Mastery of Non–Mastery in the Age of Meltdown

"For a long time, we humans have excelled in mimicking nature with the goal of exploiting it. Now, with the existential threat of global climate change on the horizon, the ever-provocative Michael Taussig asks what it would take to change ourselves so as to save our world. Acknowledging the possibility of collapse and our all-too-human impotence in the face of accelerating disaster, this book is not solely a reflection on our tragic condition but also a theoretical effort to reckon with those human faculties that have fed our ambition for dominance over nature. At stake is an ultimate undoing of our sense of control-a "mastery of non-mastery. " Animated by the urgency of a planet approaching meltdown, Taussig captures our moment, and all its attendant mythologies, with luminescent clarity"-