New Materialisms brings into focus and explains the significance of the innovative materialist critiques that are emerging across the social sciences and humanities. By gathering essays that exemplify the new thinking about matter and processes of materialization, this important collection shows how scholars are reworking older materialist traditions, contemporary theoretical debates, and advances in scientific knowledge to address pressing ethical and political challenges. In the introduction, Diana Coole and Samantha Frost highlight common themes among the distinctive critical projects that comprise the new materialisms. The continuities they discern include a posthumanist conception of matter as lively or exhibiting agency, and a reengagement with both the material realities of everyday life and broader geopolitical and socioeconomic structures. Coole and Frost argue that contemporary economic, environmental, geopolitical, and technological developments demand new accounts of nature, agency, and social and political relationships; modes of inquiry that privilege consciousness and subjectivity are not adequate to the task. New materialist philosophies are needed to do justice to the complexities of twenty-first-century biopolitics and political economy, because they raise fundamental questions about the place of embodied humans in a material world and the ways that we produce, reproduce, and consume our material environment. ContributorsSara AhmedJane BennettRosi BraidottiPheng CheahRey ChowWilliam E. ConnollyDiana CooleJason EdwardsSamantha FrostElizabeth GroszSonia KruksMelissa A. Orlie
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Leading cultural and political theorists argue that any account of experience, agency, and political action demands attention to the urgent issues of our own material existence and environment.
Acknowledgments ix
Introducing the New Materialisms / Diana Coole and Samantha Frost 1
The Force of Materiality
A Vitalist Stopover on the Way to a New Materialism / Jane Bennett 47
Nondialectical Materialism / Pheng Cheah 70
The Inertia of Matter and the Generativity of Flesh / Diana Coole 92
Impersonal Matter / Melissa A. Orlie 116
Political Matters
Feminism, Materialism, and Freedom / Elizabeth Grosz 139
Fear and the Illusion of Autonomy / Samantha Frost 158
Materialities of Experience / William E. Connolly 178
The Politics of "Life Itself" and New Ways of Dying / Rosi Braidotti 201
Economies of Disruption
The Elusive Material: What the Dog Doesn't Understand / Rey Chow 221
Orientations Matter / Sara Ahmed 234
Simon de Beauvoir: Engaging Discrepant Materialisms / Sonia Kruks 258
The Materialism of Historical Materialism / Jason Edwards 281
Bibliography 299
Contributors 319
Index 323
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“Overall, the volume makes a convincing case for the renewal of materialism, in terms of both its theoretical purchase and its radical political potential. It shows, in ways that are often exemplary, that there are rich, and sometimes surprising, resources in the philosophical tradition for renewing materialisms.” - Keith Ansell Pearson, Radical Philosophy
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Collection of essays that consider the importance of the material body to discussions of political identity and agency
Produktdetaljer
ISBN
9780822347729
Publisert
2010-09-09
Utgiver
Vendor
Duke University Press
Vekt
476 gr
Høyde
235 mm
Bredde
156 mm
Aldersnivå
P, 06
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Heftet
Biographical note
Diana Coole is Professor of Political and Social Theory at Birkbeck College, University of London, England. She is the author, most recently, of Merleau-Ponty and Modern Politics after Anti-Humanism. She is a Leverhulme Research Fellow, 2010–13.
Samantha Frost is Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science, the Gender and Women’s Studies Program, and the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She is the author of Lessons from a Materialist Thinker: Hobbesian Reflections on Ethics and Politics.