Larval Subjects: Speculative Realism, the Commons, and Politics
I do think, however, speculative realism and onticology are able to exclude certain ethico-political positions or, at least, substantially modify the terms of the debate. For example, it’s clear that under an onticological and new materialist approach to being, the normative axiomatics of liberalism and neo-liberalism can no longer be sustained. Since Locke and probably before, that ethico-political framework has been based on the idea that our body is our property and that therefore we enjoy sovereign rights over our body (a position probably worth preserving), but more importantly that through the entanglement of our bodies with other entities in our labor we transform these beings into our property. My land and my products are mine because my labor in working them over transformed them and made them extensions of my body. Yet this idea is premised on the assumption that the products of my labor that result from interactive entanglement with the labor of my body remain in place, infringing on no other bodies. I can do whatever I like to “my property”, the story goes, because it doesn’t affect any other body; or, more colloquially, it doesn’t affect anybody else.
This is a great post! FUCK YOU NEOLIBERALISM YOUR SHIT DONT STAY IN PLACE THAT SHIT IS IN THE COMMONS.
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