LE MANIFESTE CHTHULUCÈNE DE SANTA CRUZ -DONNA HARAWAY

The use of manifestos and neologisms, characteristic of the avant-gardes, is habitual in Donna Haraway’s distinctly unusual writing, which combines poststructuralist philosophy, cultural history of science, socialist feminism and cyberpunk literature. Unlike her previous manifestos, however, this one is presented separately from the central work Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, in a much briefer form and explicitly situated in a specific social and intellectual context.

Thus, from the city of Santa Cruz in California, where Haraway lives and teaches, the manifesto expounds the multiple tentacular connections of the Chthulucene, inspired by Stengers’s and Latour’s Gaia, with which it shares indifference to the destiny of humanity, by the space-time diffractions of Karen Barad’s quantic fields, by Vinciane Despret’s or Hannah Arendt’s attentive observation, by Anna Tsing’s feral biologies or by Lynn Margulis’s idea that relationships characterised by “the intimacy of strangers” constitute the driving force of evolution. The core of Haraway’s proposal is that life, in its diverse manifestations, never makes itself (autopoiesis) but is always made with others (sympoiesis) in the framework of dynamic processes in which molecules, cells, organisms, ecosystems or techno-natural assemblages intervene and in which concepts such as individual or autonomy lose validity.

Donna Haraway is a Distinguished American Professor Emerita in the History of Consciousness Department and Feminist Studies Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. A prominent scholar in the field of science and technology studies, her works have contributed to the study of both human-machine and human-animal relations and sparked debate in primatology, philosophy and developmental biology. She is the author of numerous books and essays such as « A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century » (1985), « Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective » (1988), Modest−Witness@Second−Millennium.FemaleMan−Meets−OncoMouse: Feminism and Technoscience (1997) or When Species Meet (2007). Haraway was awarded the J. D. Bernal Award from the Society for Social Studies of Science in 2000 and the Pilgrim Award from the Science Fiction Research Association in 2011 for her lifetime contributions to SF and fantasy scholarship.
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donna_Haraway