Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-jkksz Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-26T07:08:34.895Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Life's Returns: Hylozoism, Again

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Matthew A. Taylor
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

In the midst of the earth's sixth mass extinction, there has been a turn to the redemptive power of biological life in various new materialisms, neoanimisms, neovitalisms, and affirmative biopolitics. In this essay I outline a series of historical and conceptual cautions against staking our lives or others' on such reconsiderations of life. Exploring the fascination with hylozoism (the theory that all matter is alive) in turn-of-the-twentieth-century biology, philosophy, and fiction, I demonstrate a recurring link between theories of universal life and eugenic racism that troubles any attempts to base political and ethical norms on supposedly biological ones. An examination of Mark Twain's “Three Thousand Years among the Microbes” reveals an alternative philosophy of life that uncouples hylozoism and imperialism but does so at the cost of a deadening nihilism. Such examples suggest that we look elsewhere than to life for our animating principles.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 135 , Issue 3 , May 2020 , pp. 474 - 491
Copyright
Copyright © 2020 Matthew A. Taylor

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Works Cited

Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Translated by Heller-Roazen, Daniel, Stanford UP, 1998.Google Scholar
Alaimo, Stacy. “Trans-Corporeal Feminisms and the Ethical Space of Nature.” Alaimo and Hekman, Material Feminisms, pp. 237–64.Google Scholar
Alaimo, Stacy, and Hekman, Susan. “Emerging Models of Materiality in Feminist Theory.” Introduction. Alaimo and Hekman, Material Feminisms, pp. 1–19.Google Scholar
Alaimo, Stacy, and Susan Hekman, editors. Material Feminisms. Indiana UP, 2008.Google Scholar
Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. 2nd ed., U of Chicago P, 1998.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Atkinson, William Walker. Dynamic Thought; or, The Law of Vibrant Energy. Segnogram Publishing, 1906.Google Scholar
Badiou, Alain. The Century. Polity Press, 2007.Google Scholar
Bailey, Alice A. The Consciousness of the Atom. Lucifer Publishing, 1922.Google Scholar
Barad, Karen. “Interview with Karen Barad.” New Materialism: Interviews and Cartographies, edited by Dolphijn, Rick and van der Tuin, Iris, Open Humanities Press, 2012, pp. 48–70.Google Scholar
Barad, Karen. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Duke UP, 2007.Google Scholar
Bastian, Charlton. Evolution and the Origin of Life. Macmillan, 1874.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham: Duke UP, 2010.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bennett, Jane. “A Vitalist Stopover on the Way to a New Materialism.” Coole and Frost, New Materialisms, pp. 47–69.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bergson, Henri. Creative Evolution. Translated by Mitchell, Arthur, Modern Library, 1944.Google Scholar
Bergthaller, Hannes. “Limits of Agency: Notes on the Material Turn from a Systems-Theoretical Perspective.” Iovino and Opperman, pp. 37–50.Google Scholar
Braidotti, Rosa. “The Politics of 'Life Itself and New Ways of Dying.” Coole and Frost, New Materialisms, pp. 201–18.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Breu, Christopher. Insistence of the Material: Literature in the Age of Biopolitics. U of Minnesota P, 2014.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bryant, Levi R. The Democracy of Objects. Open Humanities Press, 2011.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Burroughs, John. The Breath of Life. Houghton Mifflin, 1915.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Burroughs, John. Notes on Walt Whitman, as Poet and Person. J. S. Redfield, 1871.Google Scholar
Butler, Judith. Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? Verso, 2016.Google Scholar
Butler, Samuel. Unconscious Memory. David Bogue, 1880.Google Scholar
Carus, Paul. Fundamental Problems: The Method of Philosophy as a Systematic Arrangement of Knowledge. Open Court Publishing, 1889.Google Scholar
