By Veit Braun
Eben Kirksey. Emergent Ecologies. Duke University Press, 2015. 312 pp.
Over the last couple of years, Eben Kirksey has been a major figure in carving out a niche for the fledgling field of multispecies ethnography somewhere in between human–animal studies, feminist science and technology studies, and ecology.
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By Miriam Tola
Antonio Negri. Spinoza for Our Time. Columbia University Press, 2013. xix + 125 pp
Hasana Sharp. Spinoza and the Politics of Renaturalization. University of Chicago Press, 2011. xii + 241 pp.
Nowhere has the capacity of Baruch Spinoza’s philosophy to enable radical politics been asserted more forcefully than in Antonio Negri’s The Savage Anomaly. Published in 1981, the book marked a turning point in Spinoza scholarship by establishing Spinoza as a thinker of revolutionary immanence.
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By Richard Iveson
Élisabeth de Fontenay. Without Offending Humans: A Critique of Animal Rights. Trans. Will Bishop. University of Minnesota Press, 2012. 160pp.
First and foremost, Élisabeth de Fontenay is a philosopher. A philosopher, moreover, who has for decades committed herself to bettering the situation of other animals. I mention this at the outset because, while reading Without Offending Humans, not only did I find it necessary to repeatedly remind myself of this fact, but also, because de Fontenay herself would do well to recall an equal level of commitment on behalf of certain philosophers she deals with here.
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By Stephanie Clare
Diana Coole and Samantha Frost, eds. New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics. Duke University Press, 2010. 336 pp.
If a sentence could summarize Diana Coole and Samantha Frost’s 2010 edited collection, it would be the editors’ claim that “materiality is always something more than ‘mere’ matter: an excess, force, vitality, relationality, or difference that renders matter active, self-creative, productive, unpredictable” (9).
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