Mathew Abbott
Biographic Data
| ID | 3597834 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Mathew Abbott |
| GIVEN NAMES | Mathew |
| FAMILY NAME | Abbott |
| SIGNATURE | ABBOTT M |
| AFFILIATIONS | Federation University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-9797-1310 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 13 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 0 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 12 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2011 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 0 |
How Can Nature Come Apart from Itself? Self-Consciousness and Metabolic Rift
This paper philosophically elaborates Michael Tomasello’s developmental psychology to clarify the implicit content of the eco-Marxist concept of metabolic rift. It reconstructs Marx on metabolism and human dependency on nature, bringing out that while all living beings labour because all must act to mediate their dependency on nature, the labour of self-conscious animals has a distinctively social character. This can explain the sense in which hu…
Coming round to ourselves
This paper develops an eco-Marxist interpretation of the discovery that Earth is an integrated system, a discovery we have made in grasping our own role in shaping it. It criticizes an idea pervasive among Earth system scientists that our disruption of Earth is a function of human power, while bringing out the truth in the thought from Paul Crutzen that our species has become a self-conscious manager of the Earth system. If labour encounters itse…
Species-Being and Self-Consciousness
Nature, significance, and the human perspective
This paper criticises contemporary posthumanist theories of anthropocentrism by reading an early essay by Bertrand Russell alongside work by Rosi Braidotti and Jane Bennett. It argues that, despite appearances, scientism and posthumanism share key commitments in common, such that clarifying the problems with which Russell struggles regarding nature and significance can illuminate symmetrical problems in posthumanism. Against these alternatives, t…
Martin Heidegger
It would be hard to overstate the importance of Martin Heidegger’s philosophy for Giorgio Agamben’s thinking. It is not simply that the Italian philosopher turns at various points in his work to texts and themes from early and later Heidegger, as important as this obviously is. As well as abiding interests in problems of ontology, finitude, facticity and authenticity, Agamben inherits from Heidegger a philosophical programme. That programme is th…
Michael Fried and Philosophy
The Look of Silence and the Problem of Monstrosity
In Beyond Moral Judgment, Alice Crary defends a version of moral objectivism which turns on the idea that participation in moral life involves acquired affective proclivities: subjective capacities which nevertheless allow us to be receptive to objective features of the world. In this article, I draw out key aspects and implications of her account with reference to Joshua Oppenheimer's 2014 film The Look of Silence, a companion piece to 2012's Th…
The Problem of Wild Minds
The Problem of Wild Minds:Knowing Animals in Grizzly Man and Ming of Harlem Mathew Abbott (bio) Near the end of W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz, the book’s eponymous protagonist recalls visiting the zoo of the Jardin des Plantes with his friend Marie.1 The zoo is in bad shape; the pair overhear children questioning their parents: “Mais il est où? Pourquoi il se cache? Pourquoi il ne bouge pas? Est-ce qu’il est mort?” Sebald writes: I recollect that I m…
The Problem of Wild Minds
The Figure of This World
A fundamental re-reading of Agamben that defends and develops his philosophy as post-Heideggerian political ontology. What if we've been wrong when reading Agamben? Mathew Abbott argues that Agamben's thought is misunderstood when read in terms of critical theory or traditional political philosophy. He shows instead that it engages in political ontology: studying the political stakes of the question of being. Abbott demonstrates the crucial influ…
Kiarostami's Picture Theory
The Wind Will Carry Us (1999) opens with a series of long takes of a car winding steadily down a road in the Iranian countryside. In other words, it opens with a sequence which, to anybody who knows Kiarostami's work, will be immediately recognizable as typical of it: Life and Nothing More (1992) returns repeatedly to such sequences, and ends with one; such sequences turn up in Through the Olive Trees (1994) and Taste of Cherry (1997); the protag…
Political ontology and colonialism
The Animal for which Animality is an Issue
There is congruence between Nietzsche’s philosophy of life and the biopolitical philosophy of Giorgio Agamben. For both philosophers the human animal possesses a divided relationship to its being alive. For both philosophers this division is of a political nature, such that membership in political community as we know it is conditional on the human animal’s alienation from its biological being. Both philosophers are also concerned with the possib…
