Mastery’s Paradox
Making Friends with Strangeness in a More-Than-Human World
Summary
In a culture fetishizing Mastery as dominance, control, hyper-efficiency, all linked to a desire for competitive advantage and security, this beautifully written book by Tanya Behrisch shows how there is also co-incidentally an ‘other’ way, more whole-some and life-giving. Drawing on her experience as artist, corporate manager, student and observant lover of the greater-than-human world, Behrisch intricately reveals the paradoxical, indeed interpenetrating organic relationship between making and unmaking, grasping and letting go, closure and openness, completeness and indeterminacy. For a time when an old ‘order’ seems to be dis-integrating, this is a truly important study.
– David Geoffrey Smith, PhD, Professor Emeritus, University of Alberta, Canada
Excerpt
Table Of Contents
- Cover
- Title Page
- Copyright Page
- Dedication
- Permissions
- Contents
- List of Figures and Table
- Foreword
- Bibliography
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- List of Acronyms and Symbols
- Chapter 1 On modernity, mastery, and making friends with strangeness
- 1.1. Early encounters with strangeness
- 1.2. Making modernity strange again
- Modernity’s dual starting points
- The Wonderfulness Interview
- 1.3. Living with mastery’s strange paradox
- 1.4. Conviviality in a world of strange kin
- Endnotes
- Chapter 2 Letting strangeness speak
- Chapter 3 Mastery as an ontology of abundance
- 3.1. Mattering as a stranger to the more-than-human world
- Becoming permeable
- The ethics of respecting more-than-human opacity
- 3.2. Environmental philosophy’s relationship with strangeness
- The sensual experience of phenomenology
- Ecofeminism’s broader political project
- Queering normative assumptions about nature
- Ecologies of thinking selves
- 3.3. Geocogito: knowing in relation to the more-than-human
- 3.4. Beautiful relational killers: the relational ecology of eating other creatures’ kids
- Wild animals and two-stroke motors
- Lizard brain
- Visitors
- Severed heads and savage killers
- Beautiful relational killers
- Wildness: ecological, relational, loving, brutal
- Wild’s relational, not sentimental
- Wild’s multistoried, not cruel
- 3.5. Opening through artistic practice
- 3.6. Decolonizing the Western gaze toward the more-than-human
- Chapter 4 Painting mastery’s paradox
- Chapter 5 Mastery as a regime of scarcity: a regime in need of compassion
- 5.1. The Glass Cave
- 5.2. Descartes, my complicated kin
- 5.3. Kant, my fallible ancestor
- 5.4. Lifting the endless siege of Mastery>
- Scarcity’s preoccupation with separateness
- Scarcity’s gifts
- 5.5. Enlarging the contact zone through paradox and practice
- The contact zone and the ontological turn
- Hyperseparation and homogenization
- Instrumentalism, incorporation, naturalization
- Universalism and durability
- Denial of dependency upon the more-than-human world
- 5.6. Seeking guidance from the masterful more-than-human world
- Phusis and learning to slow down
- Reimagining the masterful human being
- 5.7. Surrendering to Overseer
- Chapter 6 Pursuing Mastery in the Tower of Power
- 6.1. The Podium of Unwavering Certainty and Knowledge
- 6.2. The Zone of Mediocre Particularity
- 6.3. The fallacy of separation
- 6.4. The experience of mastery
- People aren’t machines
- Mastery of not taking things seriously
- The mastery of holding things lightly
- The mastery of multivocality
- Unscripted uncontrolled mastery
- Crossing the abyssal line
- The mastery of doing nothing
- Making friends with strangeness
- The mastery of the void
- The mastery of distributed power
- Bibliography
- Index
Figures and Table
Figure 1.1: Witness to everything, a planetary nebula stares back at me
Figure 1.2: The empty heart
Figure 1.3: Fetus in amniotic sac, 11 weeks
Figure 1.4: Fetus in amniotic sac, four months
Figure 1.5: My father’s inscription to me inside his copy of Hoyle’s Ten Faces (1977)
Figure 1.6: I have seen everything
Figure 2.1: Elaho River canyon. Photo by author
Figure 2.2: Underpainting drying in the sun
Figure 2.3: Leaving adornment and details aside, the river’s strangeness remains intact
Figure 2.4: Photo of Elaho River canyon
Figure 2.5: Early sketch on canvas board
Figure 2.6: Filling in the river, colouring the land
Figure 2.7: Adding trees and reflections
Figure 2.8: This one’s finished. And dead
Figure 2.9: Canyon painting unadorned and alive. Lesson? Stop sooner! Care less! Let it meet you halfway
Figure 2.10: Underpainting baked dry in the more-than-human world
Figure 2.11: Sketching the main contours of the canyon’s landform
Figure 2.12: I keep the chunks distinct while painting the canyon’s northern wall
Figure 2.13: Bold and indifferent, the painting seems to be working … so far
Figure 2.14: More-than-human painting rotated upside down
Figure 2.15: Glowing flowing molten weirdness
Figure 2.16: Strangeness jumps out at close range
Figure 2.17: Detail of Elaho River orange strangeness
Figure 2.18: Vibrant weird more-than-human strangeness
Figure 2.19: Deliciously weird close up of more-than-human rock and river
Figure 2.20: Filling in the river with silty watercolours
Figure 2.21: River filled in with river colour
Figure 2.22: Where did my mysterious more-than-human painting go?
