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Translation from the French of a seven-volume work originally published by Editions La Decouverte in 2003.
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Argues that humanity can be seen as a case of mistaken identity.
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Uncovering the insect logic that informs contemporary media technologies and the network society.
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By Protevi, John
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- RRP: $89.99
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For many philosophers, the rational cognitive (Cartesian) subject defines the human, or at least defines what humans should be. Yet some recent cognitive science, as well as the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari, has called into question such individuality and rationality and em...phasized social and emotional subjectivity. Understanding such embodied and embedded subjectivity, John Protevi argues, demands the notion of bodies politic.In Political Affect, Protevi investigates the relationship between the social and the somatic: how our bodies, minds, and social settings are intricately and intimately linked. Bringing together concepts from science, philosophy, and politics, he develops a perspective he calls political physiology to indicate that subjectivity is socially conditioned and sometimes bypassed in favor of a direct connection of the social and the somatic, as with the politically triggered basic emotions of rage and panic. Protevi's treatment of affective cognition in social context breaks new theoretical ground, insisting that subjectivity be studied both in its embodied expression and in terms of the distribution of affective cognitive responses in a population.Moving beyond the theoretical, Protevi applies his concept of political affect to show how unconscious emotional valuing shaped three recent, emotionally charged events: the cold rage of the Columbine High School slayings, the racialized panic that delayed rescue efforts in Hurricane Katrina, and the twists and turns of empathy occasioned by the Terry Schiavo case. These powerful individual and collective political events require new philosophical understanding.
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By Wills, David
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Inanimation is the third book by author David Wills to analyze the technology of the human. In Prosthesis, Wills traced our human attachment to external objects back to a necessity within the body itself. In Dorsality, he explored how technology is understood to function behind o...r before the human. Inanimation proceeds by taking literally the idea of inanimate or inorganic forms of life. Starting from a seemingly naive question about what it means to say texts live on or have a life of their own, Inanimation develops a new theory of the inanimate. Inanimation offers a fresh account of what life is and the ethical and political consequences that follow from this conception. Inspired by Walter Benjamin s observation that the idea of life and afterlife in works of art should be regarded with an entirely unmetaphorical objectivity, the book challenges the coherence and limitations of what lives, arguing that there is no clear opposition between a live animate and dead inanimate. Wills identifies three major forms of inorganic life: autobiography, translation, and resonance. Informed by Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze, he explores these forms through wide-ranging case studies. He brings his panoptic vision to bear on thinkers (Descartes, Freud, Derrida, Benjamin, Carl Schmitt, Jean-Luc Nancy, Roland Barthes), writers and poets (Helene Cixous, Paul Celan, William Carlos Williams, Ernst Junger, James Joyce, Georges Bataille), and visual artists (Jean-Francois Millet, Jean-Luc Godard, Paul Klee). With panache and gusto, Wills discovers life-forms well beyond textual remainders and translations, in such disparate places as the act of thinking, the death drive, poetic blank space, recorded bird songs, the technology of warfare, and the heart stopped by love.
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A fascinating look at the role of animals in human love through the ages
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'Dorsality' is an ambitious investigation of what lurks behind our humanity and our technology. The author rethinks not only our nature before all technology but also what we understand to be technology.
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A central thinker on the question of the animal in continental thought, elisabeth de Fontenay moves in this volume from Jacques Derrida's uneasily intimate writing on animals to a passionate frontal engagement with political and ethical theory as it has been applied to animals--a...long with a stinging critique of the work of Peter Singer and Paola Cavalieri as well as with other utilitarian philosophers of animal-human relations.Humans and animals are different from one another. To conflate them is to be intellectually sentimental. And yet, from our position of dominance, do we not owe them more than we often acknowledge? In the searching first chapter on Derrida, she sets out three levels of deconstruction that are testimony to the radicalization and shift of that philosopher's argument: a strategy through the animal, exposition to an animal or to this animal, and compassion toward animals. For Fontenay, Derrida's writing is particularly far-reaching when it comes to thinking about animals, and she suggests many other possible philosophical resources including Adorno, Leibniz, and Merleau-Ponty.Fontenay is at her most compelling in describing philosophy's ongoing indifference to animal life--shading into savagery, underpinned by denial--and how attempts to exclude the animal from ethical systems have in fact demeaned humanity. But Fontenay's essays carry more than philosophical significance. Without Offending Humans reveals a careful and emotionally sensitive thinker who explores the unfolding of humans' assessments of their relationship to animals--and the consequences of these assessments for how we define ourselves.
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By Kroker, Arthur
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As exemplary representatives of a form of critical feminism, the writings of Judith Butler, Katherine Hayles, and Donna Haraway offer entry into the great crises of contemporary society, politics, and culture. Butler leads readers to rethink the boundaries of the human in a time ...of perpetual war. Hayles turns herself into a writing machine in order to find a dwelling place for the digital humanities within the austere landscape of the culture of the code. Haraway is the one contemporary thinker to have begun the necessary ethical project of creating a new language of potential reconciliation among previously warring species.According to Arthur Kroker, the postmodernism of Judith Butler, the posthumanism of Katherine Hayles, and the companionism of Donna Haraway are possible pathways to the posthuman future that is captured by the specter of body drift. Body drift refers to the fact that individuals no longer inhabit a body, in any meaningful sense of the term, but rather occupy a multiplicity of bodies: gendered, sexualized, laboring, disciplined, imagined, and technologically augmented.Body drift is constituted by the blast of information culture envisioned by artists, communicated by social networking, and signified by its signs. It is lived daily by remixing, resplicing, and redesigning the codes: codes of gender, sexuality, class, ideology, and identity. The writings of Butler, Hayles, and Haraway, Kroker reveals, provide the critical vocabulary and political context for understanding the deep complexities of body drift and challenging the current emphasis on the material body.
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By Smith, Mick
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- RRP: $89.99
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Links the political critique of sovereign power with ecological concerns
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