Povinelli

RELATED TERMS: Critical Thinking; Deconstruction – Derrida; Entanglement; Hermeneutics; New Materialism; Ontological Turn; Posthumanism

Since the beginning of the 21st century, Elizabeth Povinelli argues, critical theoretical discourses have been marked by a particular style and approach. They have shifted, she suggests, from hermeneutic and deconstructive methods of reading towards a set of methods of knowledge production informed by mathematically-inspired philosophy and the natural sciences. A number of names have been given to this emergent field: the ontological turn; new materialism; and posthumanism.

Despite the variety of names given, Povinelli ascribes a common thread to these scholarly efforts.  She contends that these scholars are seeking to imagine a form of political solidarity that is grounded in the entanglement of human, other-than-human and more-than-human existents [or inter-actants]. Thus, Povinelli suggests that, despite the variety of discourses under these headings, they can all be taken to be making the ontological claim, in different ways, that ‘existence is entangled’. Two of the major theorists that Povinelli cites in this context are Karen Barad and Donna Haraway. Haraway, with her emphasis on species entanglement and symbiogenetic kinship, aims to establish the basis of an anticapitalist, antiracist, posthuman feminist perspective (Povinelli, 2021: 17).

References

Povinelli, E. A. (2021) Between Gaia and ground. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.