mostly about animals

In the Q&A session after his talk on Monday Timothy Morton suggested we were in a kind of Celtic twilight where we became most aware of things at the moment when we destroying them. He spoke of the sense of excitement, and then the sense of melancholy (and even mourning), that accompanies going 'deeper into the interconnectedness of everything'.

Morton said his next book The Ecological Thought would be 'mostly about animals'. It was clear that humans had been decentred by the dual impact of Darwin (who was 'really helpful for progressive ecological thinking') and Derrida ('deconstruction is ecology's best friend').

This kind of thinking (he didn't go on to say) would pose an extraordinary challenge for 21st-century playwrights: how to write plays in which humans were only bit-part players.