Staying knotted in the anthropocene: pain, memory, and survival in the deep and the word for world is forest
Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: This paper explores how survival is imagined in speculative fiction through the concept of relational knottinga structure of suspended tension rather than resolution. Reading Rivers Solomons The Deep and Ursula K. Le Guins The Word for World is Forest, the essay argues that survival under the pressures of historical trauma, ecological collapse, and colonial violence requires the redistribution of pain across collective, more-than-human networks. Centralized suffering leads to fragmentation; only when memory and grief are sharedthrough community, ecology, and interspecies entanglementcan a durable form of survival emerge. Drawing on theoretical insights from Donna Haraway, Bruno Latour, and Dipesh Chakrabarty, this paper proposes a Knot Theory of Relational Survival, where knots signify the ethical practice of staying knottedwith others, with place, and with histories that resist resolution. These texts imagine survivance as ecological co-dwelling in a world that insists on unfinishedness.
Source: Advances in Humanities Research
Author: Jiaqi Chen
Institution: University of Hong Kong
Language: English
Subfield: Philosophy
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W4413169993