Composed as a counter-history of western philosophical and political thought, Stormy Weather explores the role western cosmologies have played in the conquests of paganism in Europe and the Americas, the production of climate wreckage, and the concealment of that wreckage from western humanists and earth scientists until late in the day. A lived cosmology, Connolly says, contains embedded understandings about the beginnings of the earth and the way time unfolds. The text engages the major western cosmologies of Augustine, Descartes, Kant, Tocqueville, together with pagan and minor western orientations that posed challenges to them or could have. Hesiod, Ovid, William Apess, Amazonian and Aztec cosmologies, Catherine Keller's minor Christianity, James Baldwin, and Michel Serres instigate key responses, often challenging binary logics and the subject/object dichotomy with a world of multiple human and nonhuman subjectivities.
Connolly pursues a conception of time as a multiplicity of intersecting temporalities to come to terms with the vicissitudes of climate destruction and the grandeur of an earth neither highly susceptible to mastery nor designed to harmonize smoothly with humans. The book revisits the "improbable necessity" of a politics of swarming to respond to the ongoing wreckage and potential fascist responses to vast infusions of climate refugees from the south into temperate-zone capitalist states.
Stormy Weather draws on the work of earth scientists, indigenous thinkers, naturalists, humanists, and students of nonwestern cosmologies. Ultimately, Connolly contends that critical intellectuals today must not remain enclosed in disciplinary silos, or even in "the humanities" as currently defined, to do justice to our moment of climate wreckage.
Industry Reviews
Stormy Weather maps the connections between the civilizational project and its effects on the conditions of existence of life on earth. This project has failed spectacularly, and one of the symptoms of this failure is our difficulty in recognizing it, as evidenced by climate denialism and its more treacherous variant, climate casualism. Connolly examines the cosmological origins of this fateful existential blockage in some key figures in our cultural imaginary, while also looking to the side, to the extra-modern, non-Western cosmological traditions they have erased or marginalized. Stormy Weather profoundly shows how time is not teleologically oriented toward the liberation of humanity from its earthly shackles, but rather a multiplicity made up of different series and rhythms, different temporalities relating to different regions of reality and modes of existence, which are now entering catastrophe. The confrontation of the Western lived metaphysics of time with pre-Christian and extra-Western cosmologies points to alternatives that--we can't afford not to think so--allow us to live the future differently.---Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, author of Cannibal Metaphysics
