The Philosophy of Matter: A Meditation

About the Author

Rick Dolphijn is Associate Professor at Utrecht University, the Netherlands; an Honorary Professor at Hong Kong University (2017-2023), Hong Kong; and a Visiting Professor at the University of Barcelona (2019-2020), Spain. He is author of Foodscapes: towards a Deleuzian Ethics of Consumption (2004), New Materialism: Interviews and Cartographies (with Iris van der Tuin) (2012) and edited (with Rosi Braidotti) This Deleuzian Century: Art, Activism, Life (2014) and Philosophy After Nature (2017). His most recent book is Michel Serres and the Crises of the Contemporary (Bloomsbury 2018).

Rosi Braidotti is Distinguished University Professor and founding Director of the Centre for the Humanities at Utrecht University, the Netherlands. She was the Founding Professor of Gender Studies in the Humanities at Utrecht (1988-2005) and the first scientific director of the Netherlands Research School of Women's Studies.

Product Description

The Philosophy of Matter is a journey in thinking through the material fate of the earth itself; its surfaces and undercurrrents, ecologies, environments and irreparable cracks.

With figures such as Spinoza, Gilles Deleuze and Michel Serres as philosophical guides and writings on New Materialism, Posthumanism and Affect Theory as intellectual context, Rick Dolphijn proposes a radical rethinking of some of the basic themes of philosophy: subjectivity, materiality, body (both human and otherwise) and the act of living. This rethink is a work of imagination and meditation in order to conceive of “another earth for another people”. It is a homage to courageous thinking that dares to question the religious, capitalist and humanist realities of the day.

A poetic philosophy of how to live in troubling times when even the earth beneath us feels unstable, Dolphijn offers a way to think about the world with depth, honesty and glimpses of hope.

Review

“It is a rare book that can be, at once, so seismically unsettling and yet so sumptuously composed. The world is breaking, broken. By deftly tracking among and between the cracks that are everywhere – in literature, philosophy, dance, architecture, the earth's surface and substrata – Rick Dolphijn's meditation should be profoundly melancholic (and often it is) but it arrives with the Spinozist grace of a benediction.” ―Gregory J. Seigworth, Professor of Digital Communication & Cultural Studies, Millersville University, USA

“Rather than choosing to be a polarizing book by virtue of veering off to the extremes of posthumanism or humanism, Rick Dolphijn's The Philosophy of Matter is a much more subtle and mindful exercise in ameliorating and mending the great schism between the two. Through a wealth of literary, cultural, and theoretical cases and arguments, Dolphijn advocates a critical humanism that rises from the ashes of the old form of humanism through the combined forces of imagination and critique afforded to it by an account of nature that enriches the human and its interactions with the world of which it is a part. In doing so, such an account of nature actively reinvents not only what the non-human can be but also what we historically consider the human to be.” ―Reza Negarestani, author of "Intelligence and Spirit"