Contributions to Law, Philosophy and Ecology ─ Exploring Re-embodiments

This book explores the failure of established institutions to challenge the categorical centrality of ‘Western Man’ to modernity. This failure can be linked to a fundamental tension between the tired assumptions of modernism and the urgent needs of a complex age characterized by eco-crises: a tension in which mainstream social and legal theory are, by and large, still implicated. Against this background, the central conviction of this collection is that the categorical position of ‘Man’ is in the process of being eroded, such that Western/ised anthropocentrism can no longer operate as point of reference for theory. More specifically, the contributors to this volume explore the (impossible) disembodiment of the human from planetary eco-cycles and bio-rhythms. Building on the compelling critiques emerging from ecofeminism, political economy, ethno-ecology and some strands of legal theory, this collection provides both a sustained interrogation of disembodied forms of living. And in so doing, it advocates a re-embodiment of the human, and a re-embedding of human understandings and practices in the fact of our bio-material existence.