The Philosophy of Matter: A Meditation

by Rick Dolphijn

Overview

The Philosophy of Matter is a journey in thinking through the material fate of the earth itself; its surfaces and undercurrrents, ecologies, environments and irreparable cracks.

With figures such as Spinoza, Gilles Deleuze and Michel Serres as philosophical guides and writings on New Materialism, Posthumanism and Affect Theory as intellectual context, Rick Dolphijn proposes a radical rethinking of some of the basic themes of philosophy: subjectivity, materiality, body (both human and otherwise) and the act of living. This rethink is a work of imagination and meditation in order to conceive of “another earth for another people”. It is a homage to courageous thinking that dares to question the religious, capitalist and humanist realities of the day.

A poetic philosophy of how to live in troubling times when even the earth beneath us feels unstable, Dolphijn offers a way to think about the world with depth, honesty and glimpses of hope.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781350211926
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Publishing
Publication date:	07/15/2021
Series:	Theory in the New Humanities
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	176
File size:	572 KB

About the Author

Rick Dolphijn is Associate Professor at Utrecht University, the Netherlands; an Honorary Professor at Hong Kong University (2017-2023), Hong Kong; and a Visiting Professor at the University of Barcelona (2019-2020), Spain. He is author of Foodscapes: towards a Deleuzian Ethics of Consumption (2004), New Materialism: Interviews and Cartographies (with Iris van der Tuin) (2012) and edited (with Rosi Braidotti) This Deleuzian Century: Art, Activism, Life (2014) and Philosophy After Nature (2017). His most recent book is Michel Serres and the Crises of the Contemporary (Bloomsbury 2018).
Rick Dolphijn is Associate Professor at Utrecht University, the Netherlands; an Honorary Professor at Hong Kong University (2017-2023), Hong Kong; and a Visiting Professor at the University of Barcelona (2019-2020), Spain. He is author of Foodscapes: towards a Deleuzian Ethics of Consumption (2004), New Materialism: Interviews and Cartographies (with Iris van der Tuin) (2012) and edited (with Rosi Braidotti) This Deleuzian Century: Art, Activism, Life (2014) and Philosophy After Nature (2017). His most recent book is Michel Serres and the Crises of the Contemporary (Bloomsbury 2018).

Table of Contents

Introduction

Part I
IMAGINING THE UNDERCURRENT
I Don't Know Where This Is Going but I Know Where to Begin...
The History Of Cartesianism Is The History Of Critique
Why our world demands a different form of thinking
Rewriting Humanism
Imagination Is What Matters… It Nurtures Everything

Part II
THIS IS NOT THE EARTH!
The Philosopher is the Geometer
The Deserted…
The Pathologists Of The Earth
Become A Target

Part III
I CAN SEE SOMETHING
I Am Not A Person, Right?
Shadows In Shadows
The Cracks Of The Contemporary
The Wound (I Was Born To Embody)

Part IV
GEOMETER, SHOW ME A NEW EARTH
The Geometer Starts From A Physics Beyond Critique
The Geometers First Axiom: A Body Is That Which Folds
The Geometer Maps That Which Is Savage, Irregular, Alive
The Geometer Maps How Art Objects
Earth… You Are Everywhere

Editorial Reviews

It is a rare book that can be, at once, so seismically unsettling and yet so sumptuously composed. The world is breaking, broken. By deftly tracking among and between the cracks that are everywhere – in literature, philosophy, dance, architecture, the earth's surface and substrata – Rick Dolphijn's meditation should be profoundly melancholic (and often it is) but it arrives with the Spinozist grace of a benediction.” —Gregory J. Seigworth, Professor of Digital Communication & Cultural Studies, Millersville University, USA

“Rather than choosing to be a polarizing book by virtue of veering off to the extremes of posthumanism or humanism, Rick Dolphijn's The Philosophy of Matter is a much more subtle and mindful exercise in ameliorating and mending the great schism between the two. Through a wealth of literary, cultural, and theoretical cases and arguments, Dolphijn advocates a critical humanism that rises from the ashes of the old form of humanism through the combined forces of imagination and critique afforded to it by an account of nature that enriches the human and its interactions with the world of which it is a part. In doing so, such an account of nature actively reinvents not only what the non-human can be but also what we historically consider the human to be.” —Reza Negarestani, author of "Intelligence and Spirit"

From the Publisher