The New Politics of Materialism: History, Philosophy, Science

341 Pages·2017·3.29 MB·English

by  Sarah Ellenzweig

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.
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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.
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ISBN: 978-1-138-24074-2 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-26847-7 (ebk)
Typeset in Sabon
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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,