Edyta B. Pietrzak
Teoria Polityki, Nr 9/2024, Early View 2024
New materialism is a heterogeneous and dynamic philosophical current and theoretical movement reviving interest in materiality. It emerged within non-anthropocentric humanities, driven by a sense of exhaustion of traditional ways of thinking about the world. Although its origins can be found in Baruch Spinoza and Gilles Deleuze, the term itself emerged in the late 1990s in the texts of Rosi Braidotti and Manuel DeLanda, and its main representatives include Karen Barad, Elizabeth Grosz, Donna Haraway and Jane Bennett. New materialisms emerge from the dialogue between feminist theory and science and focus on the life and workings of matter and its production of meaning. They ask about the ontological foundations of social and political reality. They reject anthropocentrism and androcentrism, taking as their starting point the relationships of human and non-human, natural and technological, organic and synthetic, matter and language entities. Thus, they arouse as much interest as controversy. The paper addresses issues related to the political significance of new materialisms. The political contexts of embodied theories and philosophies and the new interpretative paths they set out for politics are presented.