Introduction. Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Difference -- Part 1. A Philosophy of Elemental Difference. A revised Irigarayan study of the hierarchy of form and matter, this time without sexual difference -- Performativity and political ecology, matter's politics -- Latour's modern is Fanon's Manichaean -- Part 2. The Climate Of The Body. Sylvia Wynter and the climate of biocentric man -- The problem is the one, the body.
Summary:
"The polis, the philosophical concept according to which there is one complete human form, is to blame for political and ecological crisis. The polis as a philosophical tradition shares the current complex shape of climate change. A certain perfect body figures the denial of matter of the polis. The book presents a philosophy of elemental difference, an affirmation of the singularities of location, movement, living, aging, dying, valuing, in which humans partake. Elemental difference in the polis can be appreciated in the fact that empirical bodily non-identity can be called upon to elevate one group of bodies among the rest. Empirical bodily non-identity is a feature of the original articulation of the polis as a philosophical concept in the work of Aristotle. Sylvia Wynter has argued that the very idea of empirical bodily non-identity begins with the modern science of racial anatomy. She calls this biocentrism. I argue that biocentrism is a feature of the polis, according to which the one complete body was defined by its capacity for disembodied thought. The sciences of racial anatomy are a more explicit commitment to biocentrism, but the ranking of matter with respect to one complete human, a body that is the site of supra-natural thinking, is a practice that has always characterized the polis. In this way, the polis is responsible for both political and ecological hierarchy. It is as responsible for what is euphemistically called climate change as it is for the political hierarchy that constitutes it"-- Provided by publisher.
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