French Technological Thought and the Nonhuman Turn

Uncovers the nonhuman turn’s unexpected roots in the avant-gardes and mysticisms of 19th-century France

• Builds a new genealogy which highlights the unacknowledged expression of Catholic mysticism and avant-garde French literature in the nonhuman turn
• Brings into play both canonical and non-canonical authors, from Symbolism to Surrealism and beyond
• Mines unexplored elements of major thinkers, including Gilbert Simondon and Gilles Deleuze
• Tackles the porous boundaries between literature, philosophy, science, politics and theology in French thought

French Technological Thought and the Nonhuman Turn traces a genealogy of thinking and writing about technology, which takes us from the French avant-gardes to the contemporary ‘nonhuman turn’ in Anglo-American theory via the Surrealists, Gilbert Simondon, and Gilles Deleuze.

Tracking the unruly transition from Catholic vocabularies of grace, potentiality and actuality to the modern and contemporary secular lexicon of agency, virtuality and affect, this book explores technology as a source of subject matter and conceptual metaphors, but also probes how ideas and words are modes of technicity through which we shape and reshape the world. Fusing literature, philosophy and theology, it offers readers new contexts – and questions – for the egalitarian ontological commitments of contemporary post- and nonhuman thinking.