Embodied Experience shows how literature reveals and heals binary structures which debase women and matter. Its ethical materialism affirms that literary belongings matter, and that it matters when characters sensuously connect to these things and to the knowledge they harbor. Delving into literature’s thing-life archaeologically, it finds characters digging deep into things, finding them radiant and baffling – only to begin again: this is the fluid story of belonging with. In quarrying things, the book benefits from Spinoza’s Ethics, especially his idea that there is joy in activity and that, in striving to live, one lives virtuously. Thus, female characters who embrace their bodies and mind as one also claim the right to vitality and ethics without having to sacrifice energy and volition. These archaeological journeys highlight how the authors discussed themselves initiate a theory and praxis of human–nonhuman camaraderie that embodies belonging with, and Embodied Experience suggests that readers should emulate them in discovering these prismatic interrelations.

Through close analyses of a wide range of Minoan animalian things, we have explored the specificity of their involvements in the experiences of people, and how those engagements contributed to the unique character of sociocultural life in the Aegean, on various levels. Here we draw out key points from across the foregoing analyses. Special attention has come to the objects’ inter-corporeal relationships with living humans and the connections that would have been realized through the objects’ particular qualities—connections with other animals, things, and spaces. Such relations were afforded through different dynamics, including bodily juxtaposition, cultivation of formal assonance, the sharing of specific features (e.g., a forward gaze), and embodiment with the same substances, as well as through similarities in size, composition (e.g., in friezes), and contextualization. Moreover, by working beyond an implicit focus on the design of the objects, to instead emphasize people’s actual experiences with them, we have opened the space for appreciating how both intended and unintended associations involving these complex things were in play together. We should view these not as alternative lenses on the objects, but as forces working concurrently, and upon one another, in the creative realizations that the animalian objects were.

The sociocultural spaces of the “Minoan” Aegean were teeming with animal bodies. Many of these animals were alive, but many were not—and never had been; the latter are our focus here. Realized across a range of media, such as zoomorphic vessels, frescoes, and seal stones, animals’ bodies took on a rich diversity of material and spatial qualities that could afford distinctive interactive experiences that the notion of “representations” fails to capture. By recognizing both biological and fabricated entities as real embodiments of animals, which could coexist and interact in Aegean spaces, the nature of our discussion changes. We see that the dynamics of representation were caught up in a much wider field of relationships involving these crafted bodies, which characterized their engagements with people. Doing so moves us beyond questions of signification and intentional design, and toward a fuller recognition of people’s actual experiences of animalian bodies. Looking closely at a variety of venues, ranging from palatial courts to a modest house bench, our focus thus can turn to how the world of animalian things was a crucial part of social life in Aegean spaces, and how direct interactions with these other animal bodies were central, yet often overlooked and minimized, components of human relations with nonhuman beasts.

This chapter proposes that Louis Zukofsky’s ongoing work on his long poem “A” was animated by a strong investment in restoring a sense of language’s historical and material situatedness – its social ontology – as a means of combatting what Zukofsky and other contemporary writers saw as its vulgarization within an emerging commodity culture. I argue that in the eighth and ninth sections of “A,” written between mid 1935 and early 1940, Zukofsky equates labor and language, revealing both to be historically contingent and socially produced. I begin the chapter by returning to the debate between Zukofsky and Ezra Pound over the concept of the commodity to reveal an under-discussed aspect of their quarrel, namely its basis in the two poets’ attitudes concerning language’s relation to materiality. I then move on to align the treatment of the commodity in “A”-8 and (the first half of) “A”-9, an often-discussed aspect of these sections, with their seldom noted but equally important thematization of language. Focusing on the equivalences the poem draws between labor and language, I claim that the project of restoring both to their concrete historical conditions of social production furnishes a key to reading Zukofsky’s long poem.

This essay explores the spectacle cast of race in nineteenth-century American literature and culture by way of highlighting an impulse in white writing to represent black figures according to a cultural materialism rooted in the invention of the daguerreotype in 1839. Specifically, it explores the cultural force of daguerreotypy on nineteenth-century US literary and visual portrait cultures. Taking Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin for its touchstone text, “The Man That Was a Thing” argues that under the sway of visual portrait making on the unconscious of US law and literature, the black slave subject like Uncle Tom was portrayed not so much as a person debased into property (as we routinely imagine) so much as living property, a half-thing, made to seem alternately like a person in the sentimental interests of (white) democratic thought. In other words, in Stowe, both the doubly literary and juridical effects of racialized vision on the question of human being follow from a strange technology of words and thought in US law that granted the slave two bodies in early American legal history, as it were – one personal, the other thingly.

Maximus the Confessor's theory of the logoi in the Logos applied to human evolution. God's use of material things – such as stones – to bring about the incarnation. Maximus's pregnant mentions of the blood of Christ as the intelligibility of things.

While Aristotle located minerals, metals and other earth matter at the bottom of the hierarchical classification of beings, thus creating an insurmountable gap between the geological and animated ontologies, post-humanist approaches to the inorganic seek to bridge that gap and complicate the Aristotelian hierarchy of beings. Post-humanist approaches to the inorganic include thing-theory, object-oriented ontology, vital materialism and actor-network theory. I zoom onto Catherine Malabou’s concept of plasticity, which she develops in a post-humanist reading of Hegel, and which captures the capacity of organisms and objects to transform their internal parameters in response to the environment. I argue that Malabou’s ‘plasticity’ complicated and subverts the Aristotelian hierarchy of beings. Next, I apply these conceptual insights to ask about the place of non-human agency in collective and traumatic memory; through a close reading of Didi-Huberman’s Bark, I show that materiality and plasticity are aspects of mnemonic affordance

In “Object Studies and Keepsakes, Artifacts, and Ephemera,” Krista Quesenberry explores the fascination with artifacts Ernest Hemingway – often described as “a notorious packrat” – left behind. These keepsakes, which range from guns to family photographs to clothing, make up various formal and informal archives around the world, from the Hemingway Collection at the Kennedy Library to the Finca Vigía in Cuba to the materials stored in Benjamin “Dink” Bruce’s attic in Key West. Drawing from an eclectic range of sources, including not only newspaper stories about these possessions but academic calls for papers, Quesenberry notes how objects are invested with aura and give authenticity to the experience of examining an author’s life. The downside is that desire often leads to unexpected discovery of a new revelation. Quesenberry then examines materiality in Hemingway’s texts, arguing the author’s stylistic fondness for objects is a form of material realism. The essay also discusses several contemporary schools of theory in which analyses of these archives and objects may be analyzed: object theory, object-oriented feminism, material culture, and more.