Overview

Delves into the intricate concept of 'per se', examining its essence as both the intrinsic nature of things and the intricate web of relationships linking them. This volume is a collaborative work of ficto-critical eco-politics written by two Australian scholar-poets based in the Western Australian Wheatlands (John Kinsella) and Germany's south-western Wurttemberg (Russell West-Pavlov). Contestatory and Creative Poetics for a Time of Climate Catastrophe: Volume 1: Per Se is an extended narrative meditation upon the meaning of per se, which generally denotes the thing-in-itself, for its own sake but that, upon closer examination, transpires to be a high tensile composite of the 'thing' (se) and a relationship (per) that always links it to something else and indeed, in relations of internal complexity, to itself. Per se, in the book's multiple parsings of the term, is a moniker for the infinite relationality of the world and the relationality of each thing in itself. Per se also denotes the endless fractal embedding of bundles of relationality at the successive levels of thing-ness from the infinitesimally minute nano-scale to the unimaginably distant outer reaches of the sideral. Per se becomes an exploration of the way commodities, cut loose from their context of production and floating on sea of oscillating (exchange) values, never cease to morph back into artefacts defined by the socially intensive use-values their fellow actants discover in them. The book thus focalises a politicised effort to revision the rampant multiscalar individualism, solipsism and apartheid-like segregation of our age. Instead, it searches for possibilities or community in every aspect of the world we have learnt to see through a relentlessly atomising and hypostatising filter. The volume claims that every act of perception is political, reestablishing obfuscated connections, thereby seeking to repair the shredded fabric of the ecosphere below the threshold of myopic common-sense. Yet it also celebrates the myriad acts of citizen defiance, visible and invisible, that constitute activist agendas around the world, sending signals both practical and exemplary, symbolic and literary that shore up communities of resistance everywhere. The book does not hesitate to interrogate the fractal responsiveness to its own nature, meditating repeatedly on the political character of writing, and more significantly, of the teaching of writing. Central to its concerns are various avatars of trees, from the pirogue that hangs above a bar in Lille, and one that is crafted as part of an Italian artist's global collaboration on the periphery of this volume's emergence, via the jacarandas of post-apartheid South Africa, to a wood-chipped pine forest that has become a memorial library in Oslo to name only a few of the topics taken up by the book's many silvan micro-fictions. Looming over all these concerns are two contemporary silvan catastrophes: the megablazes that destroyed forests in Amazonia, Australia, California, Siberia and the Mediterranean during the period when the book was being written and the deforestation that has allowed zoogenic diseases to jump from once secluded animal species to the humans that would never have been their neighbours if naturally occurring forest-barriers had been left intact.

Full Product Details

Author:   John Kinsella ,  Russell West-Pavlov
Publisher:   Anthem Press
Imprint:   Anthem Press
Dimensions:   Width: 15.30cm , Height: 2.30cm , Length: 22.90cm
Weight:   0.618kg
ISBN:  

9781839992735

ISBN 10:   1839992735
Pages:   334
Publication Date:   14 October 2025
Audience:   Professional and scholarly ,  Professional & Vocational
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   Manufactured on demand  
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Table of Contents

