Incorporeal

Elizabeth Grosz is the Jean Fox O'Barr Professor in the Programs in Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies and Literature at Duke University. She is the author of Chaos, Territory, Art: Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth (Columbia, 2008).

The Incorporeal might seem to be a departure for Elizabeth Grosz, whose work has provided one of the most profound and sustained theorizations of matter, embodiment and sexual difference. Rather than a refusal of corporeal feminism, this book is a powerful exploration of corporeality and its possibilities. A remarkable and groundbreaking work, The Incorporeal intensifies Grosz's already complex and nuanced account of bodies and difference: incorporeality is not to be equated with mind, ideality or the disembodied. It is, rather, part of the volatility that Grosz has always discerned in bodies, human and nonhuman. -- Claire Colebrook, Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of English, Pennsylvania State University In this new book, Elizabeth Grosz continues her investigations of role of the body in thinking in art and science, as in politics and philosophy. Through a fresh engagement with the work of Deleuze and the thinkers he admired, she extracts a vital new ethics, itself part of a philosophy of nature beyond the limits of 'the new materialism'. A stimulating and rigorous journey towards a new philosophy for our times. -- John Rajchman, author of The Deleuze Connections In this rich and deeply rewarding book, Elizabeth Grosz traces the hidden genealogy-centered on but not reducible to Gilles Deleuze-of a philosophy that makes room for both body and mind, without reductionism, but also without mysticism. -- Steven Shaviro, DeRoy Professor of English, Wayne State University Philosophy, and in its wake cultural theory, has long made periodic pendulum swings between two poles, the materialist and the idealist. What is needed is a move through the middle: an incorporeal materialism, or a materialist idealism. This is the important and timely project Elizabeth Grosz undertakes in this book, with the help of judiciously chosen philosophical guides, from the Stoics to Simondon. -- Brian Massumi, University of Montreal This is a bold, brilliant, and fascinating study of an alternative philosophical tradition. The treatments of Simondon and Ruyer are especially welcome, and a new and highly challenging conception of materialism is offered. -- Keith Ansell-Pearson, University of Warwick

• Acknowledgments List of Abbreviations Introduction 1. The Stoics, Materialism, and the Incorporeal 2. Spinoza, Substance, and Attributes 3. Nietzsche and Amor Fati 4. Deleuze and the Plane of Immanence 5. Simondon and the Preindividual 6. Ruyer and an Embryogenesis of the World Conclusion Notes Bibliography Index