The New Materialism

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

Guiding the reader through both theory and application, Fox and Alldred explore the varied uses of "new materialism", a key emerging trend in 21st century thought, in the practice of doing sociology today.

"Following Vattimo's postmodern philosophy, Badiou's postmetaphysical ontology, and i ek's revolutionary style, the authors of this marvelous book invites us to reactivate our politics of resistance against our greatest enemy: corporate capitalism. The best solution to the ecological, energy, and financial crisis corporate capitalism has created, as Crockett Clayton and Jeffrey Robbins suggest, is a new theological materialism where Being is conceived as energy both subjectively and objectively. All my graduate students will have to read this book carefully if they want to become philosophers." - Santiago Zabala, ICREA Research Professor at the University of Barcelona "This is a book of an extraordinary timeliness, written in an accessible and strikingly informative way. It is excellently poised to become a synthetic and agenda setting statement about the implications of a new materialism for the founding of a new radical theology, a new kind of spirituality. I consider this therefore quite a remarkable book which will be influential in ongoing discussions of psychoanalysis, continental philosophy, and theology. Moreover, it will be, quite simply, the best book about spirituality and the new materialism on the market today. While all of the work of the new materialists engage at one level or another the question of a new spirituality, I do not think there is anything comparable in significance to what Crockett and Robbins have provided here." - Ward Blanton, University of Kent "This book will perhaps be most appreciated by the reader with an intuitive cast of mind, able to recognize the force of an argument in its imaginative suggestiveness . . . New Materialism is about energy transformation, we are told, energy which cannot be reduced to matter because it resonates with spirit and life . . . Yet the book strikes a fundamental note of hard reality: 'if we want our civilization to live on earth a little longer we will have to recognize our coexistence with and in earth'." - Christian Ecology Link

Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek have become two of the dominant voices in contemporary philosophy and critical theory. In this book, Geoff Pfeifer offers an in-depth look at their respective views. Using Louis Althusser’s materialism as a starting point—which, as Pfeifer shows, was built partially as a response to the Marxism of the Parti Communiste Français and partially in dialogue with other philosophical movements and intellectual currents of its times—the book looks at the differing ways in which both Badiou’s and Žižek’s work attempt to respond to issues that arise within the Althusserian edifice. Pfeifer argues here that, ultimately, Žižek’s materialism succeeds in responding to these issues in ways that Badiou’s does not. In building this argument, Pfeifer engages not only with the work of Althusser, Badiou, and Žižek and their intellectual backgrounds, but also with much of the contemporary scholarship surrounding these thinkers. As such, Pfeifer’s book is an important addition to the ongoing debates within contemporary critical theory.

The essays in this volume discuss the various approaches to New Materialism in Sociology and Philosophy. They raise the questions of what New Materialism consists of and whether it in fact should be considered a radical change in Social Theory. Are the ideas of a “material turn”, as the theory is formulated and in its assumptions, foreshadowed by the classical philosophies of Spinoza and Tarde? Do these new approaches bring substantially new perspectives to Social Theory? A further goal of these essays is to formulate the methodological and methodical consequences for its empirical implementation. What conditions must an ethnography of things fulfill if it is to be sufficient? Which participant objects and bodies do the approaches of the various social theories and methodologies include or exclude?

Honourable Mention, ICQI 2022 Outstanding Qualitative Book Award Entanglement in the World’s Becoming and the Doing of New Materialist Inquiry explores new materialist concepts and the ways in which they provoke an opening up of thought about being human, and about being more-than-human. The more-than-human refers, here, to the world that we are of – a world that includes humans, who are emergent and permeable, and all of the animal and earth others they intra-act with. It explores how we affect those others and are affected. This book engages intimately in encounters of various kinds, some drawn from the author’s everyday life, some from the research projects she has engaged in over several decades, and some from others’ research. It works at the interface of living- and writing-as-inquiry, delving into the rich seam of conceptual possibilities opened up by Deleuze and Guattari, and Barad, and by new materialist inquiry more broadly. It brings not just words to the task, but also art, photopraphs, movement, memories, bodies, sound, touch, things. It delves into the ways in which the entangled dynamics of social, material and semiotic flows and forces make up the diffractive movements through which life emerges, assembles itself, and endures. New materialist concepts, as they are explored here, offer new and emergent approaches to life itself, and to ways in which we might research our lives as they are intricately enfolded in the life of the earth.

In this groundbreaking volume, theologians and scholars of religion criticize and refine new materialist views, to advance debate about the role of religious experience in social and political change.