ABSTRACT
In recent years, anthropocentrism – the view privileging humans over all other creatures, casting humans only as intelligent and goal-oriented agents – has been under attack from various sorts of posthumanism. This chapter explores Karen Barad’s ambitious book Meeting the Universe Halfway, a work that has met with much enthusiasm for its attempt to employ insights from quantum physics to critique the representationalism that according to Barad still reigns in philosophy and many of the natural sciences – i.e., the view that the objects we seek knowledge about preexist that knowledge and remain separate and independent from it, whereby “objectivity” is taken to be precisely what knowledge thus understood both requires and allows for. Barad’s proposed alternative is an “agential realism” built on an insight that she derives from the physicist Niels Bohr in particular, namely that what facilitates knowledge is in fact the very inter-dependence of knower and known, of observer and observed, that traditional philosophy has regarded as its threat. The Bohrian influence in her position is borne out in Barad’s understanding of apparatus and experiment. However, as becomes clear in her key example – the brittlestar – Barad’s alternative take on agency is highly questionable: it comes at the price of eliding crucial differences between human and other-than-human agents.
