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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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

Are we made of junk? This book believes we are. Examining an array of cybernetic structures from genetic codes to communication networks, it explores the idea that most of culture and nature, including humans, is composed primarily of useless, but always potentially recyclable, material otherwise known as “junk.” This book unravels the presence of junk at the interface between science fictions and fictions of science, showing that molecular biology and popular culture since the early 1960s belong to the same culture—cyberculture—which is essentially a culture of junk. He draws on a wide variety of sources, including the writings of Philip K. Dick and William S. Burroughs, interviews with scientists as well as “crackpots,” and work in genetics, cybernetics, and physics to support his contention that junk DNA represents a blind spot in our understanding of life. At the same time, this book examines the cultural history that led to the encoding and decoding of life itself and the contemporary turning of these codes into a commodity. But it also contends that, beyond good and evil, the essential “junkiness” of this new subject is both the symptom and the potential cure.

As a transformative thinker of the twentieth century, whose work spanned all branches of the humanities, Michel Foucault had a complex and profound relationship with literature. And yet this critical aspect of his thought, because it was largely expressed in speeches and interviews, remains virtually unknown to even his most loyal readers. This book brings together previously unpublished transcripts of oral presentations in which Foucault speaks at length about literature and its links to some of his principal themes: madness, language and criticism, and truth and desire. The associations between madness and language—and madness and silence—preoccupy Foucault in two 1963 radio broadcasts, presented here, in which he ranges among literary examples from Cervantes and Shakespeare to Diderot before taking up questions about Artaud’s literary correspondence, lettres de cachet, and the materiality of language. In his lectures on the relations among language, the literary work, and literature, he discusses Joyce, Proust, Chateaubriand, Racine, and Corneille, as well as the linguist Roman Jakobson. What we know as literature, Foucault contends, begins with the Marquis de Sade, to whose writing—particularly La Nouvelle Justine and Juliette—he devotes a full two-part lecture series focusing on literary self-consciousness. Following his meditations on history in the recently published Speech Begins after Death, this current volume makes clear the importance of literature to Foucault’s thought and intellectual development.

François Laruelle, the idiosyncratic French thinker and promulgator of “non-standard philosophy,” is currently experiencing a renaissance in the English-speaking world. In the first extended analysis of Laruelle’s work available in English, Alexander R. Galloway suggests that we collide Laruelle’s concept of the “One” with its binary counterpart, the Zero, in order to explore the relationship between philosophy and the digital. Part exegetical monograph on the work of Laruelle, part exploration of the nature of digitality, this book argues that the digital is a philosophical concept not simply a technical one. It uses a detailed reading of Laruelle to make the case, with help from others in the French and continental tradition including Alain Badiou, Gilles Deleuze, Martin Heidegger, and Immanuel Kant. Digital machines dominate the world, while so-called digital thinking–binarisms like presence and absence, or self and world–is often synonymous with what it means to think at all. By exploring Laruelle and digitality together, the goal is not to forge a new digital Laruelle. On the contrary, the goal is to show how, even in this day and age, Laruelle remains a profoundly non-digital thinker, perhaps the only non-digital thinker we have. With chapters on computers, capitalism, art, the ethical, and the political, Galloway shows how a withdrawal from the digital reveals an immanent and material universe.

Life, War, Earth is excitingly speculative yet empirically responsible. Protevi shows that Deleuze’s ontology of the virtual, intensive, and actual [or just “Deleuze’s philosophy”] helps us understand crucial new issues in geography, cognitive science and biology. In linking the geo-political, the bio-neuro-political, and the techno-political, Life, War, Earth continues Protevi’s unique analysis, begun in Political Affect, of “bodies politic” that go “above, beyond, and alongside the subject.” The book will serve to introduce scientifically minded philosophers and philosophically minded scientists to the benefits of a Deleuzean approach, and to introduce Deleuzeans and other continental philosophers to the possibilities of linking Deleuze’s thought to that of some of the most interesting and important contemporary sciences. Protevi shows how a Deleuzean approach can illuminate key issues in war and military training; in the “embodied mind” approach to cognitive science; and in new approaches in biology. There are overlapping themes of affect and of “difference and development” – that is, variation in trans-generational subjectification practices – that disabuse us of the customary albeit largely unthematized focus on the rational male adult subject. The book shows how the social and the somatic are not opposed to each other, but are interwoven on three time scales – the evolutionary, the developmental, and the behavioral – and on three political scales – the geo-political, the bio-neuro-political, and the techno-political.

