Herman Melville and the Politics of the Inhuman

Studies of the writing of Herman Melville are often divided among those that address his political, historical, or biographical dimensions and those that offer creative theoretical readings of his texts. In Herman Melville and the Politics of the Inhuman, Michael Jonik offers a series of nuanced and ambitious philosophical readings of Melville that unite these varied approaches. Through a careful reconstruction of Melville's interaction with philosophy, Jonik argues that Melville develops a notion of the 'inhuman' after Spinoza's radically non-anthropocentric and relational thought. Melville's own political philosophy, in turn, actively disassembles differences between humans and nonhumans, and the animate and inanimate. Jonik has us rethink not only how we read Melville, but also how we understand our deeply inhuman condition.

Michael Jonik teaches American literature at the University of Sussex. He writes on pre–1900 American literature, continental philosophy, and the history of science, with essays on Berkeley, Thoreau, Hawthorne, and James. He has won a Cornell Society for the Humanities Postdoctoral Fellowship, a Leverhulme Research Grant, and, in 2015, the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy prize 'for the paper that makes the most significant contribution to the history of American Philosophy from colonial times to the present.' He is founding member of The British Association of Nineteenth-Century Americanists (BrANCA), and Reviews and Special Issues editor for Textual Practice.