Carus, Paul. “Panpsychism and Panbiotism.” The Monist, Vol. 3, No. 2, Jan. 1893, pp. 234–57.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cheah, Pheng. “Non-dialectical Materialism.” Coole and Frost, New Materialisms, pp. 70–91.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Clare, Stephanie. “On the Politics of ?New Feminist Materialisms.'” Pitts-Taylor, Mattering, pp. 58–72.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Clarke, D. S. Panpsychism and the Religious Attitude. State U of New York P, 2003.Google Scholar
Clarke, D. S. Panpsychism: Past and Recent Selected Readings. State U of New York P, 2004.Google Scholar
Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome. Acknowledgments. Prismatic Ecology: Ecotheory beyond Green, edited by Cohen, , U of Minnesota P, 2013, pp. xiii–xiv.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome. “Storied Matter.” Foreword. Iovino and Opperman, pp. ix-xii.Google Scholar
Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome, and Duckert, Lowell. “Eleven Principles of the Elements.” Introduction. Elemental Ecocriticism: Thinking with Earth, Air, Water, and Fire, edited by Cohen, and Duckert, , U of Minnesota P, 2015, pp. 1–26.Google Scholar
Colebrook, Claire. “On Not Becoming Man: The Materialist Politics of Unactualized Potential.” Alaimo and Hekman, Material Feminisms, pp. 52–84.Google Scholar
Coleman, William. Biology in the Nineteenth Century: Problems of Form, Function, and Transformation. Cambridge UP, 1977.Google Scholar
Coole, Diana. “The Inertia of Matter and the Generativity of Flesh.” Coole and Frost, New Materialisms, pp. 92–115.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Coole, Diana, and Frost, Samantha. “Introducing the New Materialisms.” Coole and Frost, New Materialisms, pp. 1–43.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Coole, Diana, and Samantha Frost, editors. New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics. Duke UP, 2010.Google Scholar
DeLanda, Manuel. A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History. Zone Books, 1997.Google Scholar
Dolphijn, Rick, and van der Tuin, Iris. “Introduction: A New ‘Tradition’ in Thought.” New Materialisms: Interviews and Cartographies, edited by Dolphijn, and Tuin, , Open Humanities Press, 2012, pp. 85–92.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Eimer, G. H. Theodor. Organic Evolution as the Result of the Inheritance of Acquired Characters according to the Laws of Organic Growth. Macmillan, 1890.Google Scholar
Ellis, Havelock. The Task of Social Hygiene. Houghton Mifflin, 1912.Google Scholar
Esposito, Roberto. Communitas: The Origin and Destiny of Community. Translated by Campbell, Timothy, Stanford UP, 2010.Google Scholar
Fangerau, Heiner. “Monism, Racial Hygiene, and National Socialism.” Monism: Science, Philosophy, Religion, and the History of a Worldview, edited by Weir, Todd H., Palgrave Macmillan, 2012, pp. 223–47.Google Scholar
Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. Vintage Books, 1994.Google Scholar
Foucault, Michel. “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–1976. Translated by Macey, David, Picador, 2003.Google Scholar
Frost, Samantha. Biocultural Creatures: Toward a New Theory of the Human. Duke UP, 2016.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gillman, Susan. Blood Talk: American Race Melodrama and the Culture of the Occult. U of Chicago P, 2003.Google Scholar
Gillman, Susan. Dark Twins: Imposture and Identity in Mark Twain's America. U of Chicago P, 1989.Google Scholar
Glaser, Otto C. “Is a Scientific Explanation of Life Possible?” Popular Science Monthly, Vol. 81, July 1912, pp. 78–89.Google Scholar
Grindon, Leo H. Life: Its Nature, Varieties, and Phenomena. 6th ed., J. B. Lippincott, 1875.Google Scholar
Grosz, Elizabeth. The Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution, and the Untimely. Duke UP, 2004.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Haeckel, Ernst. The History of Creation; or, The Development of the Earth and Its Inhabitants by the Action of Natural Causes. Translated by Lankester, E. Ray, D. Appleton, 1880. 2 vols.Google Scholar
Haeckel, Ernst. The Riddle of the Universe at the Close of the Nineteenth Century. Translated by McCabe, Joseph, Harper and Bros., 1905.Google Scholar
Haeckel, Ernst. The Wonders of Life: A Popular Study of Biological Philosophy. Translated by McCabe, Joseph, Harper and Bros., 1904.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Haldane, J. S. The Causes of Evolution. Longmans, Green, 1932.Google Scholar