List of Figures; Acknowledgements; Preface: Kelp Forest; Space Arc Space Ark; Pirogue Per Se…; Graphology Proximity 5: Gnarly; Snakes; Scales; Graphology Proximity 15; Wordsworth and Campbell – Mirrinatwa and Hesse ; Zurich Eclogue Im Urs Jaeggi; Collaborators; Per Se Approximations of Collaboration; Investor Notes for Chalice Mining’s Persecution of land at Julimar; The Local ‘Polycrisis’; The Glasshouse – Research, Ethics, Writing; and the Failure of Metaphor; Spheres; Platanenallee Rooks, Neckar Island, Tübingen; Riverrun (1); Riverrun (2); A Pacifist Against Defence: For the Demilitarization of the Humanities; Resistant Writing; The Argument from Samson Agonistes: A Re-dramatization After Milton; Sensorship; Black-Headed Monitor Ontic – A Wheatbelt Post-Phenomenology; and the Spontaneous Eruption of Hope and New Humano-Animalism!; And Then We Go Back to Another Reptile-Human Interface: Oblong Turtle ... Out of Synch and Not to be Syched; A Rose Is a Rose; All Those Attempts to Define ‘Place’, Per Se?; Jacarandas; From Down in the City I Critique My Own Spatializing; Around and About Jam Tree Gully ; Writing; The Square Root of –1: The Performative Per Se; Quoted Out of Context Per Se, Then Recontextualized!; On Evelyn Araluen’s Dropbear; Per Se and Coleridge’s ‘The Nightingale: A Conversation Poem,; Written in April 1798’ from the First Edition of Lyrical Ballads; What is a Posthumanist Practice?; Mowing Reality; The Occult; Sacred Kingfishers and Oblong Turtles; Awaiting Words; Ode to Underlying ‘Values’; Aesthetics Note Written on the Side of a Rural Road,; Western Australia; Ineffable; Building a Language with Nature: More Graphologizing; Graphology Ratio 26; Again, Anthologizing Against Nations and Nationalism:; Political, Ethical, Moral…?; Self-Sufficiency; Questions for John Kinsella on Old Growth; On the Abolition of Writing; Emily Is Here with Me Again and ‘Silent is the House’; Ex-Duction; `Humanities’ Means Peace, Doesn’t It? A Plea for; Non-violence at All Costs…; Why We Chose It – On Ali Alizadeh’s Poem ‘Animals’; Christmas 2021; Tree-Felling; The Argonautica I Am Re-Envisaging and Will Eventually; Try To Forget, As I Should?; Life After Nature: An Aesthetic Project; Villanelle of Fire; Fire Letter; Forests as Space; Fallatious Futurities; The Problem of the ‘Future Library’ (Blog of 19 August 2020); Correspondence between Italo Lanfredini and John Kinsella; Help Protect Helms Forest; Snakes, Again; A Conclusion that Is Really a Preface; Coda to a Conclusion that Is Really a Preface; Two Sonnets; Endnotes; Bibliography; Index

Reviews

“Similar to Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus or Berlant and Stewart’s The Hundreds, this book multiplies the ways to reanimate the vibrant web of life on Earth threatened, as it is, by malevolent destruction. Here are texts that philtre antidotes – powerful mixtures of philosophy and poetry restoring connections you had never imagined.” —Stephen Muecke, University of Notre Dame, Australia. “As humanity engages with end-time scenarios, a book that combines incandescent words and theoretical sophistica-tion to both provoke and assuage. Engaging with the quiddity of nature and arguing for the porosity of the human and animal, the authors pose both a new paradigm and a challenge to the disciplines in the age of the Anthropocene.” —Dilip M. Menon, Professor of History and International Relations, University of Witwatersrand, South Africa, and editor Changing Theory: Concepts for the Global South (Routledge, 2022). “In this unique antipodal collaboration, Kinsella and West-Pavlov engage in an exhilarating dialogue of forms—fictocriticism, poetry, microfictions—responding to the urgencies of climate crisis with brilliance and imagina-tive force.” —Philip Mead, The University of Melbourne, Australia. “Per Se is an extraordinary collaborative work that reflects in fascinating ways on its own making. In the variety and verve of its forms, registers and concerns, it embodies exactly the multiplicity and connectedness the writers celebrate in the world. Essential reading for our troubled times.” —Ivan Vladislavić, Distinguished Professor in Creative Writing, University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa.

Author Information

John Kinsella is the author of over seventy books of poetry, fiction, criticism, plays, edited works and collaborative works. He is an extraordinary fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, and emeritus professor of Literature and Environment at Curtin University. He has recently been a DAAD visiting professor at the University of Tbingen (2021-2024). Russell West-Pavlov is a professor of Anglophone Literature and co-convenor of the Interdisciplinary Centre for Global South Studies at the University of Tbingen, Germany. His recent book publications include Eastern African Literatures (2018), German as Contact Zone (2019), AfrikAffekt (2020) and, as editor, The Global South and Literature (2018).

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