Abstract This essay begins by noting that “the question of the animal” has been abandoned prematurely in the current theoretical landscape in favor of the Plant, the Stone, the Object, and a more general rush toward Materialism and Realism (in their various permutations). The latest iteration of this economy of knowledge production (and planned obsolescence) may be found in the ubiquitous discourse of “the Anthropocene.” While it is a large and diverse body of thought and writing, I will focus here on Bruno Latour’s influential rendition in Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime. I share Latour’s reservations about the concept of the Anthropocene, and I also share his desire for a more complex understanding of Gaia as an “outlaw” whose alterity pushes back against traditional concepts of nature as a totalized and homeostatic order. As I will show, however, Latour’s Actor Network Theory is far too blunt a theoretical instrument to account for the radical difference between qualitatively different orders of complexity and causation that obtain in biological vs. physical systems, which is crucial, of course, for understanding the role of the biological in the larger domain of Gaia and climate change. As I will show – drawing principally on the work of Stuart Kauffman and his proposition that the evolution of the biosphere is neither non-ergodic nor governed by entailing laws – the real “outlaw” (to use Latour’s language), when it comes to the evolution of the earth and its climate system, is the contingency and recursivity of autopoietic biological systems, which enable a form of downward and distributed causality, and a “decoupling” between micro- and macro-levels (to borrow Alicia Juarrero’s phrase), in which the alterity and negativity of temporality (hence my emphasis on “dynamic”) is irreducible and “creative.” We see this both ontogenetically and phylogenetically (as in the example of niche formation in ecosystems). In short, biology is not (only) physics – far from it. Why is this important? Because, after decades of hegemony by the neo-Darwinian reductionist paradigm, with its infatuation with the genome as the “book of life” and its subsequent engineering paradigm for biological existence, it is crucial to formulate an anti-reductionist, interdisciplinary framework for understanding the real complexity of life on the planet and its evolution. Here, however – as I argued in What is Posthumanism? – the issue isn’t just what you are thinking (the decentering of the human and humanism that Latour and I both share) but how you are thinking it. Here, Latour’s work has a desire, but no theory, for the alterity we both seek. At this crucial epistemic moment, we need, in short, an anti-reductionist anti-reductionism – not flat ontologies, but ever more “jagged” ones.

中文翻译：

---

“动物”可以教给“人类世”什么

摘要 本文首先指出，在当前的理论景观中，“动物问题”已被过早地抛弃，转而支持植物、石头、物体以及更普遍的唯物主义和现实主义（在它们的各种排列中） . 可以在无处不在的“人类世”话语中找到这种知识生产经济（和有计划的过时）的最新迭代。虽然它是一个庞大而多样的思想和写作体系，但我将在这里重点介绍布鲁诺·拉图尔在《面对盖亚：关于新气候制度的八场讲座》中的有影响力的演绎。我同意拉图尔对人类世概念的保留意见，我也同意他希望更复杂地将盖亚理解为“不法之徒”，他的他异性反抗传统的自然概念，即总体和稳态秩序。然而，正如我将要展示的，拉图尔的行动者网络理论是一个过于生硬的理论工具，无法解释在生物系统与物理系统中获得的质量不同的复杂性和因果关系之间的根本差异，当然，这对于理解至关重要生物在盖亚和气候变化的更大领域中的作用。正如我将要展示的——主要借鉴 Stuart Kauffman 的工作和他的命题，即生物圈的进化既不是非遍历性的，也不是受必然法则支配的——真正的“不法之徒”（用拉图尔的语言），当涉及到地球及其气候系统的进化，是自创生物系统的偶然性和递归性，它使一种形式的向下和分布的因果关系成为可能，以及微观和宏观层面之间的“脱钩”（借用 Alicia Juarrero 的短语），其中时间的他异性和消极性（因此我强调“动态”）是不可还原的和“创造性的”。我们在个体发育和系统发育上都看到了这一点（如生态系统中生态位形成的例子）。简而言之，生物学不仅仅是（仅）物理学——远非如此。为什么这很重要？因为，经过新达尔文还原论范式的数十年霸权，迷恋基因组作为“生命之书”及其随后的生物存在工程范式，制定一个反还原论的、跨学科的框架来理解是至关重要的。地球上生命的真正复杂性及其演变。这里，然而——正如我在什么是后人类主义？– 问题不只是你在想什么（拉图和我都分享的人性和人文主义的中心化），而是你是如何思考的。在这里，拉图尔的作品对我们都寻求的他异性有一种渴望，但没有理论。在这个关键的认识论时刻，简而言之，我们需要一种反还原论的反还原论——不是扁平的本体论，而是更加“锯齿状”的本体论。