A World of Becoming - 9780822348795

In A World of Becoming William E. Connolly outlines a political philosophy suited to a world whose powers of creative evolution include and exceed the human estate. This is a world composed of multiple interacting systems, including those of climate change, biological evolution, economic practices, and geological formations. Such open systems, set on different temporal registers of stability and instability, periodically resonate together to produce profound, unpredictable changes. To engage such a world reflectively is to feel pressure to alter established practices of politics, ethics, and spirituality.

"A World of Becoming continues William E. Connolly's project of a `positive' pluralism: one unafraid of the `messy fecundities' of a complex world tense with unresolved tendencies yet effervescent with emergent potential. Against the politics of resentment so dominant today, he argues for an ethos of radical `interinvolvement' affirmative of becoming, with all its promise and all its loose ends. To counter the otherworldly lure of final transcendent solutions in which the politics of resentment too often takes refuge, he proposes the meeting ground of a non-doctrinal faith that amplifies attachment to this world as a work-in-progress and collective adventure. Written in flowingly accessible prose that sacrifices nothing of the complexity it charts, and as passionate as it is conceptually precise, A World of Becoming is a political and philosophical statement of foremost importance for our times."---Brian Massumi author of Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation

"William E. Connolly has not so much written about a world of becoming as he has enacted it, energized it, opened it into language limpid and alive with the temporal pulsation he narrates. A leading political philosopher here takes politics and philosophy somewhere other than where they have been, somewhere densely enmeshed in the Deleuzian and Whiteheadian philosophies of open-ended process, somewhere strangely hospitable to any thinking---even theological---respectful of its own uncertainty. With him we `enter into moments of suspension to allow creative thoughts to gestate when a new fork in time is underway.' The book is brilliant with metamorphosis."---Catherine Keller author of The Face of the Deep: A Theology of Becoming

"A World of Becoming is a deeply original and timely book drawing together a series of ideas, discoveries, and concepts from a wide range of fields into a coherent image of a new way of responding to what William E. Connolly understands as the human predicament. It suggests many practical guidelines, forms of action, types of ethos, and modes of interaction directly applicable to some of the most intractable social and political problems we face today. It is a brave and engaged work."---James Williams author of Gilles Deleuze's Logic of Sense