Description
Book SynopsisThis volume examines the nature/politics relationship anew in the wake of recent critiques of the category of “nature.” Its essays draw on contemporary and canonical thinkers to reflect on “second nature” as a site or paradigm of political contest and intervene into debates about environmentalism, human rights, and more.
Trade Review"Archer, Ephraim, and Maxwell have compiled a fascinating array of analyses of what Nietzsche termed 'second nature': the agonistic, original attempt to create and recreate the human self. The collection brings together familiar and new voices, each investigating the overlaps and mutual constitutions between nature and culture, human and nonhuman, life and matter. The book leaves us aware of the struggles with the world in which beings of all sorts engage, over the materiality of life, over the situatedness of being, and over the inevitability of death." -- -Kennan Ferguson University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments Introduction: Politics on the Terrain of Second Nature Crina Archer, Laura Ephraim, and Lida Maxwell 1. Necessity and Fortune: Machiavelli's Politics of Nature Yves Winter 2. Burning the Dead and the Ways of Nature Thomas Laqueur 3. Corpses for Kilowatts? Mourning, Justice, Burial, and the Ends of Humanism Bonnie Honig 4. "The Unnatural Growth of the Natural": Reconsidering Nature and Artifi ce in the Context of Biotechnology Ashley Biser 5. Potentialities of Second Nature: Agamben on Human Rights Ayten Gundogdu 6. The Utopian Content of Reifi cation: Adorno's Critical Social Theory of Nature Christopher Buck 7. From Nature to Matter Jane Bennett Notes List of Contributors Index
