Jonathan Basile
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jonothingeb.bsky.social
Jonathan Basile
@jonothingeb.bsky.social
1K followers 1.1K following 160 posts
Postdoc at UofT, Institute for Hist & Phil of Sci & Tech, 20th C literature and science, viruses, evolutionary theory, deconstruction, libraryofbabel.info. Author: Virality Vitality (https://sunypress.edu/Books/V/Virality-Vitality)
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jonothingeb.bsky.social
October 27, 2025 at 8:56 PM
jonothingeb.bsky.social
Our conference on Dialectical Biology, the Marxist tradition represented by the work of Richard Lewontin, is this weekend! Join us Friday to Sunday, online or in Toronto, register here: ihpst.utoronto.ca/events/diale...

Help spread the word if you can!
October 7, 2025 at 6:27 PM
jonothingeb.bsky.social
I’m enormously grateful to Ian James, who has written the first review of my book, Virality Vitality. It’s an honor to be read so carefully and generously:

olrsupplement.com/2025/10/06/v...
Overall, then, Basile’s book deserves recognition as a major contribution to the contemporary literature of biodeconstruction. But it is also exemplary of the manner in which biodeconstruction can intervene in an original and important way within the philosophical or conceptual fundamentals of biological theory and the ethics and politics of biological practice. There are, no doubt, many biologists who wish to turn to philosophy and the work of philosophers to better understand the implications and wider importance of their work. This may particularly be so in areas where there is so much dogmatic doctrine and economic interest at play. In this context, the biodeconstructive work of Basile and that of others, like Vitale, deserves to be read. One also gets the sense, reading Virality Vitality, of the ongoing importance of Derrida’s legacy and of the way in which this legacy can offer a useful corrective to some of the tendencies within philosophy in the wake of postmodernism and in the context of the so-called ‘ontological turn’. Similarly, the inventiveness of Basile’s book reminds us that Derrida’s legacy needs to remain open and not restricted by attempts to ensure forms of fidelity to a body of thought that has always questioned the terms in which any gesture of fidelity might first be judged. Thus, Basile’s work should, arguably, be allied, not just with those works that form the emergent canon of biodeconstruction, but also with a range of recent and contemporary work that situates itself with the domain of the life sciences and that inherits more broadly from the post-deconstructive moment. There is a wider field here that also places a key emphasis upon something like the reading and interpretation of life, upon ‘natural lection’, rather than seeking new forms of ontological ground.[8] The open, plural, and above all ceaselessly inventive recasting of Derridean thought, such as one finds in Basile’s book, offers no better way of securing its legacy in both t…
October 6, 2025 at 12:54 PM
jonothingeb.bsky.social
"Despite the university requiring students to undergo the training, the Trump administration still cut $790m in research funding."
The university emailed students in March to say that the implementation of the training “will adhere to federal policy including President Donald Trump’s 29 January executive order, ‘Additional Measures to Combat Anti-Semitism’”. Despite the university requiring students to undergo the training, the Trump administration still cut $790m in research funding.
September 30, 2025 at 4:05 AM
jonothingeb.bsky.social
We now have this nifty flier for our upcoming conference on Marxist biology - please help spread the word!

(registration including for zoom link here: ihpst.utoronto.ca/events/diale...)
September 23, 2025 at 5:23 PM
jonothingeb.bsky.social
Here's the schedule!
Keynote: Elliott Sober
Presenters: Sonia Sultan, Ana M. Soto & Carlos Sonnenschein, Denis Walsh, Christopher Shambaugh, Rasmus Winther, Jonathan Basile, Stuart Newman, Alejandro Fabrègas Tejeda, Andrea Gambarotto & Rebecca Riccardo Cuciniello, Fermín Fulda
Friday, October 10th: Session 1: Sonia Sultan, 12:30-2:00   Respondent: Jacinda Kalaher Session 2: Ana M. Soto & Carlos Sonnenschein, 2:15-3:45   Respondent: Hongyu Chen Keynote: Elliott Sober, 4-6 Saturday, October 11th: Session 3: Denis Walsh, 9-10:15 Session 4: Christopher Shambaugh, 10:30-11:45 Session 5: Rasmus Winther, 1-2:30   Respondent: Emma Sigsworth Session 6: Jonathan Basile, 2:45-4:00 Session 7: Stuart Newman, 4:15-5:45   Respondent: David Rattray Sunday, October 12th: Session 8: Alejandro Fábregas-Tejeda, 9-10:15 Session 9: Andrea Gambarotto & Rebecca Riccardo Cuciniello (they/them), 10:30-11:45 Session 10: Fermín Fulda, 12-1:30   Respondent: Cassandra Williams
September 15, 2025 at 5:40 PM
jonothingeb.bsky.social
I'm excited to share with you all a conference I'm planning Oct. 10-12: Dialectical Biology Today: Legacies of Richard Lewontin.

