Table of Contents

Introduction: The Turning1. Biosemiotics: Towards an Ecological Ontology of Sign Relations2. The Wrecked Vessel and Earth Repudiation: Gnosticism, Nominalism and the Semiotic Scaffolding of Modern Scientific Consciousness3. The Lightest Burden: The Aesthetic Abductions of Biosemiotics4. A Feeling for Life: Natural and Cultural Ecologies and the Orders of Discourse5. A Connoisseur of Magical Coincidences: Chance, Creativity and Poiesis from a Biosemiotic Perspective6. Expecting the Earth: A New Animism, the Technological Object and Gilbert Simondon

About the Author

Wendy Wheeler is Professor Emeritus of English Literature and Cultural Inquiry at London Metropolitan University and is currently a Visiting Professor at Goldsmiths College, University of London and in the School of Art, Environment and Cultural Studies at RMIT University in Melbourne Australia where she is the London member of the Art, Ecology, Globalisation and the Interpretation of Science research group.

Reviews

'This is an amazingly good book. Wendy Wheeler explains why biosemiotics has become crucial for understanding culture. She shows how both nature and culture are made of meanings that evolve in semiotic relations between life and the Earthly environment life expects.'Kalevi Kull, Professor of Biosemiotics, University of Tartu, Estonia
'This is a commanding work of revisionist intellectual history, disclosing the proto-biosemiotic dimension of the thought of Deleuze and Guattari, the gnostic influence constraining modern science, and the actuality of medieval theology and German Idealism. In her explorations of the poetic character of relational natural becoming, the organismic aspect of human works of art, and the unpredictable liveliness of our technological inventions, Wheeler shows how our humanly constructed worlds might be rendered more hospitable to the expectations of our own creaturely being, along with those of many other creatures. She demonstrates how biosemiotics provides the crucial intellectual wherewithal to help arrest industrial modernity's continuing slide towards ecocide.'Professor Kate Rigby, Director of the Research Centre for Environmental Humanities, Bath Spa University, and Adjunct Professor, Monash University. Author of Dancing with Disaster: Environmental Histories, Narratives and Ethics for Perilous Times (2015).