Katerina Kolozova "Solidarity in Suffering with the Non-Human"

Here is a recording of Katerina Kolozova's talk "Solidarity in Suffering with the Non-Human," delivered at D.U.S.T. on June 24th, 2013. In it, Kolozova uses the real of suffering as the basis of creating a non-colonizing and non-identarian universality, and that universality extends to the non-human. She engages the work of Judith Butler, Donna Haraway, and François Laruelle in order to advance her argument. It's really good, and I highly suggest you take the time to listen to it.

One other note, I have not read much of Laruelle. And, I am sure many of you remember claims made a few years ago that there was really no there there with Laruelle. While I have not really read Laruelle, we are seeing an amazing production of works by people who have taken Laruelle seriously. If you look at Kolozova's new book, Cut of the Real, John Mullarkey's Post-Continental Philosophy, and Anthony Paul Smith's A Non-Philosophical Theory of Nature you see smart and groundbreaking work being thought seriously through, alongside, and against Laruelle. Also, interesting, all three of the people I just mentioned take seriously the non-human as well (including the non-human animal).

Women in philosophy: The Hannah Arendt edition

Recently, The Stone at The New York Times has published five female philosophers--Sally Haslanger,  Linda Martín Alcoff, Rae Langton, Louise Antony, and Peg O’Connor--on issues and conditions of being a woman in philosophy. There has been some excellent discussion over at Feminist Philosophers, see here, here, here, here, here, and here (also see this post by Samir Chopra). Also, a while back, Jennifer Saul had a piece in Salon on the topic, and she and Helen Beebee discussed this on the BBC show Women's Hour. Okay, I don't have much to add to this discussion, but I want to add some earlier comments from Hannah Arendt. These comments might not have much to do with the current conditions and issues, but I happen to be reading this as all of this was going on, and just thought it was worth sharing. This comes from the interview that was conducted by Gunter Gaus, and I am citing from Essays in Understanding: 1930-1945.

"Gaus begins the conversation by saying that Arendt is the first woman to take part in the series of interviews he is conducting; then he immediately qualifies that statement by noting that she has a 'very masculine occupation,' namely, that of a philosopher. This leads him to his first question: in spite of the recognition and respect she has received, does she perceive 'her role in the circle of philosophers' as unusual or peculiar because she is a woman?
Arendt replies: I am afraid I have to protest. I do not belong to the circle of philosophers. My profession, if one can even speak of it at all, is political theory. I neither feel like a philosopher, nor do I believe that I have been accepted in the circle of philosophers, as you so kindly suppose. But to speak of the other question that you raised in your opening remarks: you say that philosophy is generally thought to be a masculine occupation. It does not have to remain a masculine occupation! it is entirely possible that a woman will one day be a philosopher....
GAUS: I consider you to be a philosopher....
ARENDT: Well, I can't help that, but in my opinion I am not. In my opinion I have said good-bye to philosophy once and for all. As you know, I studied philosophy, but that does not mean that I stayed with it.
(pp. 1-2, emphasis added, ellipses in the original).

The whole interview is here, German with English subtitles:


So, not only does she disavow the role of philosopher (and she spends a bit of time explaining why she doesn't), but also, she argues that philosophers as such would not accept her! Moreover, that there is not yet a woman philosopher (and again, one wonders if she means that a woman philosopher accepted by men philosophers).

On this very interview, there is an interesting EGS discussion between Judith Butler, Avital Ronell, and Larry Rickels. You can find the videos here (though, NB: some of the videos seem to be missing. If someone knows of a more full version, I would love the links).

One of the more interesting times that there is this discussion of why Hannah Arendt might not feel accepted into the circle of philosophers begins at the beginning of the sixth video with Judith Butler, but that is not the first or last instance of discussion of this issue. You can see the sixth video below.

FEA: Stephanie Jenkins, Judith Butler, Donna Haraway, and killable subjects

Two quick notes: (1) The "virtual symposium" has been extended until at least July 20th. So, if you haven't had a chance to read and participate, you have longer! (2) The comments are coming more quickly than they were in the first few days. There are several lively and interesting discussions throughout the various posts of the symposiums, and I highly suggest you pop on over there and read the comments, even if you have already read all the initial posts. They are worth your time.

