SOAS Research Online

Abstract

Against the rise of a whole host of new takes on the primacy of the ontological in solving ostensibly epistemological questions—evidenced, for example, in certain expositions of the ontological turn in social anthropology, the speculative turn in ‘continental’ materialist and realist philosophy and nearly oxymoronic fields of inquiry such as political ontology and ontopolitics—this paper makes a case for an ontoepistemic messiness of life. At issue are, primarily, one’s many worldings—one’s being-in-the-world and one’s knowing-in-the-world—which seem to flood into one another and co-constitute each other even when they are not meant to do so. This not only makes ‘us’ complex, intersubjective beings, so thoroughly inexplicable through the dialectical distinction between ontology and epistemology, it also unsettles the all-too-crude divergence between ‘me’-‘us’ and ‘you’-‘them’ in the world. Worlding is, therefore, a mattering matter, but also one that renders ‘pure’ materialities and, mutatis mutandis, ‘pure’ ontologies and epistemologies impossible. The world, politics and the self seem, at the very least, spillable, as do ‘our’ elsewhere and otherwise.