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Chapter 4 presents the work of the feminist philosopher and physicist Karen Barad on the physics and philosophical writings of the father of quantum mechanics, Neils Bohr. Barad's work gives both experimental as well as theoretical arguments for the deeply flawed nature of the Boylian-Cartesian-Newtonian paradigm. Neils Bohr's theory of complementarity, as interpreted by Barad, is presented as a powerful alternative to the dualist modernist onto-epistemology. In Barad's elaboration of Bohr's insights, she offers her theory of “agential-realism” a non-representationalist and non-anthropocentric paradigm. The chapter argues that agential-realism opens the door to the possibility of applying her insights to the realm of ritual studies and the reality of the other-than-humans.

The introduction situates this volume into different theoretical and historiographical traditions. It starts by examining the meanings of performativity through a reading of Roland Barthes’s A Lover’s Discourse (1977), as his analysis of the utterance “I love you” perfectly illustrates the bodily effects of emotions. The next section moves on to discuss the theoretical grounding of the concept “emotional bodies,” linking the work on emotional practices as developed by anthropologists, cultural historians and sociologists such as Monique Scheer, Jo Labanyi, and Sarah Ahmed with the feminist materialism of Judith Butler and Karen Barad. Finally, the last section makes connections between chapters in different sections, highlighting the common ideas underpinning this book.

This chapter considers the ways in which Woolf, primarily in The Waves, engages with the materiality of life itself. The first half of the chapter addresses ‘matter’ by focusing on how The Waves engages with many of the philosophical issues concerning materiality arising out of the new physics in the first decades of the twentieth century, before turning to the ways in which the novel anticipates more recent debates which include Karen Barad’s work on Niels Bohr’s ‘philosophy-physics’ and her theory of ‘agential realism’ and ‘intra-action’ in Meeting the Universe Halfway (2007). The second half of this chapter considers the conceptualisation of ‘life’ in Woolf’s novel, drawing especially on Eugene Thacker’s consideration of Aristotelian psukhe and the distinction between ‘Life’ and ‘the living’, Jane Bennett’s ‘vital materialism’ and ‘thing-power’, and Deleuze’s ‘assemblage’, ‘haecceity’, and ‘pure immanence’. Through its exploration of the material entanglements of human bodies and nonhuman objects, things, and environments, The Waves is read as presenting an immanent, posthuman ontology of life.

It is not just that we are entangled in matter—we subjects who read, write, and ruminate on what “we” are. We are materializations entangled in other materializations; we happen in our mattering. What matters in our ethics, our politics, our worlds entangles us in and as new materializations. And at this juncture, it entangles scholarship in retrievals and rethinkings of matter itself. Even disciplines that struggle with long histories of disembodied transcendence are registering the effects.

This chapter examines the relevance of Karen Barad's account of the sea creature called Brittlestar for Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's thoughts about queer theory. It explains that the Brittlestar is a model of intra-action, constantly breaking off and regenerating its bodily boundaries as it enfolds bits of its environment within itself, expelling parts of its own body into the surrounding environment. The chapter discusses the idea that nature makes and unmakes itself experimentally, and that nature's differentiations of its own material were never binary.

This chapter considers a bodily becoming neither human nor divine but entangled in both. In conversation with Karen Barad, quantum entanglement discloses the relational ontology—the “agential intra-activity”—of which every body in the universe is woven. The chapter demonstrates the proximity of Barad's to Alfred North Whitehead's responsive materiality. Here, intercarnation might have turned to intra-carnation. But then there might seem to be a single mega-body inside which all enfleshment takes place. The point, however, is that creatures, micro- or macro-, do not pre-exist their relationships. The chapter examines what kind of theology might materialize in conversation with the so-called new materialism and what sort of theology might already identify itself as a Christian materialism.

Inspired by the work of Niels Bohr, the quantum physicist and philosopher Karen Barad refers to apparatuses as “device[s] for making and remaking boundaries”. Although theatrical performances are not necessarily the same as the performative enactments Barad describes, theatre as an apparatus is in a prime position for such boundary work. This book has specifically followed how the modern stage has generated and challenged the immunitary, biopolitical boundaries of nineteenth and twentieth century European society. Given that Bruno Latour as well has advised us to think of objects not in terms of substances but rather as performances, theatre is in a more than advantageous position to benefit from the insights of the recent material turn in philosophy and culture– and the material turn from theatre.

