‘The Embarrassment of Being Human: A Critical Essay on the New Materialisms and Modernity in an Age of Crisis’ by Benjamin Boysen reviewed by Charles Devellenne... (opens in new tab)

In 2010, Jane Bennett published Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, sparking significant interest in the new materialisms that had already been popularised by the works of Manuel DeLanda and Rosi Braidotti. The same year, Diana Coole and Samantha Frost published a series of essays on these new materialisms (including one by Bennett), and many scholars interested in critical political theory engaged seriously with the themes of those books. Throughout the 2010s, I taught the new mat...