ABSTRACTA lineage has been drawn between the immanent philosophy articulated by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari and the work of Donna Haraway, most notably by the nomadic feminist and immanentist Rosi Braidotti. However, while containing certain parallels via the process nature of their ontologies, upon further inspection, such an equivocation is unwarranted on the grounds that it fails to remain nuanced in distinguishing the precise ‘mechanism’ or midwife that gives birth to the continued proliferation of the flux of becoming. This (...) disparity is exposed through the erection of a homology using Lacanian psychoanalysis that eases the passing from immanentism to Haraway by showing that the latter inscribes the obverse of L'Autre into the field of becoming unravelling privileged channels of desire. This results in an ingenuity that can never be pinned down by the signifier and, further, actively works to subvert it through ploy. (shrink)

This essay discusses critical approaches to culture, difference, and empathy in health care education through a reading of Junot Diaz’s “Wildwood” chapter from the 2007 novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. I begin with an analysis of the way that Diaz’s narrative invites readers to imagine and explore the experiences of others with subtlety and complexity. My reading of “Wildwood” illuminates its double-edged injunction to try to imagine another’s perspective while recognizing the limits to—or even the impossibility of—that (...) exercise. I draw on post-colonial theory and feminist science studies to illuminate a text that is created and interpreted in a post-colonial context—the Dominican diaspora in the United States. The essay offers a model of historical and critical analysis that health care educators can use to frame the concept of empathy in the classroom and the clinic. (shrink)

1234Coming from the current context permeated by technological systems of Artificial Intelligence (AI), we discern a growing and recurring concern for the future, for its images and imaginaries, wh...

Ha sido usual criticar el posthumanismo por ser una especulación puramente hipotética sin conexión con nuestras posibilidades técnicas y científicas. Se argumenta aquí, sin embargo, que los desarrollos recientes para la producción de diferentes tipos de híbridos —como híbridos de cerdohombre— abren posibilidades reales para el programa posthumanista. El posthumanismo debe ser tomado en serio. En este trabajo presentamos las líneas centrales de la ontología y la ética posthumanistas, y también algunas razones para resistir su programa de transformación social y (...) política. (shrink)

Woolf's modernist animals affected Deleuze and Guattari's animal philosophy, as they describe in A Thousand Plateaus. This essay focuses on the significance of these references to Woolf's aesthetics for Deleuzian philosophy, whilst also considering how we can better understand Woolf's broader exploration of animality through close engagement with Deleuze's conceptual framework. In mapping various appearances of one of the oldest domesticated animals, cows, in the work of both, the essay builds an argument about the shared bovine territory in their writings (...) and the ontological and ethical implications of this. It therefore expands upon the relationship between Deleuze and Woolf at the same time as affirming the importance of their animal ontology, ethics and aesthetics for animal studies more widely. (shrink)

In this paper, we discuss Næss’s concept of ecological self in light of the process of identification and the idea of self-realization, in order to understand the asymmetrical relationship among human beings and nature. In this regard, our hypothesis is that Næss does not use the concept of the ecological self to justify ontology of processes, or definitively overcome the idea of individual entities in view of a transpersonal ecology, as Fox argues. Quite the opposite: Næss’s ecological self is nothing (...) but an echo of the theme of the home and of belonging to a place, and, therefore, it deals with a positive relationship of the individual with its environment. This allows us to reshape environmental ethics starting from environmental ontology, and recalling the primacy of the latter on the former: the very theoretic background of an ethical view might only be a suitable interpretation of human nature and properties, starting from a relational viewpoint that may help understanding us our asymmetrical relationships with the world. (shrink)

Resumen Repensar la naturaleza en la época actual significa enfrentar las nuevas perspectivas desarrolladas por la ética ambiental, es decir, las respuestas a la crisis ecológica contemporánea. Los dos paradigmas ambientales principales, biocentrismo y antropocentrismo, antes que ser paradigmas éticos son dos visiones antropológicas desarrolladas a partir de una cierta idea del puesto del ser humano en el cosmos. En este sentido, el objeto de este artículo es destacar el hecho de que la ecología es una antropología y, debido a (...) esto, para repensar la naturaleza tenemos que reformular nuestra visión antropológica, dada la insuficiencia a nivel teórico de los principales paradigmas ambientales.Rethinking nature nowadays means to face the new perspectives developed by environmental ethics, i.e., the responses to the contemporary ecological crisis. The two main environmental paradigms, biocentrism and anthropocentrism, even before being ethical paradigms, are two anthropological visions developed from a certain idea of the position of human beings in the cosmos. In this sense, the purpose of this article is to highlight the fact the ecology is rooted in anthropology. In order to rethink the idea of nature, then, we have to reformulate our anthropological view, given the failure of the two main environmental paradigms at this theoretic level. (shrink)

