Living in Difficult Times: New Materialist Subject/ivity and Becoming of Posthuman Life

This paper attempts to address the new materialist turn in recent critical thinking at the backdrop of the material vulnerability of global geopolitical conditions of living in which both human and nonhuman are implicated in their deep entanglement via violent ideological and structural orderings/otherings. Drawing on Diana Cool and Samanta Frost’s New Materialisms (2010) and Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter (2010), the two pioneering texts on “new materialism” and mediating through Jacques Derrida’s notion of hauntological nature of matter, as introduced and extended in Specters of Marx ([1994] 2006), this paper foregrounds the philosophical urgency of such a radical mode of thinking for the possibility of a (new) materially grounded life “to come.” Living in difficult times, it argues, when “time is out of joint” and the history of the living present is haunted by the spectral traces of the past and possible future “to come,” the materiality of matter (its subject/ivity) can never be located in a stable ontological positionality but certainly in the matter’s imbeddedness in hauntological temporality — an emerging posthuman space of transformative possibility where “matter becomes” in its radical mode of living through becoming. This becoming of matter informs as well as transforms the nature as well as the very condition of life: a radical becoming of posthuman life that becomes as well as comes at the same moment foregrounding a process living as complex and open ended but ethically grounded.