Chad Augustine Córdova, "Toward a Premodern Posthumanism: Anarchic Ontologies of Earthly Life in Early Modern France" (Northwestern UP, 2025)

New Books in Environmental Studies · Dec 6, 2025 · 58m

What good is aesthetics in a time of ecological crisis? Toward a Premodern Posthumanism: Anarchic Ontologies of Earthly Life in Early Modern France (Northwestern UP, 2025) shows that philosophical aesthetics contains unheeded potentialities for challenging the ontological subjection of nature to the human subject. Drawing on deconstructive, ecological, and biopolitical thought, Chad Córdova uncovers in aesthetics something irreducible to humanist metaphysics: an account of how beings emerge and are interrelated, responsive, and even response-able without reason or why.

This anarchic and…