Xenological Subjectivity: Rosi Braidotti and Object-Oriented Ontology

1 Introduction

For almost three decades now, the Continental philosopher and socio-political theoretician Rosi Braidotti has been one of the most lucid and stimulating voices in postmodern feminism. In the wake of figures such as Gilles Deleuze or Luce Irigaray, the 1990s witnessed the flowering of her philosophical agenda, an adventurous roadmap propelled by various interconnected monographs ranging from accurate accounts of ethics and emancipation to pioneering elaborations on subjectivity. Over the years and through her notion of posthumanism, Braidotti has increasingly framed these concerns in light of a generalized ecology, also known as ecosophy: a relational model merging technological, geological, and biological dimensions while “crossing transversally the multiple layers of the subject, from interiority to exteriority and everything in between,”^[1] thus configuring a model of subjectivity^[2] in which the subject is fully exposed. By including the convergence of the Fourth Industrial Revolution and the Sixth Extinction in these analyses, Braidotti scrutinizes the notion of the Anthropocene in light of what constitutes the basic research question of this essay: What forms of subjectivity are fuelled by a post-anthropocentric approach? How do we conceive the elements of creativity, imagination, subversion, desire and aspirations of the self, and its relation to others and to the world, in light of our entanglement with human and non-human beings? In brief: How do we engage with human subjectivity in the age of the Anthropocene?

Drawing on an argument developed through a close reading of Braidotti’s posthuman subjectivity, the central contribution of this essay consists in approaching these questions by proposing a model of subjectivity defined as xenological. In pursuit of this purpose, the text initially argues that, within Braidotti’s model, the transversal multiplicity of the self and its non-hierarchical relationality with the others and the world are worth preserving, since they powerfully account for crucial socio-political aspects of the Anthropocene. However, by grounding them in a neo-Spinozistic monism, Braidotti obscures the accountability of finitude, agency, and change, watering down the notion of otherness and compromising the overall theory’s consistency. Since, according to this argument, these obstacles derive from the neo-Spinozistic monism propelling Braidotti’s posthuman subjectivity, this essay proposes to combine the latter with an ontological framework that emphasizes discrete entities. Relying on its non-onto-taxonomical pluralism, Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO) is instrumentalized for this purpose. By capitalizing on this confederation and deviating from a generalized ecology, the essay proposes a xenological form of subjectivity invoking the Greek concept of xeno – including both xenos (guest-friend) and xenia (pacts of hospitality) – as a narrative imaginary in order to accommodate a form of subjectivity whose exposure is no longer absolute, but selective and intermittent. A subjectivity that is thus inexhaustible by any overarching ecology, accounting for the notions of self, others, and world in consonance with the concepts that are maintained from Braidotti’s model, while approaching its aforementioned limitations through OOO’s non-onto-taxonomical pluralism.

Following this introduction, Section 2 analyses the relevance of Braidotti’s posthuman subjectivity in relation to the Anthropocene, discussing her model’s difficulties in accounting for finitude, agency, and change. In light of these criticisms, Section 3 briefly presents the non-onto-taxonomical pluralism of OOO while arguing for its compatibility with decisive aspects of Braidotti’s posthuman subjectivity. Given this foundation, Section 4 presents the notion of xeno and proposes a xenological form of subjectivity, arguing that it constitutes an adequate alternative to Braidotti’s project. By way of conclusion, Section 5 briefly signals the relevance that this form of subjectivity might have regarding the architectural notion of home within the Anthropocene.

2 Differing togetherness

Defined by Braidotti as “the historical moment when the Human has become a geological force capable of affecting all life on this planet,”^[3] the term “Anthropocene” signals a process of incorporation: it claims that issues such as global warming or the widening of the ozone gap are internal to the modern narrative of human progress rather than external actors threatening humanity from the outside. Thus, within a context amalgamating beings conventionally indexed to different worlds, the anthropos is no longer the delirium of a species who believes itself alien to its own environment; it has become an ingredient in it. Braidotti accounts for these transformations through her notion of posthumanism. Defined as a genealogical and navigational tool “to help us rethink the basic unit of reference for the human in the bio-genetic age known as Anthropocene,”^[4] Braidotti’s posthumanism updates Nietzsche, Foucault, and Deleuze’s critiques of Humanism and anthropocentrism by connecting them to technological developments, climate change, and cognitive capitalism. It establishes a multi-directional nature–culture continuum underpinned by a self-organizing structure of living matter, approaching the socio-political condition of the Anthropocene as a process of differing togetherness.^[5]

Differing: in order to “mobilize the insights and methods of posthumanism (as critique of Eurocentric privilege) and post-anthropocentrism (as critique of species privilege),”^[6] the heterogeneity of Braidotti’s project is twofold: it overcomes the socio-cultural homogenization of patriarchal power and racism by giving voice to minority discourses such as postcolonial and feminism, and it accounts for the irreducibility of zoe/geo/techno otherness by considering them as beings in their own right.

