beyond the human condition
Ecocriticism is an interdisciplinary field of literary and cultural studies that examines the relationship between literature, culture, and the environment. It seeks to understand how nature and environmental issues are represented in literary and artistic works, while also exploring the impact of human activities on the natural world and how cultural attitudes toward nature shape human interaction with the environment. Similarly, the interdisciplinary fields of plant and animal studies may deal with the questions of representation, exploring how views of nature differ across cultures and historical periods, revealing shifts in human relationships with the environment. They may also penetrate deeper into ethics, politics, and essential philosophical questions concerning the presupposition of human exceptional stance and interconnectedness with other forms of life.
In my personal perspective, the conundrum of more-than-human life comes to the fore as an issue related to extracultural becoming of man, the process of transcending our own humanness understood as a cultural/cultured condition. The trans-phyletic (in the Guattarian sense of the term phylum) is one of the direction of exploration of the cultural frontiers. The non-cultural dimension accessible to a human individual may share some of those plant-like features of what Coccia defined as “cosmic contemplation” of complete, immersive being-in-the-world. Experiencing and developing a solidarity with plants may provide a non-cultural paradigm of existence. On the other hand, the commensality of the human and the remaining predatory species marks our participation in the digestive, visceral physiology.
In my personal perspective, the conundrum of more-than-human life comes to the fore as an issue related to extracultural becoming of man, the process of transcending our own humanness understood as a cultural/cultured condition. The trans-phyletic (in the Guattarian sense of the term phylum) is one of the direction of exploration of the cultural frontiers. The non-cultural dimension accessible to a human individual may share some of those plant-like features of what Coccia defined as “cosmic contemplation” of complete, immersive being-in-the-world. Experiencing and developing a solidarity with plants may provide a non-cultural paradigm of existence. On the other hand, the commensality of the human and the remaining predatory species marks our participation in the digestive, visceral physiology.
selected essays in ecocriticism
Frames of hunting. Grievable animal life in Olga Tokarczuk’s Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the DeadForthcoming publication: Alif, 45/2025.
In 441 BC, at the Festival of Dionysus in Athens, a tragedy written by Sophocles was performed. In the center of the plot, two understandings of law clashed with such a power that, figuratively speaking, they sent ripples across the universal literature visible up to the present day. In the aftermath of a civil war, Creon, the new ruler of Thebes, forbade the burial of one of two brothers who killed each other while fighting for opposite factions. Antigone, their sister, defies the secular order in the name of a greater, sacred law that imposes the burial of the dead and proclaims all human life as grievable. Twenty-four centuries later, Janina Duszejko, the female protagonist of Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, a novel written by the Polish Nobel Prize winner Olga Tokarczuk, took up her spade to bury the mutilated remains of a roe deer and to grieve over a life that was considered out of the boundaries of the secular law. She was moved to do so by her intuition of a greater law that can hardly be called divine--since the novel’s heroine defines herself as an atheist or at least an agnostic--but nonetheless appears as sacred. Even if in a novel published in 2009 gender roles might be presented in modern, if not post-modern, light, the archaic function of the woman as the griever, her vocation of elegy and sorrow comes to the fore. |
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Ghosts, eco-queer, Sri Lankan history:
Shehan Karunatilaka’sThe Seven Moons of Maali Almeida
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eTropic, vol. 23, no 1, 2024, p. 156-178.
ISSN 1448-2940 https://journals.jcu.edu.au/index.php/etropic/article/view/4067/3838 Queering the thinking about Sri Lanka, the writer fosters the expansion of attention and awareness beyond the perimeter of human history and memory, no matter how pressing and painful. The photographer’s Nikon camera was an optical instrument forcing him to focus on fragments of reality, framing dead bodies and shameful encounters. Yet the proliferation of shots finally permitted him to transcend this focus. Photography, like history, expands into a widening gyre, the circle of queer intimacy encompasses all beings. Investing in the imagery of broadening, unbounded perspectives, Karunatilaka overcomes not only the marginality of his gay protagonist but also the normative understanding of the politics of interethnic conflict, expanding our understanding to notions of co-presence and co-existence, and our inherent interrelations with the more-than-human world. |
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selected essays in plant & animal studies
Becoming (in)human. The search for an alternative present in Helen Macdonald's H is for Hawk
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periodicos.ufsc.br/index.php/desterro/article/view/92216/54061
In 2014, Helen Macdonald published a bestselling non-fiction text, H is for Hawk. Building upon an inherited cultural practice of keeping and taming goshawks, she offered to the readers a compelling presentation of her personal journey of mourning after the death of her father. Macdonald “re-stories” an interspecies practice (the relation between the austringer, i.e. the keeper of goshawks, and the bird of prey) in such a way that it ceases to be instrumentalised primarily as a hunting technique. The manning of the hawk becomes a process of introspection and healing of the bereaved woman in the company of a non-human partner. In parallel to this experience, she reads the personal history of yet another traumatised austringer, the homosexual author T. H. White. This double line of experience counters and deconstructs the dominant male narration and introduces a maternal element in the relationship with the hawk. Finally, having reached a breaking point in her identification with the bird and its predatory instincts, the austringer recovers the balance of the wild and the tame. 
