Antebellum Posthuman

Front matter

ANTEBELLUM POSTHUMAN

Antebellum Posthuman

RACE AND MATERIALITY IN THE

Contents

Introduction. Beyond Recognition: The Problem of Antebellum Embodiment

Douglass’s Animals: Racial Science and the Problem of Human Equality

‘Thoreau’s Seeds: Evolution and the Problem

Introduction

Beyond Recognition: The Problem of Antebellum Embodiment

“Am I not a man and a brother?” the eighteenth-century abolitionist motto demands. This question is meant to be rhetorical—to indict a blindness to one’s fellow human so obscene that today, as Hortense Spillers notes, it “might be denied, point blank, as a possibility for anyone, except that we know it happened.”! Indeed, Anglo-American abolitionists regularly diagnosed slavery as the product of a monumental failure—or deliberate refusal—to recognize the humanity of enslaved persons, and their rhetoric survives today in the commonplace assertion that slavery and racism are practices that operate by dehumanization. But while, as the famous abolitionist motto suggests, the “question” of Black humanity was undeniably on the line in the debate over slavery, this focus on recognition overlooks the full scope of the struggle that was pitched on the battleground of the Black body in the antebellum United States.’

In this book, I argue that the ideological struggle over slavery in antebellum America was one that contested not just the constituency of humanity (who qualifies?) but also the meaning of “the human” as such. That is, I suggest that to understand the true stakes of the fight for recognition— and of the ferocity with which that recognition was denied—we must be

I alert to the fact that the antebellum debate over Black humanity unfolded at a time when the definition of “human” being was in flux, destabilized by the rise of a newly empirical episteme. At the dawn of the nineteenth century, Western culture had, for centuries, defined human being by contrast to its material body, identifying the mark of humanity in mankind’s supposedly transcendent freedom from material causality—a moral autonomy guaranteed by the uniquely ensouled or rational nature of the human. Indeed, in the late eighteenth century, this faith in humanity’s inherent autonomy from nature fueled democratic revolutions in the United States, France, and Haiti by underwriting popular appeals to mankind’s universal right to freedom. As Michel Foucault argues, however, in this same late eighteenth-century moment a very different conception of human being was also beginning to take shape and transform this Western episteme of “Man.” As Foucault explains, thanks to a host of newly emerging fields of knowledge dedicated to the empirical study of human life (fields such as natural history, biology, ethnology, demography, political economy, public health, and statistics), “Western man was gradually learning what it meant to be a living species in a living world, to have a body, conditions of existence, probabilities of life, and individual and collective welfare.”* In contrast to the humanisms that preceded it, then, this new empirical episteme proposed to define human being by physical traits—identifying human thought and action with embodied processes rather than by freedom from such material forces. In the wake of this epistemic shift, Foucault writes, “the human being begins to exist within his organism, inside the shell of his head.” The late eighteenth century thus marks the onset of a new volatility in the Western conception of the human. Just as democratic revolutions began to enshrine the principles of liberal humanism, promising to extend rational subjecthood to all man- (and possibly woman-) kind, the burgeoning of empirical discourse was proliferating a new episteme that threw humanity’s rational freedom into question.

Of course, the rough timeline I have just sketched indicates that this epistemic upheaval would have been already well under way by the mid-nineteenth century, the period on which this book focuses. Indeed, as studies by Jonathan Kramnick, Alan Richardson, and Justine Murison demonstrate, materialist discourses of mind circulated widely across a range of philosophical, literary, and popular outlets in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Anglo-American culture.® But although the queasy coexistence of liberal and biological epistemes was therefore no longer news in the antebellum era, this study proposes that the antebellum moment in America nonetheless marks an important point of inflection in the ongoing rearticulation of “the human.” In these years, the intensifying debate over U.S. slavery triggered a popularization of racial science that charged biological accounts of the human with newly explosive political significance. As Americans increasingly turned to the body for ostensibly objective empirical proof of the slave’s inherent equality or inferiority, the problem of human materiality was thrust to the center of midcentury political—and, as we shall see, literary—concern.

