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Humanity has sat at the center of philosophical thinking for too long. The recent advent of environmental philosophy and posthuman studies has widened our scope of inquiry to include ecosystems, animals, and artificial intelligence. Yet the vast majority of the stuff in our universe, and even in our lives, remains beyond serious philosophical concern. This book develops an object-oriented ontology that puts things at the center of being—a philosophy in which nothing exists any more or less than anything else, in which humans are elements but not the sole or even primary elements of philosophical interest. And unlike experimental phenomenology or the philosophy of technology, this book’s alien phenomenology takes for granted that all beings interact with and perceive one another. This experience, however, withdraws from human comprehension and becomes accessible only through a speculative philosophy based on metaphor.

All Thoughts Are Equal is an introduction to the work of French philosopher François Laruelle and an experiment in nonhuman thinking. For Laruelle, standard forms of philosophy continue to dominate our models of what counts as exemplary thought and knowledge. By contrast, what Laruelle calls his “non-standard” approach attempts to bring democracy into thought, because all forms of thinking are equal in value. Philosophy–the discipline that posits itself as the power to think at the highest level–does not have a monopoly on reason. Such democracy clearly has relevance for the nonhuman, too. If non-philosophy hopes to extend what we mean by thinking beyond the boundaries set by classical approaches, then such a project has important implications as regards the existence and value of nonhuman forms of thought. This study strives to see how philosophy might appear when we look at it with non-philosophical and nonhuman eyes. And it does so by refusing to explain Laruelle through orthodox philosophy, opting instead to follow the structure of a film, Lars von Trier’s The Five Obstructions, to introduce the non-standard method. Von Trier’s documentary is a meditation on the creative constraints set by film, both technologically and aesthetically, and how they can push our experience of film, and of ourselves, beyond what is normally deemed “the perfect human.” All Thoughts Are Equal adopts those constraints in its own experiment by showing how Laruelle’s radically new style of philosophy is best introduced using our most nonhuman form of thought, that found in cinema itself.

Autonomy is a vital concept in much of modern theory, defining the Subject as capable of self-governance. Democratic theory relies on the concept of autonomy to provide justification for participatory government and the normative goal of democratic governance, which is to protect the ability of the individual to self-govern. Offering an examination of the concept of autonomy from a postfoundationalist perspective, the book analyzes how the ideal of self-governance has shaped everyday life. The text begins by considering the academic terrain of autonomy, then it focuses on specific examples of political behavior that allow for these theories to be investigated. The book demonstrates how the adolescent—a not-yet-autonomous subject—highlights how the ideal of self-governance generates practices intended to cultivate autonomy by forming the individual’s relationship to his or her body. The book points up how the war on drugs rests on the perception that drug addicts are the antithesis of autonomy and thus must be regulated for their own good. Showing that the animal rights movement may challenge the distinction between human and animal, the book also examines the place of the endurance athlete in fitness culture, where self-management of the body is the exemplar of autonomous subjectivity.

A provocative historical inquiry into human becoming, this book consists of a set of idiosyncratic essays on embryology and infancy, play and games, manners, meals, and other messes. Inspecting a wide range of textual, visual, and artefactual evidence in and beyond medieval England, Mitchell argues that humanity issued from a dense material matrix that is barely human. Congeries of animate and inanimate objects expose the extent to which the human learned to dwell among a welter of things. Becoming (ontogeny) turns out to be a better category than being (ontology) for capturing the conjugated modes of existence required for sustaining life at various scales. While Mitchell makes important contributions to medieval scholarship on the body, sexuality, family, medicine, and material culture, his work is also in dialogue with recent developments in the posthumanities. The book theorizes what can be called a medieval ecological imaginary, offering a longer historical perspective on the fate of the human than is usually found in modern discussions. Mitchell returns to early understandings of epigenesis, virtuality, natality, chaos, animation, and cosmogony to trace the inheritance of modern speculative and scientific notions usually considered in isolation from the past. He explores a broad array of phenomenal objects, and in the process rediscovers and reanimates distinctly medieval ontologies. In addressing the emergency of the human in the later Middle Ages, Mitchell identifies ideas of becoming in the past where humanity is and remains at risk.