Figure 3.1: “Just before me is the perfect statement of how things are” (Hyde 2010, 5)
Figure 4.1: Voided beauty: the strangeness of spe’uth’s feces
Figure 4.2: Canvas-stained colours of berry-rich bear sign
Figure 4.3: Stain of berries voided by spe’uth
Figure 4.4: Quinacridone violet glistening next to dried pigments
Figure 4.5: Radiant violet strangeness
Figure 4.6: Sketch of spe’uth’s poop looks like wood duck
Figure 4.7: Detail of sketch of spe’uth’s compost
Figure 4.8: Starting with staining the darkest berry stains
Figure 4.9: Phallic strangeness or … Florida?
Figure 4.10: At a microscale, geographies of other worlds exist
Figure 4.11: Close up inhuman scale of spe’uth’s heap reveals radically other world
Figure 4.12: Strangeness in close up chunk
Figure 4.13: Blue strangeness
Figure 4.14: Spe’uth’s heap, before I start painting the ice
Figure 4.15: If I didn’t know this was feces, I’d say it was pretty
Figure 4.16: Spe’uth’s heap’s got appeal
Figure 4.17: Worth several pictures, teen likes strangeness of spe’uths heap
Figure 4.18: Cleaning spe’uth’s harvest from my brush
Figure 4.19: Scumbling entails dragging my brush lightly over a painted surface. Dim berry-filled dung glows through ice
Figure 4.20: Strangeness: ice surrounding organic heap of spe’uth’s feces
Figure 4.21: Grass gets sealed in ice when water around spe’uth’s heap freezes
Figure 4.22: Adding fibers to organic material
Figure 4.23: A small world: compost erupting through ice
Figure 4.24: Strangeness gets weirder when rotated
Figure 4.25: Bear shit
Figure 4.26: No longer a painting of compost, strangeness speaks its own tongue
Figure 4.27: A universe of relations contained in a chunk of compost
Figure 5.1: Diagram showing scarce value (p) embattled against infinite region of not-value (~p)
Figure 5.2: Shapeshifting Mastery>: insecure scarcity hovers inside great realm of abundance
Figure 6.1: Slide 1 of Mishka’s guest lecture
Figure 6.2: Slide 2 of Mishka’s guest lecture; detail of “Sonorous snow” oil on canvas
Figure 6.3: Slide 3 of Mishka’s guest lecture; “Hopeful” oil on paper
Figure 6.4: Slide 4 of Mishka’s guest lecture; “Evening glitter” oil on canvas
Figure 6.5: Slide 5 of Mishka’s guest lecture; detail of “Old Stumpy” oil on canvas
Figure 6.6: Slide 6 of Mishka’s guest lecture; “Mamma bear smells fertile ambiguity” oil on canvas
Figure 6.7: Slide 7 of Mishka’s guest lecture; “Fireweed” oil on canvas
Figure 6.8: Slide 8 of Mishka’s guest lecture; “Storm” oil on paper
Table 5.1: Selected dualisms
Foreword
“There is nothing to fear”: On holding things lightly
Details
- Pages
- XXX, 224
- Publication Year
- 2026
- ISBN (PDF)
- 9783034358422
- ISBN (ePUB)
- 9783034358439
- ISBN (Softcover)
- 9783034358064
- DOI
- 10.3726/b22861
- Language
- English
- Publication date
- 2026 (June)
- Keywords
- mastery modernity the West Renaissance humanism humility posthumanism more-than-human strangeness otherness colonialism dualisms ecological philosophy hermeneutics queer theory oil painting epistemic humility opacity Lao Tzu
- Published
- New York, Berlin, Bruxelles, Chennai, Lausanne, Oxford, 2026. XXX, 224 pp., 8 b/w ill., 59 color ill., 1 tables.
- Product Safety
- Peter Lang Group AG
