In this timely, elegant addition to the Iowa Whitman Series, Jimmie Killingsworth merges his deep knowledge of Whitman's poetry and environ-mental rhetoric to give "a reconsideration of Whitman's language in light of an ecological understanding of the world and a reconsideration of ...

Categories such as chance, contingency, probability, and aleatoricism are often used, but not spelt out as the foundation for neomaterialism or more general materialist philosophies. As Marx and Engels (1968) point out, materialism has occupied a largely marginal position in the history of philosophy and, for Marx at least, even the staunchest materialists, such as Feuerbach, reveal a covert idealism. The problem lies, Marx (1959) argues, in the fact that practically all materialist philosophers-including Feuerbach-have maintained a 'subjective' perspective instead of moving towards a more third-party's view, one pertaining to science. This statement bears a striking resemblance to François Laruelle's project of non-philosophy, which calls upon the abandonment of the 'principle of philosophical sufficiency', assuming instead a posture of thought that emulates science's treatment of the real. 1 The latter concerns the fact that science does not seek to 'express' or convey 'the essence' of anything 'in itself'. Rather, it recognises 'the indifference of the real' to its aspirations and assumes a relation of unilaterality vis-à-vis the real (Laruelle 1989: 56). The outside world-exteriority-is not 'endowed with meaning' that science seeks to relay, but rather submits to its constitutive foreclosure whilst explaining 'how it works'. The latter is termed 'description' by way of 'cloning' the real (Laruelle 2014: 28, 51 et passim), or by way of superposition (Gangle and Greve 2017). The use of physics and categories of natural philosophy for contemporary materialist philosophy draws on the legacy of Greek atomism. In order to speak of materialism proper, rather than the one criticised by Marx as merely covert or reversed idealism, we claim that, following Marx, any contemporary re-appropriation of Greek atomism ought to posit the notions of clinamen (in Greek: παρέγκλισις), aleatoricism, uncertainty, and transcending the philosophical-theological belief in ideality, as its founding tenets. Materialist atomism seeks to traverse the membrane between subject and object, and to position itself beyond the logic of subjectivisation. In this way it transcends the centrality of subjectivity as the core problem of the pseudo-materialism criticised by Marx. Materialist atomism is implicitly projected onto the boundary between subject and object whilst displacing them, decentering them from their classical positions-as, for example, in the speculative binary criticised by Luce Irigaray (1985) in Speculum of the Other Woman. Therefore, its explicit problematisation needs to be articulated in a way that genealogises the origin of that very boundary. In this chapter we provide a genealogy of new materialism rooted/