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Life's Returns: Hylozoism, Again

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Matthew A. Taylor
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Abstract

In the midst of the earth's sixth mass extinction, there has been a turn to the redemptive power of biological life in various new materialisms, neoanimisms, neovitalisms, and affirmative biopolitics. In this essay I outline a series of historical and conceptual cautions against staking our lives or others' on such reconsiderations of life. Exploring the fascination with hylozoism (the theory that all matter is alive) in turn-of-the-twentieth-century biology, philosophy, and fiction, I demonstrate a recurring link between theories of universal life and eugenic racism that troubles any attempts to base political and ethical norms on supposedly biological ones. An examination of Mark Twain's “Three Thousand Years among the Microbes” reveals an alternative philosophy of life that uncouples hylozoism and imperialism but does so at the cost of a deadening nihilism. Such examples suggest that we look elsewhere than to life for our animating principles.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 135 , Issue 3 , May 2020 , pp. 474 - 491
Copyright
Copyright © 2020 Matthew A. Taylor

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