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New materialisms argue for a more science-friendly humanities, ventilating questions about methodology and subject matter and the importance of the non-human. However, these new sites of attention - climate, biology, affect, geology, animals and objects - tend to leverage their difference against language and the discursive. Similarly, questions about ontology have come to eclipse, and even eschew, those of epistemology.While this collection of essays is in kinship with this radical shake-up of how and what we study, the aim is to re-navigate what constitutes materiality. These efforts are encapsulated by a rewriting of the Derridean axiom, 'there is no outside text' as 'there is no outside nature.' What if nature has always been literate, numerate, social? And what happens to 'the human' if its exceptional identity and status is conceded quantum, non-local and ecological implication?

New materialisms argue for a more science-friendly humanities, ventilating questions about methodology and subject matter and the importance of the non-human. However, these new sites of attention - climate, biology, affect, geology, animals and objects - tend to leverage their difference against language and the discursive. Similarly, questions about ontology have come to eclipse, and even eschew, those of epistemology. While this collection of essays is in kinship with this radical shake-up of how and what we study, the aim is to re-navigate what constitutes materiality. These efforts are encapsulated by a rewriting of the Derridean axiom, 'there is no outside text' as 'there is no outside nature.' What if nature has always been literate, numerate, social? And what happens to 'the human' if its exceptional identity and status is conceded quantum, non-local and ecological implication?

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Preface: The Question of Supplementarity —A Quantum Problematic -- Acknowledgments -- 1. Anthropology Diffracted: Originary Humanicity -- 2. Just Figures?: Forensic Clairvoyance,Mathematics, and the Language Question -- 3. Enumerating Language: ''The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics'' -- Natural Convers(at)ions: Or, What if Culture Was Really Nature All Along? -- 5. (Con)founding ''the Human'': Incestuous Beginnings -- 6. Culpability and the Double-Cross: Irigaray with Merleau-Ponty -- Notes -- Works Cited -- Index

Attempting to explain the how, what, and why of normativity has exercised the attentions of social analysts for centuries, remaining an enduring puzzle in sociology since its disciplinary inception. A nest of related riddles attend the subjectivation of the individual, or how the social gets under our skin. How does an outside (social norms, grids of intelligibility, and behavioral compliance) also articulate the inside (personal belief and conscience, and even biological symptomatologies)? Given this intricate involvement between the inside and the outside, an involvement whose causal origin cannot be determined, should the conscious strategies of antinormativity be understood as interventions that hail from outside these norms or as expressions of power's internal and perverse machinations? If norms are considered the genetics of power that inform all of social life (without necessarily dictating it), then the peculiar identity and ubiquity of a norm is neither restricted nor prohibited. In sum, what is normal about a norm?
This essay explores power's intransitivity, its "self-possession," by interrogating the way that cultural analysis routinely assumes that the workings of power rest on a break with nature, a break that explains human exceptionalism as an unnatural perversion of nature's previous conventions and prescriptions. By way of Georges Canguilhem, the argument dilates on the implications of this foundational assumption, itself a form of antinormativity, by shifting its frame of reference to that of life itself.

Metaphysical terms like science, matter, nature, and reality have always been in limbo in critical theory; scholars have deconstructed and problematized and critiqued them, yet they still will not go away. Debates over science's relationship to discourse and knowledge particularly revolve around the extent to which science's objects are "real" or, put more formally, to what extent objects of human inquiry exist outside their investigation. This essay critiques two important interlocutors in the debate—Butler and Latour—to argue that this is the wrong question to ask. Resisting the temptation to make the poststructuralist move of positing culture as the origin of nature, which would grant culture the primary status that nature has historically held, Kirby bypasses arguments over whether matter is out in the world or a product of language by expanding what counts as language. Rather than claim that nature in its prerepresentational form is impossible to experience, she argues that nature itself consists of representations, and not just human-made ones. This essay, and, in its own way, each essay in the special issue it responds to, shows how the binaries operating in science were never really binaries. Nature and culture, body and mind, and subject and object are not opposing terms that need to be brought together but always already related terms whose relatedness must be—and, throughout the issue of differences in which it appears, will be—unveiled.

Feminism could be described as a discourse that negotiates corporeality, what a body is and what a body can do. Nevertheless, the specter of essentialism means that the biological or anatomical body, the body that is commonly understood to be the "real" body, is often excluded from this investigation. The increasingly sterile debate between essentialism and antiessentialism has inadvertently encouraged this somatophobia. I argue that these opposing positions are actually inseparable, sharing a complicitous relationship that produces material effects.