Diana Coole

Samantha Frost

New Materialisms brings into focus and explains the significance of the innovative materialist critiques that are emerging across the social sciences and humanities. By gathering essays that exemplify the new thinking about matter and processes of materialization, this important collection shows how scholars are reworking older materialist traditions, contemporary theoretical debates, and advances in scientific knowledge to address pressing ethical and political challenges. In the introduction, Diana Coole and Samantha Frost highlight common themes among the distinctive critical projects that comprise the new materialisms. The continuities they discern include a posthumanist conception of matter as lively or exhibiting agency, and a reengagement with both the material realities of everyday life and broader geopolitical and socioeconomic structures. Coole and Frost argue that contemporary economic, environmental, geopolitical, and technological developments demand new accounts of nature, agency, and social and political relationships; modes of inquiry that privilege consciousness and subjectivity are not adequate to the task. New materialist philosophies are needed to do justice to the complexities of twenty-first-century biopolitics and political economy, because they raise fundamental questions about the place of embodied humans in a material world and the ways that we produce, reproduce, and consume our material environment. Contributors Sara Ahmed Jane Bennett Rosi Braidotti Pheng Cheah Rey Chow William E. Connolly Diana Coole Jason Edwards Samantha Frost Elizabeth Grosz Sonia Kruks Melissa A. Orlie

Ontology, Agency, and Politics

New Materialisms

In this important new book, Diana Coole shows how existential phenomenology illuminates and enlivens our understanding of politics. Merleau-Ponty's focus on embodied experience allows us to approach political life in a manner that is both critical and engaged. With breadth of vision and penetrating insight, Coole demonstrates that political questions were always central to Merleau-Ponty's philosophical project. Her examination of his complete body of work presents us with a rigorous philosophy that maintains our capacities for agency despite moving beyond a philosophy of the subject. Merleau-Ponty and Modern Politics after Anti-humanism is the first major work on Merleau-Ponty's political philosophy in over two decades. Coole presents his later philosophy of flesh as the outline for a new understanding of the political, which forms the basis for reconsidering humanism after, but also through, anti-humanism. She also shows how Merleau-Ponty's concern with contingency anticipated arguments by thinkers such as Derrida, Foucault and Deleuze, while sustaining a robust sense of politics as the domain of collective life. The result is a philosophical analysis that speaks to our contemporary concerns in which we seek a coherent account of our actions, our environment and ourselves, such that we might become exemplary political actors within a complex and uncertain world.

Merleau-Ponty and Modern Politics After Anti-Humanism

Julia Bryan-Wilson

Easypieces is published for the first New York museum solo presentation of work by Argentine artist Mika Rottenberg (born 1976). Employing absurdist satire to address the critical issues of our time, Rottenberg creates videos and installations that offer subversive allegories for contemporary life. Contributors include Samantha Frost, Associate Professor of Political Science and Gender and Women's Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign; Diana Coole, Professor of Political and Social Theory at the School of Politics of Sociology, Birkbeck, University of London; and Julia Bryan-Wilson, Professor of History of Art at the University of California, Berkeley, in an interview with Rottenberg. The catalog also features an overview by New Museum Curator Margot Norton. Easypieces is part of an ongoing series of solo exhibitions that provide a focused exploration of artists' practices and continues the New Museum's history of giving contemporary artists their first museum presentations in New York.

Easypieces

Mika Rottenberg

Elisabeth Ellis

Kennan Ferguson

Michael T. Gibbons

The Encyclopedia of Political Thought is the most comprehensive and rigorous treatment of significant political thinkers, political theories, concepts, ideas, and schools of thought. Comprises over 900 A-Z entries, including brief definitions, biographies, and major topics, written by a team of 700 contributors from around the world Explores key theories and theorists, including non-western perspectives, in tracing the evolution of political thought from antiquity to the present day Published in association with The Foundations of Political Theory, an organized section of the American Political Science Association 8 Volumes www.encyclopediaofpoliticalthought.com

The Encyclopedia of Political Thought

First published in 2000. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Diana Coole

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