Humanism returns for the New Materialism in ‘nonhuman’ form as matter. New ‘matter’ and new materialism thus fashion the world to human advantage in the gesture of abjecting us. They commit us to the humanism of masochists. They offer an animistic and paradisiacal realm of immediate transactions, human to human, human to and with nonhuman, face to face, world without end. The impulse is tactically and strategically useful. But ‘matter’ will not help us if we fashion it so that it bears in its concept the signature of a human hand in its making. Can we do otherwise? Only by conceiving matter as what absolutizes what is not-one: matter from which no discipline will normally, normatively, produce an object or take its concept; on which heroical abjection will founder; matter non-human in ways the human animal can neither designate, nor ever count.