The advent of immediatist abolitionism in the 1830s and the ensuing intensification of antislavery sentiment in the North put mounting pressure on proslavery apologists to justify their support for the embattled institution, and in their efforts to do so slavery’s advocates increasingly looked to what we now know as modern, biological racism. By the 1850s, the center of gravity in the debate over U.S. slavery had noticeably shifted from the question of whether it is morally acceptable to enslave a human being toward the question of whether Black bodies should be considered fully human in the first place. Whereas the former question—is slavery bumane?—is a moral one referred to the consciences of voting Americans, the latter question—are Black humans really buman?—was increasingly understood to be an empirical question “upon which science alone has the right to pronounce.”’ On the face of things, this appeal to empirical analysis merely redirects the central question of Black recognition (“Am I not a man and a brother?”) from voters’ consciences to scientific analysis. But in fact, as this study contends, this redirection fundamentally alters the stakes of the question at hand. For to refer the question of the Black body’s humanity to science is to presume that “humanness” is a quality best determined by the sort of features that science is equipped to investigate—it is, in other words, to assume that human being is ultimately defined by corporeal (material or empirically demonstrable) as opposed to moral features. Thus the embodied episteme of human being implicit in the latter version of the question (is the Black body human?) can be understood to index a broader cultural transformation. If the spike in racial science’s popular authority in antebellum discourse suggests an intensification of racist antipathies, it moreover also signals the ascent of a new, materialist conception of the human that brought with it the promise—or the threat—of newly materialist, nonhumanistic ethical imaginaries.

This study therefore suggests that by the 1850s, the problem of recognition had subtly but profoundly changed. In this decade, the struggle for the recognition of Black humanity opened onto an even more elemental disagreement about the meaning or stakes of that recognition, as liberal and biological epistemes competed to define the nature of human being as such. In light of this epistemic revision, we can begin to see how racism functioned, in the antebellum context, not simply to “dehumanize” Black Americans but moreover to justify indifference to the fact of Black humanity. For under its empirical redescription, (biological) humanness strictly vouches for a basic physiological commonality across the human species that makes no definite claim about the moral equality of all members.’ To recognize a Black body’s speciological humanity, then, need not entail acknowledging her moral equivalence to other humans (her “full” humanity). And thus we underestimate biological racism when we treat it as strictly an exclusionary logic—a rationale for refusing to recognize the humanity of one’s fellow human. More radically, the spread of biological racism indexed the advent of an empirical reconceptualization of the human which, as the chapters to follow will investigate, posed a variety of acute challenges to the moral significance of human belonging and to the conception of human being enshrined, at least in theory, in American liberal democracy. Our analyses of the debate over slavery therefore cannot afford to stop at the politics of recognition: the fight for recognition presumes the integrity of a liberal humanist conception of the human that was increasingly destabilized by the rise of biological discourse in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and by the new forms of racism that surged out of this empirical turn.

Accordingly, Antebellum Posthuman endeavors to think beyond the politics of recognition in an effort to explore the shifting sands upon which recognition’s liberal politics stood in the antebellum era. More specifically, this study will endeavor to restore a sense of biologism’s remarkable political lability at midcentury—its ideological open-endedness. Against a common critical tendency to treat antebellum biologism as synonymous with biological racism, this study highlights alternative discourses of embodiment that disputed racist ideology, charting the emergence of a materialist strain of antislavery thought in the 1850s.’ In chapters on Frederick Douglass, Henry David Thoreau, and Walt Whitman, I show how these authors appropriate the materialist ontology, but not the racist politics, of antebellum racial science, producing an antislavery materialism that rebuts biological racism in its own empirical terms.

This strain of antislavery materialism did not amount to an explicit philosophical program or political platform; rather, it surfaced as a leaning or tendency within these authors’ writings in the 1850s as they began to explore new perspectives on human identity and community that were opened up by embodied discourse. We must, then, keep an ear to the ground for this incipient refrain. But when we do, the effect is often quite striking because the antislavery materialism these authors develop takes them far afield of some of the most basic liberal principles (Commitments to human equality, moral freedom, and individualism) for which Douglass, Thoreau, and Whitman are widely remembered as spokespersons, and by the light of which we continue to read their work. This departure from the liberal principles these authors espouse elsewhere in their writings signals the divergence of antislavery materialism from the larger antislavery movement: despite the congruity of its antiracist aims with abolitionism, this tentative new strain remains something philosophically distinct. I will be suggesting, then, that “the human” was fracturing along at least two different fault lines in the mid-nineteenth century. The contest to define the meaning of the human played out not only in the clash between liberal humanist and biological discourses of the human, but also between pro- and antislavery strains of biological thought that vied to define the political ethics of this new empirical episteme.

