The UTC Graduate School is pleased to announce that James Harris will present Master’s research titled, Otherwise than Human: Responsibility in the Wake of Disaster on 07/09/2025 at 2pm in Lupton 372. Everyone is invited to attend.
English
Chair: Matthew Guy
Co-Chair: Heather Palmer
Abstract:
Climate catastrophe is undeniably the most urgent issue of our time. However, despite this imminent danger, it appears that not much is being done to mitigate its effects. One such reason for this, among others, as I have argued in the past in “Strange Dwellings: An Eco-Deconstructive Alternative to Ecology” (2022), is the very way in which we talk and write about climate catastrophe itself. In other words, the way in which we signify climate catastrophe affects, in a fundamentally constitutive way, any potential response we may devise. Considering the scale of climate catastrophe and the countless environmental dynamics and relationships it affects, it should be asked whether our language – and here I mean to speak of language in general, of writing – is sufficient for our crisis. It is my view that our language is woefully inadequate and that, lacking a radical shift, this deficiency will result in nothing short of unimaginable catastrophe. For it is really not that we do not know how to address the environmental crisis – just stop polluting and switch to renewable energy sources, of course – but rather that we do not yet know how to envision what this might look like because the language we use necessarily inculcates us into a conceptual frame of reference that privileges the human, and specifically man, over all else. This innate, yet covertly embedded, prejudice of language fundamentally hinders our potential response to climate catastrophe because if we do not yet have the words to describe an ethical relationship with our environment and nonhuman neighbors – let alone our less fortunate and marginalized human neighbors who are also excluded from certain ethical concerns or categories – then how can we possibly hope to achieve such a relationship? It is therefore the aim of this thesis to, firstly, assume a line of eco-deconstructive reasoning, which takes as its point of departure from other approaches to the environment the basic premises of deconstruction, ones which aim to de-center the specific ontological and epistemological assumptions of Western thought about the subject and language, and apply it to the concept of nature as it has operated within language and culture in order to demonstrate how climate catastrophe constitutes a fundamental rupture in traditional ontology. Secondly, in order to devise a sufficient response to the rupture that climate catastrophe I will turn towards the ethics of Emmanuel Levinas, as in present in his God, Death, and Time and Totality and Infinity, and bring the anthropocentrism at the heart of his philosophy to bear the weight of responsibility we owe to, not just our human neighbors but, more significantly, to our nonhuman neighbors at a time when those nonhuman others can no longer go unrecognized.