INTRODUCTION

The radical politics of ‘civil disobedience’ which Henry David Thoreau advocates in his essay ‘Resistance to Civil Government’ (1849), and the ecological philosophy of Walden and his natural historical writings have each energised generations of scholars and activists. Yet, while often taken as separate aspects of Thoreau's work, the time is propitious to reconsider how Thoreau's calls to individual action in his anti-war and antislavery writings might be understood in tandem with the onto-ethics of relation, materialism and agency in his ecological work. What is at stake here is how such a ‘crossing’ between Thoreau's radical politics and ecology might afford new possibilities for individual and collective resistance, new modes of informed conducts of living, and a new concept of interactive responsibility past the constraints of liberal theorisations of justice.

The time is now! Environmental activists from Greenpeace to Extinction Rebellion understand civil disobedience as a necessary tactic both to disrupt the hegemonic forces of corporate capitalism that drive ecological degradation, and to fight for environmental justice for humans and nonhumans alike. The banner of civil disobedience has been raised over nonviolent acts of blocking access to fracking sites and forest protection, mass climate dissidence, as well as more openly combative acts of ecotage, property destruction and outright violent struggle. According to the Guardian, violent reprisals against ecological civil disobedience have reached a tragically high number in 2019, with 212 environmental activists murdered for defending the land against the degradations caused by agribusiness and resource extraction. At the same time, although the Thoreau-inspired modes of resistance made famous by Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr were oriented against colonialist and racist oppression, recent invocations of ecological civil disobedience have less often allied themselves with the cause of ending modern slavery.

“Amidst his gray philosophizing, Life breaks upon a man like a morning.” Melville, Pierre or the Ambiguities1 In the decades since Stanley Cavell’s provocation in Senses of Walden that nineteenth-century American philosophy is perhaps best found in the “metaphysical riot of its greatest literature,”2 critics have charted with renewed interest how writers such as Emerson, Thoreau, Poe, Melville, Dickinson, Douglass, and Whitman have responded to and challenged the philosophical tradition. They have explored how these writers anticipate philosophers such as Friedrich Nietzsche, William James, Martin Heidegger, and Gilles Deleuze, and how contemporary philosophers from Giorgio Agamben to Slavoj Žižek have used pallid Melville as a cipher for their own conceptual systems.3 At the same time, critics have articulated how nineteenth-century American writers offer unique philosophies; how their writings blur literature and philosophy, as well as science and psychology; and how they develop their own philosophies of democracy, race, and sexuality.4 For Elizabeth Duquette, recent philosophical investigations of American literature have highlighted the importance “of the practice and place of philosophy in nineteenth-century American literature” and inspired scholars to “reexamine assumptions about abstraction, and what we do when we read a literary text.”5 It is not only a question of recognizing that writers such as Dickinson or Poe, Melville or Douglass are themselves perspicuous readers of philosophy, or that they make philosophical interventions of their own. These writers also push us to rethink issues of representation, interpretation, expression, style, and form. Given the wealth of recent philosophical readings of American literature, then, one might even be tempted to consider the study of American literature and philosophy as an emergent subfield.