Posthumanism and the limits of multispecies relationality

In M. Hayler & C. Daigle (Eds.), Posthumanism in Practice (2023)

The contemporary shift towards an ecological mode of doing science is shaping the way human-microbial relationalities are being practiced – the proliferation of practices aimed at the deliberate entanglement of human and micro-organisms for therapeutic ends can be linked for example, to the emergence of a post-Pasteurian notion of health. Yet, what responses to the COVID-19 pandemic suggests however, is that such post-Pasteurian microbiopolitics also run parallel to a more traditional immuno-microbiopolitics which figures co-existence with microbial others in terms of defence/aggression. Situated at the point where these two different microbiopolitics meet, this chapter builds on posthumanist thinking and probes the limits of current debates in social theory regarding multispecies relationality by asking: what might it mean to embrace an ‘unloved’ and ‘unloving’ pathogenic other, if doing so also simultaneously threatens one’s very own existence?

This chapter considers recent developments in microbiology and immunology alongside social science and humanities research associated with the turn to the ‘more-than-human’, so as to elaborate on this move away from an exclusively immunological mode of practicing microbial relations. It illustrates how, for all the differences that obtain between a post-Pasteurian and immunological mode of practicing human-microbial relations, both remain resolutely normatively anthropocentric since the perduance of the human organism is always privileged. Arguing that this anthropocentrism is rooted in a conceptualisation of finitude that is tied too exclusively to human death, this chapter concludes with some possible theoretical directions in which posthumanism might be reoriented towards so to better account for our lived experience that multispecies worldmaking is never only benign.