Duke University Press

Astrology is the language in which all of existence speaks, says astrologer and tarotist Bess Matassa. In Star Charting, she leads readers on a vivid journey through the twelve signs of the zodiac as a poetic practice and transformative framework for befriending both the familiar and the strange. Matassa blends personal narrative, sensory immersion, inquiry exercises, and communal calls to action to reframe this ancient art as a modern manifesto for healing division by exalting the astounding complexity within this wild world. In contrast to more technical manuals on birth chart interpretation, this is magic-making as an exploratory treasure hunt, forging radical pathways to personal and collective evolution. Twelve modes of bearing witness to life and moving with its currents. Twelve styles of championing creative change. And twelve ways of never, ever losing heart.

From the rustle of a crow’s wings to the cool touch of moss on a stone wall, to the quiet determination of a worm crossing a sidewalk, The Sound of Feathers invites readers to notice the small wonders of life all around them. These fleeting details hold surprising truths about humanity’s connection to nature, the complex relationships of care and harm in which we are entangled, our responsibilities to other species, and what it means to be fully present in the world. Through vivid storytelling and deeply personal reflections, Kathryn Gillespie invites us to slow down, pay attention, and think differently about our everyday lives so that we might imagine shared futures of flourishing. She urges us to confront the forces that separate us from the natural world and find more compassionate ways of living in harmony with it. Gillespie reminds us that the quiet, often overlooked moments in life are where the most profound insights and connections begin.

In Rescuing the Enlightenment from the Europeans, Nikita Dhawan puts the critical project of decolonization into conversation with the Enlightenment. She explores the ethical-political challenges faced by postcolonial thought, which must be articulated using the very language of Enlightenment discourses on human rights, democracy, international law, sovereignty, and justice—even as these norms are subjects of postcolonial critique. Bridging postcolonial and Holocaust studies while also highlighting differences from decolonial approaches, she engages with thinkers ranging from Kant to the Frankfurt school to defend them against accusations of normative nihilism, antisemitism, and epistemic servitude to Europe. Dhawan argues that criticizing the Enlightenment and its legacies does not necessarily entail rejecting them, nor does engaging with Enlightenment principles mean endorsing them unconditionally. Instead, she makes a case for rescuing the best aspects of the Enlightenment in order to further the critical project of decolonization.

In Vibrant Matter the political theorist Jane Bennett, renowned for her work on nature, ethics, and affect, shifts her focus from the human experience of things to things themselves. Bennett argues that political theory needs to do a better job of recognizing the active participation of nonhuman forces in events. Toward that end, she theorizes a "vital materiality" that runs through and across bodies, both human and nonhuman. Bennett explores how political analyses of public events might change were we to acknowledge that agency always emerges as the effect of ad hoc configurations of human and nonhuman forces. She suggests that recognizing that agency is distributed this way, and is not solely the province of humans, might spur the cultivation of a more responsible, ecologically sound politics: a politics less devoted to blaming and condemning individuals than to discerning the web of forces affecting situations and events.Bennett examines the political and theoretical implications of vital materialism through extended discussions of commonplace things and physical phenomena including stem cells, fish oils, electricity, metal, and trash. She reflects on the vital power of material formations such as landfills, which generate lively streams of chemicals, and omega-3 fatty acids, which can transform brain chemistry and mood. Along the way, she engages with the concepts and claims of Spinoza, Nietzsche, Thoreau, Darwin, Adorno, and Deleuze, disclosing a long history of thinking about vibrant matter in Western philosophy, including attempts by Kant, Bergson, and the embryologist Hans Driesch to name the "vital force" inherent in material forms. Bennett concludes by sketching the contours of a "green materialist" ecophilosophy.

In Necropolitics Achille Mbembe, a leader in the new wave of francophone critical theory, theorizes the genealogy of the contemporary world, a world plagued by ever-increasing inequality, militarization, enmity, and terror as well as by a resurgence of racist, fascist, and nationalist forces determined to exclude and kill. He outlines how democracy has begun to embrace its dark side---what he calls its “nocturnal body”---which is based on the desires, fears, affects, relations, and violence that drove colonialism. This shift has hollowed out democracy, thereby eroding the very values, rights, and freedoms liberal democracy routinely celebrates. As a result, war has become the sacrament of our times in a conception of sovereignty that operates by annihilating all those considered enemies of the state. Despite his dire diagnosis, Mbembe draws on post-Foucauldian debates on biopolitics, war, and race as well as Fanon's notion of care as a shared vulnerability to explore how new conceptions of the human that transcend humanism might come to pass. These new conceptions would allow us to encounter the Other not as a thing to exclude but as a person with whom to build a more just world.