Political Ontologies beyond the Bifurcation of Nature. Nature, Society and Politics in Critical Posthumanist and Heterological Ontologies

Abstract

In my research project I investigate the potentials (and limits) of selected critical posthumanist and heterological ontologies for anti-capitalist, queer feminist, decolonial, multispecies and socio-ecological projects of transformation in the ruins of the Anthropo-Capitalocene. Both propositions have in common that they are not based on the onto-epistemological division of reality into nature and culture, mind and matter or subject and object in the tradition of Western modernity. What is problematic about this division or “bifurcation of nature” (Whitehead) is not primarily that it stems from an inherently inconsistent dualistic mode of thought, but above all that such thinking has real consequences in that it results in extremely destructive relations of the self, of society and of nature. I am therefore interested in how the bifurcation of reality into nature/society/aesthetics/politics is undermined in critical posthumanist and heterological ontologies in a critical-speculative but also political-activist way. Where are overlaps, where divergences, where and how can these ontologies be “partially connected” (Strathern) in the sense of a “new aesthetic paradigm” (Guattari) for a comprehensive social transformation? At which points might a complementary approach by ‘classical’ critical theories be necessary? 

Keywords: Critical Posthumanism, Heterological Ontologies, Speculative Knowledge Production, Epistemic Violence, Queer Ecology, More-than-Human Aesthetics, Donna J. Haraway, Isabelle Stengers, A.N. Whitehead, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Marisol de la Cadena

Short biography

Short bio English:
Isabella Schlehaider is a philosopher and doctoral candidate at the Institute of Art Theory and Cultural Studies under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Ruth Sonderegger. She is a lecturer at different universities in Austria. Selected publications: A Thousand Subjects. The Radically Pluralistic Notion of the Subject in Critical Posthumanism and the Work of A. N. Whitehead (in German, monograph), Stuttgart: ibidem-Verlag, 2021; ‘Apart from the Experiences of Subjects There Is Nothing, Nothing, Nothing, Bare Nothingness’ – Nature and Subjectivity in Alfred North Whitehead, in: Histories 2023; Queer(ing) Ethics. Outlines of a Critical (Post)Humanist Ethics of Relating (in German, forthcoming).