Stephanie Jenkins' contribution is a wonder, and particularly close to my own work. She wants an "an affective feminist practice that views animal others as grievable, vulnerable, and valuable"*. Such an understanding gives us (either contra or pace Warkentin, I am not full sure) a different understanding of veganism. As Jenkins argues: 

When built upon feminist ethics, vegan practice is not a universal obligation or a fantasy of purity but rather a “bodily imperative” (Weiss 1999, 129) to respond to another’s suffering and to reject the everyday embodied practices that make certain animate others killable.

This is a strong contribution to a rethinking of veganism that several of us are trying to produce, in which veganism is neither reducible to another instance in the economies of the sacred and the profane, the pure and the polluted, and the innocent and the damned; but also is not reducible to one more consumer choice, one more boycott, one more instance in the transformation of us into homo economicus.  

Jenkins in interesting in contrasting an ethically engaged animal studies with what she, cleverly, called "hypo-critical animal studies". 

Because it isolates ontological inquiry from ethical practice, hypo-critical animal studies constitute a response to animal suffering that is a nonresponse. These studies do not call upon us to change how we eat, dress, or entertain in the world in regard to our everyday relationships with other animals. 

Hypo-critical animal studies would be what Michael Lundblad terms "animality studies".  

The major target of Jenkins attack is Donna Haraway, and particularly Haraway's notion of "killing well" (a somewhat strange translation of Derrida's eating well). For those who have read When Species Meet, Haraway justifies scientific experimentation on animals, as well as killing and eating animals. Both of which are problematized, but ultimately the conclusions are for our right to kill and eat animals in ways that very, very problematic (and conclusions matter, no matter nuanced we get there). For example, Donna Haraway is okay with killing and eating wild boars in California because they are an invasive species. To tie this back into Kelly Oliver's piece, just as pit bulls are seen sometimes in racialized and criminalized codes, the invasive species occupies a similar ground, bringing in our xenophobia and anxieties over immigration (I want to thank my colleague Kevin Cummings for this insight). After all, the invasive species does not belong, replicates too quickly, drains important resources that should be going to other, 'more natural' species that 'belong'. For Donna Haraway, killing well often means a biopolitical justification of killing, that is of sacrificing the individual for the population's sustainability (I have argued this before). Now, for a brief disagreement with Jenkins. 

Jenkins is concerned with articulating a nonviolent philosophy, one that centralizes the idea of though shalt not kill, as opposed to Haraway's formulation of thou shalt not make killable. I am not at all convinced that nonviolent ethics is truly possible (again, see my discussion of ethics and innocence). And I agree with Haraway that the issue isn't one so much of thou shalt not kill as much as it is one of thou shalt not make killable. Haraway failure, and here I come back to full agreement with Jenkins, is that she doesn't actualize this ethos. Jenkins is passionate in her articulation of why the violence of the vegan and the violence of the omnivore is not the same violence. 

Jenkins ends her short essay with an appeal to Butler's work. (Stephanie, along with Eric Jonas, presented on Butler and animal ethics/ontology/politics at the Sex, Gender, Species conference. Their work on Butler has been essential for my own). Needless to say, I agree, and I encourage to read it (and all of the comments) in full. 

*I currently don't have the pdf in front of me, with the page numbers. And cutting and pasting from it caused the weird formating issues from earlier posts. So, I don't have page numbers right now. Also, I will keep to calling Stephanie "Jenkins", even though we are friends, and it seems weird. 

Giorgio Agamben and Judith Butler

Recently, I and Joshua Miller got into a discussion over the importance of Judith Butler over at his blog (bonus, see what books and essays actually changed his mind about something. Which is a great meme that I would like to see reproduced). One of the points he made was that he felt that much of what Judith Butler has been arguing about with precarity is secondary literature on Agamben. I don't think so, and I think this is a great opportunity to clarify the relationship of these two thinkers.

I think it is pretty clear that Agamben has long been an influence on Butler's work. However, I doubt you could call her work on precariousness as secondary literature. First of all, it has none of the form of that (no long textual exegesis, etc.). But the more substantial point is to distinguish Agamben's notion of bare life from Butler's notion of precarious life.

