New Materialisms

Diana Coole is Professor of Political and Social Theory at Birkbeck College, University of London, England. She is the author, most recently, of Merleau-Ponty and Modern Politics after Anti-Humanism. She is a Leverhulme Research Fellow, 2010-13. Samantha Frost is Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science, the Gender and Women's Studies Program, and the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She is the author of Lessons from a Materialist Thinker: Hobbesian Reflections on Ethics and Politics.

Acknowledgments ix Introducing the New Materialisms / Diana Coole and Samantha Frost 1 The Force of Materiality A Vitalist Stopover on the Way to a New Materialism / Jane Bennett 47 Nondialectical Materialism / Pheng Cheah 70 The Inertia of Matter and the Generativity of Flesh / Diana Coole 92 Impersonal Matter / Melissa A. Orlie 116 Political Matters Feminism, Materialism, and Freedom / Elizabeth Grosz 139 Fear and the Illusion of Autonomy / Samantha Frost 158 Materialities of Experience / William E. Connolly 178 The Politics of "Life Itself" and New Ways of Dying / Rosi Braidotti 201 Economies of Disruption The Elusive Material: What the Dog Doesn't Understand / Rey Chow 221 Orientations Matter / Sara Ahmed 234 Simon de Beauvoir: Engaging Discrepant Materialisms / Sonia Kruks 258 The Materialism of Historical Materialism / Jason Edwards 281 Bibliography 299 Contributors 319 Index 323

"The essays collected here--authored by leading political theorists, feminist and cultural critics--examine the 'choreographies of becoming' and move beyond constructivism and humanism to track processes of de- and re-materialization. The effect is to scramble habitual categories of thought - active versus passive, inert versus animate, political versus ontological, causality versus spontaneity--and force us to think materiality, not matter for, as the editors put it: 'materiality is always something more than "mere" matter: an excess, force, vitality, relationality or difference that renders matter active, self-creative, productive, unpredictable.'"--Bonnie Honig, author of Emergency Politics: Paradox, Law, Democracy "This is a strong and timely collection, one that could very well direct future discussions of the 'new materialisms' toward an experimental, process-oriented, and politically-engaged 'new ontology.'"--Ellen Rooney, Brown University