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Entropology

Publication at Faculty of Arts |
2022

Abstract

The critique of human exceptionalism has necessarily led to a renewed questioning of the status of "life" systems more generally. Pursuing a radical deconstruction of those Cartesian dualisms that continue to infiltrate theoretical discourse - mind-body, human-animal, and technology-life - has not merely decentered western anthropology (or re-centered it within a global Anthropocene), but has altered the entire genealogy within which both humanism and its various posts- had previously been conceptualized.

The term "entropology," having begun as a marginal allusion by Claude Lévi-Strauss to a future anthropology of dissipation, has come to far exceed the trajectory laid down for it by structuralism. Indeed, we may go so far as to argue (Armand, Incendiary devices: discourses of the other.

Karolinum, Prague, 1993: 135ff; Armand, Technē. Charles University, Prague, 1997: 182ff) that any "entropology" must deconstruct the logic not only of the anthropos but also of (its) dissipation (or loss of plenitude) - requiring that entropy, too, be thought not as a simple "negation" of life (including its human artifacts) but as evolutionary technē, contiguous with the inaugurating and driving force of whatever can be brought under the rubric of "life" itself.