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The art of living today has shifted to a continuous state of the experimental. In one of his last texts, Telemorphosis, renowned thinker and anti-philosopher Jean Baudrillard takes on the task of thinking and reflecting on the coming digital media architectures of the social. While “the social” may have never existed, according to Baudrillard, his analysis at the beginning of the twenty-first century of the coming social media–networked cultures cannot be ignored. One need not look far in order to find oneself snared within some sort of screenification of a techno-social community. “What the most radical critical critique, the most subversive delirious imagination, what no Situationist drift could have done . . . television has done.” Collective reality has entered a realm of telemorphosis.

This volume gathers notable critics and philosophers to engage the predominant impasse of an emerging era of climate change and ecocatastrophic acceleration: that is, how to conceptual and critical practices inherited from 20th century master-thinkers—who took no account of these emergences and logics—alter, adapt, mutate, or undergo translation at the current moment. Rather than assume that the humanities and philosophic practices of the past routed in the rethinking of language and power are suspended as irrelevant before mutations of the biosphere itself, Telemorphosis asks how, in fact, the latter have always been imbricated in these cognitive and linguistic practices and remain so, which is also to ask how a certain violence returns, today, to entirely different fields of reference. The writers in the volume ask, implicitly, how the 21st century horizons that exceed any political, economic, or conceptual models alters or redefines a series of key topoi. These range through figures of sexual difference, bioethics, care, species invasion, war, post-carbon thought, ecotechnics, time, and so on. As such, the volume is also a dossier on what metamorphoses await the legacies of “humanistic” thought in adapting to, or rethinking, the other materialities that impinge on contemporary “life as we know it.”