With the message that everything in a sense is alive, thus allowing us to join forces with new politico-ethical communities stretching across human and nonhuman realms, the new materialisms have captivated the minds of many academics, artists, and intellectuals by stressing that it is time to return to a premodern mindset and discard modernity and its concepts of secularization, autonomy, and finitude.
The Embarrassment of Being Human not only demonstrates how these magical materialisms are beset by grave theoretical and practical inconsistencies and self-contradictions. It also demonstrates how their demand for humans to step down and allow for an emancipation of things qualifies the new materialisms as a metaphysics of neoliberalism that reproduces and fortifies the self-contradictions rampant in the current neoliberal hegemony.
While helping us to gain a comprehensive understanding of the tenets of the eerie ills of our epoch, the critique of the new materialisms can furthermore inspire us to appreciate how the exact inversion of the new materialist complex amounts to a revitalization of the modern project. A revitalization that is critical to think our epoch differently.
Table of Contents:
I. Unfreedom, Inequality, and Resentment II. Leaving Modernity for the World of the Teacup III. The Embarrassment of Being Human IV. Production of Real Presence: What Presence Cannot Convey V. Undoing Modernity VI. Struggling with Modernity (Knausgård’s My Struggle) VII. “The world too much with us?” VIII. Literature
About the Author :
Benjamin Boysen, PhD. and Dr.Phil., is author of The Ethics of Love: An Essay on James Joyce (2013), Nothingness, Negativity, and Nominalism in Shakespeare and Petrarch (2021), and the two Danish books, At være en anden: Essays om intethed, ambivalens og fremmedhed hos Francesco Petrarca og William Shakespeare [Being Another: Essays on Nothingness, Ambivalence, and Strangeness in Francesco Petrarch and William Shakespeare] (2007) and Digtning og filosofi hos Platon [Poetry and Philosophy in Plato] (2020), and he has, with Jesper Lundsfryd Rasmussen, co-edited a critical anthology Against the New Materialisms (2023). Boysen is currently working on a monograph, The Madness of Thinking, focusing on the relationship between philosophy and literature.
Review :
"What are the stakes of giving up on the human? In his riveting account of new materialism, actor-network theory, object-oriented ontology, and speculative realism, Benjamin Boysen tirelessly historicizes such movements (and the attraction to them) by locating them squarely within the neoliberal dictates that have shaped the 21st century. And what he perceives as the ill-fated desire to undo modernity he goes on to track extensively in Karl Knausgård’s six-volume My Struggle, that autofictional account of his struggle against the modern world, his neo-fascist cravings, and his ultimate recognition that aggressive individualism is a dead end. In contrast, William Carlos Williams appears here not as the poet of the object world but as the astute critic of the economic system. Throughout, Boysen reanimates Hegel, Heidegger, Sartre, and (above all) Marx to clarify how and why the current conceptual vogue can only obfuscate the ecological and social emergencies of our time. All told, this is a trenchant critique of the aspiration to move beyond critique, a sharply political investigation of the post-political, and, above all, a radically materialist account of new materialism. It is a plea to reinstate human responsibility. We should be embarrassed not about being human but about tolerating the present capitalist system."
- Bill Brown (University of Chicago), author of The Material Unconscious (Harvard, 1997), A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature (Chicago, 2004), and Other Things (Chicago, 2015)
"Benjamin Boysen has written a much-needed book. Meticulously attentive to the “material turn,” unearthing its affective, psychological, and socio-political appeal, Boysen brings to light, in a damning fashion, the contradictory, premodern, and pseudo-religious impulses of the material turn’s biggest names, including Jane Bennett and Graham Harman. Boysen’s riposte to the new materialists is as clear as it is penetrating: we must double down on modernity’s relevance for thinking otherwise our current catastrophic age."
- Zahi Zalloua, Cushing Eels professor of philosophy and literature, professor of indigeneity, race, and ethnicity studies (Whitman College), author of Solidarity and the Palestinian Cause: Indigeneity, Blackness, and the Promise of Universality (Bloomsbury, 2021)
"The Embarrassment of Being Human boldly challenges the tenets of new materialism, contending that certain scholars, despite their intentions, inadvertently strip contemporary crises of their political urgency. The core of the argument is an engaging close reading of Karl Ove Knausgård’s autobiographical novel, My Struggle. Here, Boysen, in one of the most thorough and serious accounts of Knausgård's project, presents Knausgård’s novel as a prime example of a neoliberal narrative, demonstrating how it both embodies and highlights the harmful consequences of neoliberal ideologies, while also emphasizing the imperative need for resistance against them. Offering both a scholarly critique of new materialism and a significant contribution to the understanding of Knausgård's work, this book is an important addition to our understanding of 21st-century literature and culture."
- Claus Elholm Andersen, Assistant Professor of Scandinavian Studies (University of Wisconsin-Madison), author of The Very Edge of Fiction: Karl Ove Knausgård and the Autofictional Novel (New York, 2024)
