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The New Politics of Materialism New materialism challenges the mechanistic models characteristic of early modern philosophy that regarded matter as largely passive and inert. Instead it gives weight to topics often overlooked in such accounts: agency, vitalism, complexity, contingency, and self-organization. This collection, which includes an international roster of contributors from philosophy, history, literature, and science, is the first to ask what is “new” about the new materialism and place it in interdisciplinary per- spective. Against current theories of new materialism it argues for a deeper engagement with materialism’s history, questions whether matter can be “lively,” and asks whether new materialism’s wish to revitalize politics and the political lives up to its promise. Contributors: Keith Ansell-Pearson, Sarah Ellenzweig, Christian J. Emden, N. Katherine Hayles, Jess Keiser, Mogens Lærke, Ian Lowrie, Lenny Moss, Angela Willey, Catherine Wilson, Charles T. Wolfe, Derek Woods, and John H. Zammito. This page intentionally left blank The New Politics of Materialism History, Philosophy, Science Edited by Sarah Ellenzweig and John H. Zammito First published 2017 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York City, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2017 selection and editorial matter, Sarah Ellenzweig and John H. Zammito; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Sarah Ellenzweig and John H. Zammito to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalog record has been requested for this book ISBN: 978-1-138-24074-2 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-26847-7 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India Contents Notes on Contributors vii Acknowledgements xi Introduction: New Materialism: Looking Forward, Looking Back 1 SARAH ELLENZWEIG AND JOHN H. ZAMMITO PART I Materialist Prehistories 17 1 Who’s Afraid of Inertia? The Cartesian–Newtonian Legacy Reconsidered 19 SARAH ELLENZWEIG 2 Varieties of Vital Materialism 44 CHARLES T. WOLFE 3 Plastic Matters 66 JESS KEISER 4 Deleuze and New Materialism: Naturalism, Norms, and Ethics 88 KEITH ANSELL-PEARSON PART II Humanities and the Sciences of Matter 109 5 Materialism, Old and New, and the Party of Humanity 111 CATHERINE WILSON vi Contents 6 Engendering New Materializations: Feminism, Nature, and the Challenge to Disciplinary Proper Objects 131 ANGELA WILLEY 7 What Sort of Thing Is the Social? Or, Durkheim and Deleuze on Organization and Infrastructure 154 IAN LOWRIE PART III Monism, Liveliness, and the Problem of Scale 179 8 The Cognitive Nonconscious and the New Materialism 181 N. KATHERINE HAYLES 9 Scale Variance and the Concept of Matter 200 DEREK WOODS PART IV The Politics of Ontology 225 10 Detachment Theory: Agency, Nature, and the Normative Nihilism of New Materialism 227 LENNY MOSS 11 Materialism, Constructivism, and Political Skepticism: Leibniz, Hobbes, and the Erudite Libertines 250 MOGENS LæRKE 12 Normativity Matters: Philosophical Naturalism and Political Theory 269 CHRISTIAN J. EMDEN Concluding (Irenic) Postscript: Naturalism as a Response to the New Materialism 300 JOHN H. ZAMMITO Index 323 Notes on Contributors Keith Ansell-Pearson holds a Personal Chair in Philosophy at the University of Warwick, England, a position he has held since 1998. He is the author of close to 100 essays in journals and edited book collections. His books include Nietzsche contra Rousseau (Cambridge University Press, 1991/1994), Germinal Life: The Difference and Repetition of Deleuze (Routledge, 1999), Bergson and the Time of Life (Routledge, 2002), and Thinking Beyond the Human Condition with Bergson (Bloomsbury, 2017). He is also the editor of Bergson: Key Writings (Bloomsbury, 2006, 2014), A Companion to Nietzsche (Blackwell, 2006), and The Nietzsche Reader (Blackwell, 2006). He is currently researching a book on ethics and the art of life in Nietzsche, Foucault, and Deleuze. Sarah Ellenzweig is Associate Professor in the Department of English at Rice University. She is author of The Fringes of Belief: English Literature, Ancient Heresy, and the Politics of Freethinking, 1660–1760 (Stanford University Press, 2008). She has published essays in ELH, Journal of the History of Ideas, Journal of British Studies, and MLQ. Her recent work on the history of materialism and the philosophy of motion appears in edited volumes from Oxford University Press and University of Toronto Press. She is currently working on a book on the philosophy of motion and the rise of the novel in the eighteenth century. Christian J. Emden is Co-Director of the Program in Law, Politics & Social Thought and Professor in the Department of Classical and European Studies at Rice University, where he teaches modern intel- lectual history and political thought. He is the author of four books, most recently Nietzsche’s Naturalism: Philosophy and the Life Sciences in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge University Press, 2014) and Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of History (Cambridge University Press, 2008). He also edited, with David Midgley, Beyond Habermas: Democracy, Knowledge, and the Public Sphere (Berghahn Books, 2012) and Changing Perceptions of the Public Sphere (Berghahn Books, 2012). Emden is currently working on three projects: one on normativity and viii Notes on Contributors philosophical naturalism, the second on political realism in the work of Max Weber and Hannah Arendt, and the third on political citizenship in a postnational world. N. Katherine Hayles is the James B. Duke Professor of Literature at Duke University. She teaches and writes on the relations of literature, science, and