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Non-cultural morphogenesis: plants
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Historia - Kultura - Globalizacja, no 26/2019, p. 111-120.
The essay is conceived as a presentation of the author's stance on the extra-cultural becoming of man, interwoven with the “metaphysics of mixture” recently proposed by Emanuele Coccia. Both insights coincide in the valorisation of the non-cultural paradigm of plant-like, pneumatic existence, as well as the notion of penetrability and interference between the organism and the world. Vegetable morphogenesis, that differs from human technique as a way of transforming matter, epitomises the cosmogonic immersion in which the organism creates its environment being one with it. Constant interpenetration of the self and the world, present in the primordial physiology of breathing, offers an access to the emergent, post-cultural stage of man, preserving and perpetuating his/her liminal position. 
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From Agamben to Saville's bellies.
Transgression into the animal condition in post-humanity, primitive humanity and contemporary art
Dialogue & Universalism, vol. XXIV, no 1/2014, p. 121-129. ISSN 1234-5792
Reprinted in: The Animals in Us - We in Animals, Szymon Wróbel (ed.), Frankfurt am Main, Peter Lang, 2014, p. 163-172. ISBN 978-3-631-65039-4
The reflection presented in this article in three distinct “steps of inspiration” (Agamben, ethnology and art) interrelate apparently distant spheres of problems and cultural phenomena. The starting point is given by Agamben’s idea of the apocatastatic “opening of the community,” overcoming the human condition defined by exclusion. The second move will explore an ethnological inspiration. We will reflect upon the archaic search of transcendence through the animal and in the animal, corresponding to the stage of man before the “invention of monotheism” which introduced the concept of divinity defined by reduction and abstraction. As a working hypothesis, it is assumed that the monotheistic concept of God radically driven away from any biological analogy precedes and shapes the concept of humanity defined by exclusion from the universality of biological life. We will also bring about some examples from the domain of the contemporary art which can be interpreted as an incentive to reopen the possibility of “transgression into animality,” overcoming the frontiers of the human condition in the direction of other forms of being.
Reprinted in: The Animals in Us - We in Animals, Szymon Wróbel (ed.), Frankfurt am Main, Peter Lang, 2014, p. 163-172. ISBN 978-3-631-65039-4
The reflection presented in this article in three distinct “steps of inspiration” (Agamben, ethnology and art) interrelate apparently distant spheres of problems and cultural phenomena. The starting point is given by Agamben’s idea of the apocatastatic “opening of the community,” overcoming the human condition defined by exclusion. The second move will explore an ethnological inspiration. We will reflect upon the archaic search of transcendence through the animal and in the animal, corresponding to the stage of man before the “invention of monotheism” which introduced the concept of divinity defined by reduction and abstraction. As a working hypothesis, it is assumed that the monotheistic concept of God radically driven away from any biological analogy precedes and shapes the concept of humanity defined by exclusion from the universality of biological life. We will also bring about some examples from the domain of the contemporary art which can be interpreted as an incentive to reopen the possibility of “transgression into animality,” overcoming the frontiers of the human condition in the direction of other forms of being.
The primitive man transcends, through mask and ritual dance, the limitations of the human condition. But this act of transcending leads him not outside, but into the animal condition. In a sense, the animal becomes a transhumanistic aspiration of the primitive humanity. In rituals through which man symbolically becomes an animal, the meaning of trespassing the frontiers of humanity may consist in claiming certain animal qualities, such as speed, strength or resistance, but perhaps it also constitutes a first approach to the solution of a basic problem of man, who lacks a proper nature; the essential “manchanza del uomo a se stesso,” as Agamben calls it.
This essential lack remains deeply inscribed also in the monotheistic vision. The invention of the monotheism consists in the emergence of a new concept of divinity, defined by reduction and abstraction. The supreme god standing above the multiplicity of theriomorphic gods would possess no attribute in order to resume an infinity of attributes. As it is the only one, it needs no identification, no ascribed characteristics that used to define its polytheistic counterparts. The monotheistic divinity has no sex nor any other animal feature. It can be assumed that this concept of God radically driven away from any biological analogy precedes and shapes the concept of humanity defined by a radical exclusion from universality of life. The monotheistic divinity does not hunt, either. The commensality of man and animal can be no longer evoked as alibi or justification for the transgression of eating meat. On the contrary, the radical breaking of human-animal commensality leads to ritualistic elaboration of everything that is related to the physiological necessity of eating. From slaughtering to cooking and table manners, the rituals proliferate.
