A Daring Conceptual Leap

This article mounts a critical interpretation of Sylvia Wynter's work and champions her effort to salvage a reenchanted humanism. It traces her use of a frog's perspective—a phrase with extensive critical antecedent starting with Friedrich Nietzsche—to show how this has always been conducted in relation to other kinds of being, not at their expense. It argues that the frog's perspective is her distinctive critical method, one that reconciles totalization and rupture, abstraction and earthliness, and that this method sustains a nonanthropocentric yet human-centered form of reenchantment. It critiques certain grandiose aspects of her project, weighing its breadth, weirdness, and humanity.