After Life

Life is one of our most basic concepts, yet when examined directly it proves remarkably contradictory and elusive, encompassing both the broadest and the most specific phenomena. We can see this uncertainty about life in our habit of approaching it as something at once scientific and mystical, in the return of vitalisms of all types, and in the pervasive politicization of life. In short, life seems everywhere at stake and yet is nowhere the same.

In After Life, Eugene Thacker clears the ground for a new philosophy of life by recovering the twists and turns in its philosophical history. Beginning with Aristotle's originary formulation of a philosophy of life, Thacker examines the influence of Aristotle's ideas in medieval and early modern thought, leading him to the work of Immanuel Kant, who notes the inherently contradictory nature of "life in itself." Along the way, Thacker shows how early modern philosophy's engagement with the problem of life affects thinkers such as Gilles Deleuze, Georges Bataille, and Alain Badiou, as well as contemporary developments in the "speculative turn" in philosophy.

At a time when life is categorized, measured, and exploited in a variety of ways, After Life invites us to delve deeper into the contours and contradictions of the age-old question, "what is life?"

"This is a timely, significant, and original work that deepens and enlarges the terms of contemporary philosophical debate over the nature of `life.' After Life promises to become an indispensable point of reference for future discussions of this topic."---Ray Brassier, American University of Beirut

"A vertiginous summa of the impossibilities of thinking, and not thinking, life. In this masterwork of speculative medievalism, Eugene Thacker accomplishes for philosophical thought what the dreamer of Lovecraft's Ex Oblivione experiences only with a drug: `So, happier than I had ever dared hope to be, I dissolved again into that native infinity of crystal oblivion from which the daemon Life had called me for one brief and desolate hour.' If you think you have a life, ingest and ruminate After Life, and think again."---Nicola Masciandaro, Brooklyn College