Overview

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.

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Reviews

""…Basile's book deserves recognition as a major contribution to the contemporary literature of biodeconstruction. But it is also exemplary of the manner in which biodeconstruction can intervene in an original and important way within the philosophical or conceptual fundamentals of biological theory and the ethics and politics of biological practice."" — The OLR Supplement ""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

""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

Author Information

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.

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