Baptiste Morizot - Ways of Being Alive

1 Cover

2 Title Page Ways of Being Alive Baptiste Morizot Translated by Andrew Brown polity

3 Copyright

4 Epigraph

5 Foreword

6 Introduction: The ecological crisis as a crisis of sensibility A crisis of sensibility Animals as intercessors The ecological crisis as a crisis of political attention Lack of political attention to living beings Finding a way out Notes

7 Chapter One: A season among the livingEpisode 1: In the fog of the encounter Episode 2: The barbarian of a beast Episode 3: Millions of years folded into a song Episode 4: All of language unseparated Episode 5: Following the tracks left by song Episode 6: Being part of a gang – whatever the species Episode 7: The art of living variants Episode 8: Translating them in the spring Episode 9: Composing a body for yourself Episode 10: A season in super-faces Episode 11: So many ways of being alive Epilogue: The incandescent alloy Notes

8 Chapter Two: The promises of a sponge Descending from those we are wiping out The futurology of forms of life A speculative biology of humanist virtues Our place in evolution: contemporary developments in the philosophy of biology The banality of miracles Contingency and convergence: life Do human beings occupy a comfortable place in the coral reef of evolution? Burning more than a library Ancestor worship Notes

9 Chapter Three: Cohabiting with our wild beasts Taming the horses of the passions From one map to another: reason/passions vs joy/sadness Relationship with our animal nature, relationship with ourselves An ethology of the self Plato vs. the Cherokees From taming by force of will to diplomacy with your wild animals From the coercive charioteer to the diplomat of the passions Fortifying the white wolf without subduing the black wolf Ascensional ethics Notes

10 Chapter Four: To the other side of the nightNights on the watch Vita incognita Becoming-diplomatBriefing in the open There remains a span of sunlight The threshold of twilight ‘Do not go gentle into that good night’ ‘Before nightfall you must light your torch’ The dark side of the night Going over to the other side Dawn on the other side The political philosophy of night‘If the night turns dark, make yourself even darker’ Being a guardian of interdependences Thinking like an alpine meadow: profiling alliances The creative dimension of the intercessor Communities of concern You are not born a diplomat, you have the role thrust upon you Being captured together from the point of view of interdependences Composition and struggle Concern for interdependences as care for the self Notes

11 Epilogue: Adjusted consideration Notes

12 Afterword Free living Repolytization Always inside, never in front Style in philosophy The incandescent alloy Notes

13 Credits

14 End User License Agreement

1 Cover

2 Contents

3 Title Page

4 Copyright

5 Epigraph

6 Foreword

7 Introduction: The ecological crisis as a crisis of sensibility

8 Begin Reading

9 Epilogue: Adjusted consideration

10 Afterword

11 Credits

12 End User License Agreement

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Baptiste Morizot

Translated by Andrew Brown

polity

Originally published in French as Manières d’être vivant . Afterword by Alain Damasio © Actes Sud, France, 2020

This English edition © Polity Press, 2022

Cover artwork by Julien Thomas Salaud, Stellar Cave 4, Installation made of nails, string and black light for the Hertzliya Museum of Contemporary Art, 2015 © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2021

This work received the French Voices Award for excellence in publication and translation. French Voices is a program created and funded by the French Embassy in the United States and FACE Foundation.

French Voices logo designed by Serge Bloch.

Internal star illustrations: PeterPencil/iStock

Excerpt from The Overstory: A Novel by Richard Powers, copyright © 2018 Richard Powers. Reprinted by permission of Vintage Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited. All rights reserved / Excerpt from The Overstory by Richard Powers published by Vintage. Copyright © Richard Powers 2018. Reprinted by permission of The Random House Group Limited / Excerpt from The Overstory by Richard Powers. Copyright © Richard Powers. Reproduced by permission of the author c/o Rogers, Coleridge & White Ltd., 20 Powis Mews, London W11 1JN / Excerpt from The Overstory by Richard Powers. Copyright © Richard Powers. Reproduced by permission of W. W. Norton.