Toward a Premodern Posthumanism: Anarchic Ontologies of Earthly Life in Early Modern France

Drawing on early modern French thought to free nature and aesthetics from metaphysical humanism

What good is aesthetics in an age of ecological crisis? Toward a Premodern Posthumanism: Anarchic Ontologies of Earthly Life in Early Modern France draws on deconstructive, ecological, and biopolitical theories to interrogate the potentiality that philosophical aesthetics contains for challenging the ontological capture of ＂nature＂ by the human subject. Chad Córdova uncovers in aesthetics something irreducible to the subject: an account of how beings emerge and are interrelated, responsive, and even response-able without reason.

Constructing multitemporal constellations of texts that bring forth the untimely relevance of pre-1800 modes of writing, science, and art, Córdova charts a new, premodern trajectory of posthumanism. This anarchic and atelic ontology, recovered from Kant, becomes the guiding thread for a new trajectory of posthumanist thought. This capacious study traces this trajectory from Aristotle to Heidegger and on to contemporary plant-thinking, circling back through Montaigne, Pascal, Diderot, Rousseau, and others along the way. This is a defense and an illustration of the importance of rereading early modern texts as a means of rethinking nature, art, and humanity in a time when these concepts are in flux and more contentious than ever.

CHAD CÓRDOVA is an assistant professor of French at Cornell University.