University TU Berlin
Eco-Technology Series
Within the context of the Anthropocene, the concept of xeno – including both the xenos and the xenia – is conjured up as a narrative figure; like an explanatory myth of sorts, it helps us weave a model of subjectivity that, as occurs with the xenia, instrumentalizes present individuals while involving present and absent collectives, and as occurs with the xenos, its exposure is not absolute, but intermittent and selective. Despite stemming from the urges of our present, the invocation of this narrative figure is openly speculative, nurtured by various aesthetic dimensions and by no means limited by its historical weight, although certainly inspired and propelled by it. As an epistemological instrument, as a toolbox for thinking and making, the xeno has the virtue of complexifying the paralyzing disjunctive that seems to force us to choose between a single planetary continuum of gradients and a mere concatenation of folkloric locations. As an experimental figure, the xeno aims at configuring a programme, a framework; it lodges us within a stratum in which new emancipatory forms of subjectivity can be tested and evaluated by experimenting with the opportunities it offers and by playing with its potential lines of flight. By instrumentalizing the term xenos in relation to the Greek xenia, a xenological model invokes a form of “differing togetherness” that significantly diverges from the techno-ecology or general ecology associated with the Anthropocene. This is the case with Braidotti’s posthuman subject, whose full exposure responds to an ecological model capitalizing on the intense relationality of a general oikia, a common “house” in which zoo/techno/geo beings are exhaustively entangled, since “the universe is 100 percent relational”. The xenological model invoked through the greek term xenia is relevant to the constitution of a model of subjectivity within the Anthropocene because it leaves much more room for individuals and their singularities than the ecological model; it capitalizes on transversal, permutable, and intermittent forms of hospitality in which the xenos is capable of performing what under an ecological thinking would be an impossible pirouette: the retention of individual strangeness despite its immersion within an alien context. An immersion whose consequences are uncertain, since this engagement can be allegorical or operative, fleeting or long-lasting, decisive or insignificant, involved or tangential, restrictive or expansive, shifting or stable. However, in contrast with a generalized ecology, these consequences are not necessarily symmetrical, reciprocal or holistic, since there is no longer a common single “home”, a general oikia in which all participants are fully exposed. Instead, they engage in various forms of xenia composed by distinct individuals freed from any general ecology underlying them. The double ambiguity of the Greek word for “host” is here beautifully revealing: while its twofold meaning as host and guest conjures the permutability of roles characteristic of the xenia, its proximity with the term “ghost” assumes that “the presence of absence was always key to xenia”: although the guest might depart, its ghost can eventually remain with the host through the symbollon, the gift signaling the moral tie established between them and leaving room for future encounters.
