Studies of the writing of Herman Melville are often divided among those that address his political, historical, or biographical dimensions and those that offer creative theoretical readings of his texts. In Herman Melville and the Politics of the Inhuman, Michael Jonik offers a series of nuanced and ambitious philosophical readings of Melville that unite these varied approaches. Through a careful reconstruction of Melville's interaction with philosophy, Jonik argues that Melville develops a notion of the 'inhuman' after Spinoza's radically non-anthropocentric and relational thought. Melville's own political philosophy, in turn, actively disassembles differences between humans and nonhumans, and the animate and inanimate. Jonik has us rethink not only how we read Melville, but also how we understand our deeply inhuman condition.

'Herman Melville and the Politics of the Inhuman brilliantly captures many of these valuable strains in Melville’s work, and it is most useful - and most pleasurable to think with - when it does so.'

Adam Fales Source: The British Society for Literature and Science (bsls.ac.uk)

'It is one of the most exciting, original, ambitious books on Melville in recent years, and it deserves a wide audience among readers of Leviathan, especially those with theoretical and philosophical interests.'

Meredith Farmer Source: Leviathan