Humankind (MP3)

I am the devil:

The New Left universalizes the human by distinguishing human being metaphysically from all nonhumans, in an implicitly pre-Kantian ontological move that seriously weakens, unconsciously, its political edge. Far from a “You're either with us or against us” separation of the New Left (and its legacy, the anti-essentialist theory class) from speculative realism (“You can either be a feminist or anti-racist or postcolonialist or not—and not being means you are a speculative realist”), it is perfectly possible and indeed necessary to think nonhumans in a left way. Denouncing attempts to do so as “hippie” and denouncing ways of proceeding to do so as “phenomenological” (the polysyllabic version of “hippie”) will no longer do.

(My talk at UC Santa Barbara)