The monograph "Belated Inquiries on Pornography and Ecology" editied by Iker Arranz sets out from the idea of an obscure and perverted relationship between environmentalism, understood as a 21st century green and popular movement, and pornography, understood as a traditionalist and conservative art form. Both sides seem to come together in the interest of what has been called the Anthropocene. Somehow the same groups that rely on a fierce defense of the planet and demand a collective awareness of the risk the entire humanity faces do not do it any longer on behalf of an unknown future or revolutionary goal, but for the conservation of a still image of Earth: a positive conviction on how the future is going to look like. This aporia is dissolved into an oxymoron when environmentalist practices are put at work.

Following relevant texts by Slavoj Žižek, this monograph presents a variety of approaches on these issues. To start with Prof. Insausti presents the ideas of Susan Sontag related to the very phenomenon of pornography from a philosophical perspective, and her insights on the tendencies attached to certain social movements. Dr. Martin, using the Tv Show Black Mirror as a backbone for his arguments, describes how pornography can be productive too, and an uneasy voice for a society that seems to be swamped in routine. Thirdly, João Albuquerque confronts some of the arguments coming from Žižek himself, posing Adolfo Bioi Casares’ The Invention of Morel as a representation of an utopia that decomposes itself, a dystopia in-progress, that cannot recover nor re-invent itself, and that finally has to deal with the natural environment as an active agency of its situation. In the fourth contribution, Dr. Arranz brings some of the most significant environmentalist protests that took place in the Basque Country during the late 80s and 90s as an example of the misleading direction of ecological demands, and in the direction of unveiling the oxymoron of their demands, using Sophocles’ Antigone to do so. In the fifth contribution, Pedro Lopes de Almeida brings the travel texts of Joachim John Monteiro to the fore, and making an ecocritical reading of them, is able to disclose the ethical contradictions of colonial texts, where nature is also mobilised against subaltern communities. Finally, this monograph is completed by two reviews: Edurne Arostegi reviews The Vegetarian by Han Kang (2015), an exquisite novel that radically focuses on the limits and absurdity of human nature when intends to be fully natural; and Jonathan W. Croker reviews Paranoid Pedagogies: Education, Culture, and Paranoia by Sandlin, J. and Wallin, J. (eds.), 2017, where we can find a significant study on the actual impact of paranoia in current pedagogies and educational institutions.

All the contributions above complete a volume that discusses how current ecological concerns and movements retain a perverted vein when it comes down to the ethical values that they promote. This debate is normally based of our own survival as human beings. However, more important than surviving the long awaited (and maybe desired catastrophe), it is also worth to reflect and question on what kind of conditions and principles are we going to rely the day after doomsday.

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The extended paper by Cadell Last "A Reflective Note for Dialectical Thinkers" attempts to situate dialectical thinking as a constructive meta-mediation of the opposition between deconstruction and metalanguage.  Dialectical thinking offers a way to think about the processual nature of reason itself as a force of thought mediating being. 

IJŽS - 2007 & 2016