Niki Young on "Onto individuals : Haecceity, Posthumanism, and the Anthropocene"

Abstract:
Much modern thinking is “onto-taxonomic” in that it (tacitly or explicitly) relies on
the assumption that there are two and only two categories of being, namely humans on the one
hand, and everything else on the other (Harman, 2016; Young 2021). The 21st century however
saw the steady rise of a vast number of thinkers committed to the rejection of this mode of
thought. Though diverse in their respective approaches, Jane Bennett's vital and vibrant
materialism, Rosi Braidotti's critical posthumanism, and Graham Harman's object-oriented
ontology (OOO) collectively form a rich network of conceptual tools that allow us to reassess
our views on reality as well as our place within it. In spite of their shared similarities, Bennett
and Braidotti are both partial to a form of materialism which characterises materiality as
relational, vital, and lively, while Harman takes a decidedly anti-relational and anti-materialistic
position which insists that objects qua units – rather than processes or matter – ought to be “the
root of all philosophy.” In this talk, I shall triangulate between the work of these three thinkers
in order to defend the ontological value of singular existents and a “Leibnizianism without
God” (Derrida & Ferraris, 1991) in an age defined by the notion of the Anthropocene.
Bionote: Niki Young lectures Philosophy at the University of Malta. His areas of interest
include 20th and 21st Century Continental Philosophy, Phenomenology, Aesthetics,
Deconstruction, as well as the various forms of New Realism and Materialism currently being
developed by a number of contemporary thinkers. He has contributed to a number of
publications related to philosophy, ecology, and contemporary art. Young’s current research
focuses on the points of intersection between realism and deconstruction.