1st Edition
The Embarrassment of Being Human A Critical Essay on the New Materialisms and Modernity in an Age of Crisis
1. Unfreedom, inequality, and resentment
1.1 Global warming: “a code red for humanity”
1.2 The erosion of democracy
1.3 An enduring freedom intolerable to endure
2. Leaving modernity for the world of the teacup
2.1 Entering “that other world, the world of the teapot”
2.2 The new materialisms in an age “pregnant with its contrary”
3. The embarrassment of being human
3.1 Semiophobia and the hubris of being human
3.2 The absolute: the dualist gesture
3.3 Animism and panpsychism: the monist gesture
3.4 Weird realism and anthropomorphism
4. Production of real presence: What presence cannot convey
4.1 “But is this not, finally, a religious experience?”
4.2 Semiophobia
4.3 Presence and the “desire for immediacy”
4.4 When “meaning” is not “meaningful”
4.5 Not “presence,” but “real presence”
4.6 The closure of the age of the sign?
4.7 Gumbrecht’s mésalliance with Heidegger
4.8 I have a dream that one day we’ll “sleep forever”
5. Undoing modernity
5.1 Undoing secularization
5.2 Undoing finitude
5.3 Undoing autonomy
5.4 New materialisms between archaism and hypercapitalism
6. Struggling with modernity (Knausgård’s My Struggle)
6.1 Knausgård’s dream
6.2 “The only thing I want is to be a legend”
6.3 The discontents of everyday life
6.4 Self-hatred, megalomania, and the rage to overcome
6.5 The discontents of modernity 1 (secularization)
6.6 The discontents of modernity 2 (finitude)
6.7 The discontents of modernity 3 (autonomy)
6.8 Grudgingly coming to terms with modernity
7. “The world too much with us?”
7.1 “The world is too much with us”
7.2 “The world is not half enough with us”
7.2.1 The wonders of an enchanted world in which “the fact / of poverty is wholly without despair”
7.2.2 Capitalist oppression, destruction, and violence
7.2.3 The need for critique and for staying with the trouble (of being human)
7.2.4 Real humanism contra bourgeois humanism
7.2.5 Modernity is real democracy, and thus we have not yet been modern
Biography
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.
"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)