Excavating this twofold volatility of the human in antebellum discourse does two important things for our understanding of the politics of embodiment in this fraught historical moment. First, by demonstrating that biological essentialisms like racism and sexism were not the only ideologies of embodiment circulating in the nineteenth century, antislavery materialism reminds us that biologism does not inherently fund discrimination. On the contrary, as these antislavery materialisms demonstrate, biological racism is as much a conservatively humanistic reaction against biologism as it is an expression of biologism’s challenge to humanist principles. Biological racism attempts to limit embodiment to subjugated populations, casting Black Americans, Native Americans, and women as (in Saidiya Hartman’s phrase) “the ultimate bearers of the bodily.”!? Quite apart from its empirical falsehoods, then, (i.e., quackeries like the suggestion that skull size varies by race), midcentury biological racism departs from strict biologism insofar as the former treats materiality as if it were unevenly distributed among humans—as if some peoples are inherently more and others less embodied, as if we are a species unevenly evolving from apes to angels.’ Seen from this angle, biological racism begins to appear antibiological—an attempt to quarantine privileged populations from the illiberal taint of their own materiality. The antislavery materialisms outlined in my chapters contest this differential attribution of embodiment, and in doing so help us to disarticulate biologism’s materialist ontology from ideological encrustations like racism that cling to it. In this sense, recognizing the diversity of antebellum embodied thought can help to interrupt the reductive circuit according to which biologism is presumed to condemn us to fleshy prisons that justify discrimination against us.

As it happens, the idea that biological materialism is not inherently essentializing and therefore politically regressive informs some of the most exciting new work in critical theory today. Across a range of fields, scholars have begun to scout the possibilities for a progressive materialism as they recoil from what have come to seem like the excesses of the linguistic turn—a turn whose emphasis on interpellation and performativity fostered what Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman describe as a “flight from the material” and a foreclosing of “attention to lived, material bodies and corporeal practices.”!” Recent critical theory has therefore sought to navigate a corrective “turn to the body” by exploring new ontologies that highlight the agency of matter without collapsing into the essentialism, determinism, and teleological evolutionism that drove critical theory away from discourses of nature and embodiment in the first place.

At the radical end of this present groundswell are revisionary materialist ontologies that insist upon the constitutive entanglement of mind and body, human and nonhuman being, material and cultural forces. For the purposes of this study, I will use the term “posthumanism” to refer to this admittedly heterogeneous set of material ontologies because, although not all of the critics I will refer to under the sign of posthumanism have embraced this term, it allows me to foreground both the epistemic stakes (the not-humanism) and the historical position (the after- humanism) implied in the ontological shift that they frame.” Challenging the immateriality of both poststructuralism’s discursively constituted subject and liberal humanism’s transcendently autonomous subject, posthumanist materialism presents us with an embodied subject whose subjectivity processually emerges from her neural networks and flows of subconscious affect, from relations with nonhuman beings and agencies, and from unpredictable interactions between her physiological, material, and cultural environments. Posthumanist theory thus suggests that a truly materialist conception of the human obliges us to relinquish—or at least steeply qualify—Western humanism’s conception of the human as an autonomous subject free from physical causality. In doing so, posthumanism erodes the grounds upon which Western humanism has traditionally upheld the innate superiority of the human to all other forms of being.

A second advantage, then, of excavating antislavery materialism now is that this antebellum discourse can offer insight into the prehistory of the posthumanist critical turn we are now witnessing. By keeping one eye on the present (as the deliberate anachronism of my title, Antebellum Posthuman, invites us to do), we may begin to discern the philosophical commonalities that link antislavery and contemporary posthumanist materialisms. As Marjorie Levinson points out, the anachronism involved in such a trans-temporal mode of reading need not be thought of as the enemy of historicism—a license to overwrite the past with the present. On the contrary, Levinson argues, reading “conjuncturally” across time can help us to recover dimensions of the past that have grown closed to us. By using “the knowledges and imaginaries of our own time to summon up particular pasts,” Levinson proposes, we can make those forgotten histories “flash upon us in ways that neither they nor we could have anticipated.”'* Thus, as I hope to show, reading for the resonances that contemporary posthumanist theory elicits from these antislavery writings allows the conceptual lability of the human in antebellum literature to become visible to us in ways it has not been heretofore.

