THE CONJURING OF THE NON-HUMAN:

POLITICS AND POETICS OF SPECULATIVE FABULATION IN THE ANTHROPOCENE

Abstract

This article argues that contemporary speculative fabulation operates as a conjuring, a gesture that simultaneously invokes and exorcises, in the face of the non-human, thereby constituting a political-aesthetic program for the Anthropocene. Drawing on the theoretical framework of Eugene Thacker, in dialogue with Donna Haraway and the weird tradition, this study analyzes how this narrative mode unfolds a progression through four levels of the inhuman (anthropic subversion, anthropic inversion, ontogenetic inversion, and misanthropic subtraction). Through an analysis of works by authors such as Octavia Butler, Jeff VanderMeer, Richard Powers, Reza Negarestani, and Alan Weisman, it demonstrates that this trajectory does not lead to nihilism, but rather to a poetics of terrible wonder that cultivates ontological humility. The conclusion asserts that speculative fabulation, by conjuring non-human agencies, dismantles anthropocentric exceptionalism and prefigures posthumanist ethics founded on the recognition of our radical contingency and on responsibility towards a world that exceeds us.