Posthumous Life launches critical life studies: a mode of inquiry that neither endorses nor dismisses a wave of recent "turns" toward life, matter, vitality, inhumanity, animality, and the real. Questioning the nature and limits of life in the natural sciences, the essays in this volume examine the boundaries and significance of the human and the humanities in the wake of various redefinitions of what counts as life. They explore the possibility of theorizing life without assuming it to be either a simple substrate or an always-mediated effect of culture and difference. Posthumous Life provides new ways of thinking about animals, plants, humans, difference, sexuality, race, gender, identity, the earth, and the future.

Posthumous Life launches critical life studies: a mode of inquiry that neither endorses nor dismisses a wave of recent "turns" toward life, matter, vitality, inhumanity, animality, and the real. Questioning the nature and limits of life in the natural sciences, the essays in this volume examine the boundaries and significance of the human and the humanities in the wake of various redefinitions of what counts as life. They explore the possibility of theorizing life without assuming it to be either a simple substrate or an always-mediated effect of culture and difference. Posthumous Life provides new ways of thinking about animals, plants, humans, difference, sexuality, race, gender, identity, the earth, and the future.

Unlike other philosophers whose work can be applied to questions of sex and gender, Deleuze's philosophy was motivated by the problem of desire and difference. Over the last three decades, feminist theory, gender theory and queer theory have been revolutionised and rejuvenated by Deleuze's provocation to consider sexual difference beyond the paradigm of the Oedipal family and Western humanism. In this volume, a series of prominent critical theorists extend Deleuze's already radical philosophy into ideas of the post-human, truth, reading, sexual difference and gender politics. Moving beyond the tired debates surrounding sex, gender and representation, these essays consider difference positively and provocatively, opening up new directions for the study of sexuality.