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Helmuth Plessner

The groundbreaking classic of twentieth-century German philosophy now available in English—with an introduction by J. M. Bernstein.

Helmuth Plessner’s Levels of Organic Life and the Human, draws on phenomenological, biological, and social scientific sources to offer a systematic account of nature, life, and human existence. The book considers non-living nature, plants, non-human animals, and human beings a sequence of increasingly complex modes of boundary dynamics—simply put, interactions between a thing’s insides and the surrounding world. Living things are classed and analyzed by their “positionality, ” or orientation to and within an environment.

According to Plessner’s radical view, the human form of life is excentric—that is, the relation between body and environment is something to which humans themselves are positioned and can take a position. This “excentric positionality” enables human beings to take a stand outside the boundaries of their own body, a possibility with significant implications for knowledge, culture, religion, and technology.

A powerful and sophisticated account of embodiment, the Levels shows, with reference both to science and to philosophy, how life can be seen on its own terms to establish its own boundaries, and how, from the standpoint of life, the human establishes itself in relation to the nonhuman. As such, the book is not merely a historical monument but a source for invigorating a range of vital current conversations around the animal, posthumanism, the material turn, and the biology and sociology of cognition.

Fordham University Press

Forms of Living

Levels of Organic Life and the Human: An Introduction to Philosophical Anthropology

Millay Hyatt

Aurélien Barrau

Jean - Luc Nancy

The eminent philosopher and an emerging astrophysicist return to the ancient art of cosmology in a study of plural worlds and their rebuilding.

Our contemporary challenge, according to Jean-Luc Nancy and Aurelien Barrau, is that a new world has stolen up on us. We no longer live in a world, but in worlds. We do not live in a universe anymore, but rather in a multiverse. We no longer create; we appropriate and montage. And we no longer build sovereign, hierarchical political institutions; we form local assemblies and networks of cross-national assemblages—and we do this at the same time as we form multinational corporations that no longer pay taxes to the state.

Nancy and Barrau invite us on an uncharted walk into barely known worlds when an everyday French idiom, “What’s this world coming to?” is used to question our conventional thinking about the world. We soon find ourselves living among heaps of odd bits and pieces that are amassing without any unifying force or center, living not only in a time of ruin and fragmentation but in one of rebuilding. Astrophysicist Aurelien Barrau articulates a major shift in the paradigm of contemporary physics from a universe to a multiverse. Meanwhile, Jean-Luc Nancy’s essay “Of Struction” is a contemporary comment on the project of deconstruction and French poststructuralist thought. Together Barrau and Nancy argue that contemporary thought has shifted from deconstruction to what they carefully call the struction of dis-order.

What's These Worlds Coming To?

Travis Holloway

Flor Méchain