Neil H. Kessler’s monograph Ontology and Closeness in Human–Nature Relationships presents a critique of critical posthuman discourse. The title of the book promises a discussion that will lead the reader beyond dualisms, materialism, and posthumanism. What remains unsaid in his title is what this discussion leads toward, after the disruption of the above categories. Early in Kessler’s critique it becomes clear that he relies on a theologically inscribed notion of selfhood, which he indicates by spelling “Self” with a capital S and referring to the work of Martin Buber to ground his discussion. In relation to the domain of the “Self,” Kessler’s notion of material becoming stands in stark opposition. This dichotomized construction of selfhood forms the backdrop to his deconstruction of the posthuman turn and limits his scope in terms of effective critique. He rejects the monist materialism of key posthuman thinkers and suggests replacing this monism with an explicitly dualistic commitment to two domains of being, which are “irreducible, yet interdependent” (227). It becomes apparent that he does not reject dualist thinking as such, but rather the power dynamics that sees one half of a dichotomy become privileged over the other. This complicates the title of his book and forms a fatal flaw in his reasoning. His dichotomized construction of selfhood forms the backdrop to his deconstruction of the posthuman turn and limits his scope in terms of effective critique.While Kessler relies on a dualist ontology, and therefore faces all-too-modern limits, he does offer an important problematic for the posthuman study of religion, in that he argues for the ontological necessity of the category “more-than-human” (47) in understanding the contemporary world. He points to a definitive limit in critical posthuman reasoning, in which the new-materialist turn abstracts away “spirit” in the process of revitalizing materiality within a secular framework. There is merit in accounting for the limits of secular reason in ongoing posthuman discourse; however, Kessler’s remedy involves a recommitment to ontological dualism, and this obscures the relevant problem he raises.An ontological Self/matter distinction forms the basis for Kessler’s model of the world, and from this fundamentally dichotomized viewpoint he misses some of the more important conceptual shifts that underlie critical posthumanism. His first mention of Selves appears as the book begins, “a Self is a relationally relevant and active being, and one that is ontologically irreducible to any more essential, primary or originative material components” (11). The Self, Kessler informs us, “has the capacity to be both an ‘I’ and a ‘Thou’ in the sense that is defined by Martin Buber” (17). Buber’s “I–Thou” proposition constructs selfhood as a process of dynamic engagement between living others. Both Buber and Kessler, inasmuch as they focus on the role of relationality in the formation of the Self, find agreement in posthuman thought. However, by his own admission, Kessler does not consider himself to be writing from a posthuman position (16).Kessler’s rejection of posthumanism is primarily based on his rejection of the “monist materialism” (35) that critical posthuman scholars present through their affinities with new-materialism. The vital material world of becoming that is described by key posthuman thinkers involves an immanence within materiality that does not require a transcendent referent. Kessler maintains that this form of new-materialist thought, in presenting a world constituted only by materiality, entirely reduces away the essentially nonmaterial or “more-than-human” domain. The post-Cartesian turn that converts “ontological elements previously held to be more-than-material to the material realm” (67), involves an unacceptable reduction, according to Kessler. Furthermore, he argues that this material monism is inherently dualist (30), as it refuses to allow “more-than-human” concerns to matter. To counter this dualism, he offers one of his own.In response to the monist dualism that he discerns within postmodern materialism, he rejects efforts at monism entirely and offers an explicitly dualist ontology on which to base the becoming of the world. Kessler reenvisions a radical divide between material and more-than-material becomings, arguing that “in an ontology that holds the material and more-than-material to be co-existing and complementary, the two can be, no are, different and irreducible, yet interdependent” (227). For Kessler, reality is divided in two. The material accounts for empirical sensations, and the more-than-material accounts for emotions, souls, and deities (32). From this position, he problematizes the current hierarchal and hegemonic split between the two halves of the dichotomy, which relegates spirit to a peripheral discourse while matter takes center stage. He rejects the possibility that “spirituality is a wholly human creation projected onto an externally material reality” (155). In Kessler’s critique of posthumanism, he intends to move beyond hierarchal dualism, in which the material world is taken