Togetherness: in order to acknowledge the age of computational networks and synthetic biology and the age of climate change and erosion of liberties,^[7] Braidotti conceives the planet as a transversal network made of operative kinship, emotional closeness, and “response-ability.” This intense relationality includes human beings and animals, but also landscapes, microbes, technological artefacts, and even the universe as a whole.

Circumventing the scholarship that dismisses the need for a theory of subjectivity^[8] or that reinscribes it into the humanistic tradition,^[9] Braidotti demands new forms of subjectivity^[10] in order to “prioritize issues linked to social justice, ethical accountability, sustainability and trans-species and intergenerational solidarity,”^[11] establishing thus a “site for political and ethical accountability, for collective imaginaries and shared aspirations.”^[12] By “posthumanizing” subjectivity, Braidotti accounts for a trans-individual, trans-species, trans-generational, trans-ethnic, and trans-gender context in which subjectivity is not constructed under that unitary subject of humanism, but under an ecological framework. The term ecology is not invoked in the sense of Arne Naess’s “deep ecology” or James Lovelock’s “Gaia hypothesis,” since in its holistic and sacred organicism Braidotti identifies a full-scale humanization of the environment based on three elements:^[13] its socio-constructivist dualism, its technophobia, and its emergence from the impending environmental catastrophe. Instead, Braidotti instrumentalizes Guattari’s ecosophy and the transversal lines running through its three ecologies, since they identify unfamiliar yet decisive interconnections such as those “among the greenhouse effect, the status of women, racism and xenophobia and frantic consumerism.”^[14] In connection to Guattari, Erich Hörl’s relationism^[15] is also invoked, since “the zoe/geo/techno dimensions, however distinct, are also part of a more general ecology, which is a multi-layered dynamic system encompassing environmental, social and psychic elements.”^[16] Braidotti’s posthuman subject becomes thus entirely exposed: nothing remains opaque and withdrawn from its relations. Instead, it is propelled by trans-corporeal occupations, in which bodies extend into places and places deeply affect bodies, constituting a subjectivity that is “always already penetrated by substances and forces that can never be properly accounted for.”^[17] Braidotti deploys this subjectivity through three interdependent levels:^[18] the self, the others, and the world.

The self: Braidotti’s self is neither an identitarian autonomous essence nor an anonymous plurality, but a transversal multiplicity, an embodied and moveable assemblage entangled with a common life-space that is never mastered nor possessed, but crossed and inhabited with a community of others. This scattered self is “glued” by his/her interactions with others and by the powers of remembrance.^[19]

The others: rather than equating selfness with a consistent consciousness and otherness with its specular counterpart, posthuman subjectivity “rests on an enlarged sense of inter-connection between self and others, including the non-human others.”^[20] This non-hierarchical relationality includes all sorts of anthropomorphic^[21] and zoe/geo/techno others.

The world: Braidotti’s subject is entirely exposed to the world through a profound relationality: becoming posthuman demands redefining one’s sense of attachment and connection to others in light of a common world, constituted as a single shared territory, regardless of its multiple dimensions.

The transversal multiplicity of the self and the non-hierarchical relationality connecting it to its others and to the world regardless of culture–nature distinctions configures a subjectivity capable of accounting for the intersecting crises-opportunities of the Anthropocene. Climate refugees, animal genetic engineering, clandestine and institutional bio-piracy, algorithmic gender bias, global warming, automation-spurred job loss, and AI deep fakes present extreme degrees of mixity and multi-scalarity, obsoleting human-centred models of subjectivity.^[22] They demand instead a transversal, composite, and locative subjectivity configured “within an eco-philosophy of multiple belongings […] based on a strong sense of collectivity, relationality and hence community building.”^[23]

However, the art of combining identity and difference transcends Braidotti’s alternative between modern “dualisms” and neo-vitalist “multiple becomings,” since not every distinction is necessarily a dualism; distinction, here, means the idea that “two (or more) entities, whatever their similarities/forms of overlap may be, are not the same in some epistemically relevant respect.”^[24] There is certainly more pluralism than dualist oppositions, but this does not eliminate the need to differentiate. And, paradoxically, in its attempt to avoid dualisms through a non-essentialistic self and through a radically immanent relationality with the others and the world, Braidotti’s subject becomes a fully exposed entity that might risk dissolving into a single relational oikos what she attempts to celebrate: the vast range of human and non-human singularities that are “other” to the European human originated in the Renaissance. Even if entities are close-knit and rarely act or change in isolation, it is possible and often useful to look at entities or persons separately.^[25] Besides accounting for the ontological validity of any form of otherness, a crucial reason for a “discrete” approach, in which the subject is not entirely exposed, is to account for political dissent: the capacity to express dissatisfaction with the established socio-political model. Although in her feminist, anti-racist, and postcolonial trajectory Braidotti is certainly a restless dissident, one wonders how dissent can occur under her radical immanence: “An immanent, posthuman project assumes that all matter or substance is one and immanent to itself. This means that the posthuman subject asserts the material totality of and interconnection with all living things.”^[26]

