Vicki Kirby’s Quantum Anthropologies is a major work of feminist theory, taking aim at the old division between nature and culture with a scalpel in one hand and a detonator in the other.

Drawing on Derrida, quantum physics, biology and poststructuralist thought, Kirby argues that matter is not the mute ground upon which culture writes meaning, but is itself active, articulate and entangled with what we call language, thought and life.

This is dense, difficult and genuinely exciting theory: a book for readers interested in new materialism before it became showroom-polished, feminist science studies, deconstruction, embodiment and the politics of biological knowledge. Kirby refuses the comfort of treating “nature” as either fixed essence or passive construction, instead asking what happens when biology itself is understood as interpretive, unstable and already involved in the production of meaning.

Published by Duke University Press, Quantum Anthropologies sits alongside the work of Donna Haraway, Karen Barad, Elizabeth Grosz and Rosi Braidotti, while remaining very much its own strange and exacting beast. A strong Bower theory title.

First paperback edition. Duke University Press. Very good condition with light shelf wear.