ABSTRACT
Psychoanalysis has a checkered history with the more-than-human, usually theorizing a defensive notion of human exceptionalism—a stark split between the human and everything else. Theories of human subjectivity typically emerge through this boundary generating technology. This chapter interrogates the technology of human exceptionalism by reading Searles, one of the only psychoanalysts to theorize the “nonhuman,” through a lens of new materialisms, Indigenous and anti-Blackness studies. Doing so situates human exceptionalism as a destructive defense in the face of human insignificance, a technology of gendered, anti-Black, racio-species violence. Here those who are identified as “human” (usually white, CISgender and male) emerge only through selective geno-and eco-cidal violence. Instead this chapter proposes a “temporally dense” subjectivity, one that is made visible in each Zoom session with its boxes containing human-more-than-human assemblages. Thinking through the Zoom material, the author suggests an ontological technology of transcorporeality, where human-more-than-human entanglements hold potentials to collectively metabolize the ambivalences and annihilation anxieties fueled by the reality that no one gets out of here alive.
