beyond the human condition
Interdisciplinary fields of plant and animal studies come into my horizon of extracultural becoming of man. 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.
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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. |
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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