On Fragility: Indeterminacy, Sympoiesis, and Proximity to Death

Fragility is inherent in rigidity, as even the most rigid structures are always fragile—yet fragility transcends conceptual rigidity. It embraces an irreducible ontological excess, challenging dominant discourses with its bold closeness to nothingness.

“The strong one kills, the fragile one produces.”

Michel Serres, Atlas

 

“There are no fixtures in nature. The universe is fluid and volatile. Permanence is but a word of degrees.

Our globe seen by God is a transparent law, not a mass of facts.

The law dissolves the fact and holds it fluid.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Circles”

 

“Wonder and grief together have their ground in matter and material-corporeal perception.

Through the senses, I perceive both the wonderous beauty of the Reef and its fragility.”

Anne Elvey, Reading With Earth”

 

This essay explores “fragility” as a central concept in Michel Serres’s work and key feminist new materialist perspectives on human and nonhuman agency. The concept of fragility encourages us to engage with notions of potentiality, indeterminacy, fluidity, and vulnerability while recognizing the co-constitution and mutual entanglement of human and nonhuman agents. It resonates powerfully with ethico-political perspectives in the context of the Anthropocene. A prominent theme in both Serres’s work and feminist new materialist thought is the critique of humanity’s ecocidal-parasitic tendencies and the recognition of fragilities, alongside a strong emphasis on the interconnectedness of human and nonhuman agents. Their delicate connections are always on the verge of transformation and reconfiguration, forming part of an ongoing onto-epistemological process of co-creation –what Haraway describes as a “making-with.” This is, by nature, a fragile process—open to both discord and harmony, continually reshaped by past and future practices and narratives.

In this co-agential existence and interconnected web of life, Serres suggests that humans, as parasites, live within and alongside flora and fauna, parasitizing each other while coexisting with the parasites that make up their environment –humans also live within the “black box”, as the collective or society in the form of an animal (Leviathan): “We are certainly within something bestial … Our host? I don’t know. But I do know that we are within.”[1] Serres suggests that we are deeply embedded within something vast and bestial, though we may not fully understand our host. The host is what we create and what creates us.

Our “nature cultures” (Haraway) are comprised of the inseparable blend of nature (as the stage) and history/culture (as the play). There is no exit from this twofold existence; our stories and actions take place entirely within these intertwined realms, with no absolute external position. Reinforcing the idea that there is no direct, unproblematic separation between the natural and the cultural, Karen Barad writes that “There are only ‘acts of nature.’” Similarly, Vicki Kirby’s revision of Derrida’s “There is no outside of text” to “There is no outside of nature” does not privilege nature but acknowledges that “there is no outside, no remainder that is not already involved and evolving as text.”[2] Being eternally within, we are responsible for our actions and connections; and this highlights the dimension of our accountability as ethical modalities. In this context, being accountable entails acknowledging how and through which acts we leave “marks on bodies.”[3] This entails a deliberate recognition or adoption of a fragile subject position, or more precisely, a conscious openness to the material realities of both human and more-than-human life, as well as to the consequences of our choices and actions.

 

The Fragile Being

Serres affirms the fragile in the face of everything solid, rigid, archaic, and frozen.[4] Fragility is the readiness to change or disappear. Life and thought are marked by fragility, as they “live in closest proximity to nothingness.”[5] Humanity, “the mother of all weakness,”[6] is fragile. The fragile being is weak, frail, and exposed. Yet, it is potent and productive, it can mix, confuse, and evolve: “Any evolution can only be born of fragility,” writes Serres.[7] This potentiality is a persistent memory that flows with time rather than resisting it.

The fragile being is strong precisely because it is ready to cease existing as such, in that form, in that sense, in that moment: It is closeness to be otherwise, always on the edge of becoming something else. Whether it is human, animal, or plant, the fragile being is a “memory-thing”[8] carrying the essence of transformation. It bears traces and marks of histories of entanglements. It is a form shifter, an implication of a certain past and a certain future. It represents newness, like that of infancy and growth—an immanence unfolding within nature, which is inherently fragile and vulnerable, “ready to fade away with the first breath of wind. Ready to vanish, to return to nothingness. Nature is born, is going to be born, gets ready to be born, like a fragile infant.”[9] Fragility is also a striking feature of Serres’s philosophical practice which encompasses elements of frailty, sensitivity, and fluidity. When Latour asks whether he is seeking “a synthesis of fragility,” Serres responds,

What I seek to form, to compose, to promote –I can’t quite find the right word– is a syrrhèse, a confluence not a system, a mobile confluence of fluxes … An assembly of relations … Once again, the flames’ dance. The living body dances like that, and all life. Weakness and fragility mark the spot of their most precious secret. I seek to assist the birth of an infant.[10]

This can be described as “a construction at the limits of fragility”[11] –a gentle philosophy of connecting, confusing, mixing, bending that recognizes spaces of material relations and “spaces of non-law, where nature can get through.”[12] It views limits and boundaries as fluid, indistinct, and open.