But while my chapters on Douglass, Thoreau, and Whitman will suggest commonalities their materialism shares with contemporary posthumanism, I am ultimately even more interested in the ways in which these antebellum writers can help open up new vistas onto our present theoretical moment. In particular, I find that reading contemporary theory through the lens of its antebellum precursor helps to focalize one of the most imperative critical challenges contemporary posthumanist theory currently faces: namely, the conspicuous absence of race as a critical term in posthumanist discourse. An increasing number of scholars have begun to voice concern at what Zakiyyah Jackson calls the “resounding silence in the posthumanist, object-oriented, and new materialist literatures with respect to ”15 This occlusion of race subtends what Alexander Weheliye has diagnosed as a more fundamental epistemological exclusion in posthumanist theory: its minimization of the centrality of racism to the Western humanist tradition that it proposes to move beyond, and its failure to engage with counterdiscourses of the human articulated in nonwhite and non-Western cultural traditions.’ But if race remains largely undertheorized in contemporary posthumanist thought, race and racism are unmistakably at the center of its antebellum precedent. Attending to posthumanism’s prehistory in antislavery materialism can therefore serve as a provocation to reexamine the racial politics and racist political legacies involved in the contemporary posthumanist turn. Examining recent critiques of posthumanism by theorists of race and social justice, my final chapters will assess the considerable strengths as well as the limitations of posthumanism’s materialist politics. These chapters will outline opportunities for race.

posthumanism’s more rigorous collaboration with theories of race and social justice going forward, as well as highlight philosophical obstacles to this closer alliance with which both posthumanism and materially minded social justice criticism have yet to fully reckon.

Thus in addition to highlighting the volatile and contested status of embodiment’s politics in antebellum discourse, this study will suggest that reading across the archives of antislavery and posthumanist materialism can help us to sharpen our sense of both, not only by highlighting their commonalities but also by clarifying their angles of divergence. Below, I will offer a very brief overview of the rise of materialist politics in the post- Enlightenment era, charting the contours of the biological turn from the late eighteenth century to the birth of biopolitics, and offering a fuller account of the posthumanist turn in critical theory today. With a clearer sense of what posthumanism is, and of the ideological formations to which it responds, we can better recognize its historical and conceptual continuities with the nineteenth-century materialisms of Douglass, Thoreau, and Whitman.

Embodiment from Biopolitical Racism to Posthumanism

When Edmund Burke published his conservative Reflections on the Revolution in France in 1790, his pamphlet triggered a deluge of liberal responses including, most famously, Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man (1791) and Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). Rather less notably, in 1792 Thomas Taylor published his parodic manifesto, A Vindication of the Rights of Brutes. Citing “those wonderful productions of Mr. PAINE and Mrs. WOLLSTONECRAFT,” Taylor glibly proposes that their “sublime theory” of human equality ultimately points to an even larger moral truth poised to “give perfection to our researches into the rights of things.” This larger truth: “the equality of all things, as to their intrinsic dignity and worth.” Taylor thus proceeds to facetiously argue that universal equality is indeed universal, and ought therefore to include everything from nonhuman “brutes” to “vegetables, minerals, and even the most apparently contemptible clods of earth.”””

For the most part, Taylor’s satire of liberal egalitarianism operates by the fallacy of the slippery slope—commoners equal to kings? Women equal to men? What next? But his pamphlet finds its teeth when it subtly conflates two distinct logics closely associated with the French Revolution: the liberal discourse of human rights and the ontology of radical materialism. This conflation appears in the pamphlet’s opening gambit, where Taylor defines the disagreement between monarchist conservatives and liberal revolutionaries as a conflict of ontologies—as, in fact, a dispute over dualism. Adapting Aristotle, he explains that conservatives believe there is a naturally “slavish part of mankind” comprised of those “born with strong bodily and weak mental powers,” and that this slavish class “ought to be governed by the independent [class], in the same manner as the soul governs the body, that is, like a despot or a tyrant.” By contrast, he observes, “this is a conclusion which will surely be ridiculed by every genuine modern, as it wholly proceeds on a supposition, that mind and body are two distinct things, and that the former is more excellent than the latter, though almost every one is now convinced, that soul and body are only nominally distinguished from each other, and are essentially the same.”!® Taylor thus asserts that the new materialism abolishes not only hierarchies of the human but also hierarchies of being. For if what was traditionally called the human “soul” or “mind” is now taken to be embodied—simply an effect of physiological processes—then this mind’s “mental powers” are not, in fact, “independent” of matter but rather enchained to physical causality in the same way as the physical body.” This means that so-called rational men are not intrinsically more free than the “slavish” men and women—those (ostensibly) subrational persons defined by their machinic muscles, animal instincts, and organic appetites—over whom they presume to govern. Extending this logic, Taylor insists that, once divested of its transcendental “soul” or autonomous “mind,” humanity ceases to be ontologically exceptional and therefore can no longer claim to be morally superior to nonhuman beings. Hence Taylor’s conclusion that “genuine modern” (i.e., materialist) philosophy leads to the conclusion “that there is no such thing in the universe as superiority of nature.”’° By his reasoning, there is no such thing as superiority of nature because there is no such thing as superiority to nature. Once we acknowledge that humans do not enjoy a special exemption from the laws of matter, then we will be in a position to recognize our ontological equality not only with “brutes,” but with “vegetables, minerals, and . . . clods of earth.””!

