ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the field-defining insights of ecocriticism and focuses on Bruno Latour’s influential claim that political ecology must let go of nature. According to Latour, nature hampers genuine political action because it stands in the way of democracy. Latour draws attention to the mediations and symbolic actions that construct nature and urges environmentalists to abandon the false opposition between politics and nature, which holds nature at a distance outside political action. The rejection of nature as apolitical—a romantic myth—has become the defining feature of post-nature politics and theory. This chapter intervenes to show that the outside qua nature is not so easily dismissed. Turning to Jack London’s The Call of the Wild and gathering insight from political theorists and ecologists such as Jacques Rancière, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Frédéric Neyrat, this chapter critiques post-nature theory and maintains the importance of the outside to literary and ecological thought.
