Abstract:
Lecture Delivered January 17th 2007. Personification of non-humans is best understood as a strategy of dealing with the
uncertainty about the identity of the other, which moves the attribution scheme from
causation to double contingency and opens the space for presupposing the others’ selfreferentiality.
But there is no compelling reason to restrict the attribution of action
exclusively to humans and to social systems, as Luhmann argues. Personifying other
non-humans is a social reality today and a political necessity for the future. The
admission of actors does not take place, as Latour suggests, into one and only one
collective. Rather, the properties of new actors differ extremely according to the
multiplicity of different sites of the political ecology.