The figure of the nomad, representing the virtues of freedom, mobility, and exploration, is a frequently occurring trope within contemporary continental philosophy and social theory, derived chiefly from the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. This paper will interrogate the concept of nomadism, firstly in the philosophy of these two foundational thinkers, and then subsequently in the feminist and posthumanist theorizations of Rosi Braidotti. Whilst accepting that Braidotti's challenges to sedentarist, essentialist metaphysical accounts of the transcendental subject are still (...) politically relevant, it will be argued that the deployment of the nomadic figure—and more generally, the positing of an ontology of creative desire, or ‘becoming’—risks not only absolutizing the historical contingencies of the digitized, postindustrial society that it seeks to criticize, but actually reinforcing the unsustainable ideology of perpetual production upon which such a society is premised. (shrink)

This article discusses the role that algorithmic thinking and management play in health care and the kind of exclusions this might create. We argue that evidence‐based medicine relies on research and data to create pathways for patient journeys. Coupled with data‐based algorithmic prediction tools in health care, they establish what could be called health care algorithmics—a mode of management of healthcare that produces forms of algorithmic governmentality. Relying on a critical posthumanist perspective, we show how healthcare algorithmics is contingent on (...) the way authority over bodies is produced and how predictive health care algorithms can reproduce inequalities of the worlds from which they are made, centreing possible futures on existing normativities regulated through algorithmic biopower. In contrast to that, we explore posthuman speculative ethics as a way to challenge understanding of ‘ethics’ and ‘care’ in healthcare algorithmics. We suggest some possible avenues towards working speculative ethics into health care while still being critically attentive to algorithmic modes of management and prediction in health care. (shrink)

Woolf's modernist animals affected Deleuze and Guattari's animal philosophy, as they describe in A Thousand Plateaus. This essay focuses on the significance of these references to Woolf's aesthetics for Deleuzian philosophy, whilst also considering how we can better understand Woolf's broader exploration of animality through close engagement with Deleuze's conceptual framework . In mapping various appearances of one of the oldest domesticated animals, cows, in the work of both, the essay builds an argument about the shared bovine territory in their (...) writings and the ontological and ethical implications of this. It therefore expands upon the relationship between Deleuze and Woolf at the same time as affirming the importance of their animal ontology, ethics and aesthetics for animal studies more widely. (shrink)

Building from recent attempts in the humanities and social sciences to conceive of creative, entangled ways of doing interdisciplinary work, I turn to Braidotti’s ‘nomadic ontology’ to (re)vision the human body without a brain. Her exploration of the body as a ‘threshold of transformations’ is put into conversation with Deleuze’s comments on neurobiology to consider what a brainless body might do, or undo, in neuroscientific practice. I ground discussion in a case study, detailing the practices of brain decoding or ‘mind (...) reading,’ re-interpreting Rose’s account. Therein, I argue that the technical-social configurations of brain decoding are unlikely to usher in a radically new ontology, as Rose suggests. To better match Rose’s vision and align with new ontologies in cultural theory, I argue that neuroscience must become nomadic and embrace a body without a brain. I then conclude with six recommendations towards a nomadic neuroscience. (shrink)

abstractPosthumanism can be understood as a position that de-prioritizes or rescinds the privilege of the human in some way – frequently by attempting to think humanity as one element of a wider ecology of interdependent forces. This paper argues that one can be on the side of the human without neglecting the assemblages of which we are all a part – by conceiving of humanity as a site of nascent potential for sapience + care – an alienated understanding of a (...) complex world combined with the will to engage in the reparative processes of tending to it. (shrink)

This essay offers a critical rejoinder to affect theories prevalent in the humanities since the 1990s. In film and media studies, affect theories display an opposition to ‘screen’ and apparatus theory of the 1970s and 1980s alleged to have marginalised the spectator's body and affects and privileged cognition over affection. Yet film and media studies’ turn to affect came with its own set of problems: in emphasising the affective over the cognitive aspects of cinematic experience, theories of the affective turn (...) invert and reproduce the dichotomies they seek to contest. Critically reconsidering the turn to affect and its place within film and media studies, this article challenges the relation of affect theories to Gilles Deleuze's concept of affect, highlighting these theories’ failure to account for Deleuze's indebtedness to Immanuel Kant's aesthetics and his theory of the faculties. Suggesting a conception of cinematic affect beyond dichotomies of body and mind, affect and thought, this essay instead shows how cinematic experience instigates transformations in spectators that are simultaneously affective and cognitive. (shrink)