Much of Giorgio Agamben's work is centered around identifying and explicating a series of metaphysical machines that produce modernity. Thus, we have the state of exception in law, we have the anthropological machine in anthropology broadly construed, and we have the providential machine in theology. All of these machines operate in zones of indecision, and all of these machines are fundamentally empty, kenotic. What this means is that each iteration of the decisions of these machines are completely up for grabs each time. There is always a chance that what I do is interpreted as criminal even if it was interpreted as legal last time. The mundane example here is a speeding ticket, where one cop might decide that going 12 over is legal, and the next time the cop might decide it is illegal. The importance is that the machines produce their own justifications in these zones of indecision as if by fiat. Therefore, we all potentially can be seen as killable, we all exist within the nomos of the camp. This is what is meant by bare life-- life that is fundamentally confused between bios and zoe. [1]

Judith Butler's work on precarious life is very different from Agamben's work on bare life. First of all, there are not these monolithic metaphysical machines populating the work of Butler. Partially this is because Butler is far more interested in the nuances of how certain lives are considered livable and mournable than Agamben is. For Agamben, we all live in the nomos of the camp, and therefore you see Agamben taking up the idea of the archeologist from Foucault, and not the genealogist. To take up the mundane example from before of speeding, you would not see in Agamben any detailed discussions of the types of car your drive, or your race, or the part of town you are in as mattering for how the cop determines to pull you over or not. His metaphysical machines never seem weighted down by history, and their decisions never seem overdetermined by identity. For Butler, the frames by which we determine what gets to count as human, what gets to count as livable life, are all explored with a remarkable specificity. Gender, race, sexuality, ability, etc. all seem to play key roles in figuring out the protocols by which we determine which lives we mourn, and which lives we don't mourn.
The more important distinction, however, is that Butler does not seem to believe in bare life. As she has argued, the tasks you do to reproduce your biological existence (eating and finding food, creating shelter, etc) are all politically and culturally relevant. These are never the tasks of zoe, or of mere existence. This is why Butler talks of the bios of the non-human animal, an insight that I doubt you would ever see from Agamben. Thus, for Butler precariousness is not a condition to be overcome or critiqued, in the way that bare life would be for Agamben, rather precariousness becomes a place to think and organize from. Agamben is never a thinker of vulnerability as enabling, as productive. So, precariousness is not an ahistorical and legal condition, and it is actually something foundational to ontology, ethics, and sociality as such.



[1] I have so far treated Agamben's earlier work in Homo Sacer and State of Exception as being consistent with his later work in The Kingdom and the Glory. I have done so for some conceptual ease. However, these various works exist in some tension. Peter Gratton makes this argument frequently on his blog, and will be part of his chapter on Agamben in his The State of Sovereignty (SUNY Sometime).

Judith Butler FTW!

I just got back from a weekend debate tournament, which was long and vaguely nightmareish. As is usual, I have way too many posts on my blog reader to read them all, so if I missed anything interesting, let me know (self-promotion, as always, is encouraged). Also, if I owe you an email or anything, let me know and I will get back to you.

In very good news, though, I found out that I will be presenting on a panel about Judith Butler and non-anthropocentric ethics/politics/ontology at the Sex, Gender, Species conference this coming February. I'll be on a panel with EJ of Deconstruction, Inc. and with Stephanie of VegiFem. I am way excited, and very happy about the conference, about meeting both EJ and Stephanie (finally), and hopefully that some of you might there and I can meet you as well. So, let me know if anyone else who reads and comments on this blog will be there, and I'd love to meet you.