Through the analysis of Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter and Karen Barad’s Meeting the Universe Halfway, this chapter investigates the understanding of politics that emerges in new materialist and new feminist materialist writing, placing this literature in the context of poststructuralism and posthumanism and considering its intervention in feminist thought in particular. The chapter concludes that new materialisms is at its best not when it redefines politics so as to include non-human or more-than-human forces, but rather when it reworks understandings of human subjectivity, making it clear how the human is always enmeshed in more-than-human worlds. In this case, politics continues to center power relations between humans, but the understanding of the human itself transforms.

This chapter pursues the queerly constructive task of rethinking the strange entanglements of divinity and matter in the wake of the ecological crises of the anthropocene. Seduced simultaneously by the “land art” (especially cairns) of Andy Goldsworthy, the “new materialisms” of Karen Barad and Jane Bennett, and the theophany traditions of Christian thought, this chapter constructs a concept of “theophanic materiality,” where divine energy is entangled in the performance of indeterminate material agencies. Goldsworthy’s artistic process of collaboration with and in place helps theology think anew the fluid possibilities of creativity. That is to say, placing land art in conversation with new materialisms and theologies of creation creates at least one conceptual possibility for the queer intimacy of divinity and earth. To construct such a theology, therefore, might help to effect a reimagined political response to the exploitative systems of human power that bring about our contemporary ecological crises.

This chapter situates feminist work on matter and mattering in its larger intellectual and biopolitical context, and also highlight some of the endogenous concerns feminists bring to the consideration of matter. Its aim is to highlight the utility of feminist (and queer, anti-racist, postcolonial) approaches that take matter seriously in light of broader investments in matter, nature, and bioculture. Many disciplines and fields have newly embraced materialism and ontology, but a sustained focus of feminist inquiry is power. Feminist orientations demand we ask certain questions of matter/ing and its interlocution. The chapter asks the following questions: In what ways is matter involved in, or shot through with, sex/gender, class, race, nation, citizenship, and other stratifications? How are these power relations involved in the understanding and management of biology or “life itself,” and how do they materialize in bodies, corporeal processes, and environments? What sorts of theoretical and methodological innovations are required to address matter as thusly situating and situated?

Asking for technology and the body at the same time almost inevitably evokes the question of what kinds of connections extend between the two. But what if it is not so much a question of connections but of entanglements? What would it mean to understand the entanglement of technology and the body not so much as a matter of epistemological but of ontological indeterminacy? That is, what would it mean to argue that the boundaries and properties of bodies and technologies are performatively enacted through particular material-discursive practices, or “apparatuses”, through which ontological indeterminacy is resolved locally and temporarily? Building on Karen Barad’s work, in this chapter, I argue for an understanding of the concept of the apparatus of bodily production as both a figure and an analytical tool for technophilosophical inquiries of narratives centering on questions of power and becomings. Analyzing the Human Provenance Pilot Project— a project initiated by the UK Border Agency to determine the ethnicity and nationality of asylum seekers using DNA and isotope testing—I demonstrate how this concept allows us to get to an understanding of how bodily materialities along with far-reaching ethical and political consequences are enacted through generative material-discursive practices.

This chapter examines Bishop’s fascination with material entanglements, and the curious posthuman figures that emerge in her work. It argues that Bishop’s poems encourage strange encounters between the human and the non-human, opening up ontological borders and celebrating the various processes of merger and radical intra-relation that continuously constitute and reconstitute our world. Reading Bishop alongside contemporary posthuman theory, the chapter presents Bishop as a poet preoccupied with what Karen Barad terms ‘diffraction patterns’ or ‘interference effects’.

