Aleatory entanglements: (Post)humanism, hospitality, and attunement—A response to Hugo Letiche

ABSTRACT

This article is a response to Hugo Letiche's “Bewildering Pedagogy,” an extended critique of many of Snaza's published texts. In it, Snaza selected four important points of disagreement and elaborated four tensions between Letiche's claims and his own present thinking—tensions that all turn on ontological and epistemological axioms about borders and the work of border policing. These are: the role that the political philosophy of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri plays in Snaza's conceptualizations of politics; the precise meanings of “humanism” and “posthumanism”; the status and meaning of “animality,” especially the animality of the human; and the role of hospitality in understanding educational encounters. Using Letiche's critique as a point of departure, Snaza elaborated a conception of education as bewildering, where various participants come together in unexpected and unpredictable ways to navigate their mutual exposure to “aleatory entanglement.”

Notes

1. In “#BlackLivesMatter” (2017), Jenny Sandlin and I cite them mostly to critique their concept of “flesh,” connecting it instead to black feminist re-conceptualizations of biopolitics.

2. As Rocha argues in his response to my response (this issue), such historically sweeping claims are not “defensible.” I don't disagree, but my tactical and polemical interest here is precisely in showing how across enormously different contexts, a structurally homologous doubling of the human appears. That structure endures despite otherwise crucial variations in the politics and philosophies of the thinkers I mention.

3. To give a simple example, I have enormous reservations about the discourse of object-oriented ontology (both politically and ontologically), but it was important to me to make sure it figured into these collaborative projects because they are part of the discourse as it operates in the humanities and social sciences, and because it is important to some of my collaborators. I take collaboration very seriously and never sought to give my views any more weight than those of my co-authors. Again, because I am less interested in being right than in seeing what ideas can do, this does not bother me in the slightest.

4. This charge has, rightfully I would say, been leveled at some of my own work (Herbrecheter, 2016; Oliveira & Lopes, 2016).

5. I might also note that in my essay on Nietzsche (2013b), I deconstruct the distinction between literal and metaphorical language, arguing that the belief in the difference is a crucial aspect of Western humanist thought, which makes dealing with the animality of the human difficult.

6. I take the notion of intra-action from Karen Barad's (2006) posthumanist, queer account of physics.

7. John Dewey (1916) underscored precisely this in Democracy and Education when he claims we only ever educate indirectly by means of the environment.