ORDINARY ANIMAL: MACCORMACK, LARUELLE AND THE RADICAL ENVIRONMENTAL HUMANITIES

Abstract

This article seeks to extend Patricia MacCormack’s abolitionist ahuman project through François Laruelle’s non-philosophy. To this end, it takes the “animal remainder” produced by Laruelle’s dualysis of the “rational animal” and rethinks it as radical immanence. Once doubly dualyzed, this animal remainder becomes the ordinary animal, in contrast to the exceptional animality produced within environmental humanities through the ontologic of predication. The article pursues three aims. First, it critically examines Laruelle’s
account of the animal, which is still an underexplored aspect of his nonphilosophical project. Second, it exposes the presuppositions within environmental humanities that sustain the ontico-ontological positioning of the animal as exceptional. Finally, it advances the notion of radical environmental humanities as a critical, philo-fictional practice informed by non-philosophy. The non-philosophical ordinary animal demands a restructuring of ways of thinking, feeling, and acting through gnosis, iconoclasm, and augury, as part of its perpetual struggle against the production of beasts of ontological burden.