Description
Though less omni-present than Latour’s ANT, Barad’s theoretical work has proven a useful critical resource for theorising beyond the ‘Cartesian dualism’—the distinction between the human and the nonhuman that underpins Modern knowledge practices—in the social sciences, including International Politics. Approaches that move us beyond this binary have become especially important in the Anthropocene, a time in which the biosphere itself has become an agent of history (Chakrabarty 2009; Latour 2014). What distinguishes Barad’s approach from others in this mould—including Latour’s—is the premise that at the level of ontology, of what is, “it could be otherwise” (Woolgar & Lezaun, 2013, p. 322). As such, I argue that Barad’s work is an enormously helpful contribution to thinking political possibility and, as such, the basis for thinking about an emancipatory politics beyond the human/nonhuman binary.
However, this paper lays out and responds to the various criticisms of Barad’s approach that expose its political limits: their under-theorisation of how the potential for things to be otherwise might be realised; their preference for affirmation and aversion to critical negativity; and their preference for constructing an ethics rather than a politics. In order to rectify this and to develop Barad’s approach into one that can locate and analyse an emancipatory politics fit for the post-Cartesian context of the Anthropocene, the paper will bring their work into a constructive and novel dialogue with the political theory of Rancière. On the one hand, I argue that Rancière’s distinction between practices of policing and politics, as well as his focus on ‘wrong’ as the founding condition for politics, gives Barad’s work the necessary fangs to locate and analyse emancipatory politics. On the other hand, I argue that Barad allows us to de-anthropocentre Rancière’s work such that we can think emancipatory politics in more-than-human terms. In sum, the paper builds a tentative—but nonetheless novel—framework for analysing emancipatory politics in the Anthropocene era.
