a hybrid circle held at West Den Haag and online on 27-06-21
Quantum physics finished what Copernicus started, conclusively thrusting humanity and human affairs out of the center of the universe. In the shadow of the Atom Bomb blasts, there was an anti-humanist turn in philosophy which sought to strip away the colonial and imperialist legacy of the Enlightenment. Starting in the 80s, feminists theorists, including Donna Haraway also challenged the patriarchal epistemologies at work within scientific practice and the prospects it offered. This tendency coalesced in ‘New Materialism’ in the 21st century, an ananthropocentric, de-patriarchized humanist project which encounters the social implication of radical challenges to our conventional epistemologies built on classical physics from the insights of quantum physics. Karen Barad neologized ‘natureculture’ as a way of examining the entanglements of human activity on the earth, acknowledging that that we need radically new ways of understanding the universe, but that these do not come without us in all our socio-historical context as human beings.
Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter, Karen Barad Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 2003, vol. 28, no. 3
CYBORG SALVATION HISTORY: Donna Haraway and the Future of Religion, Robert A. Campbell Source: Humboldt Journal of Social Relations , 2001, Vol. 26, No. 1/2 (2001), pp. 154-173