It will be hybrid in Toronto and on zoom, so please join us however you can! Register for zoom link here: ihpst.utoronto.ca/events/diale...
Conference title: Dialectical Biology Today: Legacies of Richard Lewontin, and image of Lewontin in Black and White with intense expression in front of a chalkboard holding up a fist, When and Where Friday, October 10, 2025 11:30 am to Sunday, October 12, 2025 2:00 pm Music Room (218) Goldring Student Centre 150 Charles St W, Toronto, ON M5S 1K5 | and online via Zoom
September 15, 2025 at 5:35 PM
jonothingeb.bsky.social
This comes to a head in a scene that both Derrida and D&G read - for D&G, because no representative of the law is ultimate, they open the line of flight K. follows, but Derrida recognizes that this safe passage is precisely the impasse for Kafka...
September 9, 2025 at 5:20 PM
jonothingeb.bsky.social
D&G also oppose representational readings of Kafka - his writing does not provide metaphors for the law, but is itself the process by which he creates lines of flight or becomings-animal to escape oppressive structures
September 9, 2025 at 5:20 PM
jonothingeb.bsky.social
Benjamin argues, against the psychoanalytic and theological interpretations of Kafka (law=father or law=god) that Kafka should be read without allegorical referent - he evokes another world without providing it, creating parables without an allegorized doctrine
September 9, 2025 at 5:20 PM
jonothingeb.bsky.social
I have a new article out on Kafka! Basically, I argue that Derrida's reading of Before the Law/The Trial recognizes an undecidability that inhabits Benjamin's and Deleuze and Guattari's readings. Let me know if you'd like a copy!
doi.org/10.3366/olr....
September 9, 2025 at 5:20 PM
jonothingeb.bsky.social
I take it as an instance of deconstruction in and as the life sciences -- to many onlookers, this synthetic poliovirus appeared to demonstrate something already known and always true, yet, it shifted the ground under the feet of decisionmakers in numerous fields
Book Cover of Virality Vitality - bacteriophages attacking a cell
July 16, 2025 at 4:55 PM
jonothingeb.bsky.social
In 2002, a small group of virologists and biochemists synthesized infectious poliovirus from mail-order DNA fragments. I consider the implications of this experiment in the introduction of my book, Virality Vitality /THREAD
Scientist Eckard Wimmer, an older man in a lab coat with a bow tie and grey hair. In a laboratory setting an Image of poliovirus, small dots on a grainy background - black and white
July 16, 2025 at 4:53 PM
jonothingeb.bsky.social
One such biologist, Steven Rose, wrote the following, accusing his contemporaries of having incorporated the ideology that led to Reagan and Thatcher into their evolutionary biology:
I do believe […] that when the history of the move to the right of the late 1970s comes to be written, from law and order to monetarism and to the (more contradictory) attack on statism, then the switch in scientific fashion, if only from group to kin selection models in evolutionary theory, will come to be seen as part of the tide which has rolled the Thatcherites and their concept of a fixed, 19th century competitive and xenophobic human nature into power.
May 30, 2025 at 2:16 PM
jonothingeb.bsky.social
I wrote this essay to show that the types of biological racism and neoliberal apologia that Slobodian finds among explicit advocates for neoliberalism are prevalent among evolutionary biologists: olrsupplement.com/2025/05/19/g... (Thread)
Book cover of interlocking gold bars - author: Quinn Slobodian, Title: Hayek's Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right
May 30, 2025 at 2:14 PM
jonothingeb.bsky.social
There's a discount code for my book, Virality Vitality - SNWS25 (for the hardcover, which even with the discount is still quite pricey - a more affordable paperback will be published in October, and there is an ebook too) sunypress.edu/Books/V/Vira...
Virality Vitality explores the history and present of the life sciences and virology, focusing on moments of disruption that reveal the instability of the most basic concepts guiding scientific knowledge and their practical or political consequences. From their "discovery" to present-day experiments in synthetic virology, viruses have given rise to upheavals in our models of life because of the difficulty of rigorously distinguishing life from virus, self from other. The virus has been compared to a gene, to an agent of life's heredity and immunity, and we humans depend on the fossils of ancient viral infections in our genome in order to bear children. Can a parasite give birth to its host? To interpret the nonoppositional relationship of virality and vitality, this book draws on the work of Jacques Derrida and the growing field of biodeconstruction that has emerged from his posthumously published work on genetics. In turn, Virality Vitality suggests a novel approach to questions of the agency of "matter" or the "nonhuman," often raised in Anthropocene studies, the material turn, and ecocriticism. Nothing is more natural than the artificiality of the borders drawn, maintained, and displaced by the living and their viruses, by virality-vitality. The inscription of these borders remains to be read, and thus deconstructive textuality is anything but opposed to the sciences and what they call life. Reviews "Virality Vitality constitutes an immensely important contribution to scholarship at the emerging intersections of deconstruction and the so-called life sciences. Virality Vitality, however, does not simply propose a viral supplement to already established work in 'bio-' or 'ecodeconstruction' but invites us to rethink the very conditions of possibility of these fields. Basile's work is equally important in redeploying and nuancing the ongoing conversations in the environmental posthumanities on nonhuman 'life' and material 'agency,' showing how deconstruction l…
May 26, 2025 at 2:52 PM
jonothingeb.bsky.social
Come join this conversation about my new book tomorrow on zoom! Register here: utoronto.zoom.us/meeting/regi...
May 12, 2025 at 2:46 PM
jonothingeb.bsky.social
An article I wrote on the similarities between the 'Tree of Life' in biological discourse and the Book of Genesis has been published -- let me know if you'd like a PDF (10.1353/sub.2025.a959048) (special thanks to @lint_ax for his research advice!)
May 9, 2025 at 3:26 PM
jonothingeb.bsky.social
Dear friends! I hope you'll join us for this virtual Virality Vitality Book Launch Event, May 13th at 2 PM ET, with Richard Doyle, Adam Rosenthal, and Naomi Waltham-Smith. Register Here: utoronto.zoom.us/meeting/regi...
April 29, 2025 at 2:03 PM
jonothingeb.bsky.social
Rutting on Rhum
April 23, 2025 at 1:23 AM
jonothingeb.bsky.social
Stationary company owned by Emily Paper
April 12, 2025 at 2:50 PM
jonothingeb.bsky.social
This little pathogen I’ve created now has a life of its own. Virality Vitality, on the subterfuges of reproduction and contagion, has just been published!

