Oxford Literary Review 49.2: SETI and the Cosmic Turn in the Environmental Humanities, Edited by Timothy Clark and Philippe Lynes

OLR devotes itself to outstanding writing in deconstruction, literary theory, psychoanalytic theory, political theory and related forms of exploratory thought. OLR 49.2, to be published by Edinburgh University Press in late 2027, is planned to direct the journal’s distinctive mode of enquiry on the philosophy, culture and assumptions of SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.

https://www.euppublishing.com/loi/olr

Attacked for its frequent entrapment in anthropomorphic assumptions, for encouraging often lazy and ill-considered speculations about aliens, and even as skirting absurdity, SETI is a valuable exercise in its compelling back reflection on ‘the human’ and the longevity of its worlds in relation to the cosmos and deep time. The project becomes a blurred intersection of the religious, the philosophical and the scientific, engaging questions of intelligence and stupidity, response and reaction, significance and nonsense, life and death, self and other, the technical and the natural, the moral and the immoral, the normal and the monstrous, the social and the individual, the absurd and the profound. Such back reflection is to be the focus of this OLR.

SETI as a cultural and intellectual project can be read as a denial of death and nihilism, where notions of ‘life’ function as a kind of theotrope, and as a grand statement of humanism. By contrast, it can also be read an intense undermining of every humanism, including its posthuman and transhumanist offshoots. It thus invites deconstructive reflection on the innumerable contingencies that underlie the human and its current ‘civilisation’, an essential task for the environmental humanities of today and tomorrow.

Work on SETI now forms a busy minor genre in popular science (e.g. talks or texts by Jill Tarter, David Grinspoon, Keith Cooper), variously communicating, popularising, or translating scientific questions into terms aimed at a broader public. It is in this context—more than science fiction—that this OLR especially welcomes submissions on SETI engaged with the deconstructive force of cosmological questions, for instance cosmic pessimism (e.g. Eugene Thacker), cosmopolitics (e.g. Isabelle Stengers), or cosmotechnics (e.g. Yuk Hui).

This call for papers is open until the end of March 2026. This OLR will be published in late 2027, with papers of up to 5,000 words each, due by April 2027.

Abstracts of up to 200 words should be sent to the editors of this issue, Timothy Clark (University of Durham) and Philippe Lynes (University of Dundee).

Timothy Clark, t.j.clark@durham.ac.uk

Philippe Lynes, PLynes001@dundee.ac.uk