Ultimately, then, Taylor suggests that “genuine modern” philosophy is self-defeating, that in fact it abolishes the equality its exponents purport to defend. For Taylor, there can be no ontological freedom in the absence of a corollary category of unfree being called “property” (embodied in wives, slaves, horses, or houses, and finally, most fundamentally, in one’s own body).” Hence, at its grandest and most unsettling, Rights of Brutes maintains that a thoroughgoing materialism is logically incompatible with a rights-based version of the political: the latter, Taylor proposes, ultimately

Io Introduction depends upon an exceptionalist model of the human that the former fatally undermines. Of course, as a critique of Wollstonecraft and Paine, ‘Taylor’s satire misses the mark, for to arrive at his parodic egalitarianism he must first rewrite their liberal position as a materialist one. Nonetheless, the argument of Rights of Brutes remains compelling for the way it highlights the tension implicit in the Enlightenment’s dual (although not always simultaneously held) commitments to liberal and materialist philosophies.

At the turn of the nineteenth century, then, Western culture sponsored what ‘Taylor suggests are incommensurable epistemes of the human: liberal Man defined (in Foucault’s words) “by his freedom, or by the opposition of soul and body,” on the one hand, and empirical Man defined by his body and the economy of his biological interests, on the other.” But although the liberal and empirical figures of Man appear to be incommensurable in the abstract, in practice, as Foucault argues, their joint appearance at the end of the eighteenth century produced a reorganization of Western politics—the birth of biopolitics—that oversaw their unstable imbrication. Briefly described, biopolitics refers to a subtle but profound reconceptualization of state power according to which Western states came to conceive of their citizenry not (or not only) as rights-bearing liberal subjects but as an aggregate biological population—a “multiple body” that “cannot ... be counted” because its life is not proper (not the property of individuals) but rather processual, unfolding across its fluctuating collective mass.** Accordingly, although long dedicated to maintaining law and order, in the early nineteenth century Western states began to take a new interest in managing the biological processes of populational life, and to this end they began to develop policies aimed not at disciplining individual bodies—punishing criminals, for instance—but at controlling the collective body—regulating rates of health, mortality, reproduction, labor productivity, and the like. In other words, under biopolitics Western states began to conceive of the populace as so many liberal citizens and as biocapital, a statistical mass life whose biological economies and embodied interests can, like any other material resource, be mined and administered for maximum productivity.”

As Foucault details, biopolitics erodes the freedoms of liberal subjecthood by turning the state’s attention from the individual to the population, even as it insinuates state power ever more comprehensively into the material conditions of individual life. Underscoring this shift, Wendy Brown objects that biopolitics gave rise to a “subject so profoundly integrated and hence subordinated to the supervening goal of macroeconomic growth that its own well-being is easily sacrificed to these larger pur-

Introduction II poses.”?ć Hartman’s sobering study of the “amazing continuity” between slavery and freedom in the experience of nineteenth-century Black Americans amplifies this assessment by illustrating how the freedom of liberal personhood accorded to Black Americans by the Fourteenth Amendment proved a vastly diminished prize in the wake of biopolitics’ ascendance.”’

But as Hartman’s analysis further demonstrates, if the birth of biopolitics threatened the freedoms of the liberal citizen, it moreover also made biological racism insidiously structural to the logic of modern governance. Racism, Foucault explains, is fundamentally “a mechanism that allows biopower to work.”?* It does so by inscribing “caesuras within the biological continuum of life,” dividing what would otherwise be an undifferentiated mass of interrelated material processes (the immanent “biological continuum” of life encompassing all being) into life that has been selected to live (“the population”) and life that has been “dysselected”—deemed biologically inferior, degenerate, a risk to the “true” population’s health and purity.” Biological racism thus distinguishes between types of life that are deemed “fully” human and types of life (sub- or nonhuman) that are deemed biologically inferior and even potentially deleterious or infectious—populations that may, or even must be sacrificed in order for the designated population to thrive.*°

