Vital Stein

Modernism is typically associated with energy and vitality, but what is the meaning of modernist ‘life’? That question is at the heart of Vital Stein. In early-twentieth-century philosophy, life was a key concept, replacing ideas that had determined older debates, such as God, Spirit, Nature, Reason. This book focuses on Gertrude Stein, who wanted to capture ‘this thing life’ in writing, and argues that Stein’s fascination with life connects her writing to a number of late-nineteenth- and twentieth-century thinkers, working in different contexts, who, like Stein, conceived of life as an open, differential system. These thinkers include Wilhelm Dilthey, Henri Bergson, Walter Benjamin and A.N. Whitehead. Vital Stein operates on three levels. It reports, first, on a vitalist system that grounds Stein’s thinking and writing about the concept of life, by way of a discussion of three alternate notions key to Stein’s work: history, cinema and landscape. Second, it offers an alternative vitalist framework for our understanding of modernism and the avant-garde by roping in thinkers not commonly associated with vitalism. Third, it traces a genealogy of the contemporary fascination with vitalism, from Gilles Deleuze to Isabelle Stengers and Bruno Latour.