This path was created by Multiple Authors. The last update was by Paul A. Harris.
The Path of Animaterialism
Stoned thinking could be situated in a nexus of contemporary discourses, including ecotheory, object oriented ontology, new materialisms, and environmental humanities more generally. Stoned thinking aligns well with Jane Bennett's call in Vibrant Matter to “theorize a kind of geological affect or material vitality” in recognition of the “shimmering, potentially violent vitality intrinsic to matter” (61). Of all the many works of eco-theory, stoned thinking finds its closest companion in Jeffrey Jerome Cohen's Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman, in which he both theorizes and enacts "an affective interspace where the agency of stone and human ardor meet in mutual relation, in cross-ontological embrace" (252).
Stoned thinking follows new materialisms to their logical conclusion by embracing an animaterialism. The animating faculty of this mental modality is the “animaterialist imagination,” a portmanteau Pierre Jardin coined after the work of Gaston Bachelard. Jardin takes inspiration from Bachelard's disciplined commitment to living poetically and "dreaming well." This ethos nurtures a "material imagination," a mode of immersive, intimate interaction with matter. The "material imagination" "goes beyond the attractions of the imagination of forms; [it] thinks matter, dreams in it, lives in it, or, in other words, materializes the imaginary” (xlvi).
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- The Library of Stoned Thinking Paul A. Harris