Although she signals the need for a differentiation “on qualitative grounds”^[27] based on the fact that “we-are-(all)-in-this-together-but-we-are-not-one-and-the-same,” Braidotti defines this “we” as “the result of a praxis, a collective engagement to produce different assemblages.”^[28] Yet, if the self results from a non-essential multiplicity and the others and the world are immanent to it, how can a qualitative difference occur? How can Braidotti’s radical immanence account for what she attempts to reinforce, that is “a radical other, albeit a significant other”?^[29]

This essay argues that these difficulties emerge from the instrumentalization of a neo-Spinozistic monism, in which the notion of potentia fuels Braidotti’s subject by ontologically grounding its conception of the self, the others, and the world. Assuming Spinoza’s differentiation between potestas and potentia, in recent years it has become common to read Spinoza’s entire thinking as being centred on the notion of power. While potestas needs a referent to dominate or to be dominated by, potentia invokes a relationship to the world through harmonic variations. Consequently, Spinoza’s potentia does not necessarily refer to relations between entities where one has power over the other; rather, it defines beings as such: to know what something is, is to know its potentia, what its body can do.^[30]

However, Spinoza’s potentia is connected to potentia dei, where the substance (Deus sive Natura) operates via affections: modal expressions modifying individual power to be and to act. Power as potentia is a ubiquitous medium of constitution whose relationality exceeds any individuality by being heterogeneously distributed across reality without sedimenting into any stable centre. This conception of power propels the immanent and non-essentialist characteristics of Braidotti’s subjectivity, fuelling a model in which desire is read as freedom, as potentia, as the expression of all we are capable of becoming: desire “is no longer predicated on the negative principles of Lack and Law, but on relational affirmation and plenitude.”^[31] Updated by French poststructuralism, Spinozist philosophy appears to Braidotti as an “active concept of monism […] defining matter as vital and self-organizing”;^[32] in Braidotti’s hands, Spinoza’s monism unfolds a radical immanence aligning with the Anthropocene’s nature–culture continuum, establishing “a direct connection between monism, the unity of all living matter and post-anthropocentrism as a general frame of reference for contemporary subjectivity.”^[33]

Despite the attraction that this vital and self-organized relationality holds for worldviews stressing the interdependence between nature and culture, distinctions still play a crucial role: if they are blurred, we lose the possibility of examining the relation between the two terms, since one will inevitably subsume the other. Braidotti’s indexing of the self, the others, and the world to one ontological big “plateau” risks not doing socio-political justice to any of its human on non-human entities. By blurring their singular potentia under a secularized potentia dei, Braidotti obscures three crucial notions: finitude, agency, and change. These difficulties, whose origin lies in Spinoza’s treatment of “modes,” reveal various inconsistencies flooding the trajectory from an ontological monism to a posthuman subjectivity while diminishing its socio-political capacity for dissent.

3 An ontological discretization

Unicorns and tables, you, me, this thought. Yesterday’s dinner, the Andromeda Galaxy, protons. Mars and Popeye. Graham Harman’s OOO advocates for a kaleidoscopic constellation of entities irreducible to its parts or to its context: objects. Although the universe might be populated with an infinity of them, objects come in only two types: “the real object that withdraws from all experience, and the sensual object that exists only in experience.”^[60] This distinction does not designate two distinct groups of objects, but rather differentiates two modes of being: sensual and real. An object is a unified entity withdrawn from all access (real object) yet somehow manifest (sensual object). Withdrawn and manifest, at the same time. Withdrawn: objects retreat from all relations with other objects, enclosing themselves in a vacuum-sealed region precluding any attempt at knowledge. Manifest: despite their radical distancing, objects allude to their inscrutable reality by appearing in the experience of other objects. Objects play hide and seek.^[61]

Despite the various voices lamenting that OOO advocates for “a brutal eclipse of the subject,”^[62] OOO retains the human subject as a component in many real objects, and thus it is by no means nonsensical to rethink human subjectivity through ontologies that are “object-oriented.” In order to discretize Braidotti’s posthuman subject in a way that accounts for the transversal multiplicity of the self and its non-hierarchical relationality with the others and the world, this essay capitalizes on one of OOO’s main principles: its non-onto-taxonomical pluralism.

Since the limitations of Braidotti’s posthuman subjectivity stem from its ontological underpinning in a neo-Spinozistic monism, it seems reasonable to overcome the limitations that the latter inflicts on the former by instrumentalizing a pluralist ontology. OOO may be characterized in these terms to the extent that it recognizes an equal ontological autonomy for an infinite plurality of entities qua objects.^[63] Despite holding their own intimate reality,^[64] objects interact by being grafted one within the other in the form of compounds. Nothing else populates Harman’s pluriverse, only objects – individual entities that, whether natural or cultural, physical or ideal, material or semiotic, exist on the same ontological plane.

