Duke University Press New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics

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 Review " New Materialisms is an extraordinary and in fact interdisciplinary collection in its own right. . . . [T]he work coming out of the material turn is mind-blowing work, both in scholarly and in artistic research, and in art".--Iris van der Tuin "Women's Studies International Forum" "New materialisms offer democratic theory an important opportunity to regard its own parameters and function - what can be hoped for and why. And Coole and Frost's volume offers a new view of the human (and the thing) that are well worth regarding. . . ."--Andrew Poe "Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy" "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" "The essays collected here--authored by leading political theorists and 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. 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 From the Back Cover "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 About the Author 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