Onto-Cartography

Levi R. Bryant is Professor of Philosophy at Collin College outside of Dallas, Texas. He is the author of Difference and Givenness: Deleuze’s Transcendental Empiricism and the Ontology of Immanence (Northwestern University Press, 2008), The Democracy of Objects (Open Humanities Press, 2011), and co-edited The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism (Re.Press, 2011). He has written widely on Lacan, Deleuze, Badiou, Žižek, speculative realism, and object-oriented ontology.

• Acknowledgments; Introduction: For a Renewal of Materialism; Part I. Machines; 1. Towards a Posthuman Media Ecology; 1.1. Common Prejudices About Machines; 1.2. Varieties of Machines; 1.3. Posthuman Media Ecology; 2. What is a Machine?; 2.1. Machines Operate; 2.2. Machines are Split Between Their Powers and Products; 2.3. Machines are Binary Machines: Trans-Corporeality; 3. Alien Phenomenology; 3.1. Machines are Structurally Open and Operationally Closed; 3.2. Alien Phenomenology, Second-Order Observation, and Post-Vitalist Ethology; 4. Machinic Assemblages and Entropy; 4.1. Machinic Assemblages; 4.2. Assemblages and Individuals; 4.3. Extended Minds and Bodies; 4.4. Entropy; Part II: Worlds; 5.; The Structure of Worlds; 5.1. Ecologies of Worlds; 5.2. Content and Expression; 6. Topologies of Time and Space; 6.1. Space; 6.2. Time; 6.3. Overdetermination; 7. Gravity; 7.1. The Gravity of Things; 7.2. Gravitational Relations Between Machines: The Objects; 7.3. Subjects, Quasi-Objects, and Catalysis; 7.4. Happenings and Events; 8. Earth, Maps, and Practices; 8.1. Geophilosophy: A Revised Concept of Nature; 8.2. The Three Dimensions of Geophilosophy: Cartography, Deconstruction, and Terraformation; Conclusion; References.

This book finally rescues materialism from the dilution of social historical theory. But rather than rejecting the lessons of Marxism, Bryant substantially extends the material underpinnings of life. Lucid, far-reaching, and urgent, Onto-Cartographies is the book many object-oriented ontology skeptics have been waiting for.