Bio-Aesthetics. A Critique examines the rising influence of evolutionary theory across academic disciplines today. Empowered by neo-Darwinian theory and recent advances in neuroscientific research, nascent academic fields have particularly challenged the Humanities’ non-empirical and largely speculative approach to modern art, culture, and aesthetic theory. In its stead, evolutionary scholars advocate a strict biological functionalism that effectively reduces mind to brain and art to science. Unfortunately, Humanities’ scholars so far have been slow to respond to this challenge. Bio-Aesthetics remedies this problem by providing the first comprehensive account of current evolutionary and neuroscientific approaches to art and human culture to demonstrate both the need for and the limits of interdisciplinary research in the Humanities. Above all, Bio-Aesthetics is A Critique in the Kantian sense of the term: it works through a critical appraisal of neo-Darwinian reductionism in order to develop a more germane and balanced methodology for future collaborative research across disciplines. Bio-Aesthetics central argument contends that Kant’s transcendentalism amounts to the “structural coupling” of organism and environment, which also applies to our knowledge of the (phenomenological) world we come to inhabit as living beings. Scientific reductionism and neo-Darwinian theory ignore the self-constructed nature of reason and culture for genetic laws and evolutionary principles that allegedly determine human behaviour. Hence the overriding goal of Bio-Aesthetics is to provide the Humanities with a self-critical, historically nuanced and epistemologically up-to-date counter-paradigm to what E. O Wilson called “sociobiology,” that is the reductionist view of human cultural evolution dominant in neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory today.

Science is about finding the truth whether we like it or not; philosophy a questing spirit that questions even science itself; and both are the birthright of every person born on the planet. Cosmic Apprentice dovetails philosophy and science, reinvigorating both with new possibilities. Using both science and philosophyto “keep each other honest” in a kind of open circuit, Cosmic Apprentice explores the interplay between themes that range from deeply autobiographical to cosmically impersonal. In essays that intercalate postmodern thinkers such as Bataille, Heidegger, Levinas, Derrida and Esposito with modern scientific thought, the great questions of ancient Greek philosophy are returned to with new rigor. Being, purpose, life, truth, poetry, sex, drugs, writing, thought and freedom are explored with data and theory from symbiogenetics, nonequilibrium thermodynamics and anthropic physics deconstructs. Authoritarianism in science is exposed along with obscurantism in philosophy. Healing the two cultures while rejecting aspects of both science and philosophy as recently practiced Ontos Telos Bios presents a heady synergistic mix of modern science and postmodern and classical philosophy. The blend will appeal to fans of science and its popularization, students of continental philosophy, critics of culture and politics, devotees of fiction and writing, and those interested in provocative essays and the life of the mind.

Creaturely Love explores some of the ways in which desire makes us both more, and less, human. Focusing on key figures in modern philosophy, art, and literature—Nietzsche, Salomé, Rilke, Balthus, Musil, Proust —as well as pre-modern texts and fairy-tales—Fourier, Fournival, Ovid—this book examines how animals inform and influence the understanding and expression of love between people. From pet names to spirit animals, and allegories to analogies, animals constantly appear in our writings and thoughts about romantic desire. Creaturely Love argues that animals are not only “good to think with,” as Claude Lévi-Strauss maintained, but also good to love with. Throughout Western history, we seem to need the figure of the animal to express our passions; and yet, ironically, we use these same creatures to disavow our own animal appetites. By following certain charismatic animals, during their passage through the love letters of philosophers, the romances of novelists, the conceits of fables, the epiphanies of poets, the paradoxes of contemporary films, and the digital menageries of the internet, this book demonstrates how essential “the creature” has been to our own conception of love through the ages. In our appropriation and deployment of the animal in our amorous expression, we are both acknowledging – and disavowing – our own animal aspect. It is this ambivalence that forms the focus of the book, which ultimately argues that what we adore in the beloved is not (only) their humanity, but their creatureliness.

