What remains of materialism’s subversive potential — i.e., its ties with heresy or atheism and republicanism or communism — and to what extent does this concept still interpellate us politically and philosophically?
As neoliberal policies expanded far beyond the state, their mechanisms of control seeped into the materiality of social reproduction, solidifying a conception of matter as something inert, to be appropriated, manipulated, and exploited. If in this context the subversive nature of a reference to materiality is called into question, it has also provoked new forms of resistance, as well as fundamental reconsiderations of the political implications of the notion of ‘matter’.
Against this background, the aim of this book is to show the diversity within continued engagements with materialism as a central concept for progressive politics, be it in the direction opened up by New Materialism, in renewed forms of Marxist and Spinozist based approaches, or in feminist analyses, each in their own terms, without excluding the possibility of alliances between them.
Finally, this volume insists that the study of materiality and materialist approaches does not amount to a renunciation of philosophy, but rather urges us to broaden the task of philosophical thought in order to reconsider the historical and, in every sense of the word, material situatedness of all philosophical problems. Against a reductive and ahistorical conception of materialism — the straightest way back to ideology —, this book offers an analysis of its diverse emancipatory potentialities.
Table of Contents
I. The Actuality of Spinoza’s Materialism
- Introduction to Part i
- Materialist Variations on Spinoza: Theoretical Alliances and Political Strategies
- Non Defuit Materia: Freedom and Necessity in Spinoza’s Democratic Theory
- Temporality and History in Spinoza: The Refusal of Teleological Thought
- Spinozist Moments in Deleuze: Materialism as Immanence
- Are there One or Two Aleatory Materialisms?
II. The Materiality of the Milieu and the Materialist Education
- Introduction to Part ii
- Language Follows Labour: Nikolai Marr’s Materialist Palaeontology of Speech
- Materialism and Capitalism Today: Zoo-aesthetics and a Critique of the Social Bond after Marcel Mauss and André Leroi-Gourhan
- The Product of Circumstances: Towards a Materialist and Situated Pedagogy
- In the Labyrinth of Emancipation: An Inquiry into the Relationship between Knowledge and Politics
- A Materialist Education: Thinking with Spinoza
III. Critical Materialities in Feminism and New Materialism
- Introduction to Part iii
- Materialism, Matter, Matrix, and Mater: Contesting Notions in Feminist and Gender Studies
- Anarchafeminism & the Ontology of the Transindividual
- Psychodynamism of Individuation and New Materialism: Possible Encounters
- Emergence that Matters and Emergent Irrelevance: On the Political Use of Fundamental Physics
IV. Towards a Renewed Historical Materialism
- Introduction to Part iv
- Materialism against Materialism: Taking up Marx’s Break with Reductionism
- Materialism, Politics, and the History of Philosophy: French, German, and Turkish Materialist Authors in the Nineteenth Century
- The Historicity of Materialism and the Critique of Politics
- On Populist Illusion: Impasses of Political Ontology, or How the Ordinary Matters
- Theory’s Method? Ethnography and Critical Theory
Distribution
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