Since Braidotti’s project accounts for the non-anthropocentric subjectivity of the Anthropocene, its ontological discretization needs to be non-onto-taxonomical. The postulation of two fundamental ontological domains is the primary onto-taxonomical gesture: while the first domain “is earmarked exclusively for human beings […] and their products […], the other is reserved for everything else that is supposedly non human.”^[65] The various historical forms “have either postulated an a priori fissure separating humans from everything else [gap onto-taxonomy], or an a priori relational bond between the two [correlational onto-taxonomy].”^[66] Onto-taxonomy is the nemesis of OOO for at least three reasons.^[67] First, by positing a hierarchical twofold ontology, onto-taxonomy obscures the discussion of beings as such. Second, by associating one realm with the human being and the other with the rest of beings, onto-taxonomy is anthropocentric. Third, by reducing philosophical thought to a thought on the human, onto-taxonomy expels philosophy from thinking about object–object relations. The crucial factor here is objects’ withdrawnness, since it is the condition shared by all objects, independently of their nature, thus precluding a priori ontological distinctions. However, it is also crucial for OOO’s account of finitude, agency, and change.

As for finitude; in OOO, “everything is split up according to definite boundaries and cut-off points rather than along continuous gradients.”^[68] Since an object is autonomous from its context and from its pieces, it is necessarily demarcated from its environment. Despite the fact that any real object can vicariously relate to another real object through its sensual object, the former’s ontological withdrawal constitutes it as a “walled island.”^[69] In contrast with Spinoza’s modes, real objects’ exodus and exile from their environment imply objects’ constitution as finite individuals. This finitude is twofold: since objects are distinct, they are also countable. In the first case, objects’ finitude implies a number of attributes – real qualities – providing thisness, that is haecceity to each object: objects are specific. In the second case, objects’ finitude implies a multiplicity of entities in their own right whose individuality is irreducible to one overarching substance: objects are many.

As for agency, in OOO, each object “is a thing-in-itself, since it cannot be translated without energy loss into any sort of knowledge, practice, or causal relation.”^[70] Contrasting with the inexorable presence of Spinoza’s substance in its modes, an object cannot be reduced to its effects (overmining) or to its parts (undermining) by another object, since that would imply that real objects are no longer withdrawn. The inaccessibility of objects paves the way for a form of agency in which all objects are equally a source of determination, since their essence is not limited by any exterior being. However, the fact that in OOO essences are not directly knowable, and thus objects’ agency can never be totalized, does not imply the complete freedom of an object in the sense of the liberal tradition, since it is subjected to its own essence, whose reality is also veiled to itself.

As for change, in OOO, “change is intermittent and stability the norm”:^[71] not every relation is equally significant for the transformation of an object’s reality. Harman invokes Lynn Margulis’ serial endosymbiosis theory^[72] to differentiate variations from turning points, which “rarely result from introspective brooding in one’s private chambers,”^[73] but mostly occur through symbiosis with another object. Rather than the eternal character of Spinoza’s substance or the volatility of Deleuzian entities, by instrumentalizing Margulis’ symbiosis Harman invokes a relation “changing the reality of one of its relata, rather than merely resulting in discernible mutual impact.”^[74] The real object’s withdrawal is crucial: contrasting with Spinoza’s modes, the nonexhaustion of objects in their relations permits them to keep something in reserve, leaving room for the possibility of change.

The contrast between a continuous monism and a discrete pluralism thus has divergent ontological implications regarding finitude, agency, and change. This opposition is noted by both authors; while Harman lists 9 axioms^[75] tracing the differences between new materialism and his immaterialism, Braidotti affirms that by opposing vital materialist theories OOO seems to have “no comments on the mixture of panic and elation before the massive technological shifts, occurring with climate change and devastation.”^[76] Under this crossfire, it might seem an entelechy to search for decisive compatibilities between Braidotti’s subjectivity and OOO’s non-onto-taxonomical pluralism. However, this essay argues not only that a significant portion of the socio-political statements of Braidotti’s posthuman subjectivity are compatible with OOO, it also affirms that their confederation can propel a xenological subjectivity that, by distancing itself from the full relationality of the ecological model, might overcome the aforementioned difficulties. This implies ontologically disengaging the conception of the self as a transversal multiplicity, and its relationality to the “others” and the “world” as non-hierarchized by nature–culture distinctions, from Braidotti’s neo-Spinozistic monism.

