Steven Shaviro

American philosopher and media theorist, DeRoy Professor of English at Wayne State University. Author of Without Criteria: Kant, Whitehead, Deleuze, and Aesthetics (2009); The Universe of Things: On Speculative Realism (2014); and other works on Whitehead, panpsychism, and the aesthetics of new media. Morin reads Shaviro's "cautious anthropomorphism" as the cleanest articulation of the strategic-anthropomorphism move applied retroactively to MP's 1948 corpus.

Key Points

• Cautious anthropomorphism: "I attribute feelings to stones precisely in order to get away from the pernicious dualism that would insist that human beings alone (or at most, human beings together with some animals) have feelings, while everything else does not" (Universe of Things 61). The strategy is defamiliarisation in both directions — neither making stones knowable like us, nor flattening ontological distinction.
• Speculation: "We need to subtract our own prejudices and presuppositions from any account we give of the world. And we need to create a new image of thought: one that is no longer modeled on, or limited to, anthropocentric parameters" (Universe of Things 111).
• Distinguished from Meillassoux: Shaviro thinks Meillassoux smuggles anthropocentrism back into philosophy by limiting thought to "what thought is for us" and then trying to escape it (Universe of Things 125). Meillassoux flees the human centre, but the centre is "still bad."
• Influenced by Whitehead: Without Criteria (16–21) discusses the Cleopatra's Needle passage that becomes load-bearing for Latour's Gothenburg scene.

Connections

• coined / popularised the cautious-anthropomorphism frame (in dialogue with jeffrey-cohen and jane-bennett).
• parallels jeffrey-cohen's Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman — both use cautious anthropomorphism to grant stones agency without panpsychism.
• contrasts with quentin-meillassoux — Shaviro reads Meillassoux as still anthropocentric (the centre is bad).
• contrasts with graham-harman's reckless anthropomorphism (sincerity of objects).
• reads alfred-north-whitehead as foundational.

Open Questions

• Does Shaviro's "subtraction of presuppositions" entail a negative theology of the non-human, or a positive strategy? Universe of Things leans toward the latter but the methodology is under-articulated.
• Is Shaviro's panpsychism (where he flirts with it) compatible with Nancy's refusal of panpsychism? Per Morin, the cautious anthropomorphism is the meeting-point; explicit panpsychism diverges.

Sources

• morin-2022-mp-nancy-sense-being — Ch 5 §3 (cautious anthropomorphism as Morin's diagnostic for MP-1948).