Fragility is inherent in rigidity, as even the most rigid structures are always fragile—yet fragility transcends conceptual rigidity. It embraces an irreducible ontological excess, challenging dominant discourses with its bold closeness to nothingness.

 

Fragile States of Subject and Object

Serres, in Natural Contract, acknowledges the fragility of human agency and mastery, proposing an anti-reductionist treatment of nature, which “behaves as a subject.”[13] The social contract theory, brutally transitioning from nature to culture, led to the world’s disappearance while “self-important men are left with their history and their reason.”[14] Nature encompasses all conditions of human nature, providing shelter and food, but it reacts and takes them away when we abuse them; and  behaving as a subject, it “speaks to us in terms of forces, bonds, and interactions.”[15] Following Vicki Kirby, we can describe this “Subject Nature” as a “literate, numerate and social” nature within which “the exceptional status and identity of the human is one of quantum dis/location.”[16] This view of Subject Nature highlights the mutual implication and entanglement of humans and nonhumans and helps to problematize what Sloterdijk calls “the old ecology of stage and play”[17] –the view of nature as an absolute, mute, passive supplier of resources, which belongs to the Cartesian/modernist anthropocentric imaginary. Sloterdijk associates fragility with historicity, which, for civilizations, means mortality.[18] In the Anthropocene, nature as the old stage or background of human action has shed its traditional role as the backdrop for human activity, revealing its fragility and demanding recognition of its limits.[19] Serres’s idea of a Natural Contract recognizes this fragility, appearing as what we humans owe to nature, a legal subjectivity, a ground for reciprocity and symbiosis: “a gift that could allow nonhuman lives to flourish by simply being allowed to be without subjugation,”[20] as Patricia MacCormack explains.

Serres’s problematization of subject-object positions reveals the abrasiveness of the discursive culture of Anthropos that repeats practices of human mastery and sameness: “the parasite takes all and gives nothing; the host gives all and takes nothing. Rights of mastery and property come down to parasitism.”[21] The view of human agency as “an umbilical, non-metaphorical yardstick of all other claims to agency,”[22]  maintained the violent dichotomy of active subject-passive object. This is the discourse of the Selfsame which is a “history of an identity,” of “phallocentrism and propriation.”[23]

Identity, however, is not static; it is fluid, evolving, queer and multifaceted. For Karen Barad, identity is not an isolated concept but a phenomenal matter, inherently multiple and constantly shifting within itself –it is a process of “diffraction / différance / differing / deferring / differentiating,” where an atom’s identity is always subject to reworkings, shaped by both past and future interactions.[24] Michel Serres shares a similar view. As David Webb explains, Serres sees material order as the formation of a code where atoms do not follow predetermined laws but rather form their own codes as they combine.[25] This perspective highlights the relational and dynamic nature of identity, viewing it as an ongoing process of differentiation.

The ambiguity of subject-object positions exposes the fragility of the boundaries that shape identity and divide agencies. As such, beyond the context of the one-directional, parasitic relationship between subject and object, human agency can be viewed as just one form of agency that involves “receiving, storing, processing and emitting information.”[26] The isomorphic participation of both humans and nonhumans in these processes highlights that agency is not exclusive to humans.

 

Fragility and Indeterminacy

The substitution and interchangeability of subject-object positions demonstrate the operation of indeterminacy. Exploring indeterminacy through Barad’s agential realist account can be productive. In agential realism, indeterminacy marks the basic ontological mode. Phenomena are “ontologically primitive relations” and “the ontological inseparability / entanglement of intra-acting ‘agencies.’”[27] Unlike a Cartesian cut (subject and object), an intra-action (rather than an “interaction” which assumes pre-given relata) forms an agential cut and “enacts a resolution within the phenomenon of the inherent ontological (and semantic) indeterminacy.”[28] Agential separability takes place as “the local condition of exteriority-within-phenomena[29] –thus, “differentiating is not a relation of radical exteriority, but of agential separability, of exteriority-within.”[30] With the agential realist understanding of agency, Barad challenges the “classical ontological condition of exteriority between observer and observed.”[31] This classical ontological condition, which is replaced by agential separability, can be viewed as the old onto-epistemological mode of what Serres calls “the old agency of the ‘I’” which, encountering the multiple voices of the universe, shatters like a “fragile vase,” with its explosion leading to the formation of “an exterior with any interior”:

The universal flood of noise –sounds, music, and discourse mixed together, presto e fortissimo, erasing the silence– destroys the old agency of the “I,” the way a thin and fragile vase would explode by dint of vibrations, to the profit of transparency thrown towards the perpetual present, forming an exterior with any interior, weaving relations without reserving any substance for itself, sparkling multiplicities without any nucleus. Formerly a dense seed or dark bit of gravel, single and hard, the self becomes multiple, criss-crossed, mosaic, and shimmering.[32]

All forms of agency participate and intra-act within the material-discursive continuum, the spacetimemattering. In the inseparable, co-constitutive relationship of space, time, and matter—emerging through ongoing intra-actions—agency is understood as a process of “doing” or “being,” reflecting the continuous reconfigurations of the world.[33] This onto-epistemological perspective challenges the traditional subject-object binary. As Jane Bennett suggests, entities are neither strictly subject nor object but rather a “mode” of what Spinoza referred to as “Deus sive Natura” (God or Nature).[34] Bennett views the agency as collaborative and distributed: no single actant operates in isolation. She emphasizes that agency changes when nonhuman entities are recognized not as mere social constructs but as actors in their own right and when humans are understood not as autonomous beings but as vital materialities.[35] The agency is dynamic, relational, and process-driven, composed of delicate entanglements that require creative exploration. (As Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman note, we must develop ways to grasp the agency, significance, and transformative power of the world.[36]) A non-hierarchical view of agency calls for moving beyond reductive thinking that privileges human agency, instead engaging with responsible material-discursive practices that reflect a commitment to understanding how the boundaries and divisions we create hold meaning –a commitment “to understand how different cuts matter.”[37] This view of agency aligns with Rosi Braidotti’s notion of ethico-political subjectivity which she focuses on in her critical posthumanist framework. According to Braidotti, agency is not the sole privilege of Anthropos, and the knowing subject is not just Man but a complex assemblage that transcends the boundaries between self and other: “subjects are embodied and embedded, relational and affective collaborative entities, activated by relational ethics.”[38] This perspective, where agents intra-act through fluid assemblages, suggests a fluid subject position. As Iris Van Der Tuin points out, such a position challenges the dominant discourses of malestream society and identity-based feminisms.[39]

The fluidity of subject-object positions does not imply ambiguous ethical positions, but rather, indeterminacy acquires a founding ethical gesture pertaining to material reality. As Barad writes, “The existence of indeterminacies does not mean that there are no facts, no histories, no bleeding –on the contrary, indeterminacies are constitutive of the very materiality of being.”[40] In this context, indeterminacy can be seen as the ethico-onto-epistemological characteristic of fragile agency, perpetually open to reconfigurations and transformations, operating within fluid and shifting boundaries.

It could be argued that the absence of fixed boundaries suggests a “negative” space of indeterminacy, perceived as emptiness or ambiguity, which can be understood through Serres’s parasitical paradigm:

It might be dangerous not to decide who is the host and who is the guest, who gives and who receives, who is the parasite and who is the table d’hôte, who has the gift and who has the loss, and where hostility begins within hospitality. Who hasn’t trembled with fear in a shady hotel? Shady, obscure, badly lit.[41]

It is important to note that Barad’s account on indeterminacy highlights the ethical implications of boundary-making practices that allocate status, position, or identity. This approach steers clear of the shady, obscure, and fear-inducing aspects of negative indeterminacy described by Serres.