The book looks at canonical books in political theory and contemporary interventions in food politics to examine how the experience of eating structures our ability to conceptualize politics. The book offers a theoretical treatment of food politics, examining how food offers valuable resources for thinking about such political concepts as identity, knowledge, and sovereignty. The book does not just contribute to Food Studies, but helps explain the rise of Food Studies as an area of humanistic inquiry. The book links the concerns of food politics (especially questions of sustainability, public health, and inequality) to the changing nature of global order and the possibilities for democratic rule. The book examines the significance of consumerist politics, and (simultaneously) the relationship between politics and ethics, public and private.

Exposed argues for a material feminist posthumanism that departs from the predominant modes of humanist transcendence in theory, science, consumerism, and popular culture. Featuring three sections, the book calls for an environmental stance in which humanity thinks, feels, and acts as the very stuff of the world. As a work within the environmental humanities, it grapples with climate change, biodiversity, sustainability, ocean conservation, environmental activism, and the depiction of the anthropocene. And as a study in new materialism it focuses on how the materiality of human bodies provoke modes of posthumanist pleasure, environmental protest, and a sense of immersion within the strange agencies that constitute the world.

Gilles Deleuze once claimed that “modern science has not found its metaphysics, the metaphysics it needs.” This book responds to this need by investigating the consequences of the philosopher’s interest in (and appeal to) “the exact sciences.” In exploring the problematic relationship between the philosophy of Deleuze and science, the chapters gathered here examine how science functions in respect to Deleuze’s concepts of time and space, how science accounts for processes of qualitative change, how science actively participates in the production of subjectivity, and how Deleuze’s thinking engages neuroscience. The book works through Deleuze’s understanding of the virtual—a force of qualitative change that is ontologically primary to the exact, measurable relations that can be found in and among the objects of science. By adopting such a methodology, this text generates significant new insights, especially regarding the notion of scientific laws, and compels the rethinking of such ideas as reproducibility, the unity of science, and the scientific observer.

The book advances a novel reading of Foucault’s writings on the Iranian revolution and further shows how his encounter with the revolution informs his later lectures on ethics, spirituality, and enlightenment. Foucault saw in the revolution, particularly in its religious expression, an instance of his anti-teleological philosophy, a revolution that did not simply fit into the normative progressive discourses of history. What attracted him to the Iranian revolution was its ambiguity, precisely the same feature for which his critics ridiculed him. Rather than his fascination with death or his absorption in the aesthetics of violence, as his critics assert, it was the inexplicability of “the man in revolt” that motivated much of his writing on the Iranian revolution. He defined the indeterminacy of the revolutionary movement together with the inexplicability of the revolutionary subject as an expression of political spirituality. This concept led many of his detractors to accuse the anti-humanist philosopher of defending theocracy in order to advance his critique of modern governmentality and its disciplinary technologies.

Catherine M. Soussloff argues that Michel Foucault’s sustained engagement with European art history critically addresses present concerns about the mediated nature of the image in the digital age. She explores the meaning of painting for Foucault’s philosophy, and for contemporary art theory, proposing a new relevance for a Foucauldian view of ethics and the pleasures and predicaments of contemporary existence.

Gestures is a collection of essays that proposes a daring and ambitious new conception of human behavior. Defining gesture as “a movement of the body or of a tool attached to the body for which there is no satisfactory causal explanation,” Flusser moves around the topic from different points of view, angles and distances: sometimes he zooms in on a modest, ordinary movement like taking a photograph, shaving, or smoking a pipe. Sometimes he pulls back to look at something as vast and varied as human “making,” embracing everything from the fashioning of simple tools to mass manufacturing. Holding firmly to basic phenomenological principles – that consciousness is always consciousness of something, that we know others by reference to ourselves, he claims that we constantly “read” states of mind, i.e. thoughts, intentions, emotions, from gestures; still we lack a theory about how this happens. Gestures takes a first step. It offers alternatives to theories by now so veiled by habit and myth that we are hardly conscious of them, and so hardly realize that they are failing. These include the assumption that we can “know” something without being affected by it, the belief that science is value-free, and the common conviction that science and art are fundamentally different activities.

