The Reading of an Œuvre. Donna Haraway: The Poetics and Politics of Life
Year: 2014
Type: article
Abstract: In the fabled country called the West, nature,
no matter how protean and contradictory its
manifestations, has been the key operator in
foundational, grounding discourses for a very
long time. The foil for the culture, nature is the
zone of constraints, of the given, and of matter
as resource; nature is the necessary raw material
for human action, the field of imposition of
choice and the corollary of mind. Nature has to
serve as the model for human action; nature has
been a potent ground for moral discourse. To be
unnatural, or act unnaturally, has not been
considered healthy, moral, legal or, in general, a
good idea. (Donna Haraway: Modest Wit
ness@Second_Millenium 1997).
Donna Haraway is well known has a
feminist (some would say postfeminist)
scholar. Having been in the companionship
of her work as introducer and translator
of some of her texts into French, I
would like to come back to her empirical
and theoretical propositions and try and
give a broader account of their originality
and fertility. Focusing on her ref lexions
on natural sciences and on »life«, I will
extend my analysis beyond feminists studies,
comment on some of her main intellectual
»promises« and on the embeddedness
of her epistemic and political perspectives
that differentiate her worlds, for
instance, from Bruno Latour’s cosmopolitics.
Some key-notions will be used as
tools to (re)consider the topicality of her
thought.
Source: Feministische Studien
DOI: 10.1515/fs-2014-0109
Author: Delphine Gardey
Language: English
Subfield: Cultural Studies
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2293010318