Morton 13: "The Severing is a foundational, traumatic fissure between, to put it in stark Lacanian terms, reality (the human-correlated world) and the real (ecological symbiosis of human and nonhuman parts of the biosphere)"
"[T]he Severing has produced physical as well as psychic effects, scars of the rip between reality and the real"
it is "everywhere in post-agricultural psychic, social and philosophical space" (16)
"The difference between modernity and deep premodernity (Paleolithic cultures) is simply that sophisticated technological instruments and contemporary science tell us explicitly that the Severing is produced at the expense of actually existing biospheric beings and their relations" (16)
"Perhaps melancholia is popular among aesthetes because we carry with us the constantly reenacted 12,500-year trauma of the Severing. Perhaps this is why Adorno remarks that true progress would look like a regression to the childishly passionate--weeping along with a horse being punished, like Nietzsche, is his example"
on 132 he remarks that another way of thinking about the Severing is that we are "alienated from spectral inconsistency"