Two Poems

Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Politics, Desire, 2010

While ecocriticism has become a respected field in literary theory and in the broader landscape of aesthetic philosophy, it could benefit from an enhanced ethical-political framework which social ecology – an underrated critical theory developed by Murray Bookchin – could provide. This essay attempts to tease out the potentials for such a framework, integrating the insights of social ecology, ecocriticism, Critical Realism, and John Dewey's aesthetic concepts into a layered idea-set used for the study of all kinds of aesthetic objects, from popular art to the gallery arts. Its key principles are the emergence of aesthetic objects (including formal artworks) out of congealed human experience, the relation between organism and environment in assessing meaning, the breakdown of implicit or overt hierarchies within a work, and the idea of the artist and art-critic as a "gardener". We live in an era of crisis and catastrophe. While nuclear war occupied the minds of the general populace and the artists alike throughout the second half of the 20th century, the subsequent neoliberal era has given way to a more fragmented set of species-destroying prospects. Everything from killer-robots, to viral epidemics, to totalitarian statism, to mass surveillance, to bio-genetic mutations appear in popular fiction as new threats to human survival. The social imaginary of a large part of our culture has responded to neoliberalism, with its rhetoric of triumph and the optimistic " end of history " , by taking a turn for the apocalyptic. 1 However, an apocalypse need not be an altogether gloomy affair. The English word comes from a Greek word, which, translated, means " lifting the veil " , uncovering what was hidden, revelation. Moments of downturn may show us everything that could go wrong, but, if examined the right way, can also provide insights for how to transform things for the better. That, in brief, could be framed as the central problem of the arts today, including the world of criticism which attempts to make sense of it: how to " lift the veil " in such a way as to reveal not only potentials for doom and dystopia, but potentials for hope and utopia – or rather eutopia (good place) as distinct from an impossible outopia (no place). 2 Whether a contemporary person's mind is fixed on dystopian pessimism or eutopian hope, one topic of our cultural apocalypse is becoming more and more salient as a whole:

David Publishing Company, 2022

This paper will discuss the notion of solastalgia or climatic anxiety (Albrecht, G. et al., 2007; Galea et al., 2005) as a form of anxiety connected to traumatic environmental changes that generate an emotional blockage between individuals, their environment (Cloke et al., 1991) and their place (Nancy, 1993). I will use a phenomenological approach to explain the way in which emotions shape our constitution of reality (

Communicating in the Anthropocene, 2021

This essay argues that Wakening is a film whose futuristic ecohorror is meant to be felt in the present moment of viewing. Such horrific feelings are inevitably entangled with the past, inviting its audiences to experience the monstrous contexts of Indigenous lives across time. To articulate this temporal dynamism, I overlay two key conceptual understandings—Walter Benjamin’s critiques of Western progress and historicism, and Indigenous notions of a Native slipstream. When brought together in Wakening, which is inspired by the movement Idle No More, these concepts not only help expose the horror of Indigenous eco-social crises wrought by colonial and neocolonial occupations, they also draw our attention to the timelessness of Indigenous resistance in the face of such ecohorror. Ultimately, there are two significant implications of understanding Wakening as ecohorror of dynamic temporality. First, such a reading continues the important work of revisioning the theoretical and critical boundaries of Western cinema. Goulet’s play with audiences’ familiar expectations of horror’s invitations to the weird challenge us all to recalibrate our sense of generic cinematic representation and its purpose. Relatedly, and second, such readings highlight film’s politics of emotion, its ability to generate an “affective alliance” that can potentially help us all also re-imagine our temporal and spatial engagements with the world at large.

theory & event, 2019

The Polish Journal of Aesthetics, 2020