The embarrassment of being human: A critical essay on the new materialisms and modernity in an age of crisis By BenjaminBoysen, New York, NY: Routledge. 2025. pp. 384 hardback. ISBN: 978‐1‐032‐81229‐8.

Boysen's latest book is both a critical discussion of the new materialisms and an attempt to use that critique to think about our epoch differently. More specifically, Boysen shows how new materialist theories move away from representation and human exceptionalism and instead turn to powerful agentic forces of matter and things that we—if we just try hard enough—can see, feel, and experience. These theories, however, as Boysen argues, neglect to pay attention to “[t]he historical processes of our material conditions” (p. xvi) and thus offer very little in terms of practical solutions to the alarming crises that haunt our planet today. What is, therefore, unique about this outstanding monograph is that it utilizes a critique of the new materialisms to present an alternative vision for the future. In the preface of the book, Boysen immediately raises the stakes by arguing that “[t]he theories advanced by the new materialisms entail serious theoretical and practical problems” (p. xiv). He elaborates, “scholars within the new materialisms make ontological claims about the material world that not only seem eccentric or even extravagant but also prove self-contradictory, unscientific, and dogmatic” (p. xiv). The book's second chapter, “Leaving Modernity for the World of the Teacup” (pp. 28–75), indeed exemplifies that there are extravagant and contradictory claims galore in the new materialisms. Boysen does not merely offer a theoretically satisfying critique of some of these contradictory (and ridiculous) new materialist claims; his book is also an impressive philosophical exercise that “pay[s] attention to how the apparent irrational contradictions and paradoxes crystallizing out of those theories bespeak deeper contradictions and irrationalities of our time” (p. xv). The book's first chapter, “Unfreedom, Inequality, and Resentment” (pp. 1–27) plays a crucial role in setting up the overall argument. It sketches a backdrop of modernity in an age of crisis—or, rather, an age hijacked by the Western imperialistic neoliberal enterprise that fuels, and is fueled by, global capitalism, the erosion of democratic principles, and increasing inequality. Only by understanding this backdrop can we understand the emergence of new materialist theories, according to Boysen, because in a world rife with so many crises, new materialists have lost hope in the ability of humans to make any positive and noticeable difference in the world. Thus, or so Boysen argues, new materialists turn to “things.” Chapters 3 and 4 provide an excellent in-depth scrutiny of the work of Jane Bennett, Graham Harman, and Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, respectively, and, as such, give more detailed analyses of how things, objects, forces, and calls (by, for example, bottle caps and dead rats) animate new materialist rhetoric as much as new materialist rhetoric animates these lifeless objects into powerful co-inhabitants of the world. In these chapters, together with Chapter 2, Boysen cogently strips the new materialisms from their mystical fluff and continually makes an urgent case for why it is important to confront this fluff in the first place. “Instead of advocating a shared responsibility with nonhuman matter,” he writes, “it is vital to put humans at the center of the discussion, for the needed changes [to the global crises we are facing today] obviously cannot be generated by things or objects” (p. 48). Boysen has authored an impressive book, not least because of its clearly articulated ideas and philosophical breadth, but also for its evocative poignancy. Based on the book's preface and first chapter alone, it is apparent that Boysen writes with a crystal-clear mission: a plea to stop being embarrassed about being human and, instead, “to be embarrassed about tolerating the present capitalist system” (p. 350). It is the latter system that new materialists, Boysen argues, leave unexamined and reinforce in favor of “a retrograde and nostalgic pre-Enlightenment evocation of premodern narratives from the past, relying on infinite and immediate ties to deeper, enchanted, heteronomous voices” (p. 273). The last two chapters of the book, offering a mix of literary analysis and philosophical reflection, via Marx, Knausgård, Hegel, and Carlos Williams, among others, make this point most clearly. However, these two chapters constitute nearly half of the book, leading to an uneven distribution. For instance, while Chapter 6, “Struggling with Modernity (Knausgård's My Struggle),” provides an innovative literary analysis, it comes at the expense of a discussion of other pertinent matters of the new materialisms, such as its undeniably feminist origins and how this has shaped and continues to shape its theoretical trajectory. In particular, I wonder if Bennett's Vibrant Matter is indeed as fundamental to new materialism—especially new feminist materialism—as, for instance, the work of Karen Barad and Rosi Braidotti, both only marginally discussed. While the new materialisms have strong origins in the work of Latour, who is well acknowledged in the book, it is also a movement that has been inherently shaped by feminism. One would only have to think of the countless feminist responses to Butler's Bodies That Matter, including those of Elizabeth Grosz and Vicki Kirby, that ultimately culminated in Rosi Braidotti's coinage of a neo-materialism in the late 1990s (van der Tuin and Dolphijn, 2012, p. 93). It would have made perfect sense, then, for Boysen to directly confront Barad and Braidotti, and to acknowledge this part of new materialism's history—a move that would not necessarily be at odds with his project and, in fact, could strengthen it. While I appreciate Boysen's book and am deeply grateful for the many thought-provoking ideas it has to offer, I disagree with one thing: his inclusion of Donna Haraway as a new materialist scholar. While Haraway has argued for a material-semiotic actor to “highlight the object of knowledge as an active part of the apparatus of bodily production,” she does so “without ever implying immediate presence of such objects” (2004, p. 67, emphasis in original). Even though Boysen's book does not explicitly discuss Haraway's work beyond naming it, his arguments nonetheless made me think of it. For example, in an outstanding final Marx-inflected chapter of the book, Boysen distills the ills and problems of capitalism. He argues, “[s]urmounting capitalism, democracy would point the way out of the claustrophobia of the present neoliberal epoch dominated by antihumanism and particularistic movements advocating, endorsing, and idolizing particular identities in a manner that questions or even refuses the existence or possibility of universal common interests, understandings, and communities” (p. 349). This is a commendable and hopeful vision, but vision, as Haraway reminds us, is “always a question of the power to see – and perhaps of the violence implicit in our visualizing practices” (1991, p. 192, emphasis in original). “Real” democracy, even one inspired by Marx, is, of course, just that: a vision. I thus invoke Haraway's reminder not to diminish Boysen's achievement, but because it highlights the productive tensions his book invites us to confront as we reconsider what it means to be human in an era of profound crisis.