Carbon

“Carbon: A Biography is brilliant. Commonly invoked in reductive logics as ruinous of earthly life, carbon, in Bensaude-Vincent and Loeve’s masterful hands, transforms into polymorphic matter. With expansive erudition, the authors unfold carbon’s multiply contingent materializations – in chemistry and cosmology, technology and the arts, industry and geopolitics, and geology and biology. Instead of an isolated, inert entity to be quantified and captured, carbon becomes a wondrous, wily and generative element whose affordances and capacities arise through complex relationality. Under Bensaude-Vincent and Loeve’s guidance, carbon’s multiple modes of existence compel a renewed urgency for inhabiting our climate crisis otherwise.”—Suzana Sawyer, University of California, Davis

“Travelling a course from the stars to the underground and from deep time to uncertain climate futures, Bensaude-Vincent and Loeve provide readers with an unparalleled elemental biography on that most fundamental of substances: carbon. Prepare to pass through an atom to encounter fossils and fire, coal and gases, crystals and nanoworlds, as the multiplicity of carbon dances into being in this fascinating and essential study.”—Jennifer Gabrys, University of Cambridge

“Bensaude-Vincent and Loeve are on a rescue mission to save carbon from its one-dimensional much-maligned role in public life today. And carbon has never been in better hands. This book, like carbon itself, is an allotrope: guidebook, philosophy, geomythology, critique and biography of carbon. The authors navigate the immense centrality of carbon to human life, from Mephitus to Lavoisier, from the periodic table to the carbon–carbon bond, from macro to nano, from common measure to common enemy. Bensaude-Vincent and Loeve are your guides to carbon’s pluriverse.”—Christopher M. Kelty, UCLA

“Ambitious in scope and aspiration, this book transforms our ideas of what substance ‘biographies’ can achieve, exploring the variety of carbon’s ways of being, narrated across cosmological, planetary and human histories. Deft in analysis, original in its interpretive concepts, it is engagingly and accessibly written – highly recommended.”—John R. R. Christie, University of Oxford

“Carbon: A Biography is a profoundly interdisciplinary exploration of an element at the heart of life, technology, and culture. The book takes readers on a journey that transcends traditional scientific narratives, intertwining history, philosophy, and material culture to illuminate the multifaceted roles of carbon in shaping our world.”—Leonardo Anatrini, Bulletin for the History of Chemistry

Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent is Professor Emeritus at Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne University.

Sacha Loeve is Associate Professor in Philosophy of science and technology at the Jean Moulin University Lyon 3.