Rein Raud, Being in Flux: A Post-Anthropocentric Ontology of the Self, Cambridge, Polity, 2021, 226 pp.

Abstract

During his career, the Estonian intellectual Rein Raud published on a remarkable array of topics. Spanning from pre-modern Japanese philosophy to cultural semiotics, he also authored poetry, novels, and plays – and translated classical works such as Dante Alighieri’s Vita Nova. In recent years, he has moved his interdisciplinary gaze toward the social sciences. After focusing on the practices through which selfhood is made and understood in Western modernity, Raud has offered a fascinating theory of culture that elegantly fuses the semiotics of Juri Lotman and Umberto Eco with sociological theories (Meaning in Action, Polity, 2016). His latest book reads like the natural consequence of this convergence. In Being in Flux, Raud presents a social philosophy aimed at radically rethinking both our relationship with the world we inhabit and how we can study it. He does so by developing a processual ontology which he then employs to reconceptualize the mind, selfhood, and agency.