French Technological Thought and the Nonhuman Turn - (Crosscurrents) by Madeleine Chalmers (Paperback)

About the Book

Uncovers the nonhuman turn's unexpected roots in the avant-gardes and mysticisms of nineteenth-century France.

Book Synopsis

French Technological Thought and the Nonhuman Turn traces a genealogy of thinking and writing about technology, which takes us from the French avant-gardes to the contemporary 'nonhuman turn' in Anglo-American theory via the Surrealists, Gilbert Simondon and Gilles Deleuze.

Tracking the unruly transition from Catholic vocabularies of grace, potentiality and actuality to the modern and contemporary secular lexicon of agency, virtuality and affect, this book explores technology as a source of subject matter and conceptual metaphors, but also probes how ideas and words are modes of technicity through which we shape and reshape the world. Fusing literature, philosophy and theology, it offers readers new contexts - and questions - for the egalitarian ontological commitments of contemporary post- and nonhuman thinking.

Review Quotes

Taking her cue from the work of Bruno Latour and a "nonhuman turn" in cultural studies, she [...] explores a "technologos" running through avant-garde literary, technical, and Catholic thought. Interweaving these three discourses in which "religious and non- religious writers . . . mobilise a particular set of associations when they write about technology" to reveal a "distinctively French school of writing about technics" marks her contribution to historical-cultural scholarship.--Carl Mitcham "Technology and Culture"

Chalmers' masterful work reads a range of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century French writers and thinkers in order to uncover a lineage of technological thought that sheds new light on contemporary non-human theory. Illuminating and insightful, this book is an indispensable contribution to current thinking about technics and the nonhuman turn.--Ian James, University of Cambridge