Responding as composing: towards a post-anthropocentric, feminist ethics for the Anthropocene

ABSTRACT

Problems posed by the ‘Anthropocene’ have caused many feminists to rethink a feminist ethics in a post-anthropocentric vein. In this context, a reconceptualization of the notion of responsibility as response-ability or ability to respond has gained crucial relevance. This article reads ethics of response as feminist takes on problems posed by the Anthropocene, but also as attempts to conceptualize a non-normativist ethics working with and beyond post-structuralism. The theoretical challenge faced by a feminist post-anthropocentric ethics, the article argues, was posed by feminist philosopher Rosi Braidotti as a confrontation of ‘affirmation versus vulnerability’. In revisiting this debate, the article situates the notion of response-ability and outlines the theoretical questions which must be dealt with by an ethics of response: an integration of affirmation and negativity on one hand, and the question of the ethical and political implications of thinking from constitutive relationality on the other hand. By drawing on the work of Isabelle Stengers, the article maps out one possible conceptualization of an ethics of response-ability in more detail. It introduces the etho-ecological practice of responding as composing with otherness, which enables us to conceptualize the notion of response-ability as a concept underpinning a post-anthropocentric, feminist ethics for the Anthropocene.

KEYWORDS:

• Anthropocene
• ethics
• vulnerability
• affirmation
• political ontology
• post-anthropocentrism
• response-ability

Acknowledgements

I thank the students in my seminar on ‘New materialisms and Radical Democracy’ at Goethe-University Frankfurt in the summer term of 2018 for engaged discussions on the topics of this article and their enthusiasm for pondering prospects of politics and ethics in the Anthropocence. I also want to thank Josef Barla, Jonas Heller, Thomas Lemke and Franziska von Verschuer for important comments on earlier versions of this article. Two anonymous reviewers helped me clarify my argument. Special thanks goes to Lucy Duggan for proofreading the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Katharina Hoppe is a research associate in the ‘Biotechnologies, Nature and Society’ research group in the institute of sociology at Goethe-University Frankfurt. Her teaching and research interests involve feminist, political, and social theory, biopolitics, and feminist science studies.

Notes

1 I share the criticism of the conceptualization of the era as Anthropocene having ‘anthropos’ at its center and reinstalling an anthropocentrism that is also coupled with fantasies of a complete domination of ‘nature’. There is indeed a need for other and less human-centered stories: the ‘Capitalocene’ (Moore 2017) or even – pointing toward a writing of different futures that are rooted in a damaged present – ‘Chthulucene’ (Haraway 2015). However, I make use of the notion Anthropocene strategically, since it does work as a transdisciplinary pointer to ‘global alarm’ (Clark and Yusoff 2017, 7).

2 For general engagements with the characteristics of poststructuralist ethics and politics, see, e.g. Connolly (1999), Fagan (2013).

3 On the necessary violence of these norms and how to cope with this in nonviolent ethics, see Mills (2007).

4 On the notion of ‘dispossession’ and the impact of it on Butler’s works as well its political potential, which is mostly outlined by Athena Athanasiou, see their instructive conversations: Butler and Athanasiou (2015).

5 For example, Claude Lefort has pointed out, it is a (radical) democratic horizon that is able to institutionalize this feature of the political, in that it sees conflict and periodical change at the core of democratic politics (see Lefort 1986).

6 For an English-language discussion of the German version of Marchart’s book, see Saar (2012).

7 This can be read along the lines of critiques that suggest that Butler disavows politics in favor of ethics; see for example Dean (2008), Honig (2010), Shulman (2011).

8 In Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly (2015), Butler herself emphasizes with reference to Haraway’s works that:

[i]f we cannot really speak about bodies at all without the environments, the machines, and the complex systems of social interdependency upon which they rely, then all of these nonhuman dimensions of bodily life prove to be constitutive dimensions of human survival and flourishing.

9 In her study on depression and the gut, Elizabeth Wilson (2015) makes a similar argument, pointing out the consequences of her engagement with biological data concerning depression for feminist theory and politics. She shows that there is a lack of acknowledgement in feminist theory and practice that not everything negative can be turned into something positive: ‘Against the idea that the negative can be made valuable (productive, valorized, connected), Gut Feminism makes a case that we need to pay more attention to the destructive and damaging aspect of politics that cannot be repurposed to good ends’ (Wilson 2015, 6; original emphasis).

10 Jacques Derrida as well takes up the notion of response to overcome a speciesist conception of reaction in his engagement with the treatment of animals in Western philosophy. In the beginning of his text ‘The Animal that Therefore I am’, he states: ‘For everything that I am about to confide to you no doubt comes back to asking you to respond to me, you, to me, reply to me concerning what it is to respond. If you can. The said question of the said animal in its entirety comes down to knowing not whether the animal speaks but whether one can know what respond means. And how to distinguish a response from a reaction’ (Derrida 2002, 377; original emphasis). Derrida’s ‘said animal’ in this, is precisely not ‘the animal’ as a collective singular but a specific animal, an actually existing animal, a cat – Derrida’s cat. She interrupts his everyday life when she appears in his bathroom and surprises him naked – she makes him pause. She is ‘this irreplaceable living being that one day enters my space, enters this place where it can encounter me, see me, even see me naked. Nothing can ever take away from me the certainty that what we have here is an existence that refuses to be conceptualized’ (Derrida 2002, 379; original emphasis). Importantly, there is no reaction or response that would simply comprehend the cat. The insight that every attempt of fixing the meaning of this singularity is impossible and the very attempt of doing so has a violent side is crucial for the conceptualization of an ethics of self-alienation.

11 Stengers here refers to Dostoyevsky’s idiot (Stengers 2005, 994). In Deleuze’ appropriation of this figure, he refers to Shestov. In Difference and Repetition, for example, he writes: ‘Not an individual endowed with good will and a natural capacity for thought, but an individual full of ill will who does not manage to think, either naturally or conceptually. Only such an individual is without presuppositions. Only such an individual effectively begins and effectively repeats. For this individual the subjective presuppositions are no less prejudices than the objective presuppositions: Eudoxus and Epistemon are one and the same misleading figure who should be mistrusted. At the risk of playing the idiot, do so in the Russian manner: that of an underground man who recognizes himself no more in the subjective presuppositions of a natural capacity for thought than in the objective presuppositions of a culture of the times, and lacks the compass with which to make a circle. Such a one is the Untimely, neither temporal nor eternal. Ah Shestov, with the question he poses, the ill will he manifests, the powerlessness to think he puts into thought and the double dimension he develops in these demanding questions concerning at once both the most radical beginning and the most stubborn repetition’ (Deleuze 1994, 166, original emphasis).

12 The figure of Gaia has been taken up, for example, in ecofeminist approaches since the 1980s. For an overview, see Anderlini-D’Onofrio (2004).

13 For more extensive critical discussions of the manifesto see Latour (2015); Hamilton (2015); Crist (2015).