Le parti pris des choses : sur quelques apories onto-épistémiques du New Materialism

The theoretical movement known as New Materialism, which emerged in the early 2000s, saw not only the return of ontology, but also the affirmation of a materialism in which all oppositions and contradictions would dissolve. New Materialist trends take the agency of non-humans, as suggested by Haraway and Latour in particular, a step further, and come to regard all the material components of our societies as active agents endowed, to varying degrees, with a form of vitality. In this essay I return to what I call the “ontologism” of New Materialism in relation to vital, mechanistic and dialectical forms of materialism, commenting on authors such as Jane Bennett, Karen Barad, and Elizabeth Grosz.