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All Things Are Like a Horse, or Radical Posthumanism: A Daoist Ethics for the Anthropocene and Beyond
Abstract
This article explores how Chinese Daoist thought can address the need of an ethics that can cope with “the Anthropocene.” It explores the similarities between Daoist thought and posthumanist theories which arose partially as a response to the challenges of the Anthropocene. And it examines how Daoist thought can radicalize posthumanist thinking by means of an ethics based on a genuinely flat ontology that treats all things, human and nonhuman, as equal.
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Gathers 20 of Smith's new and classic essays into one volume for the first time. Combining his most important pieces over the last 15 years along with two completely new essays, 'On the Becoming of Concepts' and 'The Idea of the Open', this volume is Smith's definitive treatise on Deleuze. The four sections cover Deleuze's use of the history of philosophy, his philosophical system, several Deleuzian concepts and his position within contemporary philosophy. Smith's essays are frequent references for students and scholars working on Deleuze. Several of the articles have already become touchstones in the field, notably those on Alain Badiou and Jacques Derrida. For anyone interested in Deleuze's philosophy, this book is not to be missed. Key features. • The first book written by Daniel W. Smith, one of the world's leading commentators on Deleuze • Focuses exclusively on the philosophical themes of Deleuze's work, setting it apart from other works on Deleuze and making it an essential collection for philosophers working on Deleuze.
This book is the first general book to look at the current philosophical trend known as Speculative Realism. It also compares this philosophy to the work of early-twentieth-century philosopher Alfred North Whitehead. Speculative Realism insists upon the actuality of things or objects apart from the ways that our own (human) minds relate to them and understand them; it is thus part of what has been called the Nonhuman Turn in recent thought. The book gives an explication of the main tenets of Speculative Realism, and engages in close examination of several of its main figures: most notably, Graham Harman and Quentin Meillassoux. It juxtaposes their thought to that of Whitehead, who anticipated many Speculative Realist ideas, but gives them a very different focus. In the course of this discussion, the book also touches upon other philosophical themes of contemporary concern: panpsychism (the thesis that mentality is incipient in all entities), ecological thought (increasingly necessary in this time of crisis), and aesthetics (which is presented as not merely a human concern). The book serves both as an overall introduction to Speculative Realism, for those who have not encountered it previously, and as a series of arguments within Speculative Realism. It will be of interest to an interdisciplinary academic and extra-academic audience; particularly to those in the fields of literature, continental philosophy, post-structuralist theory, art and architecture, and environmental studies.
In the midst of the earth's sixth mass extinction, there has been a turn to the redemptive power of biological life in various new materialisms, neoanimisms, neovitalisms, and affirmative biopolitics. In this essay I outline a series of historical and conceptual cautions against staking our lives or others' on such reconsiderations of life. Exploring the fascination with hylozoism (the theory that all matter is alive) in turn-of-the-twentieth-century biology, philosophy, and fiction, I demonstrate a recurring link between theories of universal life and eugenic racism that troubles any attempts to base political and ethical norms on supposedly biological ones. An examination of Mark Twain's “Three Thousand Years among the Microbes” reveals an alternative philosophy of life that uncouples hylozoism and imperialism but does so at the cost of a deadening nihilism. Such examples suggest that we look elsewhere than to life for our animating principles.
Addressing the essential question of the relationship between ethics and aesthetics in Deleuze's philosophy this book provides clear indications of the practical implications of Deleuze's approach to the arts through detailed analyses of the ethical dimension of artistic activity in literature, music, and film. Bogue examines Deleuze's "transverse way" of interrelating the ethical and the aesthetic, the transverse way being both a mode of thought and a practice of living. Among the issues examined are those of the relationship of music to literature, the political vocation of the arts, violence in popular music, the ethics and aesthetics of education, the use of music and sound in film, the role of the visual in literary invention, the function of the arts in cross cultural interactions, and the future of Deleuzian analysis as a means of forming an open, reciprocally self-constituting, transcultural global culture.
In Vibrant Matter the political theorist Jane Bennett, renowned for her work on nature, ethics, and affect, shifts her focus from the human experience of things to things themselves. Bennett argues that political theory needs to do a better job of recognizing the active participation of nonhuman forces in events. Toward that end, she theorizes a “vital materiality” that runs through and across bodies, both human and nonhuman. Bennett explores how political analyses of public events might change were we to acknowledge that agency always emerges as theeffect of ad hoc configurations of human and nonhuman forces. She suggests that recognizing that agency is distributed this way, and is not solely the province of humans, might spur the cultivation of a more responsible, ecologically sound politics: a politics less devoted to blaming and condemning individuals than to discerning the web of forces affecting situations and events.
Bennett examines the political and theoretical implications of vital materialism through extended discussions of commonplace things and physical phenomena including stem cells, fish oils, electricity, metal, and trash. She reflects on the vital power of material formations such as landfills, which generate lively streams of chemicals, and omega-3 fatty acids, which can transform brain chemistry and mood. Along the way, she engages with the concepts and claims of Spinoza, Nietzsche, Thoreau, Darwin, Adorno, and Deleuze, disclosing a long history of thinking about vibrant matter in Western philosophy, including attempts by Kant, Bergson, and the embryologist Hans Driesch to name the “vital force” inherent in material forms. Bennett concludes by sketching the contours of a “green materialist” ecophilosophy.
Translated and with an Introduction by Daniel W. Smith Afterword by Tom Conley Gilles Deleuze had several paintings by Francis Bacon hanging in his Paris apartment, and the painterâs method and style as well as his motifs of seriality, difference, and repetition influenced Deleuzeâs work. This first English translation shows us one of the most original and important French philosophers of the twentieth century in intimate confrontation with one of that centuryâs most original and important painters. In considering Bacon, Deleuze offers implicit and explicit insights into the origins and development of his own philosophical and aesthetic ideas, ideas that represent a turning point in his intellectual trajectory. First published in French in 1981, Francis Bacon has come to be recognized as one of Deleuzeâs most significant texts in aesthetics. Anticipating his work on cinema, the baroque, and literary criticism, the book can be read not only as a study of Baconâs paintings but also as a crucial text within Deleuzeâs broader philosophy of art. In it, Deleuze creates a series of philosophical concepts, each of which relates to a particular aspect of Baconâs paintings but at the same time finds a place in the âgeneral logic of sensation.â Illuminating Baconâs paintings, the nonrational logic of sensation, and the act of painting itself, this workâpresented in lucid and nuanced translationâalso points beyond painting toward connections with other arts such as music, cinema, and literature. Francis Bacon is an indispensable entry point into the conceptual proliferation of Deleuzeâs philosophy as a whole. Gilles Deleuze (1925â1995) was professor of philosophy at the University of Paris, VincennesâSt. Denis. He coauthored Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus with Félix Guattari. These works, as well as Cinema 1, Cinema 2, The Fold, Proust and Signs, and others, are published in English by Minnesota. Daniel W. Smith teaches in the Department of Philosophy at Purdue University.
Transversally Yours: Deleuzian Love and Daoist Qing”. Deleuze and the Humanities: East and West
- S H Liao
Becoming Butterfly: Power of the False, Crystal Image and (Daoist) Onto-Aesthetics
- S H Liao
The Logic of Sense. Translated by Mark Lester with Charles Stivale
- G Deleuze