David Abram: On the Ecology of Language

David Abram at the seminar Poetics of the Living World at the Kampa Theatre in Prague, March 12, 2013.

An excerpt from Chapter 4 (The Body of Language) of the book by American ecophilosopher David Abram The Magic of the Senses – Perception and Language in a More Than Human World (DharmaGaia, Prague 2013, pp. 103-107); translated by Michalea Melechovská and Jiří Zemánek. In our own time, it is precisely language, understood as an exclusively human characteristic, that is most often used as evidence of the excellence of the human race in…

David Abram: The Ecology of Magic or on the Intelligence of Spiders

Excerpt from David Abram's book The Spell of the Sensuous / Perception and Language in a More-than-Human World (DharmaGaia 2009, pp. 32-38; original: The Spell of the Sensuous. Pantheon Books, New York 1996); Czech translation by Michaela Melechovská and Jiří Zemánek. A few months after my arrival in Bali, I left the village where I was staying to visit one of the island's pre-Hindu sites.…