Book Review: “Towards an Ungrounded Vitality – Ben Woodard’s Slime Dynamics: Generation, Mutation, and the Creep of Life (Zer0, 2012), and On an Ungrounded Earth: Towards a New Geophilosophy (Punctum, 2013).”

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Woodard’s Dark Vitalism: From The Earth to Slime

The horror and fascination of that which is in-between, neither here nor there, neither one nor many, the multiplicitous, the excessive and the extreme – such concerns, and their potential impetus for thought and philosophy –  are the primary starting point of the work of Ben Woodard’s philosophy of “dark vitalism” as described in his two recent books Slime Dynamics: Generation, Mutation, and the Creep of Life (Zer0, 2012) and On an Ungrounded Earth: Towards a New Geophilosophy (Punctum, 2013). An entry point into this porous corpus can be found, amongst many others, in the metaphor of the slime mold, a fantastic yet quite living biological wonder which can either…