The Feral Life of Plastic Waste: Third Nature and Speculative Aesthetics

This article explores the interactions between plastic waste and non-human animals from a non-anthropocentric and future-oriented perspective. After a first introductory section, I argue for a plane of analogy connecting animals and plastics. If extended into the future, this plane of analogy shows a new feature: ferality. Contra Hegel, Heidegger, and some contemporary scholars, I contend in the third section that ferality cannot be framed as a regression of “second nature” (human culture) to “first nature” (non-human nature), but should be understood as post-domestic “third nature”. The argument for the future ferality of animals and plastic waste also urges consideration of their evolutionary interplay, which I analyze in the fourth section through the lens of a speculative aesthetics of new materialist and feminist inspiration. The last section considers artistic projects that grant imaginative access to speculative, feral futures in which life and plastics can no longer be disentangled.