The Nonhuman Turn. Edited by Richard Grusin

The Nonhuman Turn  is a long due and welcome attempt at identifying, characterizing, and consolidating the varied recent approaches that examine the human in relation to the nonhuman. As Richard Grusin explains in the introduction and Jane Bennett clarifies in her concluding essay, the collection brings together current critical philosophical approaches that reimagine the planet as populated by vibrant animate and inanimate matter and not simply divided between active human subjects and passive objects. These approaches identify “animals, affectivity, bodies, organic and geospatial systems, materiality, [and] technologies” (vii) as the nonhuman actors responsible for ordaining life as we know it, consequently decentering Man and contesting what Agamben (in  The Open ) dubs the anthropological machine of Western epistemology.