Contents

Rethinking Ahab: Melville and the Materialist Turn

MEREDITH FARMER

Part I. Ontologies

1. Sailing without Ahab

STEVE MENTZ

2. Ambiental Cogito: Ahab with Whales

BRANKA ARSIĆ

3. Ahab after Agency

MARK D. NOBLE

4. Thinking with a Wrinkled Brow; or, Herman Melville, Catherine Malabou, and the Brains of New Materialism

CHRISTIAN P. HAINES

Part II. Relations

5. Phantom Empathy: Ahab and Mirror-Touch Synesthesia

PILAR MARTÍNEZ BENEDÍ and RALPH JAMES SAVARESE

6. Phenomenology beyond the Phantom Limb: Melvillean Figuration and Chronic Pain

MICHAEL D. SNEDIKER

7. “The King Is a Thing”; or, Ahab as Subject of the Unconscious: A Lacanian Materialist Reading

RUSSELL SBRIGLIA

8. Approaching Ahab Blind

CHRISTOPHER CASTIGLI

Part III. Politics

9. “This Post-Mortemizing of the Whale”: The Vapors of Materialism, New and Old

BONNIE HONIG

10. Ahab’s Electromagnetic Constitution

DONALD E. PEAS

11. The Whiteness of the Will: Ahab and the Matter of Monomania

JONATHAN D. S. SCHROEDER

12. Diet on the Pequod and the Wreck of Reason

JONATHAN LAMB

Part IV. New Melvilles

13. Ahab’s After-Life: The Tortoises of “The Encantadas”

MATTHEW A. TAYLOR

14. Israel Potter; or, The Excrescence

COLIN DAYAN

15. Melville, Materiality, and the Social Hieroglyphics of Leisure and Labor

IVY G. WILSON

16. Melville’s Basement Tapes

JOHN MODERN

Afterword: Melville among the Materialists

SAMUEL OTTER

Acknowledgments