The empirical falsity of the human subject: new materialism, climate change and the shared critique of artifice

This article contributes to the resilience problematique through the ‘back door’: it is interested more broadly in the epistemological and political conversions that underpin, and are implied in, the rise of resilience as a policy programme. It argues that under the umbrella of resilience, contemporary policy problematisation and recent advances in radical political theory cohere together around a similar plane of critique which is explored in an area in which this affinity is particularly prevalent and consequential: the radical political theory of new materialism and climate change adaptation policy discourses. Rather than being juxtaposed, problematisations at play in climate change as an increasingly dominant framing of international policy concerns and the radically new political ontology proposed by new materialists share central outlooks and concerns. Both radical theory and policy discourse not only problematise, but also openly reject the autonomous human subject and its political artifice as an illusion at odds with the contingent processes of reality. Based on this finding, the article sketches out some emerging trends in the logics of governing concerned with unblocking the illusion of autonomy and sovereignty, and critically intimates some of the political consequences.