Must a philosophy of life be materialist, and if so, must it also be a philosophy of immanence? In the last twenty years or so there has been a growing trend in continental thought and philosophy and critical theory that has seen a return to the category of immanence. Through consideration of the work of thinkers such as Giorgio Agamben, Catherine Malabou, Francois Laruelle, Gilles Deleuze and others, this collection aims to examine the interplay between the concepts of immanence, materialism and life, particularly as this interplay can highlight new directions for political inquiry. Furthermore, critical reflection on this constellation of concepts could also be instructive for continental philosophy of religion, in which ideas about the divine, embodiment, sexual difference, desire, creation and incarnation are refigured in provocative new ways. The way of immanence, however, is not without its dangers. Indeed, it may be that with its affirmation something of importance is lost to material life. Could it be that the integrity of material things requires a transcendent origin? Precisely what are the metaphysical, political and theological consequences of pursuing a philosophy of immanence in relation to a philosophy of life? This book was originally published as a special issue of Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities.

Must a philosophy of life be materialist, and if so, must it also be a philosophy of immanence? In the last twenty years or so there has been a growing trend in continental thought and philosophy and critical theory that has seen a return to the category of immanence. Through consideration of the work of thinkers such as Giorgio Agamben, Catherine Malabou, Francois Laruelle, Gilles Deleuze and others, this collection aims to examine the interplay between the concepts of immanence, materialism and life, particularly as this interplay can highlight new directions for political inquiry. Furthermore, critical reflection on this constellation of concepts could also be instructive for continental philosophy of religion, in which ideas about the divine, embodiment, sexual difference, desire, creation and incarnation are refigured in provocative new ways. The way of immanence, however, is not without its dangers. Indeed, it may be that with its affirmation something of importance is lost to material life. Could it be that the integrity of material things requires a transcendent origin? Precisely what are the metaphysical, political and theological consequences of pursuing a philosophy of immanence in relation to a philosophy of life? This book was originally published as a special issue of Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities.

Over the last twenty years materialist thinkers in the continental tradition have increasingly emphasized the category of immanence. Yet the turn to immanence has not meant the wholesale rejection of the concept of transcendence, but rather its reconfiguration in immanent or materialist terms: an immanent transcendence. Through an engagement with the work of Deleuze, Irigaray and Adorno, Patrice Haynes examines how the notion of immanent transcendence can help articulate a non-reductive materialism by which to rethink politics, ethics and theology in exciting new ways. However, she argues that contrary to what some might expect, immanent accounts of matter and transcendence are ultimately unable to do justice to material finitude. Indeed, Haynes concludes by suggesting that a theistic understanding of divine transcendence offers ways to affirm fully material immanence, thus pointing towards the idea of a theological materialism.

Discussions of materialism have exploded in recent years. From the speculative realism/materialism of Quentin Meillassoux to the New Materialism of many modern Marxisms, the interest in a return to or rehabilitation of materialism is on the rise. What is not analyzed in many of these discussions, however, is a trenchant methodological and metaphysical problem lying at the basis of any philosophical materialism: if matter is simply that which is other than thought, then how can it be thought without drawing it away from its materiality? On the other hand, if one assumes a direct access to matter, to this other, what are the conditions of that access? Are they material conditions or cognitive (thought) conditions? Does what would present itself immediately present, at the same time, the conditions that allow it to be presented? If not, then we are closer to a theology of matter and further from a philosophical materialism. The Thought of Matter investigates this metaphysical and methodological problem through Aristotle, Marx, Adorno, Althusser, Duns Scotus, Hobbes, and Benjamin in order to show that a philosophical materialism necessarily requires the concepts and tools of thought in order to allow the otherness of matter to emerge in its own materiality.

Globalization and climate weirding are two of the leading phenomena that challenge and change the way we need to think and act within the planetary community. Modern Western understandings of human beings, animals, and the rest of the natural world and the subsequent technologies built on those understandings have thrown us into an array of social and ecological crises with planetary implications. Earthly Things: Immanence, New Materialisms, and Planetary Thinking, argues that more immanent or planetary ways of thinking and acting have great potential for re-thinking human-technology-animal-Earth relationships and for addressing problems of global climate weirding and other forms of ecological degradation. Older and often-marginalized forms of thought from animisms, shamanisms, and other religious traditions are joined by more recent forms of thinking with immanence such as the universe story, process thought, emergence theory, the new materialisms (NM’s), object-oriented ontologies (OOO’s), affect theory, and queer theory. This book maps out some of the connections and differences between immanent frameworks to provide some eco-intellectual commons for thinking within the planetary community, with a particular emphasis on making connections between more recent theories and older ideas of immanence found in many of the world’s religious traditions. The authors in this volume met and worked together over five years, so the resulting volume reveals sustained and multifaceted perspectives on “thinking and acting with the planet.”

