William Connolly’s A World of Becoming arrived in the mail yesterday. It looks wonderful, and only two chapters appear to include material that has been previously published in any form (both very recent), which means this is all quite new. If I had the time and the energy, I would try to organize a cross-blog reading group or something of the sort, as was done with the book that serves as its “companion piece” (of a sort), Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter. (On that reading group, see here and follow the links.)
Just as Bennett had included her own “credo” in the latter part of her book, Connolly includes something like that in his “Postlude”:
Do you know what the world is to me?
A colossus of diverse energies, without beginning or end, with each flowing over, through, and around others, generating new currents and eddies.
A play of waves, forces, and perceptions on different scales of complexity, endurance, and time, with some swelling as others subside, with perhaps long cycles of repetition, but none that simply repeats those preceding.
[. . .]
The longest index entries include the names Nietzsche, Whitehead, Deleuze, Charles Taylor, Bergson, Merleau-Ponty, Hegel, and the terms time, process, becoming, capitalism, force-field, God, faith, perception, agency, human predicament, and of course immanence. I will have more thoughts on it as I read it (informed no doubt by the anticipated objections of the objectologists, which I have internalized by now), but I have little doubt that it will be a significant contribution to process-relational theory as this blog has defined it.
See the Connolly tag for previous mentions of his work here.
