Ecofeminism and New-Materialism—a Post-Dualist Approach of Zoē-Bios Binary Opposition

At the beginning of the 21st century, the concerns of human nature with regard to its future as a species, as well as to the future of non-human species, bring ever closer ecofeminist theories with the new materialist ontological claims, from the need to rethink our relationship with nature, animals or whit non-human intelligent matter, within a transversal and post-dualistic ontology. The acceleration of the climate crisis in this period of late-capitalism, characterized by the hegemony of the Anthropocene era, risks bringing us to the threshold of the sixth extinction, a consequence of the exploitation of natural resources, and not only, built on the politics of life as bios. Based on the Enlightenment’s legacy of thinking, that of progress through reason, together with the ontological grounding of western dualism—through the politics of the anthropos (as bios)—this paradigm creates a hierarchical dialectic of existence. An aspect that requires a revision, both theoretically and practically, of this traditional western thinking, by the necessity of embracing the vitality of matter, by a return to zoē—as a rhizomatic transversality and a vital force of Life. Thus, the general objective of this paper aims to call into question the zoē-bios dualism, which underlies the present Anthropocene crisis—an era which marks the supremacy and domination of human life/existence over non-human life/existence (animals, non-human others), and its consequences. Questions such as: why is a paradigm shift, from bios to zoē so necessary today; why embrace a zoē-centred way of thinking; and how can this post-anthropocentric shift prevent the imminence of the sixth extinction?—are considered here. This is why, in this point of ecological collapse, the hierarchical and structural paradigm of human-centred historicity—characterized by man’s exceptionalism (especially that of the white male), as a rational being inscribed in language [logos], which differs from zoē, seen as a “bare life,” through the political existence of the discursive life, as bios—require to be deconstructed, both in the ontological stability of the anthropos and in that of the speciesist attitude of man (through Gilles Deleuze’s, Giorgio Agamben’s or Rosi Braidotti’s philosophical theories). The theoretical objective focuses on the ecofeminist (Val Plumwood, Vandana Shiva) and new-materialist (Karen Barad, Rosi Braidotti, Jane Bennett) arguments/philosophies on the need to ‘return to matter’, as a connection between embodiment and the environment, alongside the dissolution of the hierarchical dualisms that dominate western thinking—nature (feminine)/culture (masculine)—to analyse how each affects the other (nature-culture), in a plane of immanence characterized by a non-essentialistic and rhizomatic relationship to the multiple others, human/non-human animals etc. Here, bios-centred late capitalism requires a paradigm shift—from the point of view of the exploitation and oppression of all that lives (zoē), an appearance that attracts the imminent planetary extinction, to that of a deleuzian ‘eco-philosophy of becoming’—by recognizing difference as a positive and rhizomatic element, and the decentring of life as bios, with the recognition of all life forces, elements and beings, as being embedded in the earth.