Political Physiology, the book

Good news yesterday as I agreed in principle to a contract with University of Minnesota Press for my book Political Physiology. It will appear in the Posthumanities series, edited by Cary Wolfe of Rice University. My thanks to Cary and to Doug Armato, Director of UM Press and the commissioning editor for philosophy.

Here's a brief description of the book:

The book investigates embodied, embedded, and affective cognition. It challenges both the exclusion of affect from cognition and the individualism of most treatments of the subject, insisting that subjectivity be studied in terms of the distribution of affective cognitive traits in a population. The standpoint is named “political physiology” in order to indicate that subjectivity is sometimes bypassed in favor of a direct linkage of the social and the somatic. After a theoretical and historical base in the first part, the second part offers three case studies of contemporary instances of political physiology:  the Terri Schiavo case, the Columbine high school massacre, and Hurricane Katrina.

Comments

[Chris]

That's great news, John. I'll be excited to see the finished work in print. I have one question based on the description, though. What do you mean when you say "that subjectivity is sometimes bypassed in favor of a direct linkage of the social and the somatic"? I would have guessed you'd want to think those together to show that subjectivity is social and somatic and then account for individuation in some way.

[Anthony Paul Smith]

Great news, seems like a very constructive project that builds on your Political Physics.

Have any titles been announced in the series you're editing with Palgrave?