Expecting the Earth

'This is an amazingly good book. Wendy Wheeler explains why biosemiotics has become crucial for understanding culture. She shows how both nature and culture are made of meanings that evolve in semiotic relations between life and the Earthly environment life expects.' Kalevi Kull, Professor of Biosemiotics, University of Tartu, Estonia 'This is a commanding work of revisionist intellectual history, disclosing the proto-biosemiotic dimension of the thought of Deleuze and Guattari, the gnostic influence constraining modern science, and the actuality of medieval theology and German Idealism. In her explorations of the poetic character of relational natural becoming, the organismic aspect of human works of art, and the unpredictable liveliness of our technological inventions, Wheeler shows how our humanly constructed worlds might be rendered more hospitable to the expectations of our own creaturely being, along with those of many other creatures. She demonstrates how biosemiotics provides the crucial intellectual wherewithal to help arrest industrial modernity's continuing slide towards ecocide.' Professor Kate Rigby, Director of the Research Centre for Environmental Humanities, Bath Spa University, and Adjunct Professor, Monash University. Author of Dancing with Disaster: Environmental Histories, Narratives and Ethics for Perilous Times (2015).