Unfortunately, only in hardcover for the time being (sunypress.edu/Books/V/Vira...); if you’d like to read it just get in touch!
A smiling man holding a book of which he is evidently very proud. The title is Virality Vitality and the cover is blue and orange, with an image of a cell being invaded by ghostly bacteriophages, like little lollipops
April 8, 2025 at 3:16 PM
jonothingeb.bsky.social
Brendan Moore's psychoanalytic and deconstructive reading of the fears of social media among parents and doctors is an example of the kind of theoretically informed writing about contemporary culture and politics that The OLR Supplement aims to feature.

olrsupplement.com/2025/01/16/t...
Indeed, it’s worth asking whether doctors are not themselves unduly predisposed (contagiously triggered) by media exposure to inquire about a social media cause for these recently developed violent tics, and a biological cause in less explosive tics. The theory of social contagion is everywhere in this reporting, which is predictable, because, as far as metaphors go, social contagion is quite contagious. Its descriptive powers, appealing but vacuous, are applied to phenomena as various as obesity, autism, trans identity, criminality and now tics. Having a fat friend, according to this logic, is enough to make one fat,[11] while having a trans friend will make one’s child trans.[12] What is curious here is not that humans are assumed to be affected by their relationships with others, but that this relationality is being defined as pathological in a special way. Somewhere, it is implied, there are forms of embodiment and identities which inhere and suffice in themselves—but not the tics and trans identities of my/our children. If contagiousness is already there at the beginning of—is the beginning of—psychic life, then it is responsible as much for what goes right as for what goes wrong. TikToks about mental health, for example, like those counseling vagus nerve stimulation for unspecified feelings of emotional distress, are there to make us feel less alone through the dual balm of the quick fix delivered by the comforting friend. The warm therapist or the fellow traveler-in-trauma gives us an insight (memorising the sound of someone’s footsteps is a hold-over from childhood trauma) or a hack (take ice baths, abolish capitalism), but what they are offering above all is themselves. As one empirically backed theory of psychotherapeutic action suggests, it is the relationship that cures rather than any specific technique. This can happen only by contagiousness, by the patient’s capacity to imbibe the therapist and the therapist’s ability to make themselves available to such introjection.[13] That contagiousness operates not only from ego to ego, but from unconscious to unconscious—that is to say, it evidently does not just obey the simple rules of monkey see, monkey do. What exactly gets transmitted is always a surprise.
February 3, 2025 at 5:38 PM
jonothingeb.bsky.social
Indeed! (I came across it in The Texts of Early Greek Philosophy)
January 30, 2025 at 2:03 AM
jonothingeb.bsky.social
For he (Empedocles) wore bronze shoes
Hippobotus says when he gor up [from healing a woman in a comal he went his way to Mount Aerna, where he stood on the edge of the crater and leapt into the fire and disappeared, wishing to confirm the report that he had hecome a god. But later the ruse was discovered when one of his shoes was thrown back up. For he wore bronze shoes.
January 30, 2025 at 1:57 AM