THEORETICAL / PHILOSOPHICAL PAPER

The Philosophical Roots of Donna Haraway’s CyborgImagery: Descartes and Heidegger Through Latour,Derrida, and Agamben

Gavin Rae

Published online: 10 September 2014

� Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2014

Abstract The purpose of this paper is to highlight some of the main philosophical

roots of Donna Haraway’s thinking, an issue she rarely discusses and which is

frequently ignored in the literature, but which will allow us to not only better

understand her thinking, but also locate it within the philosophical tradition. In

particular, it suggests that Haraway’s thinking emanates from a Cartesian and He-

ideggerian heritage whereby it, implicitly, emanates from Heidegger’s destruction

of metaphysical anthropocentrism to critique the divisions between human, animal,

and machine that Descartes insists upon in his Discourse on Method. While sug-

gesting that Haraway is, implicitly, influenced by Heidegger’s critique of the binary

logic constitutive of Descartes’ anthropocentrism, I first argue that her support for

Jacques Derrida’s, Bruno Latour’s, and Giorgio Agamben’s critical readings of

Heidegger lead her to jettison Heidegger’s suggestion that overcoming this logic

requires a re-questioning of the meaning of being to, instead, develop an immersed,

entwined ontology that aims to call into question the fundamental divisions

underpinning Cartesian-inspired anthropocentrism, before, second, concluding by

offering a Heideggerian critique of Haraway’s thinking.

Keywords Haraway � Heidegger � Anthropocentrism � Descartes � Latour � Derrida

The general orientation of Donna Haraway’s work aims to break-down the barriers

that have hitherto dominated thinking. Indeed, on one occasion, Haraway even

dismisses the privileging of binary oppositions as ‘the Greatest Story Ever Told’

(1997: 4), a clearly ironic claim. Haraway’s early work on cyborg imagery was

crucial to the development of posthumanist and feminist thinking insofar as it used

G. Rae (&)

Department of Philosophy, American University in Cairo, AUC Avenue, PO Box 74,

Cairo 11835, Egypt

e-mail: gavinrae@aucegypt.edu

123

Hum Stud (2014) 37:505–528

DOI 10.1007/s10746-014-9327-z

the imagery of the cyborg—part human, part machine—to show that the ‘old’

humanist division between ‘human’ and ‘machine’ was no longer valid (if indeed it

ever was), as a precursor to showing that binary oppositions in general need to be

overcome to recognize the entwined nature of beings. There was political intent

behind this, insofar as Haraway claims that binary oppositions entail an unjustified

privileging of one aspect which is used to justify the actual repression of various

non-privileged others, including animals, women, non-Westerners and so on.

Criticising binary logic means that we have to re-think the political privilegings that

arise from it. The aim of her thinking was, therefore, to focus on those entities that

have historically been downgraded in the binary opposition (machine, woman,

animal, etc.) to (1) show that this downgrading is unjustifiable, and (2) argue that the

‘monadic’ ontology, whereby two distinct entities face one another and define

themselves independently of the other, that underpins humanist thinking fails to

properly understand the ‘true’ relational nature of entities. The monadic ontology of

humanism needs to be replaced with a ‘relational’ ontology, whereby each entity

only is by virtue of and through its relationship to another. This does not entail the

simple reversal of the term privileged; the division inherent to the binary

oppositions needs to be overcome by re-thinking the terms of the relation and,

indeed, the nature of the relationship itself.

While Haraway’s thinking on cyborg imagery was hugely influential to the

development of posthumanist theory, which, in its early manifestations, examined

the ways the human is becoming machinised, and transhumanist theory, which aims

to use technology to enhance human capabilities (Bostrom 2005; Gray 2002; Clark

2003; Pepperell 2009), she latterly criticised both for (1) forgetting that her cyborg

imagery was an ‘ironic’ thinking, meaning it aimed not to undertake a ‘serious’

thinking of the ways in which the human and machine were intersecting, but was to

use this synthesis to call into question the binary oppositions upon which ‘humanist’

thinking is based, and (2) continuing to think from the perspective of the human

thereby unjustifiably privileging the human over the other. Haraway’s cyborg

imagery was not intended to analyse how the human and machine were synthesising

to create a ‘post/trans-human,’ but was intended to be used as a metaphor to show

