David Gould received his BA (Hons) from the University of Brighton in 2016 studying Philosophy, Politics, and Ethics. He completed his MA in Cultural and Critical Theory at the University of Leeds in 2017. His MA dissertation, titled Out Come the Wolves: On the Need to Destroy Nature, examined the historical emergence of nature. The Yorkshire Dales, for example, are known as an area of natural beauty, but for the most part they are the play grounds of the rich maintained through countless hours of human labour and manipulation. The image of nature so proudly defended by the British public is distinctly man-made, bourgeois, and an environmental disaster. With this in mind, Gould draws from Benjaminian and Adornian philosophy to argue that the only viable environmental approach is to destroy nature.
Other current research projects include the obscure representation of animal death in film, the idea that the philosophy of Walter Benjamin offers a radically materialist notion of language, and the contentious notion of class-struggle as the “return of the repressed” in contemporary politics.
