138THE END OF THE DAYDREAMhuman—just think of Deleuze and Guattari ’s becoming animal as an op-
portunity for reconfiguring anthropocentric systems into rhizomatic
networks and lines of flight.^5
We currently are at a moment of cultural crisis—one that is unavoid-
ably underpinned by a sense of guilt and deep anxiety toward our rela-
tionship with the planet. Our anthropocentric conceptions have led us to
a state of alienation in which we constantly recoil upon ourselves, inca-
pable of connecting with other beings and environments beyond the base
of utilitarianism. We have largely lost our abilities to be sensually attuned
to the world. The suspicion that our approach may also underlie many of
the seemingly irresolvable sociopolitical problems we have caused, and
coexist with, is also gaining currency. It is across this scenario that eco-
philosophies as well as object-oriented ontology, speculative realism, and
new materialism have emerged. However, it would be wrong to assume
that any of these approaches could work as a passe-partout to a better
world. Yet, in their contradictory ways, they all offer new opportunities
to rethink perception and epistemology, and thereby to reconsider our
relationship with animals, environments, and art.
The decentering of the Cartesian subject has become the preponder-
ant aim of the ontological turn. The new philosophies identify the limita-
tions involved in structuralism, poststructuralism, and deconstruction
while searching for new conceptions of realism that may better suit the
ecological, technological, and economic paradigms that mold human ex-
perience today. These philosophies share a renewed interest in and en-
thusiasm for speculation on the nature of reality as independent of
thought—they all more or less thrive on a derailment of Kantian corre-
lationism. Surpassing the perspectives of previous linguistic and critical
turns, object-oriented ontology, speculative realism, and new materialism
refuse the idea that humans only have access to the correlation between
thinking and being.^6 Language and thought still remain part of the equa-
tion that enables our relation to the outside world, yet they no longer
constitute the exclusive point of access and the defining, structuring sys-
tem. Kantian critical philosophy constructed a system of metaphysics,
substantially understood as antirealist, in which experience appeared
preempted by the existence of a priori categories. Thus, speculative real-
ism does not argue that we have unmediated access to reality—the outside
world cannot possibly be exhaustively contained by our perceptive tools—