In Posthuman Knowledge, Braidotti provides a non-exhaustive but synthetic fivefold summary of posthuman subjectivity; its concision makes it particularly adequate to measure the compatibility between OOO’s non-onto-taxonomical pluralism and her posthuman subject. Although Braidotti’s subjectivity certainly has more subtleties than the ones revealed by these five points, Braidotti’s conception of the “self” as a transversal multiplicity and of its relationality to the “others” and the “world” as non-hierarchized by nature–culture distinctions relates to these points entirely. Although the last three are eminently socio-political, the first are explicitly ontological:

“The first feature [of posthuman subjectivity] is a materialist process ontology based on immanence and becoming, defined as a creative praxis of actualization of the virtual. Secondly, posthuman subjectivity is structured by ontological relationality, which is the power to affect and be affected.”^[77]

Since these features affirm what this essay attempts at replacing, they need to be rephrased rather than endorsed:

The first feature is a pluralist and immaterialist ontology based on transcendences and turning points, defined as a creative praxis of production of compounds. Secondly, subjectivity is structured by ontological essentialism, which enables the former to avoid being entirely exhausted in the practices of affecting and being affected.

Two questions are now crucial: in what sense are Braidotti’s last three points worth retaining to conceive a model of subjectivity within the Anthropocene? And to what extent are these three points compatible with OOO’s non-onto-taxonomical pluralism? Let us address each of them now.

Thirdly, [posthuman subjectivity] involves a critical detachment from both Humanism and anthropocentrism, which respects the force of non-human elements. ^[78]

This twofold detachment is decisive in accounting for a transversal subjectivity that is non-hierarchized according to nature–culture distinctions. It endorses the criticism of the discriminatory aspects originated within Renaissance humanism, which have historically been voiced by the anthropomorphic others of “Man,” and it explodes a priori boundaries between Man and other species. Within the Anthropocene, the socio-political power of this twofold movement lies, for example in the possibility of accounting for feminist or postcolonial issues in connection to those of artificial intelligence (AI) or climate change. This is crucial in order to cover hybrid forms of human subjectivity associated with web activism, AI gender bias, or postcolonial ecocriticism.

In its non-onto-taxonomical vocation, OOO propels the transversality of this twofold socio-political endeavour. Harman’s non-onto-taxonomy dismisses both classical humanism and biological anthropocentrism, since OOO discards human relation to the world as holding any ontological privilege in relation to other beings. However, objects are not only liberated from a human privileged being, but from any privileged being: there is neither an individual entity at the centre as an Archimedean point of departure, such as a cogito or a transcendental subject, nor an underlying matrix-like entity such as the flesh or the il y a.^[79] This does not imply that Harman’s ontology ignores the human subject; it simply indicates that the human does not hold, in advance, any ontological priority over the rest of beings.

Fourthly, transversal subjectivities are composed in the mode of ecosophical assemblages that include non-human actors. ^[80]

This compositional approach to subjectivity accounts for the Anthropocene’s differing togetherness by integrating various beings through a composite model capable of assuming the zoe/geo/techno dimensions constituting human subjectivity in our age. This makes it possible to account, for example for the complex forms of human subjectivity associated with climate refugees, human cyborgs, AI-assisted humans, driverless cars, etc.

By conceiving “every entity [as] a compound,”^[81] OOO lines up with Braidotti’s composite subjectivity. Harman’s ontology unfolds this aggregative logic by creating a new object when a new relation occurs. However, this compositional model introduces a decisive nuance with regard to Braidotti’s project: the fact that an object contains various objects–components does not mean that the former can be reduced to the latter (undermining). The crucial concept here is that of strong emergence:^[82] a high-level phenomenon X is strongly emergent with respect to a low-level phenomenon Y if X arises from Y, “but truths concerning that phenomenon are not deducible […] from truths in the low-level domain.”^[83] Since emergence is thus a specific grouping of objects arranged in such a way that they form “a larger compound entity per se,”^[84] an object–compound necessarily differs from the sum of the objects–components conforming it. Consequently, its collective register constitutes a form of emergent individuality that, by exceeding and respecting that of its components, significantly differs from the individuality of the liberal tradition.

Last but not least, I want to stress the grounded, situated and perspectivist dimension [of posthuman subjectivity], which is enhanced by the ethical aspiration to compose a missing people, defined as a virtual entity. ^[85]

Braidotti’s posthuman subjectivity is “grounded, situated and perspectivist” because it is embedded and embodied, and thus limited: “our flesh is framed by the morphology of the human body, it is also always already sexed and hence differentiated.”^[86] Braidotti stresses the locative dimension of a subjectivity capable of accounting for the locus it is speaking from, thus conforming a powerful tool to elaborate a model of subjectivity within the Anthropocene; it fuels a politics of location, paying attention to subjects’ physical and socio-political consistency, rather than assuming those dimensions as irrelevant.

In the withdrawal of an object according to its characteristics and those of its interlocutor, OOO aligns with the locative dimension of Braidotti’s subjectivity. OOO’s example of the interaction between fire and cotton is revealing: the fire only relates to certain attributes of the cotton – inflammability – rather than with all of them or with the same ones as other beings do. Moreover, objects can be read as embodied in the sense that the “only place for two objects to make contact is the interior of the one object defined by the intentional relation as a whole.”^[87] Consequently, by no means can Harman’s objects be read as dis-embodied entities operating from nowhere, because their action is always located in a third object.

