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 perspective. 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 Laerke, Ian Lowrie, Lenny Moss, Angela Willey, Catherine Wilson, Charles T. Wolfe, Derek Woods, and John H. Zammito.
Sarah Ellenzweig is Associate Professor in the Department of English at Rice University, USA. She is author of The Fringes of Belief: English Literature, Ancient Heresy, and the Politics of Freethinking, 1660-1760 (2008). She has published essays in ELH, Journal of the History of Ideas, Journal of British Studies, and MLQ. She is currently working on a book on the philosophy of motion and the rise of the novel in the eighteenth century.
John H. Zammito is John Antony Weir Professor of History at Rice University, USA. His key publications are: The Genesis of Kant’s Critique of Judgment (1992); Kant, Herder, and the Birth of Anthropology (2002); and A Nice Derangement of Epistemes: Post-Positivism in the Study of Science from Quine to Latour (2004). His current research involves the life sciences in Germany in the 18th century and a monograph entitled The Gestation of German Biology is forthcoming from Chicago.