Reinach understood the specific temporality as an important structural element of law. It requires its own phenomenological assessment, which distinguishes the being of law from that of physical and psychological, but also mathematical objects. For him, however, the foundations of the temporality of law do not lie in consciousness, as in the later phenomenological theory of law, but in the a priori nature of the forms of law themselves. This is reconstructed here for the first time from the scattered fragments of Reinach’s phenomenology of the temporality of law and contrasted with Gerhard Husserl’s theory of law and time, which can draw on his father Edmund’s phenomenology of inner time consciousness and Heidegger’s “Being and Time”. Both make important contributions to a theory of the temporality of law.

Charles Brockden Brown’s Edgar Huntly (1799) narrates two scenes of panther attacks. In the first scene, Huntly’s mind is paralyzed, while in the second, Huntly’s body kills a stalking panther by hurling a tomahawk across a dark cave, an effort stemming from our bodily “constitution.” This introduction argues that this artist not only troubled the mind-centered ontology of consciousness—the Cartesian idea of the mind’s dominance over the body—but also explored the ontological alternatives that centered the expressions of our material body’s “constitution.” It both uncovers the posthumanist accents of this work, and reveals the way it prods us to refurbish posthumanism by historicizing it. Starting with Brown, this introduction thus recovers a set of texts focused on “minding the body,” on not simply eroding the philosophical distinction between the mind and body in order to trouble a mind-centered ontology and imagine a body-centered alternative to it, as posthumanism does. It also reveals the way artists used the expressive agency of these historical bodies to imagine less repressive alternatives to nineteenth-century structures of power—including chattel slavery, market capitalism, and patriarchy—whose claims to dominance involved reducing the body to little more than mindless matter.

The conclusion explores Herman Melville’s Benito Cereno (1855), focusing on the way its characters and, we, as readers, make sense of embodied actions on board the San Dominick. Being able to read the emplotment of bodies becomes the key to solving the mystery on the ship, and to making sense of the story itself. By doing so, Melville complicates the mind-centered ontological paradigm’s structuring of our reading practices, our “mind-centered reading practices,” that reduce all bodies to just so many textual objects recording lived experience. By privileging the expressive agency of the material body, Melville also presents a competing reading practice, a “body-centered reading practice,” that understands the body as an active agent making meaning out of lived experience. The conclusion contrasts Amasa Delano’s faulty “mind-centered reading practice” with Babo’s rebellious “body-centered reading practice.” Melville thus “minds the body” to demonstrate the way the material expressions of the lived experiences of racial embodiment can short-circuit the objectification of Black bodies in the nineteenth-century chattel slave economy. And by doing so, Melville also models for us, as twenty-first-century readers, new ways to interpret critically the resistant meaning-making possibilities of embodied experience in all of its expressive dynamism.

As the providers of care work, women experienced the painful losses of male bodies during the Civil War acutely. This chapter explores the way Elizabeth Stuart Phelps used her works—particularly her successful sentimental novel, The Gates Ajar (1868)—to imagine faith as a way to manage this pain. Yet, Phelps’s popularity stemmed from the way her notion of faith also complicated the orthodox Calvinist belief in a disembodied spirit: an ontology premised on the soul’s difference from, and superiority to, the body. By developing what Phelps calls “spiritual materialism,” she puts the lived experience of embodiment at the very center of belief, not drifting or working between mind-centered and body-centered paradigms, as we have seen, but operating beyond them both at the level of faith. Precisely the way this re-embodied faith moves beyond mind-centered and body-centered ontologies allows Phelps’s sentimental novel itself to move beyond the restrictive gender politics of sentimentalism, “minding the body” to tell a less repressive story of domesticity and reveal a more capacious understanding of female desire.

Henry Box Brown not only mailed himself in a box from Richmond in Philadelphia in 1849, but he also remediated this experience of embodiment later in competing slave narratives, on stage, in a panorama, and through his role as a magician and mesmerist. In these four “acts,” Brown uses the representation of his experiences of Black embodiment across various media both to support and—simultaneously—to undercut the mind-centered ontology that structured the system of chattel slavery’s reduction of Blackness to mindless matter. Rather than imagine ontological drift, as Bird does, or ontological betweenness, like Forrest, Brown uses different representations of Black embodiment to imagine existence as always already ontologically doubled, as something governed by the mind-centered paradigm that demeans the body, and by the body-centered paradigm that makes the material body’s expressive agency crucial for the fullest articulation of humanity. Brown suggests that consciousness emerges simultaneously from the mind and the body, and that by carefully curating these overlapping, and doubled, forms of consciousness, Black subjects can “mind the body” in order to imagine alternatives to white culture’s dehumanizing of Blackness.

In his intensely physical acting, the nineteenth-century actor, Edwin Forrest, crafted a working-class theatrical aesthetic that imagined our existence not as drifting, but as ontologically between, an ontological third term distinct from both the mind-centered and the body-centered ontological paradigms. By recovering the way Forrest staged his own muscular—and white—body in his interpretation of Shakespeare’s Othello (1826) and in Bird’s The Gladiator (1831), this chapter argues that Forrest used the experience of his labored at, and laboring, body to perform this ontological betweenness as an alternative to the antebellum market’s alienation and regulation of working-class bodies. In staging the agency of white, working-class bodies against Black inagentic bodies on stage, Forrest’s performance of ontological betweenness “minded the body” by offering his adoring working-class audiences less alienated—but racially complicated—ways to perform their own material embodiment in the early nineteenth century.

