From This Issue

Against the rolling eyes of the know-all cynic, we should retain shock at those litanies of iniquity capitalism throws up. That they provoke in us an appropriate, human, humane response, the fury of solidarity, the loathing of such unnecessary suffering. Who would we be not to hate this system, and its partisans?

So what role will, or can, Germany’s next government play in enabling the social and economic transformation so desperately needed to address the climate crisis? Above all, the Merkel era provided a bulwark against any sort of social-ecological transformation.

We are, all of us, in denial about what awaits us in the Changes. Not just the conservatives. Liberals and social democrats deny as well; so too does the Left. Denial is repression, the putting away of an unpleasant idea. We deny because we are human. We repress. Repression and the return of the repressed are the same. What cannot be confronted converts into stranger commitments and violence.

In the end, the most crucial question for Brazil is not where the left is, or who can replace Lula, but what kind of society is ‘left’ when the opposition retreats?

There are clear limits to how many political victories can be won through disputes over points-of-fact. But this ‘popular’ face of queer history does not seem likely to exhaust itself yet.

Both ‘Nature’ and ‘Culture’, in this sense, are for spectators. We visit, and contemplate, but do not participate. Yet this suggests that any nature worth writing about is always somewhere else. Must nature writing, to achieve its world-defamiliarizing, transcendent effect, take us to Great Scenery – forests, islands, frozen seas, mountains, ocean floors, jungle canopies, river deltas, landscapes criss-crossed with hedgework forming rumpled parallelograms – made remote by the territorial matrix of the capitalist state?