Haldane, J. S. Mechanism, Life and Personality: An Examination of the Mechanistic Theory of Life and Mind. 2nd ed., John Murray, 1921.Google Scholar
Haldane, J. S. The New Physiology and Other Addresses. Charles Griffin, 1919.Google Scholar
Hall, G. Stanley. “Eugenics: Its Ideals and What It Is Going to Do.” Religious Education, Vol. 6, Apr. 1911, pp. 152–59.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hall, G. Stanley. “From Generation to Generation: With Some Plain Language about Race Suicide and the Instruction of Children during Adolescence.” The American Magazine, Vol. 66, No. 3, July 1908, pp. 249–54.Google Scholar
Hardt, Michael, and Negri, Antonio. Empire. Harvard UP, 2000.Google Scholar
Hardt, Michael, and Negri, Antonio. Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. Penguin Books, 2004.Google Scholar
Hegel, G. W. F. Hegel's Philosophy of Nature, Vol. 3, edited by Petry, M. J., Routledge, 1970.Google Scholar
“Here Is Hylozoism Rampant.” Atlanta Constitution, 4 Feb. 1898, p. 9.Google Scholar
Hertwig, Oscar. The Growth of Biology in the Nineteenth Century, from the Smithsonian Report for 1900. Government Printing Office, 1901.Google Scholar
Hinton, James. Life in Nature. Smith, Elder, 1862.Google Scholar
Holmes, S. J. An Introduction to General Biology. Harcourt, Brace, 1926.Google Scholar
Huffer, Lynne. “Foucault's Fossils: Life Itself and the Return to Nature in Feminist Philosophy.” Anthropocene Feminism, edited by Grusin, Richard, U of Minnesota P, 2017, pp. 65–88.Google Scholar
Hunt, Alastair, and Stephanie Youngblood, editors. Against Life. Northwestern UP, 2016.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
“Intelligent Atoms.” Scientific American Supplement, Vol. 32, no. 830, 1891, pp. 13256–57.Google Scholar
Iovino, Serenella, and Serpil Opperman, editors. Material Ecocriticism. Indiana UP, 2014.Google Scholar
Jackson, Zakiyyah Iman. “Outer Worlds: The Persistence of Race in ‘Movement beyond the Human.‘” GLQ, Vol. 21, nos. 2–3, June 2015, pp. 215–18.Google Scholar
James, William. A Pluralistic Universe. William James: Writings, 1902–1910, Library of America, 1987, pp. 625–819.Google Scholar
James, William. The Principles of Psychology. Vol. 1, Henry Holt, 1890.Google Scholar
Jones, Donna V. The Racial Discourses of Life Philosophy: Négritude, Vitalism, and Modernity. Columbia UP, 2010.Google Scholar
Kant, Immanuel. The Critique of Judgement. Translated by Creed Meredith, James, Clarendon Press, 1952.Google Scholar
Kant, Immanuel. Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science. Kant's Prolegomena and Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science, translated by Belfort Bax, Ernest, George Bell and Sons, 1883, pp. 135–245.Google Scholar
Kirby, Vicki. Foreword. What If Culture Was Nature All Along?, edited by Kirby, , Edinburgh UP, 2017, pp. viii-xii.Google Scholar
Kirby, Vicki. Foreword. Quantum Anthropologies: Life at Large. Duke UP, 2011.Google Scholar
Lamarck, J. B. Zoological Philosophy: An Exposition with Regard to the Natural History of Animals. Translated by Elliot, Hugh, Macmillan, 1914.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Latour, Bruno. We Have Never Been Modern. Translated by Porter, Catherine, Harvard UP, 1993.Google Scholar
Lindborg, Henry J. “A Cosmic Tramp: Samuel Clemens's Three Thousand Years among the Microbes.” American Literature, Vol. 44, No. 4, 1973, pp. 652–57.Google Scholar
Linville, Henry R. The Biology of Man and Other Organisms. Harcourt, Brace, 1923.Google Scholar
Lotze, Hermann. Microcosmus: An Essay Concerning Man and His Relation to the World. Translated by Hamilton, Elizabeth and Constance Jones, E. E., T. and T. Clark, 1885.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Magner, Lois N. A History of the Life Sciences. 3rd ed., Marcel Dekker, 2002.Google Scholar
Mahan, Alfred Thayer. Armaments and Arbitration. Harper and Bros., 1912.Google Scholar
Malabou, Catherine. “One Life Only: Biological Resistance, Political Resistance.” Translated by Carolyn Shread, Critical Inquiry, Vol. 42, No. 3, 2016, pp. 429–38.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mayr, Ernst. The Growth of Biological Thought: Diversity, Evolution, and Inheritance. Belknap Press, 1982.Google Scholar