This chapter explores the medically-trained writer, Robert Montgomery Bird, and his fraught experience of the way the competing ontological paradigms that inflected Edgar Huntly also conditioned early nineteenth-century medical discourse. Bird uses his picaresque novel, Sheppard Lee (1836), to interrogate what was called “regular” medical discourse and its mind-centered ontology, and to imagine instead the ontological possibilities that result from the body-centered ontology of metempsychosis. For Bird, metempsychosis involves our consciousness migrating from one body to another, and being defined by its different embodiment. In representing the lived experience of both white and Black embodiment, Bird uses metempsychosis to interrogate “regular” medicine’s mind-centered ontological paradigm, even as he puts pressure on “irregular” medicine as well. As I argue, Bird understands conscious existence as ontological drift, as I call it, a far less clear, but far more capacious ontology than either regular or irregular medical discourses entertain. By “minding the body” in this way, Bird uses his novel’s interrogation of the mind-body relationship to imagine a less repressive, but not unproblematic, form of racialized conscious existence in the antebellum period.

Part of the fascination of Being and Time is that it seeks to weave together so many different strands of thought. But unsurprisingly, its readers also worry that such a work must subject itself to such strain that ultimately it itself must unravel. Key tensions are between the outlooks of three figures: Heidegger the pragmatist, Heidegger the existentialist, and Heidegger the philosopher of being. Seeing how openness to our concerns as a whole is both necessary for authenticity and reveals a unified horizon against which entities with different ways of being show themselves, dissipates these apparent tensions. Recognition of the mediating role played by a conception of the good – that Heidegger’s reading of Aristotle and Augustine inspired – helps make clear that authenticity is both compatible with the practical embeddedness of our concerns and reveals a form of understanding necessary for ontology to be possible.

This chapter explores the connection between Heidegger’s existentialism and fundamental ontology. Specifically, and contra John Haugeland who argues that existentialism is a key feature of fundamental ontology insofar as taking responsibility for our existence entails getting the being of entities right, this chapter argues that taking responsibility for our existence explicitly exhibits the temporal horizon that is fundamental for all our purpose activities and our understanding of entities, generally.

In this chapter, I examine arguments that have been or might be used to establish or defend the distinction that Heidegger draws between entities (things that are) and the being of entities (that by virtue of which those things are). I find these arguments for the ontological difference to fail – due largely to the self-concealing nature of being, which makes it difficult to distinguish being from entities. At the same time, I see something positive in these troubles for the ontological difference, that is, they serve as prompts to question the meaning of being.

The chapter starts with an impasse in criminal justice theory between liberal normative and critical historical accounts to consider a new way of developing critique. This is based on the idea of human beings as metaphysical animals, that is, animals capable of thought and love. Starting with Bernard Williams’s account of the ‘peculiar’ nature of modern ethics, a moral psychology based on a naturalistic understanding of what human beings are would be a better way of thinking about what it means to violate or be violated by another. Basing our understanding of violation on what it means to be human takes us to ontology and to ontological critique as a pivotal moment in a sequence of four critiques, moving from immanent to explanatory to ontological and then to emancipatory. This provides the possibility of a further ethically real/ institutionally critical (ERIC) position which brings together ontological naturalism, ethical realism and institutional critique. How love was identified as the immanent starting point for the argument is explained. The upshot of this fivefold form of critique is a move in the course of the book away from punishment and towards what I call a deep or tendential abolitionist position.

Chapter V develops the analyses of Chapters III and IV through a close reading of one of the most problematic passages of The Lord of the Rings, namely the fall of Gandalf in Moria and his following return. With the help of Tolkien’s own (elusive) exegesis of the passage, the chapter reveals that this narrative event embodies two key meta-literary motives recurrent in his mythology. First is sub-creative submission, featuring the sub-creator’s humble decision to hand over their sub-creations to the supreme “Writer of the Story” (the Godhead Eru) and affirm their “naked hope” in Him. This is followed by the direct, miraculous intervention of Eru, which interferes with the ontology of sub-creations, disrupting “the Rules” of their secondary world; in this particular, Eru’s intrusion transcends the intentions of Gandalf and his divine authorities – the Valar, the archetypical secondary sub-creators – and results in the enhancement of their plans, and their eventual integration within a higher creative project.

This chapter offers a critical appraisal of two dominant approaches to pluralism, conflict, and difference in contemporary political theology, both of which draw on the thought of Augustine. Postliberal Augustinianism, represented by the “Radical Orthodoxy” of John Milbank, develops a highly sophisticated account of the metaphysics of human sociality, grounded in a creative reading of Trinitarian theology which construes political community in terms of harmonious difference. Augustinian civic liberalism, represented by Charles Mathewes and Eric Gregory, draws on Augustine’s understanding of love and difference in order to propose an ethics and ascetics of liberal citizenship. Both, however, thematize political community and difference in essentially oppositional terms, privileging one or the other, and reading conflict in decidedly negative terms. The limits of these political theological strategies reveal a need to reconceptualize the nature of political community and the place of conflict therein.

In Chapter 1, I explain how the book can be read and used in a nonlinear fashion, providing affordances for further exploration, comparable to the way the book approaches the creation and experience of works of art. The chapter proceeds to present a detailed advance organizer in the form of a point-by-point overview of the main messages and ideas of this book, providing a framework for the way the book can be read and used.