When Species Meet

"The corpse is not the body. Rather, the body is always in-the-making; it is always a vital entanglement of heterogeneous scales, times, and kinds of beings webbed into fleshly presence, always a becoming, always constituted in relating." [163]

"No matter how many trips are made to the East, in its soul Western ethics is riveted to rights discourses." [156]

"... a Web site by its nature resists reduction to single purposes and dominating tropes. Links lead many places; these paths are explored by users, within the webs that designers spin but rapidly lose control over. The Internet is hardly infinitely open, but its degrees of semiotic freedom are many." [145]

"Human genetic disease is the moral, technoscientific, ideological, and financial center of the medical genetic universe. Typological thinking reigns almost unchecked in this universe, and nuanced views of the developmental biology, behavioral ecology, and genes as nodes in dynamic and multivectorial fields of vital interactions are only some of the crash victims o high-octane medical genetic fuels and gene-jockey racing careers." [143]

"... the capacity to respond, and to be responsible, should not be expected to take on symmetrical shapes and textures for all the parties. Response cannot emerge, within relationships of self-similarity." [71]

"My premise is that touch ramifies and shapes accountability. Accountability, caring for, being affected, and entering into responsibility are not ethical abstractions; these mundane, prosaic things are the result of having truck with each other. Touch does not make one small; it peppers its partners with attachment sites for world making. Touch, regard, looking back, becoming with -- all these make us responsible in unpredictable ways for which worlds take shape. In touch and regards, partners willy nilly are in the miscegenous mud that infuses our bodies with all that brought that contact into being. Touch and regard have consequences." [36]

"In my view, Margulis and Sagan's symobiogeneiss is not really compatible with their theory of autopoiesis, and the alternative is not an additive mechanistic theory but a going even more deeply into differentiation. A nice touch is that Gilbert and his students literally work on turtle embryogeny, studying the inductions and cell migrations that result in the turtle's plastron on its belly surface. Layers of turtling, indeed." [33]

"I am instructed by developmental biologist Scott Gilbert's critique of autopoiesis for its emphasis on self-building and self-maintaining systems, closed except for nourishing flows of matter and energy. Gilbert stresses that nothing makes itself in the biological world, but rather reciprocal induction within and between always-in-process critters ramifies through space and time on both large and small scales in cascades of inter- and intra-action. In embryology, Gilbert calls this 'interspecies epigenesis.' Gilbert writes: 'I think that the ideas that Lynn [Margulis] and I have are very similar; it's just that ashe was focusing on adults and I want to extend the concept (as I think the science allows it to be fully extended) to embryos. I believe that the embryonic co-construction of the physical bodies has many more imp0lications because it means that we were 'never' individuals." [32]

"Freud is our great theorist of panics of the Western psyche, and because of Derrida's commitment to track down 'the whole anthropomorphic reinstitution of the superiority of the human order over the animal order, of the law over the living,' he is my guide to Freud's approach on this question." [11]

When Species Meet

Donna Haraway

La conscienza di Zeno

"Tullio had resumed talking about his illness, which was also his chief hobby. He had studied the anatomy of the leg and the foot. Laughing, he told me that when one walks at a rapid pace, the time in which a step is taken does not exceed a half-second, and that in that half-second no fewer than fifty-four muscles are engaged. I reacted with a start, and my thoughts immediately rushed to my legs, to seek this monstrous machinery. I believe I found it. Naturally I didn't identify the fifty-four moving parts, but rather an enormous complication went to pieces the moment I intruded my attention upon it. I limped, leaving that café, and I went on limping for several days. For me, walking had become hard labor, also slightly painful. That jungle of cogs now seemed to lack oil, and in moving, they damaged one another reciprocally. A few days afterwards, I was assailed by a more serious illness, of which I will speak, that diminished the first. But even today, as I write about it, if someone watches me when I move, the fifty-four muscles become self-conscious and I risk falling." [105]

"What's definitive is always calm, because it is detached from time." [97]

"I pursued many women in my life, and many of them also allowed themselves to be overtaken. In my dreams I captured them all. Naturally I don't beautify them by changing their features, but I act like a friend of mine, a very refined painter who, when he portrays beautiful women, thinks intensely also of some other beautiful thing, for example of a piece of lovely porcelain. A dangerous dream, because it can endow the dreamed-of woman with new power and, when seen again in the light of reality, they retain something of the fruits and flowers and porcelain with which they were clad." [81]

"Without being an orator, I suffered from the disease of words. Words for me had to be an event in themselves and therefore could not be imprisoned in any other event." [76]

"The most intense life is narrated, in synthesis, by the most rudimentary sound, that of the sea-wave, which, once formed, changes at every instant until it dies!" [61]

"In the mind of a young man from a middle-class family, the concept of human life is associated with that of a career, and in early youth the career is that of Napoleon I." [61]

"The doctor is a power when he is at a sick man's bedside." [51]

"He looked around as if he sought outside himself whatever he was unable to grasp within." [41]

"The sick animal will not allow himself to be observed at any orifice through which disease or weakness can be perceived." [39]

"My yearning for health had driven me to study the human body. He, on the contrary, had been able to dispel from his memory any thought of that frightful machine. For him the heart did not beat and there was no need to recall valves and veins and metabolism, to explain how his organism lived." [34]

"Now that I am growing old and turning into a kind of patriarch, I also feel that a preached immorality is more to be punished than an immoral action. You arrive at murder through love or through hate; you propagandize murder only through wickedness." [34]

"I spoke sincerely, as in Confession: a woman never appeals to me as a whole, but rather ... in pieces! In all women I loved feet, if well shod: in many others, a slender neck but also a thick one, and the bosom, if not too heavy. I went on listing female anatomical parts, but the doctor interrupted me. "These parts add up to a whole woman."" [16]

La conscienza di Zeno

Italo Svevo