The Posthuman Condition and a Translational Ethics of Entanglement

Authors: Shabnam Naderi

Abstract:

Traditional understandings of ethics considered translators, translations, technologies and other agents as separate and prioritized human agents. In fact, ethics was equated with morality. This disengaged understanding of ethics is superseded by an ethics of relation/entanglement in the posthuman philosophy. According to this ethics of entanglement, human and nonhuman agents are in constant ‘intra-action’. The human is not separate from nature, from technology and from other nonhuman entities, and an ethics of translation in this regard cannot be separated from technology and ecology and get defined merely within the realm of human-human encounter. As such, a posthuman ethics offers opportunities for change and responds to the changing nature of reality, it is negotiable and reveals itself as a moment-by-moment practice (i.e. as temporally emergent and beyond determinacy and permanence). Far from the linguistic or cultural, or individual concerns, posthuman translational ethics discusses how the former rigid norms and laws are challenged in a process ontology which puts emphasis on activity and activation and considers ethics as surfacing in activity, not as a predefined set of rules and values. In this sense, traditional ethical principles like faithfulness, accuracy and representation are superseded by principles of privacy, sustainability, multiplicity and decentralization. The present conceptual study, drawing on Ferrando’s philosophical posthumanism (as a post-humanism, as a post-dualism and as a post-anthropocentrism), Deleuze-Guattarian philosophy of immanence and Barad’s physics-philosophy strives to destabilize traditional understandings of translation ethics and bring an ethics that has loose ends and revolves around multiplicity and decentralization into the picture.

Keywords: ethics of entanglement, post-anthropocentrism, post-dualism, post-humanism, translation