Below is a clean philosophical map of who has explicitly engaged with, shaped, or critically responded to New Materialisms—not just as a trend, but as a serious ontological and political reorientation.
I. Core philosophers
of
New Materialisms (inside the movement)
These figures define the field.
- Ontology: Agential realism, intra-action
- Agency: not possessed, but enacted
- Ethics: responsibility as ontological entanglement
- Draws on quantum physics (Bohr)
Matter is not what is represented—
matter is what happens.
- Concept: vibrant matter
- Focus: political ecology, affect, assemblages
- Ethics: attentiveness to nonhuman forces
Agency is the power to affect and be affected.
- Ontology: posthuman, zoe-centered egalitarianism
- Politics: affirmative ethics beyond the human
- Feminist materialism
The human is a historical arrangement, not an essence.
- Ontology: assemblage theory
- Anti-totality, anti-essentialism
- Strong influence on social theory & geopolitics
Societies are not structures—they are provisional compositions.
II. Philosophical
precursors
retroactively claimed
Not New Materialists, but essential ancestors.
- Becoming, immanence, material forces
- Matter as productive, not inert
- Foundational for assemblage thinking
- Monism, immanence
- Ethics without transcendence
- Bodies defined by capacities
- Process ontology
- Event-based metaphysics
- Influence on ecological thought
III. Adjacent thinkers (overlapping but distinct)
They are often cited, sometimes reluctantly.
- Actor–network theory (ANT)
- Nonhuman agency in politics and science
- More empirical, less ontological
Things act—but do not “mean.”
- Cyborgs, companion species
- Material–semiotic entanglements
- More narrative and ethical than ontological
IV. Critical interlocutors (who
argue with
New Materialism)
These figures force the debate to sharpen.
- Concern: loss of critique, power analysis
- Defense of discursive mediation
- Asks: Who benefits politically?
- Critique: “naïve realism” of matter
- Defends negativity, subjectivity
- Warns against erasing the gap (lack)
- Skeptical of immanence
- Truth ≠ material process
- Event requires rupture, not assemblage
V. Heidegger’s ambiguous position
- Critiqued anthropocentrism
- Emphasized letting-be
- BUT: still suspicious of “matter” as such
New Materialists often pass through Heidegger, then move beyond him—toward immanence rather than Being.
VI. One-page philosophical constellation
|
Position |
Thinkers |
|
Founders |
Barad, Bennett, Braidotti, DeLanda |
|
Precursors |
Spinoza, Deleuze, Whitehead |
|
Adjacent |
Latour, Haraway |
|
Critics |
Butler, Zizek, Badiou |
|
Threshold |
Heidegger |
VII. A line that resonates with
your
formulation
Your phrase:
物的反撲，人的退位
物的歸位，人的復位
Philosophically corresponds to:
- Bennett’s vibrant matter (反撲)
- Barad’s entanglement (退位)
- Braidotti’s posthuman ethics (復位)
Not the abolition of the human—
but the end of human sovereignty.
One final distillation
New Materialism is where philosophy learns—sometimes unwillingly—that matter has always been thinking back.
If you like, next we can:
- map New Materialism vs psychoanalysis
- stage a dialogue between Levinas and Barad
- or write a “field note for clinicians” version
