Anthropology diffracted : originary humanicity -- Just figures?: forensic clairvoyance, mathematics, and the language question -- Enumerating language : "The unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics" -- Natural convers(at)ions : or, what if culture was really nature all along? -- (Con)founding "the human" : rethinking the incest taboo -- Culpability and the double-cross : Irigaray with Merleau-Ponty.

New materialisms argue for a more science-friendly humanities, ventilating questions about methodology and subject matter and the importance of the non-human. However, these new sites of attention - climate, biology, affect, geology, animals and objects - tend to leverage their difference against language and the discursive. Similarly, questions about ontology have come to eclipse, and even eschew, those of epistemology. While this collection of essays is in kinship with this radical shake-up of how and what we study, the aim is (...) to re-navigate what constitutes materiality. These efforts are encapsulated by a rewriting of the Derridean axiom, 'there is no outside text' as 'there is no outside nature.' What if nature has always been literate, numerate, social? And what happens to 'the human' if its exceptional identity and status is conceded quantum, non-local and ecological implication? (shrink)

Feminism could be described as a discourse that negotiates corporeality, what a body is and what a body can do. Nevertheless, the specter of essentialism means that the biological or anatomical body, the body that is commonly understood to be the "real" body, is often excluded from this investigation. The increasingly sterile debate between essentialism and antiessentialism has inadvertently encouraged this somatophobia. I argue that these opposing positions are actually inseparable, sharing a complicitous relationship that produces material effects.

This article explores Derrida's suggestion in Of Grammatology that deconstruction might be considered a positive science. The implication here is that ‘no outside of text’ does not evoke an enclosure whose limits can't be breached, an enclosure that discovers human exceptionalism in linguistic and technological capacities. Instead, this sense of a system and its involvements (différance) is already entangled in any ‘atom’ of its expression, whereby ‘no outside of text’ can be read as ‘no outside of Nature’. The logic that (...) informs and justifies the conventional separations between nature and culture, ideation and matter, and human and non-human, are thereby confounded; the dimensions of efficacy, as well as the vexed question of intention appear as non-local (systemic); and the very notion of language – what it is and how it works – is distributed in ways that give rise to the same quandaries that surround the quantum problematic. Indeed, at the end of this meditation the difference between the humanities and the sciences, especially in its current configuration as the impasse of ‘the two cultures’, can no longer be sustained. (shrink)

I remember my immediate fascination with an edited collection, now twenty years old, Who Comes After the Subject? The title seemed to entirely displace the identity of the subject, the “of-courseness” of its uniquely human definition. Indeed, its provocation did more than destabilise the what and where of the subject, as if we might extend this complexity, albeit in attenuated form, to non-human entities. The more radical implication was a destabilisation of human identity itself—its circumscribed location—together with the progress narrative (...) that made the arrival of language, technology and agential smarts synonymous with human achievement. As contemporary concern about planetary health is galvanized around the unique power of human agency to either ruin or redeem an impassive and defenceless Nature, a “before” that lacks what being a subject affords, this article will linger over the logic that continues to sustain this story. By reworking Derrida’s “originary writing” as “originary humanicity,” a different sense of ecological involvement might be possible. (shrink)