Butler, animals, mourning

I'm working on this paper (with another academic blogger, more on this as appropriate) about Judith Butler and her anti-anthropocentrism. And it caused me to try and remember when I got interested in thinking Butler's work alongside the question of the animal. Because, her explicit comments about animals seems to have occurred mostly after I started looking toward her work. And I remember it started because of mourning. Butler has long insisted that questions over who gets to mourn whom is at the heart of the political, at the heart of social intelligibility. This makes a lot of sense, historically, because of issues of mourning were very much at the heart of queer identity and the AIDS crisis. I still remember a playwright that I knew in high school, who had a moving one man show about the death of his partner. The show centered around less the death itself, but all the problems of mourning his lover. From institutional problems of not being family and being unrecognized to stay after visiting hours, to a family that refused to recognize his relationship. He therefore was constantly grieving, but denied all the socially recognizable paths and protocols to mourn. And at the funeral, his relationship to his partner was completely whitewashed over, as if it never existed. Mourning is a way of making connections, of establishing kinship, and of recognizing the vulnerability and finitude of the other. The protocols that refuse to recognize our mourning refuse all sorts of tangible, social intelligibility. This brings me to animals.
Sometimes we are allowed to mourn animals. Particularly (perhaps even only) pets. Sometimes we are allowed to mourn species that go extinct. But to mourn particular nameless animals, to mourn the animals who cut flesh is on display, to mourn the lobster with the cracked and bound claws in the tank, to mourn the dead animals on the side of the road. To mourn, in other words, the pain and death we dish out, is something that profoundly refused. It is one thing, controversial enough, to become a vegetarian or vegan for ethical reasons, to fight for animal welfare and rights. People don't like it, but to some degree it is understood. But to be in the grocery store and to suddenly be overcome by the reality that exists behind the animal flesh on display, to be able to see their muscles and fat and bones for what they are: the cut up pieces of a being, and to mourn. To tear up, or have trouble functioning, to feel that moment of utter suffocation of being in a hall of death is completely unintelligible. Most people's response is that you need therapy, or you can't be sincere. And so most of us work hard to not mourn. We do it to function, to get by. But that means for most of us, even those of us who are absolutely committed to fighting for animals, have to also and regularly engage in disavowal. Butler's insistence that mourning is political, and it is bound up in a matrix of norms, subjectivity, and relationships is important. I am glad that her work has moved to an increasingly anti-anthropocentric place, and that she understands that at the heart of grief is also the question of what gets to count as a life, or an intelligible life.

A certain fragility of the infinite

Anyone who has been reading my blog for a while knows that questions of vulnerability, finitude, and precariousness are returning philosophical questions for my work. (See here and here for a couple of examples). Several other thinkers have used the idea of finitude to think us outside of an anthropocentric ontology, ethics, and politics (see Judith Butler, Jacques Derrida, Cora Diamond, and Cary Wolfe). Now, in one sense of this thinking vulnerability is just a fact, an almost unfortunate fact, that has to be taken into account. In more positive accounts, Butler's for one, precariousness isn't just a passive fact demanding to be taken into account. Rather, the reality of shared vulnerability produces important facts-- like sociality and plasticity, like the common and contingency. (As a side note here, when Wolfe writes on vulnerability he focuses on Diamond and Derrida, which is certainly interesting. But I wish in that chapter he had spent more time with Luhmann, I think a strong second-order systems account of vulnerability would be wonderful).
So, on the one hand, finitude is simply fragility, and as such needs to be paid attention to in the same way we stamp "Caution: Fragile" on boxes. On the other hand, finitude isn't fragility or simply fragility, it is also a productive power upon which all sorts of adaptive strengths come from (indeed, adaptation and evolution are entirely bound up with the notions of finitude). What happens, though, when we start flipping this around? In a real way, it is hard to say, because life seems to need some measure of death, but there are several literary resources at hand. For example, the vampire here enters the scene as a being defined by certain finitudes (the Hunger, fear of sunlight, etc), but also a belief that one day, the might not die. Many authors seem unsure if the great age of vampires make them powerfully devious, or if their very immortality makes them more predictable, more rigid. I started thinking about this while reading Jim Butcher's Dresden Files (don't hate). Butcher himself can't seem to make up his mind, attributing both realities to his vampires depending on what he wants done in his text. In another example, we can think of the Highlander tv series. In it Duncan MacLeod is always is always running into other immortals that he has known through his 400 plus years of existence. And almost all of them seem like pure trauma cases from psychoanalysis, constantly repeating the same traits again and again throughout the centuries. Immortals seem to almost never change, and all of them seem completely predictable. I am actually curious what other vampire stories and stories of immortal beings (including gods) have come down on in this idea of if immortality tends to produce a certain asociality and rigidity. A certain fragility of the infinite.

Judith Butler and Animal Liberation

Frequent friend of the blog EJ has his own blog, Deconstruction Inc.. I obviously suggest adding it to all of your blog readers.

He is currently working on a paper on Butler and animal liberation, a topic that I have found important in the past (see the posts here). He has several posts up, and I suggest people interested in these questions to go check them out. Go here, here, here, and here.

Critique outside of anthropocentrism: Butler on Whitehead

There is an amazing lecture given by Judith Butler on Whitehead.

I should not have even taken the time to listen to this yet (I am trying to finish up applications to get funding for next year). But I wanted to suggest this lecture. I think it is by far the strongest and most philosophical explanation of Butler's (rather recent) non-anthropocentric ontology.

