One of Donna Haraway's most controversial and troubling pleas is that we human beings should ‘make kin, not babies’. Here we have to encounter the rage which roars beneath her humour and tickling goads, what she describes to Sarah Franklin as her ‘bone-deep fury, and horror, and fear, and not being happy’ with the way that human life is reproduced on this planet.
Against accusations of Malthusianism and its attendant racism Haraway, with her inimitable urgency, affirms he commitment to all life, including human life. If we really care about the lives and prospects of humanity, this requires us to radically re-examine our infinitely interwoven symbiosis with other life on the planet.
Only through cultivating emotional bonds with non-human lives as strong as those we have with others, can we begin to articulate the kind of dialectical practices we need to sustainably care not only for the biosphere, but for each other. The provocative figure of ‘Oddkin’opens up realms of understanding and acting in the Thick Present which are radically hybrid, and transindividual.