The Mouth That Eats Itself: Geography & the Problem of Space

The Mouth That Eats Itself: Geography & the Problem of Space by Carl Olsson explores the relationship between geographical thought, freedom and the living body.

All animals must distinguish themselves from their surroundings. Humans do so not only through their hands, feet and membranes, but also through representations of themselves in the world. Following geographical thought from its beginnings into self-contradiction, Olsson asks how geography makes us free, and how its representations can turn into a trap.

Moving between a close reading of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and vivid examples involving praying mantises, chameleons, geometry and owl-eyed butterflies, the book brings the conflict between freedom and necessity into sharp focus.

Micro-lectures on The Mouth That Eats Itself

 Carl Olsson is a geographer and writer interested in how geographical thought impacts the human body.

“A much-needed return to Kant epistemically positioned beyond the “speculative realist” dismissal of so-called post-Kantianism. While Olsson stands on the shoulders of the “speculative turn,” and moves away from the poststructuralist consensus, his revisiting of Kant is a refreshing illumination of the fact that we still live and think in the era of modernism. This fact is structurally baked into our existence, on a global scale, regardless of the post-modernist or the speculative/realist/new materialist turns.“
 

“Carl Olsson’s The Mouth That Eats Itself begins with a question. How does an organism distinguish itself from a world threatening to absorb it into the concept-less exteriority of space? Olsson turns this problem into a philosophy of geography as an organ of autonomy through which the animal wrests itself from its environment and stakes out the position from which thought can begin.
            Caillois’s psychasthenia meets Kant’s transcendental subject in an argument where geography’s power to locate the self meets its limit. When thought submits the act of self-distinction to natural necessity, geography preys upon its own condition of possibility.
           The result is a philosophical horror story. The eye cannot witness its own seeing, and a mouth that consumes itself annihilates the instrument of hunger. With the severity of a treatise and the pressure of nightmare, The Mouth That Eats Itself forces naturalism into a drama of autophagic reason, where knowing our place in nature risks abolishing the distinction that lets us think at all.”

“Geography’s familiar promise to locate us in the world becomes a disturbing philosophical problem in Carl Olsson’s hands. Moving between Kant, animal mimicry, the cunning of Odysseus and psychoanalysis, The Mouth That Eats Itself asks what enables us to distinguish ourselves from our surroundings, and what happens when thought turns upon the conditions of its own activity. Olsson combines philosophical precision with an imagination that makes these questions felt. The result is a strikingly original book that reaches well beyond geography, compelling us to reconsider the conditions and costs of making a place for ourselves in the world.”