Despite the decisive ontological differences mediating between OOO’s non-onto-taxonomic pluralism and Braidotti’s posthuman subjectivity, the transversal, composite, and locative dimensions of the posthuman subject are compatible with OOO’s principles. Since these three elements underpin Braidotti’s conception of the “self” as a transversal multiplicity and its relationality to the “others” and the “world” as non-hierarchized by nature–culture distinctions, they can be conjured from the perspective of OOO and without reference to a neo-Spinozistic form of monism. Since, as we have seen, the latter obscures the accountability of finitude, agency, and change while muddying the notion of otherness and its capacity to dissent, the alliance of OOO’s non-onto-taxonomical pluralism and the posthuman subject might be valuable: it paves the way for an alternative model of subjectivity within the context of the Anthropocene, assuming the aforementioned posthumanist contributions to the self, the others, and the world, but whose subject’s exposure is no longer absolute, but intermittent and selective.

In light of OOO’s non-onto-taxonomical pluralism, this exercise of discretization sets the scene for an alternative model of subjectivity, associating Braidotti’s posthuman subject with a conceptual imagery that is no longer limited to compounds, hybridizations, or meshes. It also invokes conceptual figures such as alienation, exteriority, or remoteness – elements that are peripheral within Braidotti’s theoretical equipment yet crucial for conceiving an alternative subjectivity within the Anthropocene that can overcome posthumanism’s limitations. Within this context, the following section articulates a model of subjectivity in which this conceptual miscegenation is brought to light by invoking a type of interaction irreducible to an ecological framework: the pacts of hospitality that were established with foreigners in ancient Greece and referred to using the term xeno. As a sort of allegorical figure, and in the context of the Anthropocene, this imagery will narratively weave together the association between Braidotti’s posthumanism and OOO’s non-onto-taxonomical pluralism in order to propel a xenological model of subjectivity.

4 Xenological subjectivity

Frequently used in the formation of compound terms such as “xenogamia” or “xenophilia,” the term xeno generally refers to the “other,” the “strange,” the “alien.” It is precisely by invoking this generic form of otherness that fields of studies such as xenology – the scientific investigation of extraterrestrial life – or xenosophy – the wisdom emerging from the encounter with the other – take their names. However, these examples detach the notion of xeno from the semantic milieu in which it was originally coined in Ancient Greece: the xenia, the moral principle of giving gifts to foreign acquaintances, later absorbed by the ethical precept of hospitality.^[88]

Within this context, the term xenos gains a slight yet decisive nuance: rather than signalling a generic otherness, it embodies the latter within the figure of the guest-friend, the foreign traveller being hosted by an amphitryon.^[89]

In the Greek world, hospitality was certainly a moral endeavour, but it was also a legal practice, a contract, a pact linking host and guest under obligations regulating their permutability of roles. Among the numerous details characterizing these ritualized forms of hospitality, two of them, respectively, focusing on the xenos and the xenia, are particularly relevant when approaching the notion of subjectivity within the Anthropocene.

First, despite the care with which the host accommodates, nurtures, and protects the xenos and the courtesy with which the latter addresses the former, each one’s strangeness is by no means watered down within the new domestic context in which the xenos is lodged. A certain opacity is instead retained, since the intermittent and selective interaction established between them finds its driving motor in their mutual distinction. The singularities of both are thus not necessarily blurred under a process of assimilation, but they are nourished – and occasionally altered – as that which binds host and guest together-in-their-difference.

Second, although as a contract of hospitality the xenia is forged through two present individuals, its pacts are, above all, a genealogical entente: they concern various familial ramifications involving past, present, and future actors, being thus a collective endeavour granting equal importance both to presence and absence. However, this is not a case of the straightforward extension of a solitary right, of opening out to the family and subsequent generations a right initially granted to the individual.^[90] Rather, from the beginning, the xenia commits two house-holds, two lines of descent, two ethnic groups; it is a collective endeavour invoking both a synchronic and a diachronic “we,” a ritualized practice that in some epochs transcended the framework of a private contract, stabilizing in the more institutionalized form of a proxenia, the institution regulating the relations of hospitality between two cities, two urban subdivisions, or two cult associations.^[91]

