.

[Natalia Espilova Said]

This is just a very astounding gesture, I would say, to construct, to.

[Gemma Deer]

In.

[Natalia Espilova Said]

In some sense your book is constructed in this way. So what is your current project? Is it in. Well, I would. I would assume that you continue working towards this overlap between literature and environment.

[Gemma Deer]

Yeah, sure. So I'm working on a couple of things at the moment. I'm working on a book on extinction. And so I'm thinking about broadening the notion of extinction beyond the narrow sense of biological extinction and thinking about how it's at work in other domains. And I guess this again comes down to an etymological interest in that extinction comes from extinguishing this notion of kind of quenching fire. And so, you know, I'm kind of thinking beyond or before species extinction and how these broader and other terms of extinction might throw light on our current predicament. And again, thinking through different literary texts. And I've also just started working on fungi quite seriously and thinking about how. Well, what I call mycomorphism, how fungi in certain ways can disrupt or change the way that we think. And I think that they're really fruitful for thinking this current moment with the way that they kind of, you know, emerge out of the ground, reliant on all these invisible and underground connections that we can't see, and then they kind of fruit and give this very strange or uncanny thing. And I think it's really useful for thinking the current moment, the kind of new forms of interconnection that we're coming to terms with.

[Natalia Espilova Said]

So is this your first book?

[Gemma Deer]

Yes, it is my first book, yeah.

[Natalia Espilova Said]

Well, then congratulations. Congratulations on this first book. And I. I look forward to reading your new books. Your approach is fascinating, and thank you for. For this research and thank you for this book. Radical animism that makes us, again, aware of human narcissism on the one hand. On the other hand, this book is wonderfully written, and it has its own code. It has its code code on the textual level. It has its code even on the title level. So congratulations, Gemma, and good luck on your current and future projects as well.

[Gemma Deer]

Thank you so much for having me.

[Natalia Espilova Said]

Today I spoke with Gemma Deer about her book Radical Reading for the End of the World, published by Bloomsbury academic press in 2020. Thank you for listening to New Books in Literary Studies, a podcast channel on the New Books Network.

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