Vital Reenchantments: Biophilia, Gaia, Cosmos, and the Affectively Ecological (original) (raw)

It is in this book vital reenchantments nect living beings to the concrete matter of which these bodies were composed. " 10 The second, according to Mitchell, occurred at the turn of the following century and might be associated with neo-vitalists such as Hans Driesch, as well as "life philosophers" such as Nietzsche, Scheler, and Bergson. 11 The final wave, which began towards the end of the twentieth century, he refers to as "the vital turn. " This period is characterized by increasing numbers of philosophers, literary scholars, and cultural critics growing dissatisfied with "the exclusive emphasis of poststructuralist thought on representations and signs" and attempting to grapple in different ways with the "ontological dimensions of vitality that exceed, or stand as the conditions of possibility of, semiotics and representation. " 12 In this context, Mitchell mentions Giorgio Agamben's "bare life" and Butler's "precarious life, " but one could as easily understand the movement in cultural studies towards ecological questions, first in the form of ecocritical efforts, and now in the development and explosive growth of the ecological humanities, as belonging to this vital turn. This book, as well as the works it investigates and the majority of the theory that it draws upon, is anchored in this third wave but is constantly haunted, particularly in its reliance on Jakob von Uexküll's thought, by the two that came before it. With this long and varied vitalist history in mind, Wilson, Lovelock, and Sagan are, predictably, not the only figures that stand for a kind of "scientific reenchantment, " 13 but they do of