•  124
    Objects as Temporary Autonomous Zones
    Continent 1 (3): 149-155. 2011.
    continent. 1.3 (2011): 149-155. The world is teeming. Anything can happen. John Cage, “Silence” 1 Autonomy means that although something is part of something else, or related to it in some way, it has its own “law” or “tendency” (Greek, nomos ). In their book on life sciences, Medawar and Medawar state, “Organs and tissues…are composed of cells which…have a high measure of autonomy.”2 Autonomy also has ethical and political valences. De Grazia writes, “In Kant's enormously influential moral phil…Read more
  •  118
    The context for these interviews was a seminar [Peter Gratton] conducted on speculative realism in the Spring 2010. There has been great interest in speculative realism and one reason Gratton surmise[s] is not just the arguments offered, though [Gratton doesn't] want to take away from them; each of these scholars are vivid writers and great pedagogues, many of whom are in constant contact with their readers via their weblogs. Thus these interviews provided an opportunity to forward student quest…Read more
  •  97
    Sublime Objects
    Speculations (II): 207-227. 2011.
  •  93
    Unsustaining
    World Picture (5). 2011.
  •  73
    The ecological thought
    Harvard University Press. 2010.
    The author argues that all forms of life are interconnected and that no being, construct, or object can exist independently from the ecological entanglement, nor does "nature" exist as an entity separate from the uglier or more synthetic elements of life. Realizing this interconnectedness is what the author calls the ecological thought. He investigates the philosophical, political, and aesthetic implications of this interconnectedness.
  •  64
    Response to Peter Gratton
    Speculations 1 (1): 200-202. 2010.
  •  61
    Art in the Age of Asymmetry: Hegel, Objects, Aesthetics
    Evental Aesthetics 1 (1): 121-142. 2012.
    Timothy Morton argues that we have entered a new era of aesthetics, an ecological one. In this period, a new phase of art, unpredicted, and unpredictable, by Hegel, comes about. This phase of art is the Asymmetric Phase
  •  48
    An Object-Oriented Defense of Poetry
    New Literary History 43 (2): 205-224. 2012.
  •  34
    Hyperobjets
    with Laurent Bury
    Multitudes 3 (3): 109-116. 2018.
    Le déréglement climatique est sans doute l’exemple le plus dramatique d’« hyperobjet », à savoir d’entités de dimensions temporelles et spatiales si disproportionnées à nos habitudes de perception que nos cadres de pensée et de compréhension s’en trouvent déjoués. Cet article explique ce que sont les hyperobjets et évoque leur impact sur nos modes de pensée ainsi que sur les façons dont nous devons apprendre à coexister. Les hyperobjets nous forcent à prendre en compte l’inséparé.
  •  30
    Kissing in the Shadow
    with Paul Thomas
    Continent 2 (4): 289-334. 2012.
    In late August 2012, artist Paul Thomas and philosopher Timothy Morton took a stroll up and down King Street in Newtown, Sydney. They took photographs. If you walk too slowly down the street, you find yourself caught in the honey of aesthetic zones emitted by thousands and thousands of beings. If you want to get from A to B, you had better hurry up. Is there any space between anything? Do we not, when we look for such a space, encounter a plenitude of other things —a slice of plaster, an old vin…Read more
  •  25
    Melancholy Objects: If Stones Were Lacanian
    In Svitlana Matviyenko & Judith Roof (eds.), Lacan and the Posthuman, Springer Verlag. pp. 193-209. 2018.
    I keep up with research on schizophrenia because my brother Steve has it. One hypothesis is that a neurotoxin released by toxoplasmosis gives rise to symptoms of schizophrenia and possibly Alzheimer’s. Toxoplasmosis is caused by Toxoplasma gondii, a protozoan symbiont that lives in most people’s brains harmlessly. Cats are common hosts, and cat poop contains a lot of the protozoans. One theory is that cat poop near to pregnant humans is a way for the symbiont to jump. One in five of us humans ca…Read more
  •  24
    "In Ecology without Nature, Timothy Morton argues that the chief stumbling block to environmental thinking is the image of nature that most writers on the topic ...
  •  22
    X-Ray
    In Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (ed.), Prismatic Ecology: Ecotheory Beyond Green, University of Minnesota Press. pp. 311-327. 2014.
    This chapter considers a way of imagining ecology without nature by thinking about how humans see only a certain bandwidth of light. X-rays, also known as gamma rays, are perhaps the ultimate example of invisible light. X-rays confuse the commonsense difference between light and matter, since they can directly wound and destroy life, even as they illuminate it, brighter than bright. X-rays give the lie to the artificial division between perceiving and causing that has plagued philosophy and ideo…Read more
  •  21
    … and the Leg Bone's Connected to the Toxic Waste Dump Bone
    Anthropology of Consciousness 28 (2): 135-142. 2017.
