What If Culture Was Nature All Along? - Paperback

by Vicki Kirby (Editor)

Navigational tools towards a non-reductionist naturalism where matter is chameleon and agential

New materialisms argue for a more science-friendly humanities, ventilating questions about methodology and subject matter and the importance of the non-human. However, these new sites of attention - climate, biology, affect, geology, animals and objects - tend to leverage their difference against language and the discursive. Similarly, questions about ontology have come to eclipse, and even eschew, those of epistemology.

While this collection of essays is in kinship with this radical shake-up of how and what we study, the aim is to re-navigate what constitutes materiality. These efforts are encapsulated by a rewriting of the Derridean axiom, 'there is no outside text' as 'there is no outside nature.' What if nature has always been literate, numerate, social? And what happens to 'the human' if its exceptional identity and status is conceded quantum, non-local and ecological implication?

Front Jacket

'Vicki Kirby has already produced an impressive corpus on the relations among life, matter and inscription. This new volume takes her unique and formidable mode of argument to a new level. For Kirby, both our conceptions of nature/culture and our notion of "turns"  back to reality, materialism or life  require a more complex and intellectually more generous approach to relations and mediations. Drawing powerfully from recent work in feminist and critical theory this book will redefine the ways in which we think about life, the human and the posthuman.' Claire Colebrook, Penn State University Navigational tools towards a non-reductionist naturalism where matter is chameleon and agential New materialisms argue for a more science friendly humanities, ventilating questions about methodology and subject matter and the importance of the non-human. However, these new sites of attention - climate, biology, affect, geology, animals and objects - tend to leverage their difference against language and the discursive. Similarly, questions about ontology have come to eclipse, and even eschew, those of epistemology. While this collection of essays is in kinship with this radical shake-up of how and what we study, the aim is to re-navigate what constitutes materiality. These efforts are encapsulated by a rewriting of the Derridean axiom, 'there is no outside text' as 'there is no outside nature'. What if nature has always been literate, numerate, social? And what happens to 'the human' if its exceptional identity and status is conceded quantum, non-local and ecological implication? Vicki Kirby is Professor of Sociology at The University of New South Wales, Australia. Cover design: [EUP logo] edinburghuniversitypress.com ISBN 978-1-4744-1929-1 Barcode

Author Biography

Vicki Kirby is Professor of Sociology in the School of Social Sciences, The University of New South Wales. The motivating question in her research is the riddle of the nature/culture division because so many political and ethical evaluations and decisions are configured in terms of this opposition. Her books include Quantum Anthropologies: Life at Large (Duke 2011); Judith Butler: Live Theory (Continuum 2006) and Telling Flesh: The Substance of the Corporeal (1997).