Jeffrey Jerome Cohen

American scholar working at the intersection of medieval studies, ecocriticism, and philosophy of history; author of "Time Out of Memory" (in E. Scala and S. Federico, eds., The Post-Historical Middle Ages, Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). The wiki encounters Cohen via Décarie-Daigneault 2024's use of Cohen's daughter's mourning of Lindow Man — a 2000-year-old naturally mummified bog corpse displayed in the British Museum — as the paradigm-case for the ethical register of transtemporality: an engagement with the past as past, structured around acknowledgment of coexistence with the virtual passence of others rather than coexistence with another in the present.

Key Points

  • The Lindow Man scene. Cohen 2009 (p. 55) recounts that during a visit to the British Museum his daughter became inconsolable at the sight of Lindow Man's preserved corpse. He records her saying: "I want Lindow Man to be OK. I don't want him to be dead." Her reaction was "accompanied by tears, shaking, a loss of words." Cohen wonders whether his daughter had been "the first to mourn for Lindow Man."
  • Mourning as past-directed sorrow. For Décarie-Daigneault, Cohen's case shows mourning structured not around "an event that happened" (a present that came to pass) but around "the past as such, a passing that is always already realized, a pure past that was never present" (Décarie-Daigneault 2024 §3.2). This makes Cohen's case a working model of intersubjectivity organized around coexistence with the virtual passence of others.
  • Refuse to petrify. Cohen's prescription (2009 p. 55): "perhaps the best we can do [...] is to refuse to petrify bodies into objects, and objects into inert incarnations of some lost and unchanging historical moment." Décarie-Daigneault treats this as the ethical pivot of the cave-art encounter: the trace must be engaged in its transtemporal aliveness, not frozen into determinate object.

Connections

  • supplies the ethical paradigm-case for transtemporality §"Coexisting with the past" — Cohen's mourning shows transtemporal engagement as ethical comportment, not decryption.
  • is read through decarie-daigneault-2024-crooked-finger — Décarie-Daigneault uses Cohen's case in §3.2 as the ethical bridge between Toadvine's haunting and Dufourcq's vivre selon.
  • converges with Annabelle Dufourcq's authenticity-as-enacted reading — Cohen's "refuse to petrify" and Dufourcq's vivre selon both reject preservation-as-purity in favor of taking-up as ethical relation.

Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman (SEI, 2015)

Cohen's monograph in the Posthumanities series (University of Minnesota Press) is the major secondary anchor for the cautious-anthropomorphism frame as applied to stone. Per Morin (Ch 5 §3), Cohen's Stone is "closer to Merleau-Ponty's ontology of the flesh than to Harman's 'object-oriented ontology'" because it does not require eliminating ontological distance — instead, it cultivates trans-ontological affinity / geophilia:

  • The "lithic" and the "living" (SEI 20): "the lithic in the living and the lively in the stone." Cohen's stone is "as much about the liveliness or agency of the inhuman as about the petric in the human and the living more generally."
  • Trans-ontological affinity (SEI 19): "a pull, a movement, and a conjoint creativity that breaches ontological distance" — without dissolving it. Affinity rather than identity; companionship rather than commensurability.
  • Strategic anthropocentrism (SEI 9): Cohen acknowledges his approach is "strategic" — about how stone appears to us, enters the circuit of our existence — but precisely to disorient the human frame and scale.
  • Disorientation, not domestication (SEI 61, 83): the experience of "collaborating" with a stone should "make me realise that stone's time is not ours, that the world is not for us, even as material continuity becomes palpable." Companionship does not imply commensurability, assimilation, or harmonisation.
  • Diagnosis of Meillassoux's misanthropy (SEI 25, 63, 85, 289–90): Meillassoux's insistence on the divide between deep time and recent history "separates the world into solitary segments, silencing conversations across a gap of our own devising." Cohen reads Meillassoux as going too far — not disanthropocentric but misanthropic.

The 2009 Lindow Man piece (the wiki's original Cohen anchor via decarie-daigneault-2024-crooked-finger) and the 2015 Stone monograph share Cohen's "refuse to petrify" ethical pivot: in 2009 applied to mummified corpses; in 2015 applied to mineral existence.

Open Questions

  • Is Cohen primarily a Lindow Man scholar, or is the case incidental to his broader project? The 2009 article is in a volume on "post-historical" Middle Ages, suggesting Cohen's interest is in challenging conventional periodization rather than specifically in Lindow Man. The 2015 Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman monograph is now a second wiki anchor; Cohen's interest spans medieval studies, ecocriticism, prehistoric stones, monsters.
  • What is the relationship between Cohen's "post-historical" and Décarie-Daigneault's transtemporality? Both refuse to flatten the past into a chronological line. Cohen's framing is closer to medieval-studies methodology; Décarie-Daigneault's is closer to phenomenology. Whether the two converge philosophically or merely thematically remains open.

Sources

  • decarie-daigneault-2024-crooked-finger — cites Cohen, Jeffrey, "Time Out of Memory," in E. Scala and S. Federico (eds.), The Post-Historical Middle Ages, Palgrave Macmillan, 2009, p. 55 (notes 47, 48, 49, 54).
  • morin-2022-mp-nancy-sense-being — Ch 5 §3 + Ch 6: extensively cites Cohen's Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman (Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2015) — SEI 9, 14, 16, 19, 20, 23, 25, 61, 63, 83, 85, 289–90 n. 31. The wiki's primary anchor for Cohen's role in the contemporary new-materialist / cautious-anthropomorphism conversation.