24 mins in starts Whitehead on the non-human.

31 mins in starts an explanation of Butler's own work.

49 mins in are a series of propositions of what we can do with a twisted ontology of the human and the non-human.

Q&A (very interesting) starts 51 mins in.

Hopefully I will give a longer analysis and explanation later. But I am on an anti-blogging regime until my applications are done (funding next year needs to be focused on).

I look forward to seeing other people reflections on this, particularly those who know Whitehead better than I.

Strong Humanism, Weak Humanism, Beyond Humanism

This post follows up on my earlier post about Leigh Johnson's concept of weak humanism. Again, I encourage you to take the time to listen to her dialogue, here. Also, as a note, she has further clarified her position in a blog post. Considering the majority of my response to the podcast had been written before that was posted, I will include my responses to clarification in a second post, and my first post will not be edited to respond to her new points, but hopefully I will have a part two up tomorrow.
***

Johnson begins her argument by stating she wants to defend human rights, philosophically. She feels in order to do that she needs a proper thought of humanism (and here is my first question: Does she really need a humanism here? What about a philosophical anthropology? Would she, like Judith Butler is attempting, be able to make the argument for human rights from a non-anthropocentric anthropology that avoids any sort of humanism?). Contrasting earlier modalities of humanism (which she terms 'strong humanism,' in that the traits of humanism that mattered were positive attributes such as autonomy, rationality, etc.), she proposes a new type of humanism (which she terms 'weak humanism,' not because the humanism is weak, but because the humanism is based upon qualities like weakness, vulnerability, precariousness, etc.). Strong humanism sets the bar of admittance to the human subject too high, which not only leaves out groups that might not be able to make strong claims on rationality and autonomy, but more importantly does nothing for groups that are systematically expropriated from categories of strong humanism. In this, her work follows not only poststructuralist criticisms of humanism, but perhaps more strongly follows decolonial criticisms of humanism: the work of people like Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire, Slyvia Wynter, Nelson Maldonado-Torres, etc. The decolonial tradition has criticized humanism for its colonialist, imperialist, eugenicist, and frankly genocidal contours. These thinkers have shown how humanism not only justified colonial expansion, but also systematically denied admittance to the human subject to racialized and sexed bodies. Or, if racialized and sexed bodies were granted admittance, it was only as mimic men. After this critique, all of these thinkers make a second move; a call for a new humanism, one which will be true and real. While Johnson doesn't spend a lot of time explaining the critique against strong humanism, one assumes that all of this is in the background of her work. And if that assumption is made, it is not at all surprising that she too is constructing a new, true and real, counter-hegemonic humanism.
One of the major differences between her work and many of the decolonial thinkers is that whereas most decolonial thinkers simply assert the need for a new and true humanism, Johnson spends her time advancing the necessary step of a philosophical anthropology to support the new and true humanism. (There are, of course, several notable exceptions of decolonial thinkers who do engage in this necessary step. I would feel particularly amiss if I didn't mention the work of Slyvia Wynter again, who makes the strongest arguments in this direction, even if I ultimately disagree with her). Johnson's humanism of weakness and vulnerability is one that seeks to define the human in terms of a shared sense of being wounded, hurt, tortured, killed. One that seeks to privilege sentience over sapience as the primary quality necessary for an ethical and political response. Weakness and finitude are brought into the discussion not just to create a lower admittance into the human, but also because it is at the level of finitude we need an ethics and a politics. It is only because of our shared finitude that we are infinitely responsible for le tout autre. In this I would like to say I am agreement with Christopher Long's comment that it is at the basis of our vulnerability we are actually talking about a strength. The fiction of the autonomous and atomistic individual is an anemic fiction, actually weak because it cannot feed upon the powers of the common, a common that is possible only because of a shared finitude. Our responsibility to the wholly other is not, in this view, a burden. It is rather a practice of joy, an affirmation of life.
It is here that my confusion (or perhaps a critique hidden as confusion, though I honestly want to advance in the spirit of confusion, not critique) begins. I am working on how the concepts of abandonment, exposure, and vulnerability can be a way of entering into the dialogue of community that we find in Bataille, Blanchot, Nancy, Derrida, Agamben, and Esposito. But for me, such a community can never be a community of humans, but must be a community of animals (including humans!). When we look at capacities like vulnerability, percarity, suffering, joy, are we looking at capacities that are unique to the human? Are these the categories that make us human? That separate and demarcate the human from other animals? Or, are these the categories that come not from our humanness but from our animalness? Are not vulnerability and finitude the affirmation that we are one animal among others? An animal among other animals that suffer, that celebrate, that mourn and are mourned. As Butler argues in her Frames of War, "The point, however, would not be to catalog the forms of life damaged by war, but to reconceive life itself as a set of largely unwilled interdependencies, even systemic relations, which imply that the 'ontology' of the human is not separable from the 'ontology' of the animal. It is not just a question of two categories that overlap, but of a co-constitution that implies the need for a reconceptualization of the ontology of life itself" (pp. 75-76). Are we not talking about, ultimately, not a humanism of weakness but an animalism of weakness? Can we not think, along with Derrida, who contends in The Animal That Therefore I Am:

Being able to suffer is no longer a power; it is a possibility without power, a possibility of the impossible. Mortality resides there, as the most radical means of thinking the finitude that we share with animals, the mortality that belongs to the very finitude of life, to the experience of compassion, to the possibility of sharing the possibility of this nonpower, the possibility of this impossibility, the anguish of this vulnerability, and the vulnerability of this anguish. (p. 28).

If we are going to advance that our morality is tied up with mortality, how can we remain anthropocentric? Does not an argument for a shared vulnerability demand we jettison the anthropocentrism that got us in our present situation in the first place?
That is, I think, where my confusion has to open itself up to critique. This is where we have to go beyond humanism. I don't think it is enough to say, 'I am only concerned with human issues, and am therefore not trying to think animal issues.' I understand that one has a finite resources to work on certain political and ethical issues, but we are not talking about that right now. We are instead talking about the philosophical underpinnings for action, and those cannot exclude the wholly other because your current responsibility is not a response to that other. To paraphrase Derrida, one has to think without alibis. Not only can you not exclude the wholly other (and at this second that stands in for other animals), but it is necessary to understand the interlocking of oppressions. I don't know if I have time to go into this now, but let me advance one argument here. If you are able to expropriate beings into 'merely' animals, and if that 'animal' suffering is not considered equal to 'human' suffering, how do you stop anything? How do you stop the torture of 'terrorists' who are, as you know, animals? How do you stop the genocide of those that are, as you know, subhumans? How do human rights work if the victims' very humanity is exactly what is contested? (I am wish I had more posted on this issue. I have a rough draft of a conference paper on this exact question. I am not in total agreement with it anymore, but it might be considered interesting for showing some of the ways I am trying to explore these questions. Read it here). It seems that the only way for a weak humanism to work is for it to stop being a humanism at all.

More on Butler's anti-anthropocentrism

This post follows up on my earlier post about Butler and anti-anthropocentrism.

While moving I'd been separated from my girlfriend for a good bit of the move, and when she met up with me last night she brought me a copy of Judith Butler's new book, Frames of War. This book moves in exactly the direction I was hoping to see her work move in, increasingly anti-anthropocentric. To quote one paragraph:

In the same way, it does not ultimately make sense to claim, for instance, that we have to focus on what is distinctive about human life, since if it is the 'life' of human life that concerns us, that is precisely where there is no firm way to distinguish in absolute terms the bios of the animal from the bios of the human animal. Any such distinction would be tenuous and would, once again, fail to see that, by definition, the human animal is itself an animal. This is not an assertion concerning the type or species of animal the human is, but an avowal that animality is a precondition of the human, and there is no human who is not a human animal. (p. 19)

This paragraph is interesting on many levels, but I would just point out that ascribing a bios to the animal (as opposed to a zoe) is not a textual mistake on the part of Butler's. It is a muted yet fairly strong disagreement with both the work of Giorgio Agamben, but also with the zoe valorization of Rosi Braidotti.
Now, I am not saying the whole book is about the animal (indeed, as far as I can tell, little is explicitly about the animal, though I just started the book), but the whole book is over how we conceive of what gets to count as life; life that matters ethically and politically. Now, the OOP/OOO of you probably won't find Butler moving enough in your direction. Her book is explicitly a work of 'social ontology' (and indeed, I assume both you and her would agree that a social ontology exists in tension with a realist ontology). Now, she would argue that this social ontology is non-anthropocentric. While she hasn't advanced this argument yet in the book, one assumes this must mean that other animals contain a sociality. I don't know how this plays out in questions of objects. Still, for me her work is moving in the direction I want it to. I am very excited to finish this book.