The Lure of Whitehead addresses the sudden interest, across a range of disciplines, in Alfred North Whitehead’s speculative philosophy. Among its fifteen contributions are essays on metaphysics, philosophy of science, digital art, sociology, computer software design, artificial life, and Whitehead’s relation to both continental and analytical philosophy. There is no other book on the market that showcases the new interest in Whitehead with the focus and scope of The Lure of Whitehead. Other books have either presented Whitehead in relation to more well-known thinkers (Bergson, Deleuze)—and thus have been unable to discuss Whitehead’s thought in detail—or they have discussed his work from within the confines of professional philosophy, and thus have been unable to address the full breadth of his appeal. Our book is the first to present Whitehead on his own merits and to showcase the interdisciplinary range of his usefulness. Furthermore, it is the first to account for why Whitehead is currently enjoying this resurgence of interest.

Manifestly Haraway brings together for the first time two popular and controversial multi-world and multi-disciplinary tracts, “The Cyborg Manifesto” and “The Companions Species Manifesto.” Accompanied by a wide-ranging conversation between colleague friends Donna Haraway and Cary Wolfe, this book ends with the germs of a tentacular, ongoing, feminist “Chthulucene Manifesto,” in tension with the teleologies of the doleful Anthropocene and the exterminationist Capitalocene.

Unruffled by the motif of the end of philosophy, Raymond Ruyer elaborated one of the most singular and unclassifiable metaphysics of the 20th century and reactivated philosophy's capacity to speculate on its canonical questions: What exists? How to account for life? What is the status of subjectivity? And how is freedom possible? Hailed by Deleuze as “the latest disciple of Leibniz,” Ruyer's philosophical alliance with science is unique in French philosophy and underlies the strikingly original rigor of his argumentation. His work weds new scientific discoveries with philosophical speculation in a way that sets him apart from other thinkers in the continental tradition. Neofinalism, his magnum opus, is a systematic and lucidly argumentative treatise that deploys the new concepts of “self-survey”, “form”, and “absolute surface” in order to fashion a theory of the virtual and the trans-spatial, and to make a compelling plea for a renewed appreciation of the creative activity that organizes spatio-temporal structures and makes possible the emergence of real beings in a dynamic universe. The book should appeal to readers interested in the renewal of metaphysics and in the alliance between philosophy and science. This translation of Ruyer, one of the last great French philosophers whose work is not yet available in English, helps complete the panorama of continental philosophy in the twentieth-century and is invaluable to those working on the history of philosophy.

Emphasizing sustainability, balance, and the natural, green dominates our thinking about ecology like no other color. What about the catastrophic, the disruptive, the inaccessible, and the excessive? What of the ocean’s turbulence, the fecundity of excrement, the solitude of an iceberg, multihued contaminations? This book moves beyond the accustomed green readings of ecotheory and maps a colorful world of ecological possibility. In a series of linked chapters that span place, time, and discipline, this book illustrates the vibrant worlds formed by colors. Organized by the structure of a prism, each chapter explores the coming into existence of nonanthropocentric ecologies. “Red” engages sites of animal violence, apocalyptic emergence, and activism; “Maroon” follows the aurora borealis to the far North and beholds in its shimmering alternative modes of world composition; “Chartreuse” is a meditation on postsustainability and possibility within sublime excess; “Grey” is the color of the undead; “Ultraviolet” is a potentially lethal force that opens vistas beyond humanly known nature.

This book offers a critical phenomenology of solitary confinement in US prisons from the early penitentiary system to present-day supermax prisons. Drawing on first-person testimony, phenomenological analysis, and critical social theory, I argue that forced isolation is a form of violence against the relational structure of living being. Many prisoners in prolonged solitary confinement describe their experience as a form of living death. They experience perceptual, affective, epistemic, and even ontological alterations that undermine their capacity to make sense of the world. Who are we, such that we can be undone by prolonged isolation from others? And how have prisoners resisted the debilitating effects of isolation?