 

Fragile Sympoiesis

Agency is a matter of “making–with”[42] the earth of Cthulucene. Harawayian sympoiesis accommodates entanglements, complexities, and multiplicities. “Nothing makes itself. Nothing is really autopoietic or self–organizing … earthlings are never alone … Sympoiesis is a word proper to complex, dynamic, responsive, situated, historical systems. It is a word for worlding-with, in company.”[43] As Anne Elvey writes, forest systems, fungi, trees, and animals engage in material entanglements as co-agents, beyond species hierarchy, with an act of sympoiesis, where creatures co-create one another and their environment.[44]

Serresian agency can be described as sympoietic, a soft and dynamic web of entanglements. The “chain of life,”[45] the dance of agents, human and nonhuman, is fragile: a “soft chain, easily cut, fragments easily replaced, a chain almost always broken.”[46] The agential chain is potent and productive within the intricate web of mattering. Understanding agency as a relational and processual making-with leads to the onto-epistemological decentralization of the human agent. Serres calls to “forget the word environment … It assumes that we humans are at the center of a system of nature. This idea recalls a bygone era when the Earth… reflected our narcissism, the humanism that makes of us the exact midpoint or excellent culmination of all things.”[47] Decentralization of the human agent does not mean its dismissal or elimination. This engagement rather draws attention to how ethico-onto-epistemological boundaries are produced and maintained. In this regard, Barad’s focus on a starting point for an analysis of agency is insightful, as its focus is “the practices of differentiating,”[48] –the cuts that divide human and nonhuman.

For Serres, the view of “active subject–passive object” ironically passivizes humans, turning them into slaves in their passion for dominance –thus, we must aim towards a philosophy of nature that “restores the dignity of these memory-things, which we always forget.”[49] The dynamic relationality of agencies reveals the need for knowledge production that does not objectify or reduce, reminding that “the act of knowledge doesn’t link an active subject-pole to an other, a passive object, but rather both participate together in this act in which the games are shared.”[50] The act in which the games are shared is an agential making-with. The subject and object, material and semiotic, natural and social, are never separate.

In the context of the natural and the social, this relationality can be understood through Nancy Tuana’s concept of “viscous porosity.” Exploring how a natural phenomenon occurs with the interactional web of human social structures and practices, Tuana describes Hurricane Katrina as a phenomenon that demonstrates the viscous porosity between the social and the natural.

Material agency in its heterogeneous forms, including irreducibly diverse forms of distinctively human agency, interact in complex ways. Agency in all these instances emerges out of such interactions; it is not antecedent to them. Our epistemic practices must thus be attuned to this manifold agency and emergent interplay, which means we cannot be epistemically responsible and divide the humanities from the sciences or the study of culture from the study of nature.[51]

Tuana emphasizes how natural and social, human and more-than-human are entangled within complex material-semiotic networks, arguing for “interactionism” as a metaphysics that recognizes and acknowledges entangled agencies, while also highlighting the need for making distinctions for distributive justice.

 

Fragility and Material Vulnerability

 Like Barad, who echoes Levinasian ethics in their practice of ethico-onto-epistemology, Anne Elvey—also drawing on Levinasian philosophy through an ecological feminist materialist hermeneutics—emphasizes the material vulnerability that “shares the character of the ‘face’ that calls.”[52] We witness the shared vulnerability of humans and more-than-human on the “animals left as roadkill, mountains leveled for coal, forests razed for paper products and bodies subject to nuclear fallout”[53], and this witnessing entails “compassionate action as an ethical response.”[54] An act of compassion involves “cross-species and material agencies at work … its fleshy solidarities and resistances.”[55] Formed by senses and the body, compassion implies the body as ground: Elvey refers to the etymological links (in Hebrew and koine Greek) between compassion, maternal, and the corporeal.[56] This emphasis on the materiality of compassion opens space for recognizing human and nonhuman fragilities and for gentle hermeneutics. Via accepting fragilities of all agents, subjects acknowledge and accept their own fragilities. This acceptance is an act of gentleness – “a higher degree of compassion,”[57] as Anne Dufourmantelle puts it, a power of “secret life-giving transformation linked to what the ancients called ‘potentiality’ [puissance]”[58] and “an intelligence, one that carries life, that saves and enhances it.”[59] Only with gentleness is there the possibility for life to grow and transform. This generative, life-giving gentleness as potentiality is similar to Serres’s conception of fragility as a force that makes evolution possible.

In material ethics, as Alaimo and Hekman explain, the emphasis is on ethical practices rather than ethical principles. These practices involve an “openness to the needs, the significance, and the liveliness of the more-than-human world.”[60] Ethical actions arise from material realities, taking place within the relationality of material existence and recognizing the shared impact of co-agency. As human subjects, only by recognizing our fragility and willfully occupying a fragile subject position can we engage in a form of knowing and ethical practice that sees the limitations, boundaries, and constraints that shape our co-agential relationships. This can allow us to confront the inhuman within ourselves and move forward with compassion toward all beings.

