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Nature as Event

The Lure of the Possible

Didier Debaise author Michael Halewood translator

Format:Hardback

Publisher:Duke University Press

Published:6th Oct '17

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Nature as Event cover

We have entered a new era of nature. What remains of the frontiers of modern thought that divided the living from the inert, subjectivity from objectivity, the apparent from the real, value from fact, and the human from the nonhuman? Can the great oppositions that presided over the modern invention of nature still claim any cogency? In Nature as Event, Didier Debaise shows how new narratives and cosmologies are necessary to rearticulate that which until now had been separated. Following William James and Alfred North Whitehead, Debaise presents a pluralistic approach to nature. What would happen if we attributed subjectivity and potential to all beings, human and nonhuman? Why should we not consider aesthetics and affect as the fabric that binds all existence? And what if the senses of importance and value were no longer understood to be exclusively limited to the human?

“The takeaway of Debaise’s careful analysis is a robust and persuasive understanding of the ontology of affect, and affect as valuation–the feeling of the world in its allness and being moved by it according to what is of interest and importance to the societies we are and are becoming.” -- M. Gail Hamner * affecognitive *

"As Debaise puts it: 'What is needed is a philosophy that, in its very form, its ambition and its manners of relating to things, can grant due importance to the deeply plural experience of nature.' This is the philosophy to which Debaise has opened us in his reading of Whitehead."

-- Patricia Ticineto Clough * Critical Inquiry *

ISBN: 9780822369332

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: 272g

112 pages