Mbembe, Achille. “Necropolitics.” Biopolitics: A Reader, edited by Campbell, Timothy and Sitze, Adam, Duke UP, 2013, pp. 161–92.Google Scholar
McDougall, William. The Group Mind. Cambridge UP, 1927.Google Scholar
Mills, Catherine. “Biopolitics and the Concept of Life.” Biopower: Foucault and Beyond, edited by Cisney, Vernon W. and Morar, Nicolae, U of Chicago P, 2016, pp. 82–101.Google Scholar
Morgan, C. Lloyd. Eugenics and Environment. J. Bale, Sons and Danielsson, 1919.Google Scholar
Morgan, C. Lloyd. An Introduction to Comparative Psychology. Walter Scott Publishing, 1903.Google Scholar
Morton, Timothy. The Ecological Thought. Harvard UP, 2010.Google Scholar
Murphy, Michelle. Seizing the Means of Reproduction: Entanglements of Feminism, Health, and Technoscience. Duke UP, 2012.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nägeli, Carl von. A Mechanico-Physiological Theory of Organic Evolution. 2nd ed., Open Court Publishing, 1914.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nealon, Jeffrey T. Plant Theory: Biopower and Vegetable Life. Stanford UP, 2016.Google Scholar
Opperman, Serpil. “From Ecological Postmodernism to Material Ecocriticism: Creative Materiality and Narrative Agency.” Iovino and Opperman, pp. 21–36.Google Scholar
Paulsen, Friedrich. Introduction to Philosophy. 2nd ed., translated by Frank Thilly, Henry Holt, 1895.Google Scholar
Pearson, Karl. National Life from the Standpoint of Science. Adam and Charles Black, 1901.Google Scholar
Pitts-Taylor, Victoria. “Mattering: Feminism, Science, and Corporeal Politics.” Pitts-Taylor, Mattering, pp. 1–20.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pitts-Taylor, Victoria, editor. Mattering: Feminism, Science, and Materialism. New York UP, 2016.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Povinelli, Elizabeth A. Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism. Duke UP, 2016.Google Scholar
Powers, Ron. Mark Twain: A Life. Free Press, 2006.Google Scholar
Puig de la Bellacasa, Maria. Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More than Human Worlds. U of Minnesota P, 2017.Google Scholar
Quirk, Tom. “Mark Twain in Large and Small: The Infinite and the Infinitesimal in Twain's Late Writing.” Constructing Mark Twain: New Directions in Scholarship, edited by Trombley, Laura E. Skandera and Kiskis, Michael J., U of Missouri P, 2001, pp. 191–202.Google Scholar
Richards, Robert J. The Tragic Sense of Life: Ernst Haeckel and the Struggle over Evolutionary Thought. U of Chicago P, 2008.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rose, Nikolas. The Politics of Life Itself: Biomedicine, Power, and Subjectivity in the Twenty-First Century. Princeton UP, 2007.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Roy, Deboleena, and Subramaniam, Banu. “Matter in the Shadows: Feminist New Materialism and the Practices of Colonialism.” Pitts-Taylor, Mattering, pp. 23–42.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Saleeby, C. W. The Methods of Race-Regeneration. Moffat, Yard, 1911.Google Scholar
Saleeby, C. W. Preface. An Ethical System Based on the Laws of Nature, by Deshumbert, Marius, translated by Giles, Lionel, Open Court Publishing, 1917, pp. v–vi.Google Scholar
Saleeby, C. W. “Universal Life.” Harper's Magazine, Vol. 111, June 1905, pp. 571–74.Google Scholar
Schäfer, E. A. Life: Its Nature, Origin and Maintenance. Longmans, Green, 1912.Google ScholarPubMed
Schiller, F. C. S. Riddles of the Sphinx: A Study in the Philosophy of Humanism. Rev. ed., Swan Sonnenschein, 1910.Google Scholar
Schiller, F. C. S. Social Decay and Eugenical Reform. Constable, 1932.Google Scholar
Schiller, F. C. S. Studies in Humanism. Macmillan, 1907.Google Scholar
Schiller, F. C. S. Tantalus; or, The Future of Man. Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1924.Google Scholar
Schopenhauer, Arthur. The World as Will and Representation. Translated by Payne, E. F. J., Dover, 1969. 2 vols.Google Scholar
Schuller, Kyla. The Biopolitics of Feeling: Race, Sex, and Science in the Nineteenth Century. Duke UP, 2018.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Shaviro, Steven. The Universe of Things: On Speculative Realism. U of Minnesota P, 2014.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Skrbina, David. Panpsychism in the West. MIT Press, 2007.Google Scholar
Spencer, Herbert. First Principles. 6th ed., Watts, 1937.Google Scholar