how the binary oppositions of humanism were and had to be undone to overcome an

understanding that, due to its unjustifiable privilegings, perpetuates modes of actual

repression. This not only led to Haraway’s famous claim that ‘‘I am not a

posthumanist’’ (2008: 19), but also to a re-focusing of her work away from cyborg

imagery towards the human–animal relationship. The aim was to re-think the

human–animal relationship in a non-humanist way to show the intimate and

entwined relationship between human being and animal at both the ethical and

ontological levels. This is both complementary to her earlier work on cyborg

imagery and developmental of it, insofar as it (1) continues the work started with her

cyborg imagery by questioning the binary opposition between a privileged human

and downgraded animal inherent to humanist understandings of this relationship, to

(2) think the human–animal relationship in relational, rather than oppositional,

terms. Needless to say, Haraway’s work on animality has been highly influential in

the field of animal studies where it is primarily used to think ‘the human’ and

‘animal’ from their relationship as opposed to thinking it from two pre-determined

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terms that subsequently come into relation with one another. Her thinking is,

therefore, used to call into question the strict binary opposition between a privileged

human and downgraded animal that is thought to lie at the root of perceived wrongs

committed against animals.

While influential, however, Haraway’s thinking tends to significantly downplay

if not altogether ignore its philosophical heritage. Indeed, Haraway admits as much

when she writes that, while she reads philosophy, she feels more comfortable in

‘‘the materialities of instrumentation of organisms and laboratories’’ (2006a: 135f.).

While she aims to break-down barriers between disciplines, there is, by Haraway’s

own admission, a privileging of the social sciences in her thinking. Correcting this

requires that we engage with the philosophical history that informs Haraway’s

analyses. To this end, my suggestion will be that Haraway’s thinking is profoundly,

if implicitly, influenced by Heidegger’s critique of the binary oppositions

underpinning Cartesian anthropocentrism. Bringing this to light will highlight the

philosophical heritage that informs her analyses and in so doing contribute to her

attempted destruction of the philosophy/social science divide.

The secondary literature on Haraway’s thinking also usually fails to engage with

the philosophical history her thinking responds to and, when it does, tends to focus

on merely mentioning her relationship to thinkers that she herself mentions, such as

Bruno Latour, Jacques Derrida, and Giorgio Agamben, or links it to figures other

than Heidegger. For example, Margaret Toye (2012: 186–189) attempts to develop

an ethical dimension to Haraway’s work by appealing to Luce Irigaray’s notion of

sexual difference, which, as Toye recognises, brings Haraway’s work into

confrontation with Heidegger. Toye does not, however, provide a detailed

discussion of the Heidegger-Haraway relationship. In contrast, Casper Jensen and

Evan Selinger (2003) focus on Haraway’s Nietzschean heritage to show the

similarities and differences between the two. In contrast, I will suggest that the

dominant philosophical figure we need to focus on to understand Haraway’s

philosophical heritage is not Nietzsche, but Heidegger because (1) he offers the

most sustained and explicit critique of Descartes’ and the Cartesian heritage of

binary oppositions; a heritage that Haraway explicitly criticises, (2) he develops a

reading of Nietzsche that shows that Nietzsche remains an inherently metaphysical

thinker because his thinking continues to be based on metaphysical premises, such

as the valorization of willing and, more importantly for our purposes, binary

oppositions such as ‘master’ and ‘slave,’ meaning that to locate Haraway’s thought

in Nietzsche’s is, on this understanding, to perceive her thinking to be a mere

continuation of the Cartesian project she aims to overcome; a conclusion that seems

to downplay the radicality of Haraway’s position(s), and (3) those contemporary

thinkers whom she celebrates, such as Latour, Derrida, and Agamben, explicitly

develop their thinking from a number of critical readings of Heidegger’s work. My

suggestion is that through her engagements with Latour, Derrida, and Agamben,

who develop their positions from readings of Heidegger, Haraway is, implicitly,

engaging with and responding to the strict divisions between the human and non-

human that Rene Descartes affirms at the beginning of modern philosophy and

which Martin Heidegger attempts to overcome as part of his destruction of

metaphysics. It seems, therefore, that, through her own explicit comments on the

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nature of her endeavour and the figures that she admits influenced her theoretical

development, Heidegger looms large as an important, if often-ignored, figure in the

heritage that influenced the development of Haraway’s thinking. By exploring this

relationship we will better understand some of her philosophical ‘companions,’

what her thinking is and is not trying to do, and identify some suggestions regarding

how to develop from Haraway’s thinking.

