Homo Natura

Vanessa Lemm is Deputy Vice-Chancellor and Provost and Professor of Political Philosophy at the University of Greenwich. She is an internationally recognised expert on the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche and has published widely on Nietzsche, biopolitics and contemporary political philosophy. She is the author of Nietzsche and the Becoming of Life (Fordham University Press, 2014), Nietzsche’s Animal Philosophy: Culture, Politics and the Animality of the Human Being (Fordham University Press, 2009) and Nietzsche’s Twilight of the Idols (EUP, forthcoming).

In Homo Natura Vanessa Lemm delves into Nietzsche's enigmatic, and often misunderstood, exhoration "to place the human back among the animals." With rigourous scholarship and original analysis, Lemm brings us to an understanding of what "naturalism" this is: not one advancing a biological reductionism. To the contrary, it finds in nature a principle of creativity and generativity that carries a surplus of life over any existing order, so that in returning to nature the human can exceed itself. Among its many merits, Lemm's reinterpretation of the body in Nietzsche's posthumanism offers a provocative reading of the centrality of gender and sexuality to the most radical aspects of his thinking. Homo Natura is a key text for those interested in what Nietzsche's philosophy can offer for contemporary feminism and Anthropocene thought.

• AcknowledgementsAbbreviationsIntroduction: Who Is Homo Natura?1. Kantianism, Naturalism and Philosophical Anthropology2. Humanism beyond Anthropocentrism3. Psychoanalysis and the Deconstruction of Human Nature4. Biopolitics, Sexuality and Social TransformationConclusion: Posthumanism and Community of LifeAppendixReferencesIndex