technology in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Her book How We Became Posthuman (University of Chicago Press, 1999) won the René Wellek Prize for the Best Book in Literary Theory in 1998/9, and her book Writing Machines (MIT Press, 2002) won the Suzanne Langer Award for Outstanding Scholarship. Her most recent book is entitled Unthought: The Power of the Cognitive Nonconscious (University of Chicago Press, 2017). Jess Keiser is Assistant Professor of English at Tufts University. He has published essays on early modern materialism, satire, and m adness. His current book project, Nervous Fictions, examines the use of figurative language in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century descriptions of the brain; portions have appeared in Modern Philology and English Literary History. Mogens Lærke is a permanent researcher at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) in France with an affiliation at the École Normale Supérieure de Lyon. He is the author of Leibniz Lecteur de Spinoza. La Genèse d’une Opposition Complexe (Champion, 2008) and Les Lumières de Leibniz. Controverses avec Huet, Bayle, Regis et More (Classiques Garnier, 2015). He is the editor of The Use of Censorship in the Enlightenment (Brill, 2009) and co-editor of The Philosophy of the Young Leibniz (Franz Steiner Verlag, 2009), Spinoza/Leibniz: Rencontres, Controverses, Réceptions (Presses Universitaires de Paris Sorbonne, 2015), and Philosophy and Its History (Oxford University Press, 2015). He is the author of more than fifty articles and book chap- ters on a variety of issues in early modern philosophy. Ian Lowrie is a doctoral candidate in Anthropology at Rice University whose empirical research focuses on the emergence of data science. He has two ongoing projects. The first investigates emergent forms of academic- industrial collaboration, pedagogical techniques, and forms of inquiry specific to the conduct of data scientific education and research within the Russian science system. The second studies rapprochements between computational neuroscience and data science, with an eye to understand- ing ongoing transformations in widely circulating analytical approaches to brains and cognition. Lenny Moss is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Exeter and is a former molecular cell biologist. As a philosophically motivated research scientist Moss was interested in questions of cellular self-assembly, Notes on Contributors ix membrane biophysics and biochemistry, and the relationship of cancer to development. As a scientifically motivated and trained philosopher, Moss has come to be interested in engaging and renewing the critical tradition from Kant and Hegel, through Nietzsche and Heidegger, to Habermas and Honneth through an “anthropological optic.” Moss has given numer- ous invited lectures throughout Europe and North America and has pub- lished in a wide range of philosophical and scientific journals. His 2003 book What Genes Can’t Do (MIT Press) was translated and published in Japanese. He is currently working on a monograph on detachment theory and a co-authored monograph in theoretical biology with fellow scientist/ philosophers Stuart Newman and Sahotra Sarkar. Angela Willey is Assistant Professor in the Department of Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She works at the interstices of queer feminist theory, feminist science studies, and sexuality studies. Her work has appeared in Feminist Studies, Signs, Journal of Gender Studies, Archives of Sexual Behavior, and Sexualities, and in volumes on monogamy, the science of difference, and the global history of sexual science. She is the author of Undoing Monogamy: The Politics of Science and the Possibilities of Biology (Duke University Press, 2016). Catherine Wilson is Anniversary Professor of Philosophy at the University of York and Distinguished Professor at CUNY Graduate Center. She has written extensively on the reception of Epicurean materialism in the sev- enteenth and eighteenth centuries and on metaethics and normative eth- ics, including topics related to biology and morality. She is the author of The Invisible World (Princeton University Press, 1995), Moral Animals: Ideals and Constraints in Moral Theory (Oxford University Press, 2004), Epicureanism at the Origins of Modernity (Oxford University Press, 2008), A Very Short Introduction to Epicureanism (Oxford University Press, 2015), and Metaethics from a First-Person Standpoint (Open Book, 2016). Charles T. Wolfe is a Research Fellow in the Department of Philosophy and Moral Sciences and Sarton Centre for History of Science, Ghent University, and an associate member of the IHPST (CNRS-UMR 8590, Paris). He works primarily in history and philosophy of the early mod- ern life sciences, with a particular interest in materialism and vitalism. He is the author of Materialism: A Historico-Philosophical Introduction (Springer, 2016). He has edited several volumes, including Monsters and Philosophy (Kings College Publications, 2005), The Body as Object and Instrument of Knowledge (with O. Gal, Springer, 2010), Vitalism and the Scientific Image in Post-Enlightenment Life-Science (with S. Normandin, Springer, 2013), Brain Theory (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), Philosophy of Biology before Biology (with C. Bognon-Kuss, Routledge,

Description:
Cover -- Half Title -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Table of Contents -- Notes on Contributors -- Acknowledgements -- Introduction: New Materialism: Looking Forward, Looking Back -- Novelty: The Status of History -- Materiality: Science and Ontology -- Politics: Normativity and Political Theory -
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