'Loving the alien': a post-post-human manifesto Co-Editor of Subjectivity: Lecture given at ICA Miami, November, 2016 reproduced as part of the 10th Anniversary issue of the journal Subjectivity

摘要

Esposito points out, "for life to remain as such, it must submit itself to an alien force that, if not entirely hostile, at least inhibits its development" (Esposito 2013, p. 8) Aliens have not particularly found a hospitable milieu within the set of conditions of life that we call "The Earth". Popular culture has been rife with alien visitations, and conspiracy theories are abound with inexplicable phenomena, oddities, "strange stuff", puzzles and paradoxes, which gesture towards alternate realities and visitations by "things" not of this world. The trope of visitation presumes an entity not of this world, which encroaches and even disrupts what might count as life, and particularly forms of life, which might challenge human sense making and grids of intelligibility. The alien exists at the nexus of different scales of matter, including the planetary, biological and the popular, disclosing a cosmos that exceeds current systems of thought as well as displacing the human from its apparent centre.