Monkey Trouble

Monkey Trouble explores the turn toward immanence in contemporary posthumanism, which aims to extend hospitality to animals, plants, and even insentient things. This book argues that the displacement of anthropocentrism must cultivate a human/nonhuman relationality that affirms the immanent transcendency spawned by our phantasmatic humanness.

Peterson Christopher :

Christopher Peterson is Associate Professor in the School of Humanities and Communication Arts at Western Sydney University. He is the author of Bestial Traces: Race, Sexuality, Animality, and Kindred Specters: Death, Mourning, and American Affinity.Christopher Peterson is Associate Professor in the School of Humanities and Communication Arts at Western Sydney University. He is the author of Bestial Traces: Race, Sexuality, Animality, and Kindred Specters: Death, Mourning, and American Affinity.

—Dominic Pettman:
“Posthumanists, new materialists, neovitalists, cosmopoliticians, accelerationists, xenofeminists, post-poststructuralists, and speculative realists will have much to argue with here. But this is an argument they—we—would be well advised to have at this historical moment—a decade or two into the broader 'nonhuman turn'—given the often baroque claims, naïve enthusiasms, and extravagant contradictions performed in its name. In Peterson's meticulous and elliptical critique we encounter a forceful Counter-Reformation against the more heretical proclamations of posthumanism; along with a nuanced insistence that—when all is said and done—we are human, all too human, after all.“

Richard Iveson:
Peterson is a meticulous scholar with a philosophical and psychoanalytic background as deep as it is broad, with close reading that is never more rigorous and acute than when engaging with the intricate philosophies of Husserl and Derrida. It is a book that will, or at least should, cause serious anxiety among a great many philosophers and theorists of the so-called ‘nonhuman turn’, particularly those who have nailed their colors, perhaps precipitately, to the mast of object-oriented ontology.