Globalization and climate weirding are two of the leading phenomena that challenge and change the way we need to think and act within the planetary community. Modern Western understandings of human beings, animals, and the rest of the natural world and the subsequent technologies built on those understandings have thrown us into an array of social and ecological crises with planetary implications. In Earthly Things: Immanence, New Materialisms, and Planetary Thinking, we argue that more immanent or planetary ways of thinking and acting have great potential for re-thinking human-technology-animal-earth relationships and for addressing problems of global climate weirding and other forms of ecological degradation. Older and often marginalized forms of thought from animisms, shamanisms, and other religious traditions are joined by more recent forms of thinking with immanence such as the universe story, process thought, emergence theory, the new materialisms (NM's), object-oriented ontologies (OOO's), affect theory, and queer theory. This book maps out some of the connections and differences between immanent frameworks to provide some eco-intellectual commons for thinking within the planetary community, with a particular emphasis on making connections between more recent theories and older ideas of immanence found in many of the world's religious traditions. The authors in this volume met and worked together over five years, so the resulting volume reveals sustained and multifaceted perspectives on "thinking and acting with the planet."

Nietzsche and Freud saw Christianity as metaphysical escapism, with Nietzsche calling the religion a "Platonism for the masses" and faulting Paul the apostle for negating more immanent, material modes of thought and political solidarity. Integrating this debate with the philosophies of difference espoused by Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, and Pier Paolo Pasolini, Ward Blanton argues that genealogical interventions into the political economies of Western cultural memory do not go far enough in relation to the imagined founder of Christianity. Blanton challenges the idea of Paulinism as a pop Platonic worldview or form of social control. He unearths in Pauline legacies otherwise repressed resources for new materialist spiritualities and new forms of radical political solidarity, liberating "religion" from inherited interpretive assumptions so philosophical thought can manifest in risky, radical freedom.

This edited collection is a careful assemblage of papers that have contributed to the maturing field within education studies that works with the feminist implications of the theories and methodologies of posthumanism and new materialism – what we have also called elsewhere ‘PhEmaterialism’. The generative questions for this collection are: what if we locate education in doing and becoming rather than being? And, how does associating education with matter, multiplicity and relationality change how we think about agency, ontology and epistemology? This collection foregrounds cutting edge educational research that works to trouble the binaries between theory and methodology. It demonstrates new forms of feminist ethics and response-ability in research practices, and offers some coherence to this new area of research. This volume will provide a vital reference text for educational researchers and scholars interested in this burgeoning area of theoretically informed methodology and methodologically informed theory. The chapters in this book were originally published as articles in Taylor & Francis journals.

Philosophy has inherited a powerful impulse to embrace either dualism or a reductive monism—either a radical separation of mind and body or the reduction of mind to body. But from its origins in the writings of the Stoics, the first thoroughgoing materialists, another view has acknowledged that no forms of materialism can be completely self-inclusive—space, time, the void, and sense are the incorporeal conditions of all that is corporeal or material. In The Incorporeal Elizabeth Grosz argues that the ideal is inherent in the material and the material in the ideal, and, by tracing its development over time, she makes the case that this same idea reasserts itself in different intellectual contexts. Grosz shows that not only are idealism and materialism inextricably linked but that this "belonging together" of the entirety of ideality and the entirety of materiality is not mediated or created by human consciousness. Instead, it is an ontological condition for the development of human consciousness. Grosz draws from Spinoza's material and ideal concept of substance, Nietzsche's amor fati, Deleuze and Guattari's plane of immanence, Simondon's preindividual, and Raymond Ruyer's self-survey or autoaffection to show that the world preexists the evolution of the human and that its material and incorporeal forces are the conditions for all forms of life, human and nonhuman alike. A masterwork by an eminent theoretician, The Incorporeal offers profound new insight into the mind-body problem

‘New materialisms’ refers to a broad, contemporary, and significant movement of thought across the social sciences and cultural studies which attempts to (re)turn to, renew, or create alternative philosophies of matter. Such philosophies spring from multiple sources but are in general an attempt to bring the indissolubility of the social and environmental more forcefully into our analytical frames and modes of inquiry and tackle a perceived over-reliance on discourse and language in the so-called post-modern era of philosophy and social science. This movement in thought is underlaid by, and meets up with, the climate and biodiversity crises and the nature of the human condition (and modes of learning or becoming), within the field of environmental education. This volume brings together academics working at differing intersections of environmental education and new materialisms, highlighting tensions, knots, and lines of flight across and for research, practice, and theory. As such this collection draws on multiple interpretations and streams of thought within new materialisms and demonstrates their significance for those engaging with environmental education policy, practice and research. This book was originally published as a special issue of the journal Environmental Education Research.