Presence of Judaism in Christianity

The present study deals with the idea of "inorganic life", as developed by the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, in order to fundamentally question the nature of aliveness and its relationship to the organism. By pursuing this seemingly paradoxical idea, developing it further and questioning its philosophical and political potential, the book challenges a fundamental assumption of Western philosophy: everything that is, exists in different ways or modes. One of the most important distinctions is that between the living and the inanimate, that is, between beings that can self-organizingly develop, reproduce, pursue goals and respond to stimuli and things that merely move through external causality, are not internally structured and do not reproduce. Aliveness therefore traditionally coincides with organically structured beings that are capable of acting, gaining knowledge of their environment and (at a certain level) even gaining consciousness of themselves. Consequently, Western philosophical thought has only been interested in the organic, which is (potentially) capable of free action and can take up the search for true knowledge. Seemingly dead matter always appears to be waiting for the creative and formative access of active organisms to shape or understand it. The transcendental empiricism of Gilles Deleuze radically questions this `organic chauvinism` by tracing both organic beings and non-organic things back to continuous sub-representational processes of individuation. In this materialism shaped by Baruch de Spinoza, it becomes possible not only to understand the interweaving and co-constitution of the organic and inorganic, but also to trace the formative and creative processes of matter, which is only seemingly passive. Current debates (in New Materialism or Speculative Realism), which, inspired by Deleuze, also question the pure passivity of matter, have pointed to the political and ecological dimension of such thinking. Humans (and other organisms) are not understood here in a merely practical or even antagonistic relationship to the environment, but as embedded in a complex network of diverse (organic and inorganic) actors. This book intervenes in this discourse with a re-reading of Deleuze`s vitalism in order to close theoretical gaps on the one hand, but also to formulate a critique of current approaches to New Materialism and thus to formulate new philosophical and political dimensions of an inorganic "passive vitalism".