The most vital aspect of existence is the fragile. It is the delicate tissue that Serres celebrates: “Here is the living: tissues, young and aged, bent, fused together.”[61] The tissue is “hesitated between fluid and solid,”[62] an intermediate material, fragile and supple, “pliable, tearable, stretchable … topological.”[63] Tissue is fluid and solid, thick and thin, opaque and transparent, participating in multiple states and modes simultaneously. It is connective as placenta which is described by Braidotti as “a state of pacifist cooperation and co-creation between organisms, in a specific relational frame that facilitates their co-existence, interaction and growth.”[64] Placenta politics emphasizes our co-existence and shared materiality. There is a moment of pacifist encounter implied by the materiality of the placenta. It is a space and state of compassion, facilitating co-subjectivity that traverses intersubjectivity. According to Elvey, compassion isn’t just about a direct connection between two individuals, like an injured animal and me in a moment; instead, compassion arises from and reinforces the interconnectedness of all life, emphasizing our shared ethical responsibility as part of the larger fabric of the world.[65] The placenta emerges from the very materiality of ethical reality that posits the human as an agential part of material-discursive becoming as we participate in the differentiating of the world. Ethical practices take place within; they are co-agential, a sympoiesis, and the making-with of agents. As Barad puts it,

Ethics cannot be about responding to the other as if the other is the radical outside to the self. Ethics is not a geometrical calculation; “others” are never very far from “us”; “they” and “we” are co-constituted and entangled through the very cuts “we” help to enact. Intra-actions cut “things” together and apart. Cuts are not enacted from the outside, nor are they ever enacted once and for all.[66]

For Barad, objectivity is “about being accountable and responsible to what is real.”[67] The “real,” in this sense, amounts to what Elvey defines as “the reality of a material givenness that encompasses not only bodies … but also the relatedness that is an ethical reality.”[68] According to Elvey, an ecological feminism shaped around this reality provides the ground for practices of compassion understood as shared vulnerability that allows us “to feel in our bodies the structures of oppression that rely on the dead bodies of animals, including humans, structures for which trauma is constitutive rather than accidental.”[69]

The stories of our agential cuts capture the cumulative narratives shaped by choices and actions. Agential cuts form the boundaries and meanings and require being accountable for the apparatuses that determine them. Haraway’s multispecies storytelling embodies and conveys “complex histories that are as full of dying as living, as full of endings, even genocides, as beginnings.”[70]

As we produce, participate in, or suffer from eco-political devastation, traumatic events, violent discourses, and the political spectacle of false antagonisms, human existence can feel like the shady, obscure, badly lit hotel room Serres describes. Yet, perhaps escape may be possible through a willingness and openness that allow us to perceive openings—perhaps the “spaces of non-law” Serres speaks of, where nature can seep through. These openings, as well as our willingness, are marked by the kind of porosity Serres associates with audacity –a defining quality of the frail.

To inhabit fragility, or a fragile position, is to forge subversive connections that challenge the status quo—provoking, unsettling, and complicating, all while confronting the risk of death. Yet, for the fragile, the ever-looming shadow of death is a familiar companion, making it most alive precisely because it is always ready to fade away, disappear, and return to nothingness.

The most alive is the fragile.

 

 

 

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[1] Michel Serres, The Parasite, trans. Lawrence R. Schehr (University of Minnesota, 2007), 10.

[2] Vicki Kirby, “Matter out of Place: ‘New Materialism’ in Review,” What if Culture was Nature all Along?, ed. Vicki Kirby (Edinburgh University Press, 2017), p. ix.

[3] Karen Barad, “Nature’s Queer Performativity”, Kvinder, Køn & Forskning, (1-2), 2012, 47, https://doi.org/10.7146/kkf.v0i1-2.28067.

[4] Michel Serres and Bruno Latour, Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time – Michel Serres with Bruno Latour, trans. Roxanne Lapidus (The University of Michigan Press, 1995), 122.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Michel Serres, The Natural Contract, trans. Elizabeth MacArthur and William Paulson (University of Michigan Press, 1998), 70.

[8] Michel Serres, The Incandescent, trans. Randolph Burks (Bloomsbury Academic, 2018), 33.

[9] Serres and Latour, Conversations, 122.

[10] Ibid.

[11] Ibid., 120.

[12] Serres, Natural Contract, 70.

[13] Ibid., 36.

[14] Ibid., 35.

[15] Ibid., 39.

[16] Kirby, “Matter out of Place”, ix.

