Abstract

This chapter considers a way of imagining ecology without nature by thinking about how humans see only a certain bandwidth of light. X-rays, also known as gamma rays, are perhaps the ultimate example of invisible light. X-rays confuse the commonsense difference between light and matter, since they can directly wound and destroy life, even as they illuminate it, brighter than bright. X-rays give the lie to the artificial division between perceiving and causing that has plagued philosophy and ideology since at least the Kantian turn. In an age of ecological awareness, the idea that the perceptual dimension is a neutral field is ended, partly by lethal entities that make up that very dimension itself. The time of nuclear materials and global warming is a time of lethal illumination.