    Ecological images—the fragile web of life, NASA's “blue marble” Earth, everything being connected—appeal to our love for the planet's being and our faith that there is still hope, if we can just care enough. But this imagery is neither true nor false. In other words, when we visualize these sorts of things, we don't know what we're talking about! We think we do. But what is this wholeness really, are we actually parts of it, and what kind of part? A lot of thinking ecologically sounds religious …Read more
  •  20
    Dunkle Ökologie Für eine Logik zukünftiger Koexistenz
    Internationales Jahrbuch Für Medienphilosophie 4 (1): 251-268. 2018.
  •  18
    Third Stone from the Sun
    Substance 47 (2): 107-118. 2018.
    Picture yourself on a train in a station. The presence or absence of Plasticine porters with looking-glass ties is irrelevant.1 For some reason, the station is called Entity. Entity Junction, in the county of Anywhere.There are two platforms in Entity Junction, and they consist just of the two sides of the concrete sliver on which the very occasional passengers pace up and down—after all, it's just a junction. Rather than having numbers, the platforms have names. As you stand looking out towards…Read more
  •  16
    The Biosphere Which Is Not One: Towards Weird Essentialism
    Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 46 (2): 141-155. 2015.
    This essay uses the thought of Luce Irigaray as a very powerful way to imagine what ecological beings such as meadows and whales are like. For reasons given yet implicit in Irigaray's work, it is possible to extend what she argues about woman to include any being whatsoever. In particular, it is shown that to exist is to defy the so-called law of noncontradiction. Various paradoxes demonstrate that in order to care for beings that we consider to be ecological, such as meadows, we had better rela…Read more
  •  11
    Ecology as Text, Text as Ecology
    Oxford Literary Review 32 (1): 1-17. 2010.
    The further scholarship investigates life forms the less those forms can be said to have a single, independent and lasting identity. The further scholarship delves into texts the less they too can be said to have a single, independent and lasting identity. This similarity is not simply an analogy. Life forms cannot be said to differ in a rigorous way from texts. On many levels and for many reasons, deconstruction and ecology should talk to one another. It is interesting to contemplate an entangl…Read more
  •  6
    Subjunctivity
    with Treena Balds
    Philosophies 9 (1): 29. 2024.
    We explore the value of the subjunctive mood as a template for understanding ethical action and the theological ontology that undergirds it. We do this by examining the use of a strange but very precisely used word in the writing of a theologian and minister and poet, Samuel Taylor Coleridge: "silly." We do so in the name of exploring the value of contingency, accidentality and abjection to a general theory of ecological thought.
  •  6
    Poisoned Ground
    Symploke 21 (1-2): 37. 2013.
  •  5
    Nothing: three inquires in Buddhism (edited book)
    with Marcus Boon and Eric Cazdyn
    University of Chicago Press. 2015.
    Though contemporary European philosophy and critical theory have long had a robust engagement with Christianity, there has been no similar engagement with Buddhism—a surprising lack, given Buddhism’s global reach and obvious affinities with much of Continental philosophy. This volume fills that gap, focusing on “nothing”—essential to Buddhism, of course, but also a key concept in critical theory from Hegel and Marx through deconstruction, queer theory, and contemporary speculative philosophy. Th…Read more
  •  5
    Even the Plague Journal: Everything Is Happening Extracts (1)
    with Nicholas Royle
    Oxford Literary Review 45 (1): 123-141. 2023.
    These are the first published extracts of a Covid-19 diary, co-written over two years (2020–22). The authors are concerned to both record and analyse the ways in which the Covid-19 pandemic altered the sense and experience of inside and outside, home and world, self and other. Grief—both personal and ecological—is uncircumventable. At the same time, the virus provokes critical thinking on how ‘another life is possible’. Literature and music are key forces in the authors' shared and interweaving …Read more
  •  5
    Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality
    Open Humanities Press. 2013.
    "Object-oriented ontology offers a startlingly fresh way to think about causality that takes into account developments in physics since 1900. Causality, argues, Object Oriented Ontology, is aesthetic. In this book, Timothy Morton explores what it means to say that a thing has come into being, that it is persisting, and that it has ended. Drawing from examples in physics, biology, ecology, art, literature and music, Morton demonstrates the counterintuitive yet elegant explanatory power of OOO for…Read more