Virality Vitality

Jonathan Basile

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Hardback

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English

State University of New York Press
01 April 2025

Deconstructionism, Structuralism, Post-structuralism; Philosophy of mind; Microbiology (non-medical); Environmental science, engineering & technology

Series: SUNY series in Contemporary French Thought

Reveals the fragility of basic scientific concepts through the unstable relationship between viruses and life, calling for a deconstructive reading to grapple with their theoretical and political effects.

Virality Vitality explores the history and present of the life sciences and virology, focusing on moments of disruption that reveal the instability of the most basic concepts guiding scientific knowledge and their practical or political consequences. From their ""discovery"" to present-day experiments in synthetic virology, viruses have given rise to upheavals in our models of life because of the difficulty of rigorously distinguishing life from virus, self from other. The virus has been compared to a gene, to an agent of life's heredity and immunity, and we humans depend on the fossils of ancient viral infections in our genome in order to bear children. Can a parasite give birth to its host? To interpret the nonoppositional relationship of virality and vitality, this book draws on the work of Jacques Derrida and the growing field of biodeconstruction that has emerged from his posthumously published work on genetics. In turn, Virality Vitality suggests a novel approach to questions of the agency of ""matter"" or the ""nonhuman,"" often raised in Anthropocene studies, the material turn, and ecocriticism. Nothing is more natural than the artificiality of the borders drawn, maintained, and displaced by the living and their viruses, by virality-vitality. The inscription of these borders remains to be read, and thus deconstructive textuality is anything but opposed to the sciences and what they call life.

By: Jonathan Basile
Imprint: State University of New York Press
Country of Publication: United States [Currently unable to ship to USA: see Shipping Info]
Dimensions: Height: 229mm, Width: 152mm, Spine: 25mm
Weight: 499g
ISBN: 9798855801842
Series: SUNY series in Contemporary French Thought
Pages: 274
Publication Date: 01 April 2025
Audience: Professional and scholarly , Undergraduate
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

Jonathan Basile is an Arts and Science Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Toronto's Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology. He is the author of Tar for Mortar: ""The Library of Babel"" and the Dream of Totality and the creator of an online universal library, libraryofbabel.info.

Reviews for Virality Vitality

""Virality Vitality constitutes an immensely important contribution to scholarship at the emerging intersections of deconstruction and the so-called life sciences. Virality Vitality, however, does not simply propose a viral supplement to already established work in 'bio-' or 'ecodeconstruction' but invites us to rethink the very conditions of possibility of these fields. Basile's work is equally important in redeploying and nuancing the ongoing conversations in the environmental posthumanities on nonhuman 'life' and material 'agency,' showing how deconstruction lets us reimagine otherwise any living-together on earth. The striking originality of thought found in these pages cements Basile as one of the most exciting new voices in deconstructive scholarship today."" — Philippe Lynes, author of Futures of Life Death on Earth: Derrida’s General Ecology