Introduces the figure of Contamination as an alternative to dialectics. Challenging various concepts of purity, Contaminations enables us to recognise the simultaneity of catastrophe and hope, of anxiety and grace. It develops the figure of contamination through a close reading of Jonathan Franzen’s novel Freedom. Analyses how the satirical irony of Freedom operates at the level of incongruity: Walter Berglund’s moralistic stance fighting the evil of the Anthropocene (humanity’s overpopulation) clashes with the ruthlessness of his actions (colliding with the interests the coal industry). Walter separates society from nature, playing off the latter against the former. Walter thus creates a notion of nature as pure entity which he opposes to the pollutions caused by humanity. The human induced destruction of our planet dialectically ensures the triumph of the positive after ecological collapse. In dialectical manner ‘collapse’ morphs into ‘a window of opportunity’. Walter’ environmental activism actually supports the destruction of the environment: he campaigns for the mining of coal (in order preserve a bird species). In search for the positive we delude ourselves about what is truly harmful. Walter Berglund evaporates his own sense of freedom by dialectically turning the negative into the positive: by spinning ecological collapse into opportunities for preservation.

This chapter examines the multispecies kinship sentiments that congeal around the theological figure of creaturely life. Analyzing confessions of creaturely kinship from both theologians and evolutionary science, the chapter argues against a reading of creaturely kinship that sees this bond as merely a form of commonality, or sameness. Working with contemporary figures such as Jacques Derrida and Karen Barad, as well as the early modern philosopher Anne Conway, the essay argues for a reading of creaturely kinship as a diffractive relational bond—one that highlights the differences and plurality in creaturely life and sees, in creatureliness, a “connective distinction” or a difference that also binds.

The judicial bestiary at the heart of eighteenth-century politics has long been evident in Enlightenment social contract debates, as Michel Foucault’s and Giorgio Agamben’s theories of biopolitics show. In this essay, I argue that Wollstonecraft is nonetheless the first thinker of ‘true’ werewolf out-lawry in her final novel, Maria, Or the Wrongs of Woman and in her letters to Godwin. In the novel, Wollstonecraft leverages what we now call new materialism as a feminist critique of heteropatriarchal society. Wollstonecraft’s new materialist thinking also scrambles gender across even human and nonhuman distinctions. To counter microcosmic familial and macrocosmic state heteropatriarchy, Wollstonecraft theorizes what I am calling, following the example of wolves and werewolves, not a family but a ‘pack’. The pack manifests as new spacetimes through what Karen Barad terms “quantum entanglements” that produce love between subjects and subjects but that never strives to reproduce binaristic pairings that reproduce the sovereign family. A pack, as Wollstonecraft’s texts demonstrate, emerges from processes of co-creation that iterate new subjects and objects without dynamic power structures structured around stable gender identities or human and nonhuman power relations.

The book then presents its philosophical case for an ontological turn. It begins by directly questioning the modern philiosophical orthodoxies which sustain conventional historical practice. Enlisting the help of numerous prominent authorities in a wide array of fields, from posthumanist studies to quantum physics, it directly challenges modernity’s dualist metaphysical and ontological certainties from a variety of different critical perspectives. Then drawing together ideas from some of the most influential of these “ethnographers of the present,” it goes on to propose an alternative, non-dualist metaphysics, a “meta-metaphysics” that would authorize us to to take an ontological turn in our practice, whereby we can historicize each past way of life on its own terms, in its own distinct world of experience.

This chapter focuses on medicine and empathy in the context of global capitalism. It argues that our affective interactions are necessarily embedded in, and inflected by, structural and material relations of power. Empathy emerges as an affect that follows existing routes of privilege. The first section, ‘Medical migrations’, analyses current debates about the relation of medical migration to inequalities in world health and traces the circuits by and through which medical resource is distributed. Turning to Aminatta Forna’s The Memory of Love, it is argued that Forna pays detailed attention to the unevenness of the global economics of medical resource, with specific reference to Sierra Leone. In the second section, Forna’s protagonist Adrian Lockheart is used to open up the question of how affect circulates, and where it sticks, in the novel and discusses Adrian’s empathetic misrecognition in the treatments of his patients in Sierra Leone. The final section asks whether change is possible in the novel, drawing out the significance of the novel’s double time frame to suggest that the unfulfilled political promise of the past can shape the future.