At this stage, two objections have to be dealt with: first, that Haraway is

responding to categories of modern thought that cannot be reduced to a singular

point, such as Heidegger’s thinking. In other words, the reason Haraway only

mentions Heidegger in passing (Haraway 2008: 334n.16, 367–368n.28; 1997:

280n.1) is because his thinking is but one manifestation of a wider trend in the

intellectual ‘atmosphere’ that she writes from. In response, I’d like to suggest that,

in a sense, this is accurate; Haraway’s approval of aspects of Latour’s, Derrida’s,

and Agamben’s work, each of whom, in their own way, works from Heidegger to

challenge the binary logic of Descartes shows that Haraway was writing from a

cultural milieu that, like Heidegger, sought to undermine the binary logic inherent to

Descartes’ thinking. But I want to suggest that Latour’s, Derrida’s, and Agamben’s

work is itself located from an encounter with Heidegger’s critique of the binary

oppositions Descartes’ instantiated and that, far from being a manifestation of a

wider cultural milieu, Heidegger’s thinking, under the banner of the destruction of

metaphysics, plays a particular and foundational role in the formation of the cultural

milieu that Haraway writes from. However, even if my privileging of Heidegger is

rejected, I don’t think that any serious historian of twentieth-century philosophy

would fail to appreciate both the originality of Heidegger’s thinking or his impact

on subsequent philosophy, including, as I have shown elsewhere (Rae 2014), on

contemporary posthumanist theory, of which Haraway’s work is, rightly or wrongly,

taken to be a foundational source. As such, even if my privileging of Heidegger’s

destruction of the metaphysics is rejected, meaning that Heidegger cannot be

thought to be the source of Haraway’s thinking, but merely an instantiation of a

wider cultural happening, that traces of Heidegger’s thinking continue to influence

posthumanist theory and that the thinkers that Haraway explicitly mentions and

approves of developed their thinking from their reading of Heidegger, points to an

overlooked connection between Heidegger and Haraway.

Secondly, it may be objected that, even if this connection is established,

Haraway’s failure to mention Heidegger to any great degree means that any

connection is at best implicit and tenuous so we don’t actually gain anything from

exposing and/or dwelling on it. Indeed, it may be thought that anyone interested in

Haraway’s work would already know that she is responding to a range of issues that

have a long philosophical history so we don’t gain from making this explicit.

Assuming that we accept the tenuousness of the relationship, I will suggest that

exposing and discussing the connection between Heidegger’s thinking and

Haraway’s will be beneficial to not only understanding Heidegger’s intellectual

legacy, but also Haraway’s thinking. Simply showing that Haraway works on

problems that occupy Heidegger not only makes Heidegger Haraway’s companion

and helps place her in the philosophical tradition, but also offers the possibility of

exploring Heidegger’s thinking to enrich Haraway’s; it offers another way to read

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Haraway and in so doing remains consistent with her emphasis on multi-

dimensionality. Furthermore, as Heidegger reminds us, one of the biggest dangers

to thinking is to assume that the background heritage informing thought is either

clear or unimportant. To truly understand a position requires that we bring to light

those concealed, but nevertheless real, assumptions that inform our reflective

understanding. Making explicit her assumed, implicit Heideggerian influence will,

therefore, allow us to better understand the issues and problems that Haraway’s

thinking attends to.

