New Materialism and the Question of Anthropos

Abstract

One of the most crucial features of new materialism is its critical stance towards the philosophies of linguistic or poststructuralist turn. It argues that too much emphasis on language has pushed the question of matter and materiality into oblivion, and by ascribing agential role to language it has foreclosed any possibility of approaching matter’s autopoietic capabilities. Since language has historically been thought to be the privileged domain of anthropos, new materialist thought is by right non-anthropocentric. But despite their claims to the contrary, it often appears that a significant section of new materialist scholarship finds itself mired into the humanist paradigm. This article is divided into two segments. The first segment explores how the nonhumanism that new materialist theses espouses functions through an additive approach that subscribes to metaphysical notions of human and nonhuman, leaving the constitution of these categories intact. The second part takes up the works of Vicki Kirby and delineates how a radical nonhumanism that renders the human/nonhuman binary untenable can still be possible from a new materialist premise.