Speeding up, Slowing Down: On the Critical Limits of Nondualist Ontologies

The ontological turn is characterized by a variety of approaches and fields of inquiry. A common trait, however, is represented by the rejection of the binaries traditional to modern thinking (nature/culture, mind/body, subject/object, matter/language, reality/knowledge, sensuous/ideal etc.), which are regarded to be theoretically flawed, scientifically untenable and politically reactionary.

Yet it is possible to show that nondualist ontologies enable and support opposite arguments about the relationship between human agency and materiality. On one side, as for example feminist new materialists often do, it is possible to make a case for human humbleness, care and respect in the encounters with a lively, agentic materiality. On the other, as for example some scholars belonging to the speculative realism movement do, it is possible to argue about the full plasticity of both the human agent and its task environment, as enabling an unlimited (self-)transformation. In short, the ontological turn accommodates both post-humanist and trans-humanist arguments, precautionary and proactionary outlooks, decelerationist and accelerationist claims. And, indeed, the difference between these positions seems to blur. This raises the question of the extent to which nondualist ontologies help analyze divergences and unrecognized affinities between, for example, new materialist movements, such as those promoting alternative forms of community organization and circulation of food and energy, and positions like those expressed by the ‘Ecomodernist Manifesto’, with their plea for an accelerated Anthropocene or decoupling of human societies from biophysical systems; positions which cannot be straightforwardly labelled as neoliberal or conservative, both for their arguments and for the intellectual record of some of their supporters.

The paper aims to reflect on the critical limits of nondualist ontologies, in their currently prevailing articulations, and on the possibilities to overcome them without returning to traditional dualisms.