Earthbound

Examines how sovereignty inures us from the challenges associated with the climate crisis

• Engages with the work of Bruno Latour, Simone Weil, Clive Hamilton, Jacques Rancière, Donna Haraway, Judith Butler, Giorgio Agamben, Stuart Elden and others
• Presents an innovative theory of sovereignty’s ‘aesthetics’ that contributes to contemporary debates in legal and political theory
• Outlines the key challenges for law and politics provoked by the Anthropocene epoch

In this book, Daniel Matthews shows how sovereignty – the organising principle for modern law and politics – depends on a distinctive aesthetics that ensures that we see, feel and order the world in such a way that keeps the realities of climate change and ecological destruction largely ‘off stage’. Through analysis of a range of legal, literary, ecological and philosophical texts, this book outlines the significance of this aesthetic organisation of power and explores how it might be transformed in an effort to attend to the various challenges associated with the Anthropocene, setting the grounds for a new, ecologically attuned, critical jurisprudence.

The Anthropocene thesis contends that human impact on the environment has become so extreme that the earth system as a whole has been tipped into a new state. This new geological epoch demands sensitivity to the forces that traverse human and nonhuman life, the geological, ecological and atmospheric.