To do so, the methodology used will work in two directions: first, I will work

towards Haraway’s thinking by briefly charting a history of Western post-Cartesian

philosophy that sees the binary oppositions that inform Descartes’ thinking on the

human-other relationship as the primordial co-ordinates against which Heidegger

and Haraway develop their analyses. This will show the cultural milieu within

which Haraway works. Second, I will work from Haraway’s thinking to show the

philosophical influences that she admits inform her thinking to show they

themselves are working from Heidegger’s thinking. This will not only show that

traces of Heidegger’s work inform Haraway’s, but will also claim that Heidegger’s

thinking continues to be the implicit heritage informing Haraway’s analyses. This

does not mean that Haraway is Heideggerian nor will it aim to reduce her thinking

to his. It means that Haraway is both close to Heidegger yet distinguished from him,

a distinguishing that I will claim is more problematic than might be initially

thought. To show this, the Heidegger-Haraway relationship will be explored using a

comparative approach that will show some of the ways in which Haraway’s

thinking is related to and distinguished from Heidegger’s and a critical approach

that will suggest that, despite these differences, her thinking is actually far closer to

Heidegger’s than she realizes. Indeed, I will suggest that this closeness reveals ways

in which Heidegger’s thinking can be used to develop Haraway’s own thinking.

In terms of structure, I start by briefly outlining Descartes’ position on the

relationship between the human, machine, and animal, before moving to Heidegger

who not only outlines the historical consequences of the logic underpinning

Descartes’ position, but, in so doing, offers a radical critique of this logic as part of

his wider destruction of metaphysical anthropocentrism. This leads to a brief outline

of Heidegger’s understanding and critique of metaphysical anthropocentrism which

reveals that, for him, metaphysical anthropocentrism is problematic because it: (1)

ignores the question of being; (2) privileges the human being over other entities; and

(3) entails a thinking that occurs through strict binary oppositions. While Heidegger

attempts to overcome anthropocentrism through a re-focusing and re-awakening of

thought to the question of being, not only does he himself admit its success will be

for others to decide, but others, most notably Jacques Derrida, Bruno Latour, and

Giorgio Agamben, suggest that there are serious problems with Heidegger’s attempt

to overcome anthropocentrism and the binary logic it depends upon. While I will

only be able to very briefly discuss these three thinkers, I use them as the mediation

between Haraway and Heidegger because, in a number of places, Haraway

approvingly cites their arguments against Heidegger. While not the place to engage

in an in-depth discussion of their critiques, these are important because (1) they

reveal that, while Heidegger’s diagnosis of the problem of anthropocentrism was

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highly influential, his ‘cure’ was not and led subsequent thinkers to search for an

alternative way out of anthropocentrism, and (2) as Heidegger reminds us, simply

rejecting a position to build another remains trapped within a logic of binary

opposition (for or against) that forgets that any countermovement ‘‘remains, as does

everything, ‘anti,’ held fast in the essence of that over against which it moves’’

(1977c: 61). As such, Derrida’s, Latour’s, and Agamben’s anti-Heideggerianism

actually remains bound to and so returns us to Heidegger, a position that, because

she approvingly cites these thinkers, also brings Haraway’s thinking back to

Heidegger’s.

Descartes’ Anthropocentrism

While Rene Descartes is most famous for his cogito argument in the Second

Meditation, wherein he takes off from the method of doubt established in the First

Meditation, to argue that, because he doubts and because doubting requires a being

that thinks which, in turn, requires a being that exists, thinking proves his own

existence and essence. By establishing the human being as a privileged, rational

entity, Descartes laid down the ontological premises, based on a mind/body dualism,

that shaped modern philosophy (Martin and Barresi 2006: 122). While Descartes’

cogito argument has a legitimate claim to being the locus of Haraway’s critique,

insofar as she calls into question its mind/body dualism and human privileging, I

will focus on his earlier Discourse on Method because it is in this text that Descartes

offers a brief discussion of the relationship between humans, animals, and machines

that not only accords with his later Meditations, but, so it seems to me, is far more

determinate for Haraway’s thinking. Space constraints will prevent a detailed

engagement with Descartes’ arguments, but a schematic synopsis will be sufficient

for our purposes.

