Loving the Alien [electronic resource].

Fall Semester 2016

Open access content

Esposito points out, “for life to remain as such, it must submit itself to an alien force that, if not entirely hostile, at least inhibits its development” (Esposito 2011: 8) In this essay I will explore the ambivalent position of the alien within the context of one of the themes for this workshop: “Intimacy with the Cosmos”, in order to reflect upon the question of whether there is a place for a non-body politic? The theme invites reflection on scales beyond the grasp of the human – the micro and the macro and the proliferation thereof considered not as a fixed object, a self, or even another. As the organisers suggest, this is “matter organized extensively and intensively in such arrangements as trajectories, vectors and modulated fields. They are simultaneously local, global and universal. These forces in and of themselves may not be either purely corporeal or transcendental, but they pressure us and we feel them. We may care more about them than they do of us. Somewhere between magnetic resonance and cognitive dissonance exists our interface with the cosmos. Since where the Real begins and ends is no longer for us to decide, we must give in. Maybe we should love the alien and find such a thing as a post-human manifesto or a post-human post-manifesto? The what and where are the means and ends to speculating on what we don’t know. Lurking there may be fissures, mutations, grafts and splices into things becoming other things. We could then speculate on how inhabitable those spaces are and if we want to go there. Thus, we should discuss–at least for the course of three days–on whether or not there is a place for a non–body politic?”
https://www.librarystack.org/loving-the-alien/?ref=unknown

Art criticism
Biopolitics

Text

Lisa Marie Blackman
Yamilet Ramírez
Andreas Töpfer
Antonia Wright
Marcos Valella
Odalis Valdivieso
Angela Valella
Felice Grodin