The Incorporeal
Ontology, Ethics, and the Limits of Materialism ELIZABETH GROSZ A N E W RESO LUTI O N O F THE MI N D- BO DY P RO B LEM T H AT RECO N C I LES MATERI A LI SM A N D I DEA LI SM.
“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
“What philosophy needs is a move through the middle: an incorporeal materialism or a materialist idealism. This is the important and timely project that Grosz undertakes in this book, with the help of a diversity of judiciously chosen philosophical guides, from the Stoics to Simondon.”
Philosophy has inherited a powerful impulse to embrace either dualism or a reductive monism— either a radical separation of mind and body or the reduction of mind to body. From its origins in the writings of the Stoics, the first thoroughgoing materialists, there is an acknowledgment that no form of materialism can be completely self-inclusive—space, time, the void, and sense are the incorporeal conditions of all that is corporeal or material. In The Incorporeal, Elizabeth Grosz argues that the ideal is inherent in the material and the material in the ideal and, by tracing its development over time, she makes the case that this same idea reasserts itself in different intellectual contexts. Grosz shows not only that idealism and materialism are inextricably linked but that this “belonging together” of the entirety of ideality and the entirety of materiality is not mediated or created by human consciousness. Instead, it is an ontological condition for the development of human consciousness. Grosz draws from Spinoza’s material and ideal concept of substance, Nietzsche’s amor fati, Deleuze and Guattari’s plane of immanence, Simondon’s preindividual, and Raymond Ruyer’s self-survey or autoaffection to show that the world preexists the evolution of the human and that its material and incorporeal forces are the conditions for all forms of life, including the human. A masterwork by an eminent theoretician, The Incorporeal offers profound new insight into the mind-body problem. ELIZABETH GROSZ
—Brian Massumi, University of Montreal
is distinguished 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).
$35.00* / £26.00 cloth 978-0-231-18162-4 $34.99 / £26.00 e-book 978-0-231-54367-5 M A R C H 320 pages / 6" x 9" P H I LO S O P H Y
All Rights: Columbia University Press
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