The Embarrassment of Being Human: A Critical Essay on the New Materialisms and Modernity in an Age of Crisis

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.

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] (2008) and Digtning og filosofi hos Platon [Poetry and Philosophy in Plato] (2020), 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 the relationship between philosophy and literature.