After Nature on the de-anthropocentrism debate

Leon at After Nature (who teaches in home state of Iowa) has THIS POST about the de-anthropocentrism question.

Among other things, he reports (without supporting) the following old charge:

“The idea that deanthropocentrism can go so far so as to depreciate humans and will humanity’s eradication involves the standard charge of nihilism, already fended off in different ways, depending upon who in OOO you ask (OOO and nihilism is by now a shopworn subject). The charge of nihilism goes: Humans, and what they value, are nothing special – afterall, humans are *just* objects and so those goals, purposes, and meanings that humans have in the end are disposable, like most objects are.”

Among other things, this charge is guilty of a total conflation of OOO with scientistic versions of SR. Scientistic SR doesn’t just eliminate humans, after all; it aims to eliminate all objects. Elimination is its entire reason for being, which is why it often becomes so angry about Latour litanies, for instance, since it sees these as parades of frivolous mid-sized things that ought to be obliterated anyway: watermelon, raindrops, rabbits, canteloupe, bishops, alchemists, Popeye, and tar are all equally despicable in the eyes of this philosophy.

By contrast, OOO is the least nihilistic philosophy imaginable. All kinds and levels of objects are granted their autonomy and integrity as forces to reckon with, and humans simply have to stand in line with all the others. The days of humans butting ahead in line are over, at least in the ontological sense. (I fully understand if people think humans are more interesting than other entities, but that does not justify the ontological dualism that we find in scientistic SR no less than in subject-centered continental philosophies like those of Badiou, Johnston, Meillassoux, Žižek, and others.)