While the ‘mechanosphere’ is a concept mentioned only six times in A Thousand Plateaus, it is fundamental to the way Deleuze and Guattari construct their geophilosophy. In this article, I argue that the mechanosphere solves what Louis Althusser calls the idealist coupling of mechanism and spiritualism implicit in Teilhard de Chardin's noosphere and in Jacques Monod's appropriation of the term. My contention is that the mechanosphere must be contextualised within Althusser's critique of Monod, delivered during the ‘Philosophy Course for Scientists’ at the École normale supérieure rue d'Ulm in 1967. Reading A Thousand Plateaus (1980) against Monod's Chance and Necessity (1970) and Althusser's Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of Scientists (1967), I argue that the mechanosphere evacuates the spectre of an ‘idealist tendency’ latent in Monod's molecular science. By refashioning Teilhard's Omega point, Deleuze and Guattari create a sphere that serves as an asymptote on the horizon of ecological history – a projected point of complete destratification between the production of human subjects and planetary ecology. Ultimately, the mechanosphere nuances contemporary treatments of the Anthropocene, asking us to consider not only how humanity is overwhelming natural forces, but also how the former category is becoming increasingly indistinguishable from the latter.

Across his novels and shorter texts, Beckett engages frequently with forms of preservation fantasy: the belief that engraved language can extend an individual's life beyond the biological limits of the body. I argue that Beckett uses the inscription of proper names to reimagine textual immortality as an inherently material desire. Vital to this inquiry is Michel Serres's allotropic distinction between the hard and the soft [le dur et le doux], anticipated in Molloy. While the epitaphic tradition relies upon hard materials such as stone and metal to preserve lettering, Beckett's interest in excrement ("First Love") and mud (How It Is) remaps inscription onto immanence. Rather than seeking immortality through lithic preservation, Beckett's characters yearn to "return to the mineral state," to have their bodies subsumed and dispersed throughout a greater container. Explicating Beckett's material imagination reveals seldom considered source material including Frank Wedekind's Lulu Cycle and biologist Ernst Haeckel's theory of Urschleim.

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James Joyce's depiction of autographic signatures resembles the "doctrine of signatures"-a pre-modern system of correspondence between medicinal plants and parts of the body. Certain aspects of this episteme reappear in the late nineteenth century. This recurrence is due, in large part, to developments in the technology of writing that threaten what Friedrich Kittler calls the "surrogate sensuality of handwriting." Reading the "Nausicaa" episode of Ulysses against fin-de-siècle ideas about graphology, I argue that signature offers a unique perspective on Joyce's taxonomic representation, which questions the boundaries between a body of text and (non)human bodies.