woensdag 20 november 2019

Post-human Parasites

"To claim that man is parasitic, rather than a predator, and that this occurs in a life of parasitism in general entails several consequences for humanism, post-humanism and the ‘disciplines’ that might be adequate to thinking the inhuman. If one abandons the concept of predator then one also abandons the concept of the good and just relation: "
 (..)
Let us accept that humanity is and must be parasitic: it lives only in its robbing and destruction of a life that is not its own."
(..)
" To live and inhabit is to be parasitic, to pollute, to alter the clima, to effect an inclination that cannot be remedied or mitigated by some return or retrieval of the proper."
(..)
" The emphasis on parasitism and pollution precludes any nostalgia or restoration; in the beginning is defilement. This then yields a far more positive conception of a natural contract, which would not be man becoming one with nature as one living and symbiotic whole. Rather, it is precisely the supposedly ethical position of man as an interdisciplinary animal—man as assembler and negotiator of a single field of knowledges—that would give way to a natural contract that is a multiplicity, with divergent rather than harmonious lines of inflection. Climate change in a positive sense, following on from this parasitism and pollution, would occur as a negotiation or natural contract of the infinitely multiple."




Claire Colebrook ; Post-human Humanities
 https://quod.lib.umich.edu/o/ohp/12329362.0001.001/1:10/--death-of-the-posthuman-essays-on-extinction-volume-one?rgn=div1;view=fulltext