TC Boyle's "Politics of Nature"

This paper offers a Latourian reading of T.C. Boyle's novel When the Killing's Done. It shows that the novel satirizes contemporary ecological debates and stages the cultural wars of our current ecological culture. It also demonstrates, however, that the novel does not merely point out the impasse of our current ecologies: its fiction intuitively diagnoses the contemporary "crisis of purity" in modern environmental politics and points us towards the kind of entangled ecologies sketched by Latour and other recent thinkers. Like Latour's reinvention of a more hybrid and entangled "politics of nature," Boyle's novel allows us to reimagine a complex and contaminated new ecology, away from the purifications of our contemporary "NaturPolitiks".