Transcorporeal becoming: the temporalities of Searles and the nonhuman
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Transcorporeal becoming: the temporalities of Searles and the nonhuman Katie Gentile1 Published online: 25 May 2020 © Springer Nature Limited 2020
Abstract As critical theories center on co-emergent interspecies relationalities, psychoanalysis continues to reproduce a fantasy of narcissistic omnipotence and exceptionalism. But theories of interspecies becoming have failed to adequately address human ambivalence and conflicts of interest that are inherent in their ideals of dispersive agencies and unfolding potentialities/uncertainties. There is still a need for a theory of subjectivity that can explore the ongoing processes of human disavowals and dissociations that reify the human exceptionalism motivating planetary destruction. Psychoanalysis remains one of the only theories of subjectivity that creates space for ambivalence, conflict, and unconscious motivations. This paper melds psychoanalytic theories of the non-human with critical and indigenous theories of interspecies emergence, to create a space where dispersive agencies, unconscious ambivalences, and the potentialities of multiple temporalities can be held. Keywords Temporality · Interspecies becoming · Psychoanalysis · Indigenous studies · New materialism · Climate change and the environment The transactions between body and language lead to an articulation of the world in which the strangeness of the world revealed by death, by its noninhabitability, can be transformed into a world in which one can dwell again in full awareness of a life that has to be lived in loss (Veena Das 1996, as quoted in Best and Hartman 2005, p. 2). [Nature] has her own particularly effective method of restricting us. She destroys us – coldly, cruelly, relentlessly, as it seems to us, and possibly through the very things that occasioned our satisfaction (Freud 1927, p. 15, quoted in Schinaia 2019, p 283).
* Katie Gentile [email protected] 1
Department of Interdisciplinary Studies, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York, New York, NY 10019, USA Vol.:(0123456789)
180 K. Gentile
Living in loss is not a human speciality, yet in many ways it is what is called upon by posthumanism, vital, new, and speculative materialisms, affect and assemblage theories, actor-network theory, ecocriticism, object-oriented ontologies, and other theories dethroning the human by focusing on the spaces between bodies and language, the human and the nonhuman. This focus on the emergent in-between spaces of bodies, as Bastian (2010) notes, is a “survival project,” requiring a theory of agency that expands to the non-human–human and non-human1 animals, objects, affectivity, organic and geophysical systems, materiality or technologies, climate change, famine, intellectual property, biotechnology, war and terrorism, as Grusin (2015) describes. The human is a mere spec in terms of geological temporality, and barely 0.01% of the planet’s biomass (Carrington 2018), but, as theories of the Anthropocene note, the main source of environmental destruction. Holding this contrad
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