Entanglements:
Journal of Posthumanities
E-ISSN: 3107-488X

(Article) ‐ Volume 2, Issue 1 (Open Issue)
Embodied Affirmation: Rosi Braidotti's Neo-Materialist Ethics Between Biology and Phenomenology
Authored By — Carolina Santini

Abstract

Rosi Braidotti's neo-materialist ethics is grounded in a principle of embodied affirmation that challenges the modern opposition between the human and the non-human, redefining subjectivity as a relational and dynamic process within a vital continuum. Central to this framework is the concept of zoe, understood not as a property of the subject but as an impersonal and immanent force traversing human, animal, and technological forms of life. Ethics thus emerges as a material practice unfolding across bodies, environments, and technologies. Through a genealogical engagement with Foucault, Agamben, Haraway, Varela, and Guattari, this article places Braidotti's thought in dialogue with Lynn Margulis's theory of symbiogenesis and Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of embodiment. It argues that neo-materialist ethics can be situated within a robust empirical-ontological framework, countering interpretations that reduce it to poetic vitalism. The critique advanced by Francesco Paolo Adorno - who warns against the risk of collapsing subjectivity into mere biological life - serves as a critical test of the coherence of posthuman ethics is ontologically supported by both the biology of symbiosis and the phenomenology of flesh; and second, that responsibility and difference must be articulated through practices of care and situated knowledge that recognize the active materiality of the living world. The posthuman thus appears not as a negation of the human, but as an epistemic reconfiguration at the intersection of life sciences, phenomenology, and relational ethics.

Keywords

Posthumanism, Neo-materialism, Zoe, Embodiment, Symbiogenesis, Phenomenology, Ethics, Relational Ontology.

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