Solaris: Photonic Ecology

‘LET's GO FROM happy nihilism to dark nihilism’, Timothy Morton writes in Dark Ecology (2016: 116–17). Already in Ecology without Nature, which ‘plays with, reinforces, or deconstructs the idea of nature’ (2009: 5) on the background of Jacques Derrida's ‘profound thinking on the “without”, the sans’ (21) – in Dark Ecology it is ‘animism’ (2016: 137), therefore, rather than immanence – Morton had developed the ‘melancholic ethics’ (2009: 186) of an ecology that is based on the proposition that ‘we can't escape our minds’ (201). After it has been charged by object-oriented-ontology in Dark Ecology, this attitude is intensified even more, as are the rhetorics. While Guattari cherishes the powers of the false [→ Deleuze 39], Morton resents them. ‘There is a fundamental, irreducible gap between the raindrop phenomenon and the raindrop thing’ (2016: 93) he notes, echoing both Schrodinger and Graham Harman. While Schrodinger considered this to be an epistemological problem and Harman considers it an ontological one, Morton charges the retreat of objects into the depths with dark romanticism. ‘Flowering is thus indeed a type of “evil”, a necessary evil that comes with existing, since existing means having a gap between what you are and how you appear, even to yourself. Flowers of evil’ (104). As ‘ecological awareness is dark, insofar as its essence is unspeakable’ (110), Morton can go on to argue that ‘ecognosis is abjection’ (123).