philoSOPHIA

Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene is generous in offering a space for encounter and response to the critters, texts, and conversations it treats. Starting from the understanding that "Nobody lives everywhere; everybody lives somewhere. Nothing is connected to everything; everything is connected to something" (31), Haraway invites us to participate with her in weaving a carrier bag for the kinds of ideas and practices we need now, on this suffering planet, if we earthlings want to survive, nourish each other, or flourish. The book is playful, enticing, challenging; it will irritate many analytic philosophers.

One of the things to love about this book is its insistence on grounding every theoretical "move" in the world as it unfolds. It is hopeful and generative in part in this refusal to abstract and in this commitment to being in the mix. Since I'm not capable of writing a review that honors this mode, I'll start with the theoretical. One way in is through the title's three strands, which open a way in to the substance of the book: "staying with the trouble," "making kin," and "the Chthulucene."

"Chthulucene" cues the current iteration of a career-long attention to the material-semiotic practices necessary for understanding and living as situated beings in a connected world. Explicitly rejecting "H. P. Lovecraft's [End Page 145] misogynist racial-nightmare monster Cthulhu (note spelling difference)" (101), Haraway frames the Chthulucene as an orientation toward taking the past seriously while remaining committed to "ongoingness." This stance rejects the individualism and attachment to a certain sort of utilitarianism so commonly refracted through political economics and carves out a conception of relational ethics. Haraway is also literal, here, turning resolutely away from a view from nowhere (the view of the "sky gods") and thinking in relation to beings who are entangled and interpenetrated with the world—from jellyfish to trees to IT networks to wormy compost to corals. And she is mythic, drawing on the long histories of the tentacular and connective ones—Medusa, Gorgon, Gaia, Naga, Spider Woman, and all their kin. There is less a derivation for Haraway's fabulation of the Chthulucene and more a weaving together of f igures with fringes, tentacles, and points of attachment. Calling the era we're in the Chthulucene, for Haraway, opens a hospitable imperative, a speculation that we could go on with: "What if the doleful doings of the Anthropocene and the unworldings of the Capitalocene are the last gasps of the sky gods, not guarantors of the finished future, game over?" Staying with the connected and partial beings of the earth offers a different option:

The unfinished Chthulucene must collect up the trash of the Anthropocene, the exterminism of the Capitalocene, and chipping and sheading and layering like a mad gardener, make a much hotter compost pile for still possible pasts, presents, and futures.

(57)

Placing ourselves in the Chthulucene means being in relation to generative monsters, and it requires us to understand ourselves as vulnerable to the world. Haraway argues that "all of us on Terra—live in disturbing times, mixed-up times, troubling and turbid times. The task is to become capable, with each other in all our bumptious kinds, of response." While our impulse may be to flee this trouble we meet, to resolve it into cleaned-up future, she recommends instead staying with it. "[S]taying with the trouble requires learning to be truly present, not as a vanishing pivot between awful or edenic pasts and apocalyptic or salvific futures, but as mortal critters entwined in myriad unfinished configurations of places, times, matters, meanings" (1). One technology for learning this capacity to be present in a perpetually unfinished process is the concept of sympoiesis.

Haraway is resolute in tracing for her readers the threads of conversations that have brought her to the matters of concern she offers to our shared regard. It is...