Always learning new words - which doesn't mean I'll remember them!
"Negative entropy" - a term for order apparently used in psychoanalysis, originally coined and them, perhaps, dropped by Erwin Schrödinger.
An archaic legal term which seems to have gained a new following.
Negentropic
"Negative entropy" - a term for order apparently used in psychoanalysis, originally coined and them, perhaps, dropped by Erwin Schrödinger.
According to Ward's ["Medea Hypothesis"], the history of life and mass extinctions on Earth demonstrates that vital processes have effects on the environment that are destabilizing rather than homeostatic. ... we should bear in mind ... that what led Lovelock to Gaia was precisely the incongruity and fragility of this niche of negentropy that is living Earth - which can of course cease to exist in its present form at any moment.
Déborah Danowski and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, The Ends of the World,
trans. Rodrigo Nunes (Cambridge & Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2017), 39
Deodand
An archaic legal term which seems to have gained a new following.
Agentic capacity is now seen as differentially expressed across a wider range of ontological types. This idea is also expressed in the notion of "deodand," a figure of English law from about 1200 until it was abolished in 1846. In case of accidental death or injury to a human, the nonhuman actant, for example, the carving knife that fell into human flesh or the carriage that trampled the leg of a pedestrian - became deodand (literally, "that which must be given to God"). In recognition of its peculiar efficacy (a power that is less masterful than agency but more active than recalcitrance), the deodand ... was surrendered to the crown to be used (or sold) to compensate the harm done.
Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things
(Durham, NC & London: Duke University Press, 2010), 9
