Thesis Advisor: Julia Morandeira Arrizabalaga

Thesis: Imagination Beyond the Anthropocene: Towards an Anarchovegan (Non-)Fiction

June 2022

Abstract

This paper is an exploration of what imagination (or: the composition of possible worlds) could look like for nonhuman beings. It starts from possible world semantics in logic, combining it with vital materialism and the total liberation movement (anarchoveganism). Through case studies of the agave plant and water, this thesis aims to show that everything is alive one way or another, and that everything might have the ability to imagine, but that however one tries to investigate or fill in this ability, it will always be a confirmation of their own anthropocentrism. The total liberation movement believes that all beings are being oppressed by the state, and by endorsing this view, this thesis shows that racism, transphobia, sexism and speciesism all have their origins in the same thing: Plato’s dualism (without reducing racism, transphobia and sexism to speciesism or the extraction of nature, as that ones again affirms the stereotypes used in the discrimination of these minorities). Fictional writing is presented as a means of acknowledging the life, vitality, thoughts or imagination of nonhuman beings. This thesis is a political and philosophical investigation, in which the problems of anthropogenic sovereignty are central.

Author: Eli Witteman