Within the context of the Anthropocene, the concept of xeno – including both the xenos and the xenia – is conjured up as a narrative figure; like an explanatory myth of sorts, it helps us weave a model of subjectivity that, as occurs with the xenia, instrumentalizes present individuals while involving present and absent collectives, and as occurs with the xenos, its exposure is not absolute, but intermittent and selective. Despite stemming from the urges of our present, the invocation of this narrative figure is openly speculative, nurtured by various aesthetic dimensions and by no means limited by its historical weight, although certainly inspired and propelled by it. As an epistemological instrument, as a toolbox for thinking and making, the xeno has the virtue of complexifying the paralyzing disjunctive that seems to force us to choose between a single planetary continuum of gradients and a mere concatenation of folkloric locations. As an experimental figure, the xeno aims at configuring a programme, a framework; it lodges us within a stratum in which new emancipatory forms of subjectivity can be tested and evaluated by experimenting with the opportunities it offers and by playing with its potential lines of flight. By instrumentalizing the term xenos in relation to the Greek xenia, a xenological model invokes a form of “differing togetherness” that significantly diverges from the techno-ecology or general ecology associated with the Anthropocene. This is the case with Braidotti’s posthuman subject, whose full exposure responds to an ecological model capitalizing on the intense relationality of a general oikia, a common “house” in which zoo/techno/geo beings are exhaustively entangled, since “the universe is 100 percent relational.”^[92] The xenological model invoked through the Greek term xenia is relevant to the constitution of a model of subjectivity within the Anthropocene because it leaves much more room for individuals and their singularities than the ecological model; it capitalizes on transversal, permutable, and intermittent forms of hospitality in which the xenos is capable of performing what under an ecological thinking would be an impossible pirouette: the retention of individual strangeness despite its immersion within an alien context. An immersion whose consequences are uncertain, since this engagement can be allegorical or operative, fleeting or long-lasting, decisive or insignificant, involved or tangential, restrictive or expansive, shifting or stable. However, in contrast with a generalized ecology, these consequences are not necessarily symmetrical, reciprocal, or holistic, since there is no longer a common single “home,” a general oikia in which all participants are fully exposed. Instead, they engage in various forms of xenia composed of distinct individuals freed from any general ecology underlying them. The double ambiguity of the Greek word for “host” is here beautifully revealing: while its twofold meaning as host and guest^[93] conjures the permutability of role characteristic of the xenia, its proximity with the term “ghost” assumes that “the presence of absence was always key to xenia”:^[94] although the guest might depart, its ghost can eventually remain with the host through the symbollon, the gift signalling the moral tie established between them and leaving room for future encounters.

In the form of an unexpected outside, the xenos appears thus as the other within, the abrupt arrival of another meaning. However, in the age of the Anthropocene, its significance can no longer be limited to the folkloric human scene of a remote and exotic foreigner being candidly sheltered in the warmth of a welcoming home. Rather than a social contract, and although it could certainly include ethical customs, the xenia today would be closer to Michel Serres’ “natural contract.”^[95] The term “nature” is misleading here, however, since, in addition to conflating all non-human beings and their singularities under one generic concept, it assumes that culture and nature are the two only poles of reality. Conversely, within the Anthropocene the xenia propels dynamic and flickering constellations of organic and inorganic alliances, technological, biological, and geological pacts for a hospitable co-existence, in which the human subject is not necessarily always an ingredient; pacts aimed at being hospitable to zoe/geo/techno aggregates, pacts transcending the immediate experience of their participants; pacts eluding a grounding in or derivation from any general oikia; pacts nested at multiple scales of temporal and spatial coexistence; pacts establishing permutable complicities with the unfamiliar, the strange, and the figure of the unknown; pacts overcoming restrictive alliances with the neighbour, the alike, and the figure of the compatriot;^[96] pacts whose various dimensionalities are not ingrained within a single “big-world continuum”; pacts involving non-contiguous and even remote beings; pacts that can be decisive for their participants and unimaginably vast or remarkably minuscule in their spatio-temporal extent, but that by no means exhaust the singular strangeness of the xenos, whatever its form might be.

In the context of contemporaneous processes of subject-formation, the term xeno recently gained prominence as part of the title of Laboria Cuboniks’ text The Xenofeminist Manifesto.^[97] In its accelerationist vocation, xenofeminism reclaims the liberating potential of technology by pushing capitalism to its limits in order to speed up its collapse. While portraying itself as a universalist politics that is not of benefit to women exclusively, xenofeminism expresses its dissatisfaction with current feminism’s focus on identity and micro-communities, insisting instead on a politics of affinities aimed at a large-scale social change by instrumentalizing the concept of xenos as a form of alienation. However, while for Marx the term “alienation” refers to worker’s deployment as the means to another’s end, for xenofeminism it refers to “the perpetual state of estrangement ensuring the fluidity of potentially liberating interactions between technology and society.”^[98] Paradoxically, xenofeminists accept the view of alienation and technology proposed by Heideggerians, but they then simply invert it: precisely because technology can produce alienation rather than authenticity, it can eventually provide space for subversion. Although the correlation between estrangement and insurgent power is a crucial aspect of a xenological subjectivity, xenofeminism obscures the emancipatory potential of the anthropogenic subject by preserving the same dualism informing ecofeminism: the understanding of nature and technology as opposite dimensions. Through a dividing gesture that is reminiscent of what Harman critiques as onto-taxonomy, xenofeminism enlists only with nonhumans that are perceived as technological,^[99] ignoring a number of potential revolutionary allies such as geological forces or nonhuman animals.^[100]