Far from leveling all distinctions, then (as Taylor perhaps only halfjokingly feared), the ascendance of empirical Man instead funded a powerful new hierarchy of human being. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, empiricism did not immediately displace prior Western epistemes of Man but rather fused with and rearticulated them. Thus Sylvia Wynter shows how the advent of the biological discourse of man did not supplant but rather wove itself around preexisting hierarchies of human being that had been organized first by Western Christianity and later by Western humanism. Reinflecting those earlier hierarchies of the human (faithful/pagan, rational/nonrational), biopolitical racism recast human inequality according to an ostensibly empirical distinction between the biologically “full” human (those endowed with moral autonomy and value) and the biologically less-than-human, those anatomical humans still enthralled to their animalistic embodiment.” In this way, biopolitics brokered a toxic truce between Christian, humanist, and empirical epistemes of the human, all of which would continue to tenuously coexist in the modern era.

In contrast to empiricism’s history of collaboration with these hierarchical epistemes, contemporary posthumanist theorists now suggest that, properly understood, biological man is in fact (as Taylor facetiously suggested) incompatible with any system of thought premised upon the notion of humanity’s uniquely transcendental being. Whereas the Western tradition that Wynter outlines presumes that humans—or at least that subset of Homo sapiens deemed “full” hamans—enjoy autonomy from matter, posthumanists insists that “human life is embedded in a material world of great complexity, one on which we depend for our continued survival.” From this embodied perspective, an organism is never sovereign nor exceptional to nature but rather exists as and through a vast ecology of interdependencies—a “biological continuum” of material flows within the multitude that is the organism, among organic and nonorganic entities, and between the organism and its natural, social, and technological environments. But if posthumanism thus limits human freedom by highlighting human beings’ dependence upon nonhuman beings and forces, unlike biological racism it denies that embodiment is strictly deterministic. Posthumanism’s processual ontology is materialist yet irreducibly unpredictable, premised (as Nigel Thrift economically puts it) “on the leitmotif of movement in its many forms.”??

Contemporary posthumanist materialism therefore undermines the humanist tradition in two ways. On the one hand, its embodied subject erodes the moral distinction between human and nonhuman life. As we have seen, whereas humanism divides life into “the human” (beings understood to be free from material causation, and hence moral actors) and “the nonhuman” (beings, including “subhuman” Homo sapiens, who are understood to be simply embodied), posthumanism rejects this division by maintaining that a human being is like all beings insofar as it, too, is strictly (albeit nondeterministically) constituted through physiological processes, and insofar as its actions are, likewise, “nested in [material] forces beyond its control.”** In other words, although posthumanism does not deny that there are substantial differences between forms of life (between, say, humans, octopi, and mushrooms), its materialism does highlight the impossibility of empirically justifying the categorical moral superiority of any one form of life over others. Indeed, posthumanism makes categorical distinctions difficult by exploding the ontological closure that is characteristic of liberal humanism’s transcendental subject. Emphasizing the “transcorporeal” and “intra-active” interpenetration of human with nonhuman bodies, posthumanism overwrites the image of the bounded, autonomous, and sovereign human self with the image of a heterogeneous yet continuous plenum that Roberto Esposito (borrowing from Merleau- Ponty, not Hortense Spillers) terms “the flesh.”*> Thus, as Jasbir Puar observes, posthumanist theory works to “deprivilege the human body as a discrete organic thing” by underscoring the fluidity, multiplicity, and porosity of the embodied self.*° The posthumanist subject is at once embodied and yet nonsingular, imbricated by virtue of her embodiment with bodies and environments beyond the border of her skin. In this way, posthumanism not only breaks down the categorical moral difference between human and nonhuman being but moreover denies their physical separateness, highlighting the “vibrant” throng of unexpectedly “animate” nonhuman bodies and forces that subtend and infuse what we call human bodies and agencies.*”

This revisionary, nondeterministic materialism has spread across several areas of critical theory in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, becoming a defining feature of the current theoretical moment. It is, for instance, particularly salient in work downstream of Deleuze and Guattari, who coined many of the key terms and topoi that organize contemporary posthumanist discourse. But although the prevalence of materialist ontologies may seem distinctive of the critical landscape today, materialism is, of course, on the contrary, an ancient philosophical tradition with a long history in both Western and non-Western thought.** Moreover, as Foucault’s and Wynter’s genealogies emphasize, the epochal rise of empiricism in the late eighteenth century proliferated materialist discourses of human being that predate contemporary posthumanism by two centuries, and which proceeded to crucially shape nineteenth-century politics.