Forms of life and life itself: Reflections on human relations with ideas, artworks, and other species

This paper aims to rethink the traditional understanding of the two commandments formulated by Christ - to love God and our neighbour as ourselves -, by rethinking the category of neighbour, not just as those who belongs to the human species, but as all those to whom we can feel close, depending on the degree of empathy conceming not just sentient beings, but even all forms of life and existence. Rethinking also God not as the supreme being, but (according to the etymology) as the light of the full awareness of life itself, we propose that to live wholeheartedly the two commandments implies to die and resurrect as being everything in all and all things.

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A Thealogy of Radical Immanence: Goddess and the Posthuman

Feminist Theology ◽

10.1177/0966735019857194 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 28 (1) ◽

pp. 6-19

Author(s):

Ruth Mantin

Keyword(s):

Baruch Spinoza ◽

Capitalist Economy ◽

Life Itself ◽

Forms Of Life

In this article I offer possibilities for conversations between a feminist, post-realist thealogy and an exploration of the posthuman as presented by Rosi Braidotti. Braidotti draws on the influence of Baruch Spinoza to argue for an awareness of the ‘radical immanence’ which allows a challenge to the hierarchically dualistic assumptions of an anthropocentric paradigm. I maintain that the role of ‘Goddess-talk’ can contribute to this exploration with its figurations of a transgressive sacrality which can embrace ambiguity and plurality and which is immanent in a connection and interdependence with all forms of life. Such a thealogy can have points of contact with Braidotti’s call for an interrogation of what is meant by ‘being human’, a consideration of the implications of a ‘post-anthropocentric’ world and a challenge to the ways in which a global capitalist economy is undertaking the commodification of life itself.

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Why We Humans Have Been Chronically Stalled For Millennia In Our Evolutionary Maturation: Tapping The Dormant Global Power Of ((Transpersonal Life))©

Integral Transpersonal Journal ◽

10.32031/itibte_itj_10-ga2 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 10 (10) ◽

pp. 38

Author(s):

Ashok Gangadean

Keyword(s):

Human Evolution ◽

Human Relations ◽

Global Power ◽

Forms Of Life ◽

Genuine Communication

We know there is a chronic breakdown in real dialogue and human relations across and between widely diverse worlds, ideologies and forms of life. We can see over millennia the violent clash of worlds, religions and ideologies. But we also witness the amazing possibility of genuine communication and non-violent human relations across all sorts of borders. The author shares with us some amazing aspect of his life-long research about human evolution. KEYWORDS Transpersonal Life, global reason, transculturalism, mind, evolutionary maturation.

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Doctor Pascal

10.1093/owc/9780198746164.001.0001 ◽

2020 ◽

Author(s):

Émile Zola

Keyword(s):

Religious Faith ◽

Family Tree ◽

Human Relations ◽

The Sublime ◽

Scientific Principles ◽

Life Itself ◽

Faithful Servant ◽

All Diseases ◽

Ultimate Cure

‘There's something of everything there, the best and the worst, the vulgar and the sublime, flowers, muck, tears, laughter, the river of life itself’ Pascal Rougon has served as a doctor in the rural French town of Plassans for thirty years. He lives a quiet life with his faithful servant Martine and young niece Clotilde. Pascal is a man of science, striving to find the ultimate cure for all diseases. This puts him at odds with his niece, who is horrified by his denial of religious faith. Clotilde also distrusts Pascal's lifelong ambition to create a family tree on scientific principles, based upon his theories of heredity. Tensions in the household are fuelled by Pascal's scheming mother, Félicité, as the final episode in the great Rougon-Macquart saga plays out. Dr Pascal is the passionate conclusion to Zola's twenty-novel sequence, and the most eloquent expression of the ideas on heredity and human progress that have underpinned it. Human relations are at its heart, as Pascal and Clotilde are bound ever closer by ties of family and love.

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Biopolitical subjectification

Sign Systems Studies ◽

10.12697/sss.2019.47.1-2.04 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 47 (1/2) ◽

pp. 105-125

Author(s):

Ott Puumeister

Keyword(s):

Semiotic Mediation ◽

Life Itself ◽

Forms Of Life ◽

Ways Of Being

The article proposes a semiotic interpretation of the concept of biopolitics. Instead of a politics that takes “life itself ” as its object and, as a result, separates life as an object from subjects, biopolitics is read as subjectification – a governmental rationality that constructs social ways of being and forms of life, that is, social subjectivities. The article articulates this position on the basis of two concepts: Jakob von Uexküll’s umwelt and Michel Foucault’s dispositive. While the former makes it possible to show that the process of life can be conceptualized as subjectification, the latter enables us to argue against an interpretation of biopolitics as a totalized structure of power intervening directly, without semiotic mediation, into “life itself ”.

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Resilience and Sovereignty in the Context of Contemporary Biopolitics

Critical Times ◽

10.1215/26410478-8662272 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 3 (3) ◽

pp. 327-357

Author(s):

Rodrigo De La Fabián

Keyword(s):

Risk Management ◽

Epistemic Uncertainty ◽

Life Forms ◽

Sovereign Power ◽

Critical History ◽

Management Technology ◽

The Future ◽

Life Itself ◽

Forms Of Life ◽

Ontological Uncertainty

Abstract This essay offers a critical history, in the Foucauldian sense, of the contemporary hegemony of resilience as a new risk-management technology. Its hypothesis is that resilience is a new way of conjoining biopolitics with thanatopolitics or sovereign power. If, for Roberto Esposito, the paradigm of immunization explained this deadly linkage, resilience refers to a different biopolitical matrix, one that can no longer be understood in Esposito's terms. While the paradigm of immunization is staked on securing biopolitical bodies, resilience is a strategy for enhancing life itself. This shift, from protecting bodies to protecting life, is related to resilience's biopolitical matrix, which mediates between the molecular fiction of life and an ecological eschatology. The essay concludes, in the first place, that the discourse of resilience entails a naturalization and a seeming depoliticization of precarious forms of life—which must learn not to resist but to adapt to precarity. And, secondly, this essay concludes that, in the context of resilience, the sovereign's old right to kill is no longer invoked in the name of epistemic uncertainty (fear of the unpredictability of the future) but of ontological uncertainty: fear of the annihilation of the conditions of existence for certain life-forms.

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