This book presents an English-language translation of the modern classic Hegel ou Spinoza. Published in French in 1979, it has been widely influential, particularly in the work of the philosophers Alain Badiou, Antonio Negri, and Gilles Deleuze. This book is a surgically precise interrogation of the points of misreading of Spinoza by Hegel. As is explained in this version, the necessity of Hegel’s misreading in the kernel of thought that is “indigestible” for Hegel, which makes the Spinozist system move in a way that Hegel cannot grasp. In doing so, this volume exposes the limited and situated truth of Hegel’s perspective-which reveals more about Hegel himself than about his object of analysis. Against Hegel’s characterization of Spinoza’s work as immobile, the book offers an alternative that upsets the accepted historical progression of philosophical knowledge. It finds in Spinoza an immanent philosophy that is not subordinated to the guarantee of an a priori truth.

With the recent emergence of copious scholarship that considers the discursive life of the term “human,” posthumanism has become a timely interdisciplinary discourse. This study is a critical analysis of three strains of this discourse's technologically oriented segment: scientific, humanist, and organismic posthumanisms. Throughout, analyses are presented in an effort to appreciate the insights available from these three perspectives, and to contextualize them in the larger conversations of technology and culture. Ultimately, though, the analyses also unpack how each perspective continues to hold onto certain elements of the humanist tradition that it is mobilized against; in each case, the study desublimates the presumptions that underwrite a given perspective. This study offers at least four unique contributions to the existing literature on posthumanism. Firstly, it nominates the term “technological posthumanism” as a means of focusing specifically on the discourse as it relates to technology without neglecting its other disciplinary histories. Secondly, it suggests that deconstruction remains relevant to this discourse, specifically with respect to the performative dimension of language. Thirdly, it offers analyses of artworks that have not heretofore been considered in the light of posthumanism, specifically emphasizing the role of aurality. Finally, the text's innovative form introduces a reflexive component that exemplifies how the discourse of posthumanism might progress without resorting to the types of unilateral narratives that the dissertation critiques.

This book explores the experience of dehumanization as the privation of speech. Taking up the figure of silence as the space between human and animal, it traces the potential for an alternate political and ethical way of life beyond law. Employing the resources offered by deconstruction as well as an ontological critique of biopower, this book suggests that humAnimal, as the site of impropriety opened by racism and manifested by silence, can be political and hazardous to power. Through the lens of such works as Coetzee’s Foe, Chesnutt’s “The Dumb Witness,” Dr. Itard’s “wild child,” and aerialist Philippe Petit’s Man on Wire, this book brings Derrida’s concept of the trace and his theory of sovereignty into conversation with Agamben’s investigation of the analytics of power. The task is twofold: on the one hand, to question the logocentric presumption that determines the separation between human and animal, and on the other to examine the conflation of this separation as an instrument of power in the practice of racism. The book details the differences and intersections between Derrida and Agamben in their respective approaches to power, claiming that to think simultaneously within the registers of deconstruction (which conceives of power as a symptom of the metaphysics of presence) and biopolitics (which conceives of power as the operation of difference) entails a specification of the political and ethical consequences that attends the two perspectives. When considered as the potential of language to refuse the law of signification and semantics, silence can neutralize the exercise of power through language, and this book’s inquiry discloses a counterpower that does not so much oppose or destroy the politics of the subject but rather neutralizes it and renders it ineffective.