more seriously than the spiritual world. However, he remains firmly entrenched in the substance dualism that gives form to his project.In keeping with this ontological dichotomy, Kessler differentiates between “relations of matter” and “relations of Selves” (76). Material relations he describes as “ephemeral” and “microstructurally agential” and therefore lacking any affective dimension. In contrast to this, he describes relations of Selves as “caring and intimate” (76). With this distinction in mind, he launches an attack on posthuman thought in general, and the work of Karen Barad in particular, arguing that “posthumanists such as Barad (2007) reject the metaphysical individualism and essentialism inherent in attempts to measure the qualities of relationships based on their participants” (92). While he may be correct that Barad rejects metaphysical essentialism, his conclusion rests on a false understanding of her work.When Barad discusses the material agential realism at the basis of her model of the world, she describes the infinitely varied diffractions that constitute material world-making practices and keeps in sharp focus the ethical responsibility of human agents within this flux. Barad writes that “what we need is something like ethico-onto-epistem-ology—an appreciation of the entwining of ethics, knowing and being . . . because the becoming of the world is a deeply ethical matter” (Barad 2007, 185). Kessler’s broad dismissal of Barad’s critical engagement with ethical relationality suggests that he has chosen to neglect or refrain from integrating the radical onto-epistemological turn that Barad’s Meeting the Universe Halfway (2007) offers posthuman discourse.Kessler argues that “in posthumanism all beings become objects” (27, emphasis in original). A closer reading of Barad’s physics contradicts this. For Barad, the object/subject divide is not settled in favor of the object. Rather, the conceptual and agential cut that establishes these two categories is unmade, resulting in a cacophony of becomings that defy modern descriptions. While Kessler reaches for a “metaphysics of individualism,” Barad explicitly rejects this approach (Barad 2007, 393) and argues simply that “accountability and responsibility must be thought of in terms of what matters and what is excluded from mattering” (Barad 2007, 394) in the becoming of the world. This places the human agent in a uniquely accountable position, in which “meeting each moment, being alive to the possibilities of becoming, is an ethical call” (Barad 2007, 396). Yet Kessler fears that posthuman and new-materialist thinkers are undoing the historical domains of subjectivity altogether, and resorting to a “de-Self-ed matter” (11) in order to account for material becoming.On the surface, this fear may be warranted, especially when key new-materialist thinkers present their materialism as “deeply realist” (Hazard 2013, 66) and discuss ways to resist “the temptation within vitalism to spiritualize the vital agent” (Bennet 2010, 56, emphasis in original). However, the realism that informs posthuman material theory is not limited by the modern Cartesian cut between “real” and “unreal” phenomena. Rather, it is a holist realism that signals a rejection of the very ontological dualism that Kessler reads as necessary for the existence of the essential and individual “Self.” In the “monolithic but multiply tiered ontology” of new-materialism, “there is no definitive break between sentient and nonsentient entities or between material and spiritual phenomena” (Coole and Frost 2010, 10). That said, Kessler worries that “Selves as ontologically irreducible beings are either lost or their importance subordinated” to mere “self-perpetuating matter” (51) in the process of integrating new-materialist frameworks. In this regard, Kessler’s reliance on the term “being,” along with his dualist construction of selfhood, interferes with his reading of the posthuman term “becoming,” which would otherwise provide him with a key conceptual framework for critical thought in this arena.For Kessler, the term “becoming” is problematically Deleuzian and refers merely to the behavior of material particles in zones of proximity, indicating a radically reductive materialist ontology. Based on his rather simplistic reading of Deleuze, he argues that critical posthuman thinkers construct the conceptual apparatus of becoming around notions of relationships as “quasi-material, depersonalized, and microrelationally driven and determined” (42). In response, Kessler insists on defending an essential and stable self-identity located in a more-than-material domain.At the base of his critique, it appears that Kessler ignores the ontological nuance provided by multiple discussions of dynamic material becoming known as process philosophies, which inform critical posthuman theory on a fundamental level. Process philosophers interrogate the nature of reality using metaphors that rely on holism, dynamism, and change rather than stable and essential distinctions. The French philosopher Henri Bergson argued that the human intellect makes “instantaneous cuts” in the “the flux of the real,” which constitute “things” and “states” (Bergson 1946, 140) in terms of dynamic and agential practices. This dynamic material framework entails a rejection of the Cartesian dichotomy. With the world understood as a process, there are not “things,” “only things in the making, not states that remain fixed, but only states in process of change” (Bergson 1946, 221). Kessler’s commitment to separate ontological states in his discussion of “Self” and “matter” shows a lack of engagement with the ontological repercussions of process thinking.Kessler also ignores the fatal destruction of the fabricated epistemology/ontology divide provided by Barad. In his rejection of critical posthumanism, he argues that a reality in constant flux is not able to account “for the orientation of the Knower to the Known” (206). This brief nod to the Catholic philosopher Meister Eckhart adds another piece to the theological foundation that runs through Kessler’s critique. However, a closer reading of the feminist underpinnings of critical posthumanist thought points to a radical revision of the knower/known dichotomy. Feminist critique in the late twentieth century contributed to the collapse of the subject/object epistemological split in favor of “situated epistemologies” (Haraway 1988) and “knowing in being” (Barad 2018, 238). The material and agential self as a site of multiple and mutable becomings is core to theorists such as Karen Barad and Rosi Braidotti, both of whom are implicated directly in Kessler’s critique.However, rather than Barad’s onto-epistemological holism, within which diffracted differences come to matter in various ways, Kessler suggests that “there is a back and forth flow between the material and more-than-material” (224) and proposes that it is the “mind” that allows this relation, as it is rooted in “more-than-material as well as material ontology” (320). Unfortunately, he does little labor to substantiate this claim, which pushes his text closer to ideological rhetoric than critical analysis.Atheistic conceptions of materiality, which generally disallow agency apart from the human, trouble Kessler, and perhaps rightly so. The collapse of the agential realm in the process of modern development is responsible for the disenchantment that grips much of contemporary society (Taylor 2007). The secular turn that characterizes the modern humanist becoming of the world allows agency only under the rubric of law, and governed by the jurisdiction of the nation state. In moving past exclusive humanism, posthuman thought must eventually also deconstruct the secular ideologies that underlie modern humanist frameworks. That said, Kessler does not effectively engage Barad’s agential realism or her physics of the becoming of the world. The atheistic commitment to secular thinking, rife with modern hegemonical structures, begins to give way in the critical discourse of the posthumanists. Perhaps not quickly enough, as few critical posthuman thinkers are yet engaging questions around postsecular or nonmodern religious becoming. However, the remedy to this is not, as Kessler insists, a recommitment to metaphysical essentialism, reseparating a complex world into two halves, each of which matters in a completely different way. Instead, posthuman scholars, looking beyond the limits of the secular, are tasked with extending the notion of agential realism into the domain of religious becoming, in which nonhuman agents abound.Critical posthuman theory borders on this territory, but has not yet taken the plunge into explicating religious agencies. For this, the secular epistemological limits enacted within modern discourse need further disruption. In this regard, Kessler’s critique is valuable. Although his concern is to protect the needs and rights of what he perceives to be individual “Selves,” he also extends this designation of subjectivity to a broad range of more-than-material spiritual agents. Like Barad and Braidotti, he insists on accountability structures that allow for the mattering of nonhuman entities. Unlike these thinkers, however, he locates these structures within a tightly bound ontological dualism. In addition, he places a large straw man in the domain of critique, by arguing that posthuman thinkers, in moving beyond the sovereignty of metaphysical individuals, are insisting that one “need not worry about” the individual at all (309). A closer look at Barad’s conceptual apparatus may help him allay these fears, as her onto-epistemological politics of mattering provides the basis for an individualized account of material becoming, in which how things “come to matter” (Barad 2018, 233) rests directly on the agents involved in the process. In other words, Barad’s system of accountability makes the role of the individual agent painfully evident. Kessler’s worry that subjectivity is “lost” is unfounded. In conclusion, while Kessler raises an important point regarding the limits of modern secular reasoning, his critique of critical posthumanism reads more as an apology in favor of modern dualism than as a coherent engagement with current posthuman discourse.