Välkommen till detta seminarium med titel "The Flesh of a Drowned World: Climate Trauma and Porous Living in J.G. Ballard’s The Drowned World". Detta seminarium är en samarrangemang mellan Engelska forskarseminariet och forskningsområdet Litteraturstudier.
Abstract (på engelska)
This chapter explores the intersection of literary writing and eco-phenomenology and will focus on the transformative aspects of climate change in J.G. Ballard’s The Drowned World, leveraging its unsettling portrayal of ecological crisis in order to reimagine our relationship with the natural world. As the solar event triggers rapid global warming and rising sea levels in the novel, an environmental regression to the Triassic past becomes the new horizon of our existence. Through the experience of a scientific expedition sent to assess the possibility of reclaiming lost land, Ballard explores the impact of environmental trauma on our perceptual life while also revealing the limitations of scientific knowledge and its objectifying regimes. Using Merleau-Ponty’s (1968) phenomenology with his notion of “the flesh of the world” (84) along with Barad’s (2010) writing on hauntology, the chapter will focus on our irremissible entanglement with the non-human world. In Ballard’s world a breakdown of Cartesian dualism takes place with the subject dissolving into the rising waters and the resurgent Triassic biosphere. This disintegration is both terrifying and liberating, as it dismantles our myths of authorship and exceptionalism while exposing the mesh of all existence.
The novel also critiques the colonial appropriation of land, manifested by the last pocket of humanity clinging to the aborted scientism of its past. However, not all abide by the arrogative axioms of the past and its validation regimes. Some aspire to a receptive existence that harbours also a transformative, embodied relation to the perceived world, encompassing, beyond merely reflective awareness, a deeper phenomenological intimacy that integrates them with the feral temporality of their new existence. This relation, that I will call porous living and that evokes Merleau-Ponty’s (1968) register of “carnal adherence” (142) and “[e]ntwining” (269), however, remains open-ended, hinting at the unknown future where survival itself may be redefined. By depicting the affective, psychological and deeply ontological impact of climate change, The Drowned World urges a transformation in our perception and our engagement beyond mere scientific understanding. It compels us to question the anthropocentric assumptions of our existence and aspire to new imaginaries of kinship with the non-human world.
Bio
Zlatan Filipovic is an Associate Professor in English and Comparative Literature at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. He has a PhD in English and Comparative Literature from Goldsmiths, University of London. His published work has focused largely on affect, deconstruction and ethics in literary writing, with his latest theoretical contribution including, "Reconsidering the Ethics of Cosmopolitan Memory: In the Name of Difference and Memories To-Come” published in Philosophy & Social Criticism, Sage (2023), and an edited volume, Broken Mirrors: Representations of Apocalypses and Dystopias in Popular Culture, published by Routledge in 2020, among others. He is also an editor of Moderna Språk, a long-standing Journal of Modern Languages and Literatures and he is currently working within posthumanism and ecocriticism.