Having set global warming in irreversible motion we are facing the possibility of ecological
catastrophe. But the environmental emergency is also a crisis for our philosophical habits of
thought confronting us with a problem that seems to defy not only our control but also our
understanding. Global warming is perhaps the most dramatic example of what Timothy Morton calls
“hyperobjects”-entities of such vast temporal and spatial dimensions that they defeat
traditional ideas about what a thing is in the first place. In this book Morton explains what
hyperobjects are and their impact on how we think how we coexist with one another and with
nonhumans and how we experience our politics ethics and art. Moving fluidly between
philosophy science literature visual and conceptual art and popular culture the book
argues that hyperobjects show that the end of the world has already occurred in the sense that
concepts such as world nature and even environment are no longer a meaningful horizon against
which human events take place. Instead of inhabiting a world we find ourselves inside a number
of hyperobjects such as climate nuclear weapons evolution or relativity. Such objects put
unbearable strains on our normal ways of reasoning. Insisting that we have to reinvent how we
think to even begin to comprehend the world we now live in Hyperobjects takes the first steps
outlining a genuinely postmodern ecological approach to thought and action.
