ABSTRACT
Keith Ansell Pearson's new Viroid Life is an excellent book, foregrounding Nietzsche in an exciting look at the evolution—the past and future— of ‘the human’ in its twin registers of biology and technology. No mere exegete, Ansell Pearson critically examines extremely important issues with the help of contemporary French philosophy as well as so-called complexity theory. Prominent in Viroid Life one finds: 1. a critical interrogation of Nietzsche's relation to Darwin as well as an explication of his challenge to neo-Darwinism; 2. an exploration of Nietzsche's thoughts on the human and the transhuman in terms of his subtle interweaving of past and future; 3. a constant reference to Deleuze (principally Nietzsche and Philosophy and Difference and Repetition) and Deleuze and Guattari (A Thousand Plateaus) on the machinic nature of evolution and technology; 4. a critique of current techno-imperialist writings that celebrate (or bemoan) the ‘machines as the last stage of evolution’ trope. Throughout, Ansell Pearson's wide reading is in evidence, as in addition to the above names, Viroid Life scatters incisive readings of Freud, Heidegger, Hegel, Bergson, and a wide range of current biologists and philosophers (Margulis, Gould, Dawkins, Goodwin, Kauffman, Maturana and Varela, Csanyi, Kampis, Dennett, Lyotard, Baudrillard).
