Staying with the Trouble

Making Kin in the Chthulucene

By: Donna J. Haraway

Narrated by: Laural Merlington

Length: 8 hrs and 10 mins

Publisher's summary

In the midst of spiraling ecological devastation, multispecies feminist theorist Donna J. Haraway offers provocative new ways to reconfigure our relations to the earth and all its inhabitants. She eschews referring to our current epoch as the Anthropocene, preferring to conceptualize it as what she calls the Chthulucene, as it more aptly and fully describes our epoch as one in which the human and nonhuman are inextricably linked in tentacular practices. The Chthulucene, Haraway explains, requires sym-poiesis, or making-with, rather than auto-poiesis, or self-making.

Learning to stay with the trouble of living and dying together on a damaged earth will prove more conducive to the kind of thinking that would provide the means to building more livable futures. Theoretically and methodologically driven by the signifier SF - string figures, science fact, science fiction, speculative feminism, speculative fabulation, so far - Staying with the Trouble further cements Haraway's reputation as one of the most daring and original thinkers of our time.

©2016 Duke University Press (P)2017 Tantor

Super Fascinating, so so narration...

I am going to get the PDF version of this book in order to look back at certain chapters because the density of information is high. I am somewhat familiar with the theories that underpin Harraway's thinking but felt like I needed to look up certain things through the story. She has a poetic way of coming up with redefinitions of modern concepts. Her proposition on the existential crisis of our century is to make kin and live and die well on a damaged planet. She highlights a few different contemporary projects in which humans and non humans find themselves entangled in SF worldings. I specifically like the one on pigeons and coral reefs. She repeats terms like 'String Figuring', 'Sympoiesis' and 'Compost' often, which sometimes seemed superfluous but in the end, now I realize, also serves to anchor these rephrased/redefines concepts or neologisms in a narrative. That's why after finishing, I feel like I can understand better what she was trying to say at the beginning of the book and I should re-read. However, this is the first time that I really had an issue with the narrator. I felt like it might as well have been read by a computer generated voice. At some point I turned up the speed which made the narration a bit more lively. Point is; I missed the emotion in the voice that was talking about things I feel a great deal about.

Not feeling it!

This is the most critical subject of our time with its numerous and fascinating subtopics. The idea of breaking with good old fashion logic and ways of speaking and thinking about things is an interesting approach but (in my opinion) this is a butcher fest!

The author simultaneously rejects academic conventions of speech and reason while overly relying on highbrow terminology and endlessly dropping the names of brilliant scientists, authors and theorists.

To resolve the myriad global crisis we face requires all hands on deck. However if repairing this damaged planet falls on the shoulders of those who can make sense of this book there will be precious few people on the front lines of that work.

Said plainly, this material deserves and desperately needs to be communicated in deeply compelling and straightforward ways, with passion and poetry whenever that adds to its sway. Sadly however, this book is mostly word-salad and an absolute mess.

so important

Hope AND responsibility!!! ♡ abundant in references for continued research! thank you Donna Haraway! ☆

answers to the questions on the wind

Fantastic and tentacular. The book I needed to read and didn't know. We are all compost.

More a game of words than coherent ideas

The author gets too lost on metaphors and clever wording, loosing substance and coherence on the way.
I love the subject matter and many of the authors ideas, but this book
Is simply unreadable.

Gone with the metaphor

The book reads more like a collection of ideas connected with clever linguistic pans than a coherent narrative. The author is in love with inventing words, and easily gets carried away by a clever metaphor, never mind that i might actually mean next to nothing. Plus, the last section is just bad prose, lacking dimensionality and insight into human character.
But the book is not without merit, and some of the ideas and interpretations are clever and insightful. I just wish I didn't have to read through all the useless words in between them.

A challenging but rewarding work!

This is philosophy. It is challenging in the dual sense of metaphors that need pondering, and one's worldview that may need rethinking. In other words: it is exactly what good philosophy should be.

I am grateful that I came across this book. It is expanding my vocabulary and challenging me to consider new ways of thinking.

Not only that: it's also funny 🤣 Haraway knows how to reach the 21st century audience. In fact, she was probably ahead of her time when she first published "A Cyborg Manifesto", but this work is a maturation from that time some ~30 years ago.

I do not give the book full score on "story" and "performance" because frankly some parts of the book are really good, highly quotable, while others are a little boring in comparison. For example the last chapter was much less interesting than those before it, although by no means not worth reading. The performance was also good, but nothing extraordinary, although I must admit the old lady voice really makes me think it's Haraway herself speaking to me, so that's a big positive.

Brilliant

Donna Haraway writes in a delicious and captivating lyrical tone to urgent ideas.
I recommend this text for any thinking human seeking to live in troubling times.

A comprehensive ontology

"It matters who eats whom, and how." An excellent metissage of story, science, and art.

Haraway is still inimitable

Just like her "Cyborg Manifesto" (1985), this further elaboration of her philosophy is powerfully moving and difficult to forget. Haraway has a way with language and ideas that infect you as you read, and Laural Merlington's narration does justice to them.