This article seeks to offer a critical assessment of the conception of ethics underlying the growing constellation of 'new materialist' social theories. It argues that such theories offer little if any purchase in understanding the contemporary transformations of relations between mind and body or human and non-human natures. Taking as exemplary the work of Jane Bennett, Rosi Braidotti, and Karen Barad, this article asserts that a continuity between ethics and ontology is central to recent theories of 'materiality'. These theories assert the primacy of matter by calling upon a spiritual or ascetic self-transformation so that one might be 'attuned to' or 'register' materiality and, conversely, portray critique as hubristic, conceited, or resentful, blinded by its anthropocentrism. It is argued that framing the grounds for ontological speculation in these ethical terms licences the omission of analysis of social forces mediating thought's access to the world and so grants the theorist leave to sidestep any questions over the conditions of thought. In particular, the essay points to ongoing processes of the so-called primitive accumulation as constituting the relationship between mind and body, human and non-human natures.

This article seeks to examine the political connotations of a recent ‘material turn’ in social and political theory and its implications for theorizations of political agency. ‘New materialist’ theories are premised upon transcending the limits which social constructivism places upon thought, viewed as a reification of the division of subject and object and so a hubristic anthropocentrism which places human beings at the centre of social existence. Yet new materialist theories have tended to locate the conditions of the separation of mind and world they seek to overcome upon the terrain of epistemic or ethical error. By taking the work of Quentin Meillassoux, Jane Bennett and Karen Barad as exemplary, this article contends that new materialist theories not only fall short of their own materialist pretensions insofar as they do not interrogate the material conditions of the separation of the mental and material, but that the failure to do so has profound repercussions for the success of their accounts of political agency. This essay seeks to offer a counter-narrative to new materialist theories by situating the hierarchy between thought and world as a structural feature of capitalist social relations.

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This article offers an examination of posthumanist epistemology. Building on wider claims that `posthumanist' theorists risk disavowing the historicity of their concepts, the article asks why the posthumanist image of the researcher has proven attractive to humanities and social sciences scholarship in recent years. In examining this question the article suggests that posthumanist epistemology is premised upon a claim to the innocence of knowledge, a notion that the article traces back to the origins of modern philosophy in the work of John Locke and his view of the mind as a blank slate. Such an analysis will serve to underline the argument that claims to innocence are themselves strategically deployed epistemic tools that have political implications.

This paper engages with the question of the historical and ontological status of the logics of hegemony articulated by Ernesto Laclau. It interrogates the concept of real abstraction that Laclau mobilises to explain the historical status of his theory. It is argued that while Laclau grounds his conceptual system in an ontology of generalised antagonism, this is done to the exclusion of formally conceiving the historical conditions of those logics. The paper demonstrates that it is the irreducible gap between reflection on historical and ontological conditions of possibility from which the most pervasive critiques of Laclau's work are derived. In turning to the work of Alfred SohnRethel, the paper suggests a different conception of real abstraction, one which locates the sources of abstraction in the division of mental and manual labour. In drawing on the Marxist analysis of real abstraction and the division of labour, the essay seeks to deflate the subsumption of politics to ontology and to turn attention to the logics which condition the possibility of social struggle todaynamely, the logics of contemporary capitalism.