Lost Kingdom

"I am incredibly excited about the imminent publication of ""Lost Kingdom: Animal Death in the Anthropocene."" The editors Wendy A. Wiseman and Burak Kesgin have gathered together an international collective of leading scholars to address the various registers of ongoing massification of death whose roots lie tangled underneath the ground we now walk.[...] Taken together, the original and wide-ranging essays and array of topics broached in ""Lost Kingdom"" are a bracing call for us to acknowledge our complicity in the making of this hell-hole of modernity. This is a crime scene. A burning building. A time-bomb. What on earth will it take to wake us up to a situation of our own making? How might we reimagine the defining mark of the human not as rationality or control or even dominion but rather indeterminacy, imagination, friendship, empathy, flourishing, love . . . ? In that respect, the book is a deft reframing of the current conversation revolving around the Anthropocene, animal extinction, philosophy, and ethics. For it argues that the human-generated crises must be addressed from a perspective that decenters the human from the cosmos or even, perhaps, the ecology of political debate. In attempting to harness the ""spectral power of animality that is indistinguishable from divinity,"" the editors make a bold and successful wager that the language of (negative) theology is the last, best hope to gain interpretive leverage on a dreadful situation. ""Lost Kingdom"" is the best book, to my knowledge, that puts Anthropocene studies and questions concerning animality in conversation with theological currents of Continental Philosophy-from Nietzsche and Freud to Derrida and Haraway. This rich tapestry voices, both poetic and urgent, a compelling indictment of the theological roots of our increasingly organized proclivities for extraction and extermination. I very much appreciated this clarion call to recognize the theological registers of colonialism, capitalism, and algorithmic abstraction. For the killing fields of modernity have long been places of perverse religious worship. Prof. Dr. John Modern Author of 'Neuromatic: A Particular History of Religion and the Brain' Department of Religious Studies Franklin & Marshall College Reading this was a galvanizing, eye-opening experience. I could not put it down. This book makes a compelling case that climate change is more than just a human problem, and that we cannot solve it without addressing the conditions of animal life on the planet. After reading this volume, it is impossible to look at the standard Western lifestyle in the same way, because humans are not external to the earth system. We are merely one animal, alongside our animal neighbors, in a natural system that can kill us as well as them. The book shows that animal welfare and climate change are intricately intertwined: from the perspective of animal life, even gradual human extinction could appear to be a good thing, something the planet needs to do to retain its balance so that life can continue. [...] Each chapter broaches a significant topic, each chapter is informative, each chapter offers a constructive perspective. The variety of topics is one of the volume's strengths. And the volume as a whole is cohesive. It strikes me that it was probably difficult to find this number of contributors, with such consistently high quality in the contributions, in an emerging field such as critical animal studies. The editors are to be commended for the high quality of the individual chapters and the coherence of the volume. And the publisher is to be commended for taking on this important project. Prof. C. M. Thomas Cordano Endowed Chair Department of Religious Studies UC-Santa Barbara"