Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex”

Drawing from the theories of feminist new materialism, this article looks closely at the ways children and things, particularly fabric remnants, work together to coconstruct stories. The data prese...

Vibrant Matter The Intra-Active Role of Objects in the Construction of Young Children’s Literacies

Rabelais and His World.

Doing philosophy means reasoning about questions that are of basic importance to the human experience—questions like, What is a good life? What is reality? How are knowledge and understanding possible? What should we believe? What norms should govern our societies, our relationships, and our activities? Philosophers critically analyze ideas and practices that often are assumed without reflection. Wesleyan’s philosophy faculty draws on multiple traditions of inquiry, offering a wide variety of perspectives and methods for addressing these questions.

What is philosophy

This book is the first monograph on the theme of “new materialism,” an emerging trend in 21st century thought that has already left its mark in such fields as philosophy, cultural theory, feminism, science studies, and the arts. The first part of the book contains elaborate interviews with some of the most prominent new materialist scholars of today: Rosi Braidotti, Manuel DeLanda, Karen Barad, and Quentin Meillassoux. The second part situates the new materialist tradition in contemporary thought by singling out its transversal methodology, its position on sexual differing, and by developing the ethical and political consequences of new materialism.

New Materialism: Interviews & Cartographies

This article centres around three ways in which ‘new materialism’ or ‘neomaterialism’—terms coined by DeLanda and Braidotti in the second half of the 1990s—can be called ‘transversal’ New materialism is a cultural theory that does not privilege culture, but focuses on what Haraway would call ‘naturecultures’ It explores a monist perspective of the human being, disposed of the dualisms that have dominated the humanities until today, by giving special attention to matter, as it has been so much neglected by dualist thought New materialism, a cultural theory inspired by the thoughts of Deleuze, that spurs a renewed interest in philosophers such as Spinoza and Leibniz, shows how cultured humans are always already in nature, and how nature is necessarily cultured, how the mind is always already material, and how matter is necessarily something of the mind New materialism opposes the transcendental and humanist (dualist) traditions that are haunting a cultural theory that is standing on the brink of both th

The Transversality of New Materialism

sauce, and fish fermented with cooked grain (referred to here by its Japanese name, narezushi). Information concerning the dietary role of fermented fish products in East Asia is relatively limited, and the social and cultural significance of fermented fish products is mentioned only in passing.2 In short, this is a solid source on the availability and processing of marine and freshwater fish, shellfish, and crustaceans in Northeast and Southeast Asia. It can serve as a valuable reference book not only for seafood or fermentation fanatics but for all scholars interested in East Asian foodways. Like Huang’s monumental volume on fermentation in China,3 this study provides necessary background information that adds a much-needed macroperspective to our understanding of Asian cuisines. Unlike Huang’s volume, which sells for over two hundred dollars, the cost of downloading this e-book is only $5.99. With 97 figures, 21 tables, and 100 color photographs, this is a true bargain.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/gfc.2007.7.2.119

Foodscapes: Towards a Deleuzian Ethics of Consumption

This article discusses the way in which a group of contemporary cultural theorists in whose work we see a ''new materialism'' (a term coined by Braidotti and DeLanda) at work constitutes a philosophy of difference by traversing the dualisms that form the backbone of modernist thought. Continuing the ideas of Lyotard and Deleuze they have set themselves to a rewriting of all possible forms of emanci- pation that are to be found. This rewriting exercise involves a movement in thought that, in the words of Bergson, can be termed ''pushing dualism to an extreme.'' By this movement, Deleuze has stated, ''difference is pushed to the limit,'' that is, using Colebrook's words, ''difference is shown differing.'' The article addresses the ways in which modernity's dualisms (structured by a negative relation between terms) are traversed, and how a new conceptualization, and ontology, of difference (structured by an affirmative relation) comes to be constituted along the way. New materialism leaves behind all prioritizations (implicitly) involved in modern dualist thinking since a difference structured by affirmation does not work with predetermined relations (e.g., between mind and body) nor does it involve a (counter-)hierarchy between terms. The article makes explicit the methodology of the current-day rise of non-dualist thought, both in terms of its non-classificatory mode of (Deleuzian) thinking and in terms of the theory of the time of thought thus effectuated (Lyo- tard's notion of 'rewriting modernity' is not a post-modernism). Throughout the article we will engage with an example in order to demonstrate the ontology that is being practiced following this methodology: How does a new (feminist) materialism traverse the sexual dualisms that structure modernist (feminist) thinking? This example also shows how a feminist post-modernism (found in the canonical work of Butler) has remained dualist, and what makes new materialism ''new.'' Freed from a

Pushing dualism to an extreme: On the philosophical impetus of a new materialism

The enduring effects of the March 2011 tsunami and nuclear meltdown at the Fukushima Dai-ichi Nuclear Power Station in Japan are explored in this paper through the notions of “geo-trauma” in the authors’ work and geophilosophy in Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy. At the fulcrum of the 2011 global disaster was the nuclear meltdown and the emittance of radioactive material such as Caesium-137 and Strontium-90. This event mattered and matters, dispersing and deterritorializing organic, non-organic, and anorganic life in all of its articulations. In the wake of the singularity of Fukushima and the Anthropocene epoch more generally, it is timely to ruminate upon in what way this event as a futural wave makes “us” as the present generation both responsible for and part of the ongoing Fukushima meltdown. The questions that Fukushima provokes are not about the specific clean-up operation and environmental impacts around the plant, but more about how we can understand Fukushima as an event in nuclear history, or a singularity of “geo-trauma.” The folly of Fukushima and its aftermath, points to something fundamental about the Anthropocene, in the sense that the interconnected patterning that one may derive from the site of the disaster, gives new life to understanding the darker/non-human sides of ecology, the media, the unconscious, contamination, and space. The posthumanism of Deleuze and Guattari combined with the extinctional impetus of the Anthropocene will drive this analysis forward in terms of uncovering new forms of understanding about the Earth, World, territory, land, and Nature.

Rick Dolphijn

Papers

New Materialism: Interviews & Cartographies

The Transversality of New Materialism

Foodscapes: Towards a Deleuzian Ethics of Consumption

Pushing dualism to an extreme: On the philosophical impetus of a new materialism

Fukushima : The Geo-Trauma of a Futural Wave