The Stuff of Life

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'An old teapot, used daily, can tell me more of my past than anything I recorded of it.' Sylvia Townsend Warner There are many ways of telling the story of a life and how we've got to where we are. The questions of why and how we think the way we do continues to preoccupy philosophers. In The Stuff of Life, Timothy Morton chooses the objects that have shaped and punctuated their life to tell the story of who they are and why they might think the way they do. These objects are 'things' in the richest sense. They are beings, non-human beings, that have a presence and a force of their own. From the looming expanse of Battersea Power Station to a packet of anti-depressants and a cowboy suit, Morton explores why 'stuff' matters and the life of these things have so powerfully impinged upon their own. Their realization, through a concealer stick, that they identify as non-binary reveals the strange and wonderful ways that objects can form our worlds. Part memoir, part philosophical exploration of the meaning of a life lived alongside and through other things, Morton asks us to think about the stuff, things, objects and buildings that have formed our realities and who we are and might be.

Author Bio

Timothy Morton is Rita Shea Guffey Chair in English at Rice University, USA. They have collaborated with Bjrk, Laurie Anderson, Jennifer Walshe, Hrafnhildur Arnadottir, Sabrina Scott, Adam McKay, Jeff Bridges, Justin Guariglia, Olafur Eliasson, and Pharrell Williams. Morton co-wrote and appears in Living in the Futures Past, a 2018 film about global warming with Jeff Bridges. They are the author of Being Ecological (2018), Humankind: Solidarity with Nonhuman People (2017), Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence ( 2016), Nothing: Three Inquiries in Buddhism (2015), Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (2013), Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality (2013), The Ecological Thought (2010), Ecology without Nature (2007), eight other books and 250 essays on philosophy, ecology, literature, music, art, architecture, design and food.