The Unconstructable Earth

This book contributes to the environmental humanities field by offering an analysis of the Anthropocene fantasy: the idea that the Anthropocene is an opportunity to remake our terrestrial environment thanks to the power of technology. The author argues that the earth always escapes the human desire to remake and master it.

Neyrat argues against both a neoliberal technocracy (in which the earth is an object to be remade) and a new-agey organicism marked by unacknowledged racism and sexism.

Neyrat Frédéric :

Frederic Neyrat is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is editor of Alienocene, an online journal that charts the environmental humanities and contemporary theory. His first book in English (following thirteen in French) is Atopias: Manifesto for a Radical Existentialism (Fordham, 2018).Burk Drew S. :

Drew S. Burk is the translator of more than dozen books in continental philosophy and theory.Frédéric Neyrat (Author)
Frederic Neyrat is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is editor of Alienocene, an online journal that charts the environmental humanities and contemporary theory. His first book in English (following thirteen in French) is Atopias: Manifesto for a Radical Existentialism (Fordham, 2018).

Drew S. Burk (Translator)
Drew S. Burk is the translator of more than dozen books in continental philosophy and theory.

Karen Pinkus, author of Fuel: A Speculative Dictionary:
“An unflinching critique of geoengineering, this book offers hope in a sliver of uncolonized, unmapped, unconstructed space and time, amid the super-storms of ideology, the teleology of historicism, and the bad faith of political actors with vested interests. Planet earth is not an object or a subject, but a trajectory in time and space toward anti-production, entropy, perhaps extinction—cause for a new political ecology in the time of 400+ ppm of C02.”

Neyrat makes an ambitious, imaginative, and provocative case against the rampant trend in the West towards techno-optimism...

Steven Shaviro, Wayne State University:
“This is a vitally important book that stakes out a new position in the environmental humanities. Neyrat offers both a critique of current tendencies in ecological thought and positive proposals for a different philosophical approach. This is not a book of policy recommendations, but rather of basic foundational concerns that any actually policy will have to address and to be answerable to. A powerful and closely reasoned argument that anyone concerned with the fate of the Earth needs to take into account.”

Ursula Heise, University of California, Los Angeles:
“This is a book of great interest that addresses a topic of considerable concern among environmentalists in North America and Western Europe today—how to find a third way between ‘eco-modernism’ and an organic and holistic nature.”