Overview

Western humanism has established a reifying and predatory relation to the world. While its collateral visual regime, the perspectival image, is still saturating our screens, this relation has reached a dead end. Rather than desperately turning towards transhumanism and geoengineering, we need to readjust our position within community Earth. Facing this predicament, Ingrid Hoelzl and Rémi Marie develop the notion of the common image - understood as a multisensory perception across species; and common ethics - a comportment that transcends species-bound ways of living. Highlighting the notion of the common as opposed to the immune, the authors ultimately advocate otherness as a common ground for a larger than human communism.

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9783837659399

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"Although in recent reinterpretations of communism the emphasis has shifted to the notion of the common, very little work has been done on the possibility of extending communism to other-than-human modes of existence. In Common Image, Ingrid Hoelzl and R�mi Marie tackle this challenge with admirable thoroughness and theoretical breadth, while keeping an eye on the mediations--above all, images, which are not reducible to visuality--that render a larger than human communism possible.--Michael Marder, Author of Green Mass, Dump Philosophy, and Plant-Thinking The perspectival image, a powerful technology of humanist rationalism, which became invisible in its normalcy, is now disintegrating. The ""I"" composed by the two authors together maps the possibility of an image that comes after the image--to reshape the legacy of Western modernity towards mutualist ways of thinking the world. Forceful and broad in scope, the book proposes the common image through myths, magic, poetry, aesthesis, but also postcolonialism, community, ecology, multispecies, and many other dimensions. Can an image exist as a common relation? The book creates a concept and a figure--of a new, common image, as an ethical and aesthetic way of living.--Olga Goriunova, Author of ""Fermentation"" for More Posthuman Glossary and (with Matthew Fuller) of Bleak Joys: Aesthetics of Ecology and Impossibility Through a multilingual, transtemporal process of ""looking back, looking elsewhere,"" Common Image collects from many cultures and historical moments the materials for creating a more just and more communal future. Its argument is deeply sensical: for the West to stop extracting and exploiting at the expense of untold others, past and present, widened perspectives built upon careful attending, respect for human and nonhuman agency, and a rediscovery of magic, myth and story will be required. A timely and important book.--Jeffrey J Cohen, Author of Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman and co- author of Earth: Object Lessons"

"Although in recent reinterpretations of communism the emphasis has shifted to the notion of the common, very little work has been done on the possibility of extending communism to other-than-human modes of existence. In Common Image, Ingrid Hoelzl and Rémi Marie tackle this challenge with admirable thoroughness and theoretical breadth, while keeping an eye on the mediations--above all, images, which are not reducible to visuality--that render a larger than human communism possible.--Michael Marder, Author of Green Mass, Dump Philosophy, and Plant-Thinking The perspectival image, a powerful technology of humanist rationalism, which became invisible in its normalcy, is now disintegrating. The ""I"" composed by the two authors together maps the possibility of an image that comes after the image--to reshape the legacy of Western modernity towards mutualist ways of thinking the world. Forceful and broad in scope, the book proposes the common image through myths, magic, poetry, aesthesis, but also postcolonialism, community, ecology, multispecies, and many other dimensions. Can an image exist as a common relation? The book creates a concept and a figure--of a new, common image, as an ethical and aesthetic way of living.--Olga Goriunova, Author of ""Fermentation"" for More Posthuman Glossary and (with Matthew Fuller) of Bleak Joys: Aesthetics of Ecology and Impossibility Through a multilingual, transtemporal process of ""looking back, looking elsewhere,"" Common Image collects from many cultures and historical moments the materials for creating a more just and more communal future. Its argument is deeply sensical: for the West to stop extracting and exploiting at the expense of untold others, past and present, widened perspectives built upon careful attending, respect for human and nonhuman agency, and a rediscovery of magic, myth and story will be required. A timely and important book.--Jeffrey J Cohen, Author of Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman and co- author of Earth: Object Lessons"

»Ein Buch, das Lust auf Verantwortung macht und Hoffnung in Bezug auf eine fordernde Gegenwart gibt.« Thomas Ballhausen, Eikon, 118 (2022) Besprochen in: https://generalhumanity.org, 01.12.2021

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Ingrid Hoelzl is an independent scholar. Rémi Marie is an independent writer.

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