Chad Augustine Córdova, "Toward a Premodern Posthumanism: Anarchic Ontologies of Earthly Life in Early Modern France" (Northwestern UP, 2025)

Dec 6, 2025

Chad Córdova, an Assistant Professor at Cornell specializing in early modern French thought, explores the untapped potential of aesthetics in addressing ecological crises. He proposes that a premodern posthumanism can challenge traditional human-centered perspectives. Topics include Montaigne's essays as relational forms, the interplay of beauty and ethics through Nietzsche, and the relevance of Aristotle's spontaneous generation. Córdova advocates for a multitemporal reading of texts to rethink our connections with nature, art, and politics amid contemporary challenges.

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INSIGHT

Posthumanism As Ontological Reorientation

Post-humanism requires rethinking metaphysics, not just studying nonhuman life.
Córdova proposes an 'anarchic ontology' that decouples being from teleology and human centrality.

ADVICE

Read Across Periods To Recover Possibilities

Bridge disciplinary divides by reading early modern texts with contemporary theory.
Córdova urges combining close historical caution with theoretical risk to recover overlooked possibilities.

ANECDOTE

Author's Eco-Turn Shaped The Project

Córdova recounts his own 'eco-turn' after graduate school that reshaped his research focus.
That shift led him to pursue eco-deconstruction and rethink humanism across periods.

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What good is aesthetics in a time of ecological crisis? Toward a Premodern Posthumanism: Anarchic Ontologies of Earthly Life in Early Modern France (Northwestern UP, 2025) shows that philosophical aesthetics contains unheeded potentialities for challenging the ontological subjection of nature to the human subject. Drawing on deconstructive, ecological, and biopolitical thought, Chad Córdova uncovers in aesthetics something irreducible to humanist metaphysics: an account of how beings emerge and are interrelated, responsive, and even response-able without reason or why.
This anarchic and atelic ontology, recovered from Kant, becomes the guiding thread for a new, premodern trajectory of posthumanism. Charting a path from Aristotle to Heidegger to today’s plant-thinking, with new readings of Montaigne, Pascal, Diderot, Rousseau, and others along the way, this capacious study reveals the untimely relevance of pre-1800 practices of writing, science, and art. Enacting a multitemporal mode of reading, Córdova offers a defense and illustration of the importance of returning to early modern texts as a way to rethink nature, art, ethics, and politics in a time when these concepts are in flux and more contentious than ever.

Author Chad Córdova is Assistant Professor in the Department of Romance Studies at Cornell University where he is also affiliated faculty in the Department of Environment and Sustainability. In addition to this new book, he is the author of many articles on figures and concepts that appear in this book, such as Montaigne, Kant, and Heidegger—most recently in Essais: Revue interdisciplinaire d’humanités and The Comparitist.

Host Gina Stamm is Associate Professor of French at The University of Alabama. Their research is concentrated on the environmental humanities and speculative literatures of the 20th and 21st centuries, from surrealism to contemporary science fiction and feminist utopias, in Metropolitan France and the francophone Caribbean.

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