The Kekulé Essays: Cormac McCarthy’s Theory of Language, the Human, and the Ecological Promises of the Posthuman

ABSTRACT Beginning from the Kekulé essays, this article shows how McCarthy’s view of the human emerges from his account of language, its relationship to evolutionary biology, and its difference from other forms of animal signaling. For McCarthy, the human is defined by the unique form of representation found in the capacity for language, the ability of words to not only stand in for but replace the things they represent the basis of human society and culture. While much is entailed by this claim, one of its central implications is that any posthumanism worthy of the name must presuppose a notion of creatureliness not fundamentally defined by the representational logic of language. Hence, one sees in McCarthy’s account of language and human nature the parameters not just of his own thinking of the posthuman but that of any posthuman project; the possibility of a posthuman life capable of a truly sustainable relationship to the natural world necessitates a radical transformation in the human relationship to language. In this sense, McCarthy is, the article suggests, a paradigmatic thinker of the environmental humanities, his account of human and animal consciousness clarifying an important element of what it might mean to think a posthuman consciousness.