This essay’s instrumentalization of the xenos and the xenia configures a xenological subjectivity that differs from the universal techno-anthropocentrism of xenofeminism, yet retains the subversive power that the latter concedes to alienation. Although it is often positioned as something to overcome – since in some circles it signals social anemia or dehumanization, a completely de-alienated world would bind us to familiar cognitive schemata in which the singularities of the unknown, the foreign, and the strange are rapidly simplified into naturalized categories of common sense. However, this essay’s instrumentalization of the xenos is neither reducible to simple otherness nor limited to human and technological forms of alienation. First, the notion of otherness is invoked here as an ingredient of the xenia and, second, its range covers a wider variety of beings: it certainly includes silicon-based, carbon-based, and chlorophyll-based actors, but also various forms of animality such as humans, fish, insects, bacteria, or mushrooms. This composite and non-hierarchical transversality is certainly shared with Braidotti’s posthumanism, but while the latter’s monism diminishes the xenos’s estrangement – since any form of alienation would interrupt Braidotti’s general ecology, OOO’s non-onto-taxonomical pluralism propels it, since objects’ ontography consists in veiling the real object while exposing its sensual objects.

Ontologically grounded in OOO’s non-onto-taxonomical pluralism, in dialogue with Braidotti’s project, and located within the Anthropocene, this essay proposes a xenological model of subjectivity based on a human subject that, despite its selective and intermittent exposure, is both participative and participated. Confederated with and composed of various zoo/techno/geo clusters, it is yet partly opaque to them, never fully revealed, never fully entangled, remaining in some measure entrenched within private chambers. This partial yet abyssal model of alienation fuels a form of desire that, in contrast with Braidotti’s ecological model, does not conceive desire as potentia,^[101] as a relational plenitude opposing the negative principles of Lack and Law. It is a desire grounded instead in a constitutive opacity borne out of the essential closure of the self and the other, an opacity nurturing a fantasy of syntonization rather than of epistemic revelation, a fantasy that is not fulfilled by the promise of a potential arrival, but by the immediate yet enigmatic presence of a foreigner whose strangeness is already here, installed at home, although selectively and intermittently exposed. Thus, a “fantasy [that is] a direct response to the withdrawal of objects or others”^[102] and propelled by an opacity holding an emancipatory dimension, a space for subversion that is hardly conceivable within the radical relationality of a generalized ecology.

Since this model of subjectivity is conducted in conversation with Braidotti’s project, her categorization of the posthuman subjectivity according to the self, the others, and the world is repeated here. Despite each level being individually addressed, these categories appear as different conjugations of the aforementioned tension between an abyssal yet emancipatory retreat and an operative yet limited exposure. Within this context, the self comes to light as a composite agency whose singularity emerges from a persevering oneness not fully accessible even by introspection; the other takes shape as an alluring form of estrangement capable of detotalizing the subject’s given condition while syntonizing with some of its rhythms, patterns, and behaviours; and the world is cancelled as an ecological entity on which all beings are lodged, pluralizing instead into bubbling collectives that are always limited and in progress.

5 Conclusion

By rearticulating key aspects of Braidotti’s posthuman subject through OOO’s non-onto-taxonomical pluralism, the xenological form of subjectivity presented here not only confirms OOO’s capacity to significantly engage with human subjectivity but also manifests the benefits that might emerge from establishing alliances between allegedly antithetical philosophical positions.

In its allusion to the notions of xenos and xenia, the instrumentalization of the term xeno narratively propels a form of subjectivity that is no longer ecological: the xenological subject does not conceive itself as inhabiting a permanent, uninterrupted, and immense house in which all beings are relationally entangled, but as being immersed in selective and intermittent pacts of hospitality involving human and non-human beings that are never entirely exposed.

By advocating for a promiscuous overlap of habitational patterns void of any general oikia, this scenario might lead us to reconsider the notion of home, the design of domestic spaces within an architectural environment. Constructed of literal and metaphorical walls, the home has conventionally made sense as an architectural apparatus through a foundational gesture; the erection of divisory boundaries between interior and exterior has become the instance of separating order and chaos, civitas and barbarie, safety and peril, culture and nature, humans and non-humans. However, if the notion of xenia is scaled up and expanded to all beings and its overlapping zoe/geo/techno regimes, the foundational role of the limit within an architectural domestic environment might need to be re-examined. Although the production of spaces within spaces characterizes the specificity of architectural practice^[124] and thus grants a pivotal position to the limit, when framing the habitation of the xenological subject, the limit’s role might not be reduced to that of being a mere divisory membrane; architectural and urban designers might instead invest the limit with other roles, such as that of holding fleshes together-in-its-difference or that of being constituted as a liminal space in itself.