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. Contributors Sara Ahmed Jane Bennett Rosi Braidotti Pheng Cheah Rey Chow William E. Connolly Diana Coole Jason Edwards Samantha Frost Elizabeth Grosz Sonia Kruks Melissa A. Orlie
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.
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
Collection of essays that consider the importance of the material body to discussions of political identity and agency
"The essays collected here--authored by leading political theorists, feminist and cultural critics--examine the 'choreographies of becoming' and move beyond constructivism and humanism to track processes of de- and re-materialization. The effect is to scramble habitual categories of thought - active versus passive, inert versus animate, political versus ontological, causality versus spontaneity--and force us to think materiality, not matter for, as the editors put it: 'materiality is always something more than "mere" matter: an excess, force, vitality, relationality or difference that renders matter active, self-creative, productive, unpredictable.'"--Bonnie Honig, author of Emergency Politics: Paradox, Law, Democracy "This is a strong and timely collection, one that could very well direct future discussions of the 'new materialisms' toward an experimental, process-oriented, and politically-engaged 'new ontology.'"--Ellen Rooney, Brown University
