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Highlights the relevance of Nietzsche's thinking about human nature for contemporary debates in biopolitics and posthumanism Nietzsche coins the enigmatic term homo natura to capture his understanding of the human being as a creature of nature and tasks philosophy with the renaturalisation of humanity. Following Foucault's critique of the human sciences, Vanessa Lemm discusses the reception of Nietzsche's naturalism in philosophical anthropology, psychoanalysis and gender studies. She offers an original reading of homo natura that brings back the ancient Greek idea of nature and sexuality as creative chaos and of the philosophical life as outspoken and embodied truth, perhaps best exemplified by the Cynics' embrace of social and cultural transformation. Vanessa Lemm is Professor of Philosophy, Vice President and Executive Dean at the College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences at Flinders University, Australia.
List of contents
Acknowledgements
Abbreviations
Introduction: Who Is Homo Natura?
1. Kantianism, Naturalism and Philosophical Anthropology
2. Humanism beyond Anthropocentrism
3. Psychoanalysis and the Deconstruction of Human Nature
4. Biopolitics, Sexuality and Social Transformation
Conclusion: Posthumanism and Community of Life
Appendix
References
Index
About the author
Vanessa Lemm is Deputy Vice-Chancellor and Provost and Professor of Political Philosophy at the University of Greenwich. She is an internationally recognised expert on the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche and has published widely on Nietzsche, biopolitics and contemporary political philosophy. She is the author of
Nietzsche and the Becoming of Life (Fordham University Press, 2014),
Nietzsche's Animal Philosophy: Culture, Politics and the Animality of the Human Being (Fordham University Press, 2009) and Nietzsche's
Twilight of the Idols (EUP, forthcoming).