As a rejection and continuous reframing of theoretical humanism, critical posthumanism questions and imagines the human condition in the current context, aligning it with nonhuman and more than human entities, past and future. While this philosophical approach has been referenced in many academic disciplines since the 1990s, it has been gradually garnering interest among nursing scholars, leading to questions such as what it means to be human and what it means to be a nurse in the here and now. As (...) a deeply ethical and political project, posthumanism, which we associate with poststructuralist concepts of power and resistance, questions the formation of posthuman subjects who more accurately reflect complex times, characterized by capitalistic commodification of life—human and nonhuman. In this article, we aim to explore how the ontological and epistemological underpinnings of critical posthumanism, specifically through Rosi Braidotti's works, can be useful to understand a posthuman subjectivity that favors affirmative actions aimed at actualizing our world in becoming. Through examples in nursing practice, education, and research, we will explore not only how critical posthumanism allows us to frame transformations in the current situation that we are embedded in as nurses and more generally as beings but also how these examples allow us to move beyond critique to the actualization of affirmative actions that correspond to the creation of new worlds. (shrink)

This study is defined within the context of the critical posthuman project of decentring humanist subjectivity. We argue that because agential realism, and the agency and performativity that go with it, do not enable non-human matter to be accountable, only human matter, in its intra-active becoming with non-human matter, can support an ethical project. Secondly, we map our understanding of Barad’s agential realism, explaining the importance of agential cuts in phenomena-in-their-becoming that are the world worlding itself, and evaluate ethics, agency, (...) and performativity in this material-discursive framework. Thirdly, understanding the material-discursive to underpin storied matter, we engage it via some clarification of narrative, and narrative agency. We conclude that much organic or inorganic nature as non-human matter is directional and responsive, so alive and generative and, in this sense, capable of worlding itself. However, it does not tell its own stories in the process. (shrink)

This article is an account of the dynamics of interaction across the social sciences and neurosciences. Against an arid rhetoric of ‘interdisciplinarity’, it calls for a more expansive imaginary of what experiment – as practice and ethos – might offer in this space. Arguing that opportunities for collaboration between social scientists and neuroscientists need to be taken seriously, the article situates itself against existing conceptualizations of these dynamics, grouping them under three rubrics: ‘critique’, ‘ebullience’ and ‘interaction’. Despite their differences, each (...) insists on a distinction between sociocultural and neurobiological knowledge, or does not show how a more entangled field might be realized. The article links this absence to the ‘regime of the inter-’, an ethic of interdisciplinarity that guides interaction between disciplines on the understanding of their pre-existing separateness. The argument of the paper is thus twofold: (1) that, contra the ‘regime of the inter-’, it is no longer practicable to maintain a hygienic separation between sociocultural webs and neurobiological architecture; (2) that the cognitive neuroscientific experiment, as a space of epistemological and ontological excess, offers an opportunity to researchers, from all disciplines, to explore and register this realization. (shrink)

By engaging with Giorgio Agamben’s article on the Italian government’s measures during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, we argue that COVID-19 points to the limits of the classical biopolitical and thanatopolitical logics of analysis and therefore requires a new conceptual framework. The outbreak of COVID-19 is an example of zoonotic globalisation in which the human species as a biological and geological actor is merely one among many other species that influence biological and geological processes on Earth, thus challenging (...) humanist conceptualisations of politics. Here, the human role in politics is decentralised by thinking the virus as one of the actors that exert influence on how the political sphere is governed. We argue that the virus is the epitome of the ungovernable – an entity or broadly a historical challenge that cannot be subjected to existing mode of governing – due to its interstitial and borderline character, resting between the ontological roots of the dominant modes of governing bios and geos, and challenging them by merely existing. We draw upon the works of Ghassan Hage, Nils Bubandt, Elizabeth Povinelli, and Donna Haraway to interrogate the limits of biopolitics and diagnose theoretical conundrums stemming from the division of nature vs. culture and life vs. nonlife entrenched in the existing social-political paradigms. Rather than providing finite answers about the role of the virus as a non-human actor in the political sphere, we raise questions as to how and why it should matter. (shrink)

Using the 2010 film Into Eternity as a springboard for thought, this article considers how archaeologies of the future might help us make sense of how to seek commonality and take care across vast temporal scales. The film, about a nuclear waste repository in Finland, addresses the impossibility of communicating across millennia. In thinking with this film, we engage with recent responses to the post-human call, arguing that they are inadequate in dealing with the new questions that are asked by (...) post-human thought. Instead, we attempt to engage the work of Spinoza and Sloterdijk in rethinking the human as a strategic position or point of purchase amongst the shared materiality of present and future worlds. We offer the concepts of the materially affective and atmosphere in order to identify points of connection, drawing on moments in Into Eternity to work through these arguments in a tentative repositioning of the human as a site of concern. (shrink)