Judith Butler's anti-anthropocentrism

For those of who have read Judith Butler's more recent work (by which I mean Precarious Life, Giving An Account Of Oneself, Undoing Gender, and one assumes her new book Frames of War even though I have yet to find a copy of that book is over half a dozen bookstores), you are aware that she has become interested in produces our concept of the human. How is it that humanness is produced and deproduced? Now, despite that being in many ways the central question of her last three books, it has yet to be heavily theorized in these works. You can feel the contours in which her project is going, but also feels as if the work where it has all been worked out has yet to be written (unless, of course, Frames of War is that book). This theoretical shift has been really interesting to me (though, obviously, it isn't so much a shift. The author of Bodies That Matter clearly has long tried to think through the questions of, well, what bodies get to matter) for all the obvious reasons. The question for me has been two-fold: (1) Is this really just a way to pave a new humanism, like how such questions are usually proposed in many decolonial circles? and (2) Even if there remained a fairly dogmatic poststructuralist rejection of humanism, would this rejection like so many poststructuralists still not mean the ethical, political, and ontological inclusion of other animals?

In Giving An Account of Oneself, with the emphasis on becoming human, I clearly thought the answers to the earlier questions were yes and yes. However, there were two things in her other books that gave me pause. The first was her avowed anti-anthropocentrism near the beginning of Undoing Gender. This contained with it a strong rejection of humanism, but also employed Fanon's and Wynter's critiques of humanism without mentioning both of those authors' strong desire for a new humanism. And also, it is not clear what role she sees in extending the ethical pass the human boundary (though there is a wonderful couple of lines about the implications of a human declaring 'I am an animal'). The other interesting comment came in her Precarious Life. In it she is explaining that the body of suspected terrorists have become animalized. And then she writes something like: This has nothing to with actual animals, merely the figure of the animal. I thought that was a subtle distinction that most authors miss (that Agamben has again and again missed, for example). My greatest hope so far involves an interview published in Theory and Event entitled "Antigone's Claim." In it, she argues that:

So, one has to be critical about how and when the notion of humanity is invoked, but I am not convinced that it is always a lie or, indeed, a way of cheating. It is important to ask what it occludes, and how whatever it illuminates presupposes a consequential occlusion – one that turns the idea of “humanity” against the universality by which it is supported and seems, invariably, to reinstitute a certain anthropocentrism. As a result, I think it might be more helpful to consider instead a term such as ‘precarious life’ which, though it has strong resonances with the idea of humanity, functions very differently. There are at least two differences: the first is that precarious life is a life that is shared in a specific sense: “shared life” is not simply a “life” that functions as a common element in which individuals participate on the order of a mathesis. Rather, it is common in the sense that we are reciprocally exposed and invariably dependent, not only on others, but on a sustained and sustainable environment.
Humanity seems to be a kind of defining ontological attribute, who I am, or who we are, that properly belongs to us as persons, and in that sense, it keeps the human within the humanistic frame. But what if our ontology has to be thought otherwise? If humans actually share a condition of precariousness, not only just with one another, but also with animals, and with the environment, then this constitutive feature of who we “are” undoes the very conceit of anthropocentrism. In this sense, I want to propose ‘precarious life’ as a non-anthropocentric framework for considering what makes life valuable.

And later in the interview, in response to the question, "Would it be possible to define your concept of “precarious life” as a new form of “humanism”?" Butler responds:

Currently, I do not want a new humanism. If we ask what the human could be beyond humanism, then it seems we resituate the human within the non-human, not as a contingent fact of existence, but as a necessary ontology, an ontology that articulates certain constitutive bonds and binds. So I am struggling toward a non-anthropocentric conception of the human, if that is possible – even a non-anthropocentric philosophical anthropology. The other way of saying this is that wherever the human is, it is always outside of itself in the non-human, or it is always distributed among beings, among human and non-human beings, chiasmically related through the idea of precarious life. So we can neither lodge the human in the self, nor ground the self in the human, but find instead the relations of exposure and responsibility that constitute the “being” of the human in a sociality outside itself, even outside its human-ness.

All I got to say is: More of this, please!