Delbello - Chen

Mel Chen’s Animacies is a philosophical excursus into what can be considered human and nonhuman or animate and inanimate. She starts off by re-exploring Aristotle’s notion of the “soul” as something that animates the living beings, both animals and human beings, while leaving in the field of inanimate or “dead” the rocks and other objects. She also criticizes Descartes for having fixed the body/mind divide into what has then become a “material agency” problem. In redefining how, instead, even stones are important and are not just a part of a useless world, she enters into the realm of affect theory, which is part of a bigger turn in social and philosophical sciences and that finds its main referent points in Spinoza and Deleuze. The Spinozian part of this “ontology of affect” that Chen formulates is precisely her theorizing of an agency within what’s considered an inanimate world. She claims that there is an understanding of grammar which “expands beyond linguistic coercion to broader strokes of biopolitical governance (p.30).” So she argues that even “thingness as stoniness can be visited, can be felt, and can have been (p.235),” in this sense there is definitely a new type of materialisms and how to include what has always been deemed as “useless.” In this discussion she talks about queer people and include in the discussion the hierarchies of who and what is worth, what is “animate and inanimate.” Chen brilliantly reformulates this distinction to understand what type of materialism can we articulate and how we should articulate it.

I am very much interested in Chen’s work because it is very much close to what I have been focusing on in the last couple of years, namely the developments of Speculative and Critical Realism in discussing ontologies and reification in social sciences and what this means for new type of materialisms that attempt to overcome idealisms and subjectivism.

My question for Chen’s Animacies would be: how do we theorize new type of materialisms without going into a sort of “vitalism” that has already characterized some of an entire lineage of work in Western thought that goes from Nietzsche to Deleuze, and that, especially in the latter, has been translated into a sort of metaphysics of the subject? In other words, how can we discuss agency, including what is material and “immaterial,” without recurring to subjectivism? If we want to avoid any talk of special “features” or any spiritualism as inherent to humanity, how do we do so by also avoiding levelling everything into a universal relativism or cosmic nihilism (which is supposedly what many postmodern tendencies end up with)?