Classics non-humanly reframed
DOI: 10.23951/2312-7899-2026-1-121-148
This article addresses the persistent theoretical impasse surrounding the concept of the "classic" by diagnosing its roots not in contemporary cultural wars but in a deeper, unacknowledged epistemological rupture. It argues that the endless debates between canonical traditionalism and critical deconstruction share a fundamental correlationalist premise: the classic is invariably a human-centered phenomenon, a product of culture, history, and interpretation. To dismantle this premise, the article first performs a genealogical critique, exposing the historical shift from a pre-modern, metonymic paradigm to a modern, metaphorical one. Drawing on Foucault, Skinner, and White, it demonstrates how the classical text was transformed from an active, world-constituting agent (operating through the logic of contiguity and participation in a shared political reality) into a passive object of knowledge, requiring endless verification and explanation through the distancing lens of metaphor. This shift, it is argued, is the true source of the modern hermeneutic crisis. The core contribution of the article is its constructive proposal for an ontological turn beyond hermeneutics. It mobilizes the frameworks of Speculative Realism and Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO) to redefine the classic in radically non-human terms. A classic work is not a repository of timeless wisdom but a specific type of object whose "classicity" is an emergent property of its mode of existence within a flat ontology. This property is analyzed through a synthesis of several key concepts: 1) Allusive Power (Graham Harman): the text's dense network of real relations with other object-terms, existing independently of human recognition. 2) Cosmotechnical (Yuk Hui) Plateau: the text's exceptional ability to form a stable, generative assembly with linguistic codes, material supports, and philosophical concepts, creating a durable ecological niche. 3) Resistance to Entropy (Ray Brassier, Eugene Thacker): the text's capacity to endure as a testament to cosmic indifference, its internal complexities and dissonances seen as scars from encounters with the "World-Without-Us." Consequently, a text's value is measured not by its humanistic meaning but by its "object-oriented vitality"—its robustness, connectivity, and complexity within non-human networks. The article concludes by outlining a positive methodological program for a "non-human philology," with practical protocols such as mapping allusive networks, analyzing the archaeology of the material carrier, and diagnosing internal dissonance. This approach offers a path for a genuine decolonization of the canon, not through moral inclusion but by recognizing the ontological equality of diverse, non-interchangeable cosmotechnical plateaus (e.g., Sanskrit epic vs. Greek tragedy). Ultimately, it calls for a shift from an ethics of human recognition to an ethics of respect for the opaque, non-human reality of the textual object itself, reorienting the humanities towards the study of texts as autonomous actors in a universe of things.
Keywords: canon, speculative realism, object-oriented ontology (OOO), the non-human, hermeneutics, metaphor, metonymy, cosmotechnics, textural materiality
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Issue: 1, 2026
Series of issue: Issue 1
Rubric: ARTICLES
Pages: 121 — 148
Downloads: 123