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The Animal for which Animality is an Issue
There is congruence between Nietzsche’s philosophy of life and the biopolitical philosophy of Giorgio Agamben. For both philosophers the human animal possesses a divided relationship to its being alive. For both philosophers this division is of a political nature, such that membership in political community as we know it is conditional on the human animal’s alienation from its biological being. Both philosophers are also concerned with the possib…
Kiarostami's Picture Theory
The Wind Will Carry Us (1999) opens with a series of long takes of a car winding steadily down a road in the Iranian countryside. In other words, it opens with a sequence which, to anybody who knows Kiarostami's work, will be immediately recognizable as typical of it: Life and Nothing More (1992) returns repeatedly to such sequences, and ends with one; such sequences turn up in Through the Olive Trees (1994) and Taste of Cherry (1997); the protag…
Political ontology and colonialism
The Figure of This World
A fundamental re-reading of Agamben that defends and develops his philosophy as post-Heideggerian political ontology. What if we've been wrong when reading Agamben? Mathew Abbott argues that Agamben's thought is misunderstood when read in terms of critical theory or traditional political philosophy. He shows instead that it engages in political ontology: studying the political stakes of the question of being. Abbott demonstrates the crucial influ…
The Problem of Wild Minds
The Problem of Wild Minds:Knowing Animals in Grizzly Man and Ming of Harlem Mathew Abbott (bio) Near the end of W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz, the book’s eponymous protagonist recalls visiting the zoo of the Jardin des Plantes with his friend Marie.1 The zoo is in bad shape; the pair overhear children questioning their parents: “Mais il est où? Pourquoi il se cache? Pourquoi il ne bouge pas? Est-ce qu’il est mort?” Sebald writes: I recollect that I m…
The Problem of Wild Minds
The Look of Silence and the Problem of Monstrosity
In Beyond Moral Judgment, Alice Crary defends a version of moral objectivism which turns on the idea that participation in moral life involves acquired affective proclivities: subjective capacities which nevertheless allow us to be receptive to objective features of the world. In this article, I draw out key aspects and implications of her account with reference to Joshua Oppenheimer's 2014 film The Look of Silence, a companion piece to 2012's Th…
Martin Heidegger
It would be hard to overstate the importance of Martin Heidegger’s philosophy for Giorgio Agamben’s thinking. It is not simply that the Italian philosopher turns at various points in his work to texts and themes from early and later Heidegger, as important as this obviously is. As well as abiding interests in problems of ontology, finitude, facticity and authenticity, Agamben inherits from Heidegger a philosophical programme. That programme is th…
Michael Fried and Philosophy
Nature, significance, and the human perspective
This paper criticises contemporary posthumanist theories of anthropocentrism by reading an early essay by Bertrand Russell alongside work by Rosi Braidotti and Jane Bennett. It argues that, despite appearances, scientism and posthumanism share key commitments in common, such that clarifying the problems with which Russell struggles regarding nature and significance can illuminate symmetrical problems in posthumanism. Against these alternatives, t…
Coming round to ourselves
This paper develops an eco-Marxist interpretation of the discovery that Earth is an integrated system, a discovery we have made in grasping our own role in shaping it. It criticizes an idea pervasive among Earth system scientists that our disruption of Earth is a function of human power, while bringing out the truth in the thought from Paul Crutzen that our species has become a self-conscious manager of the Earth system. If labour encounters itse…
Species-Being and Self-Consciousness
How Can Nature Come Apart from Itself? Self-Consciousness and Metabolic Rift
This paper philosophically elaborates Michael Tomasello’s developmental psychology to clarify the implicit content of the eco-Marxist concept of metabolic rift. It reconstructs Marx on metabolism and human dependency on nature, bringing out that while all living beings labour because all must act to mediate their dependency on nature, the labour of self-conscious animals has a distinctively social character. This can explain the sense in which hu…
Philosophy (7 works) · Epistemology (6 works) · Art (4 works) · Law (4 works) · Politics (4 works) · Psychology (4 works) · Art history (3 works) · Geographies of human-animal interactions (3 works) · Literature (3 works) · Ontology (3 works)