The Embarrassment of Being Human

Reviews / Votes

"What are the stakes of giving up on the human? In his riveting account of new materialism, actor-network theory, object-oriented ontology, and speculative realism, Benjamin Boysen tirelessly historicizes such movements (and the attraction to them) by locating them squarely within the neoliberal dictates that have shaped the 21st century. And what he perceives as the ill-fated desire to undo modernity he goes on to track extensively in Karl Knausgard's six-volume My Struggle, that autofictional account of his struggle against the modern world, his neo-fascist cravings, and his ultimate recognition that aggressive individualism is a dead end. In contrast, William Carlos Williams appears here not as the poet of the object world but as the astute critic of the economic system. Throughout, Boysen reanimates Hegel, Heidegger, Sartre, and (above all) Marx to clarify how and why the current conceptual vogue can only obfuscate the ecological and social emergencies of our time. All told, this is a trenchant critique of the aspiration to move beyond critique, a sharply political investigation of the post-political, and, above all, a radically materialist account of new materialism. It is a plea to reinstate human responsibility. We should be embarrassed not about being human but about tolerating the present capitalist system."

- Bill Brown (University of Chicago), author of The Material Unconscious (Harvard, 1997), A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature (Chicago, 2004), and Other Things (Chicago, 2015)

"Benjamin Boysen has written a much-needed book. Meticulously attentive to the "material turn," unearthing its affective, psychological, and socio-political appeal, Boysen brings to light, in a damning fashion, the contradictory, premodern, and pseudo-religious impulses of the material turn's biggest names, including Jane Bennett and Graham Harman. Boysen's riposte to the new materialists is as clear as it is penetrating: we must double down on modernity's relevance for thinking otherwise our current catastrophic age."

- Zahi Zalloua, Cushing Eels professor of philosophy and literature, professor of indigeneity, race, and ethnicity studies (Whitman College), author of Solidarity and the Palestinian Cause: Indigeneity, Blackness, and the Promise of Universality (Bloomsbury, 2021)

"The Embarrassment of Being Human boldly challenges the tenets of new materialism, contending that certain scholars, despite their intentions, inadvertently strip contemporary crises of their political urgency. The core of the argument is an engaging close reading of Karl Ove Knausgard's autobiographical novel, My Struggle. Here, Boysen, in one of the most thorough and serious accounts of Knausgard's project, presents Knausgard's novel as a prime example of a neoliberal narrative, demonstrating how it both embodies and highlights the harmful consequences of neoliberal ideologies, while also emphasizing the imperative need for resistance against them. Offering both a scholarly critique of new materialism and a significant contribution to the understanding of Knausgard's work, this book is an important addition to our understanding of 21st-century literature and culture."

- Claus Elholm Andersen, Assistant Professor of Scandinavian Studies (University of Wisconsin-Madison), author of The Very Edge of Fiction: Karl Ove Knausgard and the Autofictional Novel (New York, 2024)