When Species Meet: staying with the trouble

摘要

It is a privilege-not to mention a joy-to receive reviews with such generous critical readings both to what I do and to what I failed to do or do badly in When Species Meet. These reviews are models of the "corporeal generosity" (Rosylyn Diprose) and "making available" (Vinciane Despret) to each other that Isabel Stengers's sort of cosmopolitics is about. Skirting the sucking quicksands of both humanism and post-humanism, in an improbable concatenation of terran stomachs WSM ruminates the figures and fleshly realities of companion species in an effort to be responsible inside living and dying in knotted, mortal naturecultures and pastpresents. The task of WSM is 'becoming with' rather than 'becoming', at every interleaved scale of time and space, in materialsemiotic places (here, not there; there, not here; this, not everything; attachment sites, not case studies for the general; oxymorons, not examples), all the way down, without end but also without ever starting from scratch and never alone.