Ontological Politics in a Disposable World

This book explores the intertwining of politics and ontology shedding light on the ways in which as our ability to investigate regulate appropriate 'enhance' and destroy material reality have developed so new social scientific accounts of nature and our relationship with it have emerged together with new forms of power. Engaging with cutting-edge social theory and elaborating on the thought of Foucault Heidegger Adorno and Agamben the author demonstrates that the convergence of ontology with politics is not simply an intellectual endeavour of growing import but also a governmental practice which builds upon neoliberal programmes the renewed accumulation of capital and the development of technosciences in areas such as climate change geoengineering and biotechnology. With shifts in our accounts of nature have come new means of mastering it giving rise to unprecedented forms of exploitation and destruction - with related forms of social domination. In the light of growing social inequalities environmental degradation and resource appropriation and commodification Ontological Politics in a Disposable World: The New Mastery of Nature reveals the need for new critical frameworks and oppositional practices to challenge the rationality of government that lies behind these developments: a rationality that thrives on indeterminacy and an account of materiality as comprised of fluid ever-changing states simultaneously agential and pliable to which social theory increasingly subscribes without questioning enough its underpinnings and implications. A theoretically sophisticated reassessment of the relationship between ontology and politics which draws the contours of a renewed humanism to allow for a more harmonious relationship with the world this book will appeal to scholars in social and political theory environmental sociology geography science and technology studies and contemporary European thought on the material world.