[17] Sloterdijk, Infinite Mobilization, Towards a Critique of Political Kinetics, trans. Sandra Berjan (Polity Press, 2020), 143.

[18] Peter Sloterdijk, After God, trans. Ian Alexander Moore (Polity Press, 2020), 2.

[19] Sloterdijk, Infinite Mobilization, 143.

[20] Patricia MacCormack, “The Grace of Extinction,” Michel Serres and The Crises of The Contemporary, ed. Rick Dolphijn (Bloomsbury Academic, 2020), 166.

[21] Serres, Natural Contract, 38.

[22] Christopher Watkin, Michel Serres, Figures of Thought (Edinburgh University Press, 2020), 311.

[23] Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clément, The Newly Born Woman, trans. Betsy Wing (University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 79.

[24] Barad, “Nature’s Queer Performativity,” 32.

[25] David Webb, “The Virtue of Sensibility,” Michel Serres and The Crises of the Contemporary, edited by Rick Dolphijn (Bloomsbury Academic, 2020), 21.

[26] Watkin, Figures of Thought, 391.

[27] Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, 139.

[28] Ibid., 140.

[29] Barad, “Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter,” Signs, Vol. 28, No. 3, Gender and Science: New Issues (Spring 2003): 801-831, https://doi.org/10.1086/345321815, 815.

[30] Barad, “Nature’s Queer Performativity,” 815.

[31] Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, 140.

[32] Michel Serres, Hominescence, trans. Randolph Burks (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019), 266.

[33] Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, 178.

[34] Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Duke University Press, 2010), 22.

[35] Ibid., 21.

[36] Stacey Alaimo and Susan Hekman, “Introduction: Emerging Models of Materiality in Feminist Theory,” Material Feminisms, ed. Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman (Indiana University Press, 2008), 5.

[37] Barad, “Nature’s Queer Performativity,” 46.

[38] Rosi Braidotti, Posthuman Knowledge (Polity Press, 2019), chap 2, Epub, 98.

[39] Iris van der Tuin, Generational Feminism, New Materialist Introduction to a Generative Approach (Lexington Books, 2015), 7.

[40] Karen Barad, “Diffracting Diffraction: Cutting Together-Apart,” July 2014, Parallax Vol. 20, No. 3, https://doi.org/10.1080/13534645.2014.927623

[41] Michel Serres, The Parasite, trans. Lawrence R. Schehr (University of Minnesota, 2007), 15-6.

[42] Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble – Making Kin in the Chthulucene, (Duke University Press, 2016), 58.

[43] Ibid.

[44] Anne Elvey, Reading With Earth, Contributions of the New Materialism to an Ecological Feminist Hermeneutics (Bloomsbury, 2022), 151.

[45] Michel Serres, Genesis, trans. Genevieve James and James Nielson (University of Michigan Press, 1995), 72.

[46] Ibid.

[47] Serres, The Natural Contract, 33.

[48] Barad, “Nature’s Queer Peformativity,” 31.

[49] Serres, The Incandescent, 33.

[50] Ibid.

[51] Nancy Tuana, “Viscous Porosity: Witnessing Katrina,” Material Feminisms, eds. Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman (Indiana University Press, 2008), 196.

[52] Elvey, Reading With Earth, 141.

[53] Ibid.

[54] Ibid.

[55] Ibid., 153.

[56] Ibid., 147.

[57] Anne Dufourmantelle, Power of Gentleness, Meditations on the Risk of Living, trans. Katherine Payne and Vincent Sallé (New York: Fordham University Press, 2018), 13.

[58] Dufourmantelle, Power of Gentleness, 6.

[59] Ibid., 14.

[60] Alaimo and Hekman, “Introduction: Emerging Models of Materiality in Feminist Theory,” 8.

[61] Michel Serres, Atlas, unpublished manuscript, trans. Randolph Burks and Anthony Uhlmann, 2021, 22, https://www.academia.edu/44930768/Atlas_by_Michel_Serres_Translated_by_Randolph_Burks_and_Anthony_Uhlmann

[62] Ibid., 21.

[63] Ibid.

[64] Rosi Braidotti, “Placenta Politics,” Posthuman Glossary, eds. Rosi Braidotti and Maria Hlavajova (Bloomsbury Academic, 2018), 316.

[65] Elvey, Reading with Earth, 147.

[66] Barad, Meeting The Universe Halfway, 178-9.

[67] Ibid., 340.

[68] Elvey, Reading with Earth, 149.

[69] Ibid.

[70] Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, 10.

 

 

 

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