Description
Book SynopsisA leading feminist theorist rethinks deconstruction and its relevance to nature, embodiment, materialism, and science.
Trade Review“Vicki Kirby’s
Quantum Anthropologies: Life at Large has the capacity to influence a wide range of contemporary scholars ranging from the humanities to the natural sciences and back again. Its elegant yet complex title reveals a lot of what the book has to say.” - Iris van der Tuin,
Somatechnics“To read Vicki Kirby’s work is to encounter feminist theory as if for the first time—the urgency, impact, and sheer pleasure of feminist politics are being written anew.
Quantum Anthropologies deliberates on our most elemental questions (What is the body? What is nature?) and argues brilliantly for ontologies that are systemic patternments of textuality and humanicity. This is a fearless book that will deepen and intensify the kinds of feminist questions that can be asked in the generation ahead.”—
Elizabeth A. Wilson, author of
Psychosomatic: Feminism and the Neurological Body“Vicki Kirby is a leading theorist of new materialist approaches to feminism, and
Quantum Anthropologies is a work of great significance. It is a theoretically sound and robust challenge to our most deeply held ideas about nature versus culture. Provocative, smart, and invigorating, it is a book to think with, one with far-reaching implications for science studies, cultural studies, and poststructuralist, feminist, queer, political, and social theory.”—
Karen Barad, author of
Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning“Vicki Kirby’s
Quantum Anthropologies: Life at Large has the capacity to influence a wide range of contemporary scholars ranging from the humanities to the natural sciences and back again. Its elegant yet complex title reveals a lot of what the book has to say.” -- Iris van der Tuin * Somatechnics *
Table of ContentsPreface:
The Question of Supplementarity - A Quantum Problematic vii
Acknowledgments xiii
1. Anthropology Diffracted:
Originary Humanicity 1
2. Just Figures?:
Forensic Clairvoyance, Mathematics, and the Language Question 22
3. Enumerating Language:
"The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics" 49
4. Natural Convers(at)ions:
Or, What if Culture Was Really Nature All Along? 68
5. (Con)founding "the Human":
Rethinking the Incest taboo 89
6. Culpability and the Double-Cross:
Irigaray with Merleau-Ponty 111
Notes 137
Works Cited 155
Index 163