Has biopolitics actually become thanatopolitics, a field of study obsessed with death? Is there something about the nature of biopolitical thought today that makes it impossible to deploy affirmatively? If this is true, what can life-minded thinkers put forward as the merits of biopolitical reflection? These questions drive this intervention. This book argues that a “crypto-thanatopolitics” can be teased out of Heidegger’s critique of technology and that some of the leading scholars of biopolitics—including Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, and Peter Sloterdijk—have been substantively influenced by Heidegger’s thought, particularly his reading of proper and improper writing. In fact, the book shows how all of these philosophers have pointed toward a tragic, thanatopolitical destination as somehow an inevitable result of technology. But in Improper Life he articulates a corrective biopolitics that can begin with rereadings of Foucault (especially his late work regarding the care and technologies of the self), Freud (notably his writings on the drives and negation), and Gilles Deleuze (particularly in the relation of attention to aesthetics).

Using the work of Alain Badiou, Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Derrida, “In Motion, At Rest: The Event of the Athletic Body,” explores three events in sport: Ron Artest in basketball and Eric Cantona and Zinedine Zidane in football (soccer). The sports event, “In Motion” argues, reveals the ways in which the intensity and opacity of the event is most visible in sport. Theorizing the event through sport makes possible a new thinking of the event, revealing how what was already inherent to the event is opened to new possibilities by thinking sport philosophically. “In Motion” is not so much distinct from any other works on the event in sport, sport’s theory, sport’s studies, as it stands sui generis: by itself because it is the first work in these fields to think the sport’s event philosophically. Similarly, there are no works in philosophically that pay any attention to the sport’s event.

This book demonstrates that since the publication of Proust and Signs in 1964 Gilles Deleuze’s search for a new means of philosophical expression became a central theme of all his oeuvre, including those written with psychoanalyst Félix Guattari. This book, like Deleuze, calls this “the image of thought.” This book’s exploration begins with Deleuze’s earliest exposition of the Proustian image of thought and then follows the “tangled history” of the image that runs through subsequent works, such as Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, The Rhizome (which serves as an introduction to Deleuze’s A Thousand Plateaus), and several later writings from the 1980s collected in Essays Critical and Clinical. The book shows how this topic underlies Deleuze’s studies of modern cinema, where the image of thought is predominant in the analysis of the cinematic image—particularly in The Time-Image. This book finds it to be the fundamental concern of the brain proposed by Deleuze in the conclusion of What Is Philosophy? By connecting the various appearances of the image of thought that permeate Deleuze’s entire corpus, this book reveals how thinking first assumes an image, how the images of thought become identified with the problem of expression early in the works, and how this issue turns into a primary motive for the more experimental works of philosophy written with Guattari. The study traces a distinctly modern relationship between philosophy and non-philosophy (literature and cinema especially) that has developed into a hallmark of the term “Deleuzian.” However, the book argues, this aspect of the philosopher’s vision has not been fully appreciated in terms of its significance for philosophy: “not only ‘for today’ but, to quote Nietzsche, meaning also ‘for tomorrow, and for the day after tomorrow.’”

Inanimation is the third volume in a series of attempts to analyze the technology of the human. Following Prosthesis (1995), where our attachment to “external” objects was traced back to a necessity within the body itself, and Dorsality (2008), where technology was understood to function behind or before the human, Inanimation proceeds by taking literally the idea of inanimate or inorganic forms of life. Such an idea is presumed, for example, by our referring to a work of art that “lives on” after its author. My book takes its inspiration from Walter Benjamin, who states in his famous essay “The Task of the Translator” that “the idea of life and afterlife in works of art should be regarded with an entirely unmetaphorical objectivity,” continuing that “even in times of narrowly prejudiced thought, there was an inkling that life was not limited to organic corporeality.” On that basis Inanimation questions the coherence and limitations of the category of “what lives,” and argues that there can be no clear opposition between a live animate and dead inanimate. Three major forms of inorganic life emerge from the discussion--autobiography, translation, and what I call “resonance”—and each is examined and expanded by means of three “case studies.” Inanimate life forms are uncovered not only in textual remainders and in translation, but also in “places” as disparate as the act of thinking, the death drive, poetic blank space, the technology of warfare, the heart stopped by love, visualized music and recorded bird songs.