Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Exhausting the (Human) Problem

2024; Volume: 9; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.21476/pp.2024.91439

2947-5589

Annalaura Alifuoco,

Posthumanist Ethics and Activism

What is the problem? Is it the pressures of global conflict, forced displacement, mass extinction, oceanic acidification, economic devastation, viral pandemic, environmental dissolution, academic disillusion? These ubiquitous phenomena inform a persistent state of emergency that confounds, arouses and magnifies. Its relentlessness is amplified by an apparent inability of the “human-kind” to respond sensibly and constructively. What possible solutions reveal themselves in this season of the new impossible? Is it possible that all solutions are exhausted because we have exhausted the problem, or that problems have been exhausted because are ourselves exhausted? And if so, how do we re-think the way we live, survive, thrive even? And who is this ‘we’ anyway? The affective forms of exhaustion here become the key to rebut human (and humanist) solutionism: as a quality that composes life at the bare edge of survival; as an affective mode that calls for practices of existence beyond the human. Within this trajectory, I am compelled to explore the regions of both aesthetics and ethics with accents on contemporary philosophies. By considering the “things” that conspire around the figure of Belgian artist Berlinde de Bruyckere, this contribution imagines ways of creatively thinking and feeling with the (im)possibilities that form connections between philosophical, aesthetic, ethical, microbial and macropolitical. At these intra-sections, perhaps ‘we’ can also tune in to an exhaustive potential to resist prescribed solutions, to sustain the creative problems that animate us, and contribute ways to reorient our problematic existence.