Spencer, Herbert. The Principles of Biology. Vol. 2, Williams and Norgate, 1867.Google Scholar
Spencer, Herbert. Social Statics; or, The Conditions Essential to Human Happiness Specified, and the First of Them Developed. D. Appleton, 1883.Google Scholar
Spring, Gerald M. The Vitalism of Count de Gobineau. Institute of French Studies, 1932.Google Scholar
Stengers, Isabelle. Cosmopolitics I. Translated by Bononno, Robert, U of Minnesota P, 2010.Google Scholar
Stephens, C. A. The Pluri-Cellular Man. Laboratory Company, 1892.Google Scholar
Strawson, Galen. “Realistic Monism: Why Physicalism Entails Panpsychism.” Consciousness and Its Place in Nature: Does Physicalism Entail Panpsychism?, edited by Freeman, Anthony, Imprint Academic, 2006, pp. 3–31.Google Scholar
Tarizzo, Davide. Life: A Modern Invention. Translated by William Epstein, Mark, U of Minnesota P, 2017.Google Scholar
Thacker, Eugene. After Life. U of Chicago P, 2010.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Twain, Mark. Autobiography of Mark Twain. Vol. 1, edited by Elinor Smith, Harriet, U of California P, 2010.Google Scholar
Twain, Mark. Collected Tales, Sketches, Speeches, and Essays, 1891–1910. Library of America, 1992.Google Scholar
Twain, Mark. “Extract from Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven.” Twain, Collected Tales, pp. 826–63.Google Scholar
Twain, Mark. “Flies and Russians.” Twain, Mark Twain's Fables of Man, pp. 421–24.Google Scholar
Twain, Mark. Following the Equator. A Tramp Abroad, Following the Equator, Other Travels, Library of America, 2010, pp. 405–882.Google Scholar
Twain, Mark. “The Great Dark.” Twain, Collected Tales, pp. 297–343.Google Scholar
Twain, Mark. “Letters from the Earth.” Twain, Collected Tales, pp. 880–928.Google Scholar
Twain, Mark. “Man's Place in the Animal World.” Twain, Collected Tales, pp. 207–16.Google Scholar
Twain, Mark. Mark Twain's Fables of Man. Edited by Tuckey, John S., U of California P, 1972.Google Scholar
Twain, Mark. “No. 44, the Mysterious Stranger.” The Gilded Age and Later Novels, Library of America, 2002, pp. 805–986.Google Scholar
Twain, Mark. “Reflections on Religion.” The Hudson Review, Vol. 16, No. 3, 1963, pp. 329–52.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Twain, Mark. “The Refuge of the Derelicts.” Twain, Mark Twain's Fables of Man, pp. 162–248.Google Scholar
Twain, Mark. “Three Thousand Years among the Microbes.” Which Was the Dream? and Other Symbolic Writings of the Later Years, edited by Tuckey, John S., U of California P, 1968, pp. 433–553.Google Scholar
Tyndall, John. “Vitality.” Lectures and Essays, Watts, 1903, pp. 94–96.Google Scholar
Vitale, Francisco. Biodeconstruction: Jacques Derrida and the Life Sciences. Translated by Senatore, Mauro, State U of New York P, 2018.Google Scholar
Ward, Lester F. “Eugenics, Euthenics, and Eudemics.” The American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 18, No. 6, May 1913, pp. 737–54.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ward, Lester F. Pure Sociology: A Treatise on the Origin and Spontaneous Development of Society. 2nd ed., Macmillan, 1907.Google Scholar
Weheliye, Alexander G. Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human. Duke UP, 2014.Google Scholar
Weinstein, Jami. “Vital Ethics: On Life and In/difference.” Against Life, edited by Hunt, Alastair and Youngblood, Stephanie, Northwestern UP, 2016, pp. 87–118.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Weir, Todd H. “The Riddles of Monism: An Introductory Essay.” Monism: Science, Philosophy, Religion, and the History of a Worldview, edited by Weir, , Palgrave Macmillan, 2012, pp. 1–44.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Whitehead, Alfred North. Process and Reality. Corrected ed., edited by Ray Griffin, David and Sherburne, Donald W., Free Press, 1978.Google Scholar
Wills, David. Inanimation: Theories of Inorganic Life. U of Minnesota P, 2016.Google Scholar
Windle, Bertram C. A. What Is Life? A Study of Vitalism and Neo-vitalism. Sands, 1908.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wynter, Sylvia. “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/ Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, after Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument.” CR: The New Centennial Review, Vol. 3, No. 3, Fall 2003, pp. 257–337.CrossRefGoogle Scholar