More-than-Human: a reader

Edited by Andrés Jaque, Marina Otero Verzier and Lucia Pietroiusti
Associate Editor: Lisa Mazza
Published by Het Nieuwe Instituut, December 2020
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The More-than-Human reader brings together texts by writers across a wide array of disciplines that serve to reflect on the state of post-anthropocentric thinking today. Focusing on the ecologies and technologies of climate injustice and inequalities, as well as the destructive structures lurking within anthropocentrism, More-than-Human proposes complex entanglements, frictions, and reparative attention across species and beings. Thinking past the centrality of the human subject, the texts that compose this reader begin to imagine networks of ethics and responsibility emerging not from the ideologies of old, but from the messy and complex liveliness around us, and underfoot. 

Rather than attempting to be a comprehensive compendium on the topic (which would be virtually impossible), More-than-Human provides a cross-section of the breadth and vitality of a literary, scientific, and conceptual milieu where multiple strands of work intersect even as they are frequently regarded as belonging to separate disciplinary discourses.

The book includes a collection of thirty-four texts published between 1990 and 2020 and is "dis-organized" into five sections: Assemblages and Proliferations, Queering More-than-Human, Towards More-than-Human Justice, Technologies, With and Through the More-than-Human. The act of reprinting these texts allows readers to explore how anthropological, legal, philosophical, poetic, and scientific inquiries often share common concerns, motivations, and challenges, despite the critical, ontological, and methodological differences in the fields from which they have emerged.

While many of the intellectual traditions represented in this book have often been characterized as being intent on destabilizing anthropocentrism and dismantling human hegemony, the discourses they constitute exceed the limitations of those claims. The works included here do more than just question or critique the hegemony of humans over non-humans; they undermine the very possibility of thinking about humanity as autonomous and self-determined.

Ultimately, More-than-Human is a collaborative effort spanning disciplines and institutions. Over the last few years Het Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam, the twelfth edition of the nomadic Manifesta Biennale in Palermo initiated by Manifesta Foundation, the Office for Political Innovation in New York and Madrid, and the General Ecology project at the Serpentine Galleries in London have been developing research, public programmes, and exhibitions based on more-than-human perspectives. This book is the result of their determination to find ways to promote institutional cooperation and collective forms of knowledge production.