Against New Materialisms

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The first comprehensive scrutiny of the theories associated with new materialisms including speculative realism, new materialism, Object-oriented ontology and actor-network theory. One of the most influential trends in the humanities and social sciences in the last decades, new materialisms embody a critique of modernity and a pledge to regain immediate reality by focusing on the materiality of the world human and nonhuman rather than a post-structuralist focus upon texts. Against New Materialisms examines the theoretical and practical problems connected with discarding modernity and the human subject from a number of interdisciplinary angles: ontology and phenomenology to political theory, mythology and ecology. With contributions from international scholars, including Markus Gabriel, Andrew Cole, and Dipesh Chakrabarty, the essays here challenge the capacity of new materialisms to provide solutions to current international crises, whilst also calling into question what the desire for such theories can tell us about the global situation today.

Author Bio

Benjamin Boysen is author of Nothingness, Negativity, and Nominalism in Shakespeare and Petrarch (2020) and The Ethics of Love: An Essay on James Joyce (2013). Jesper Lundsfryd Rasmussen is Carlsberg Reintegration Fellow in Philosophy at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark.