Articulates a philosophical mode of thinking modeled after our bodily construction points
What if we were to reimagine bodies of all kinds - biological and ecosystemic, political and textual, cosmic and artistic - from the perspective of their joints? This is the wager of Michael Marder's philosophical treatise, which explores the extremes of totalization and fragmentation by following the model of the joints, the structures that both articulate and disarticulate complex living unities.
Of Joints and Other Articulations: The Futures of Arthrosophy proposes that as embodied figures of relations, joints shed new light on the question of time and the meaning of art, the activity of language and the fluctuations of good and ill health, political violence and humility, conversions and perversions. Arthrosophy, the wisdom of joints, supplements and substantiates philosophy itself, teaching us how to think through and with our knees and elbows, hips and shoulders, sutures and pivot joints.
Michael Marder is Ikerbasque Research Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of the Basque Country, Vitoria-Gasteiz, and Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Global Reconstitution (IGRec), Berlin. His books include Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life and Dust.
"Of Joints and Other Articulations is highly original, brilliantly erudite, and extremely well written. Few thinkers can boast such a command of traditions and texts, ancient and modern, Western and Eastern. Marder rigorously controls the metaphorics of joints and articulation to yield a trenchant critique of nihilism in contemporary thought and politics. I know of no competing work." - Mary C. Rawlinson, University College, London