Descartes maintains that there is a fundamental rupture between the human,

animal, and machine. While different in kind, Descartes does, however, think the

animal/machine from the perspective of humans, thereby revealing a privileging of

human being. In relation to the machine, Descartes starts by recognising that

humans can make machines. The problem is, however, that the machine made is

simplistic in comparison to the complexity of human being. In short, the machine is

objective and runs according to programmed ends, whereas the human is organic

and capable of spontaneous action, which not only gives the human being a different

flow than machines, but also means we easily spot machines that look like humans

(1998: 31). There are two reasons why this distinction is easily identifiable: (1)

while machines can utter words, they do not have the flexibility of language that

allows them to express themselves spontaneously; and (2) while machines are able

to do a number of tasks very well, Descartes claims these are pre-programmed and

rigid. When the machine tries to act in a way not pre-programmed into its

algorithms, it is unable to do so. The conclusion reached is that humans are

distinguished from machines through their organism, use of language, and

spontaneity.

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While animals in general are distinguished from machines by the former’s

organicism, Descartes claims they are distinguished from humans by their inability

to speak in a rational, informed manner. This is not because animals lack the organs

to enable to them to utter words. Descartes notes many animals make sounds, but is

because, while they have the component parts to allow them to utter words, they

lack the reason constitutive of human being (1998: 32). As a consequence, not only

is there a radical and irreducible difference between the three, but Descartes

introduces a number of distinctions between the human, animal, and machine that

reveal the human’s privileged position. Not only is the human more spontaneous

and free than the machine, but the human is constituted by language, both of which

allow the human a freedom not found in the machine. In relation to animals,

Descartes maintains that while they too are defined by a greater spontaneity than

machines, and can utter words, not only are their languages simplistic in comparison

to humans, but they lack reason. As a consequence, human being occupies a

particular, special place in relation to other entities defined by spontaneity, reason,

and language.

While the particularities of Descartes understanding were questioned by

subsequent thinking, its underlying logic, based on a radical cleavage between

the privileged human and other entities, was highly influential. Indeed, Descartes’

privileging lies at the base of modern philosophy’s thinking about human being; a

thinking that is fundamentally different to the pre-modern (Seigel 2005: chapter 2).

While it may be tempting to chart the impact of Descartes’ analysis by engaging

with detailed comparative accounts of Descartes’ relation to ‘X,’ a comparative

analysis that would no doubt call into question aspects of Descartes’ thinking, the

danger is that such questioning would leave its underlying logic intact. For this

reason, I now turn to the work of Martin Heidegger who produced one of the most

sustained critiques of the binary logic upon which Cartesian anthropocentrism rests.

Again, the discussion will not aim to be, nor does it need to be, holistic (for this, see

Rae 2010); it will be sufficient to chart the main threads of Heidegger’s critique as a

precursor to suggesting that Haraway’s critique of anthropocentrism, while arriving

at different conclusions, is influenced by Heidegger’s questioning.

Heidegger’s Critique of Anthropocentrism

Heidegger’s critique of anthropocentrism emanates from and feeds into his critique

of, what he calls, metaphysics, which details not an account of the nature of reality,

but a framework through which being is thought. Heidegger sets out the generalities

of his project in Being and Time, where he aims to ‘‘raise anew the question of the

meaning of being’’ (1962: 1) through an initial questioning of human being in

combination with a detailed historical engagement with the way being has been

thought. Heidegger’s subsequent destruction of metaphysics entails critiques of the

technological being and way of thinking associated with metaphysics, both of which

engender a view of being based on a quantifiable, objective, fixed essence. By

linking being to time, he shows that being is not fixed but is, ‘essentially,’

becoming. While the ramifications of this are wide-ranging, we will focus on what

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they mean for anthropocentrism by briefly outlining the key aspects of Heidegger’s

critique of anthropocentrism as this is detailed in his 1947 Letter on Humanism.

Heidegger’s verdict on Descartes is that, for all his innovation, he remains a

metaphysical thinker (1977a: 234). To understand this, we need to understand what

Heidegger means by metaphysical. First, thinking is metaphysical if it operates from

certain, fixed, unquestioned assumptions which act as the ground from which that

particular worldview emanates (1977a: 225). The reason why this occurs is because,

second, thinking fails to remember Heidegger’s ontological difference between

being and entities and, rather than engage with entities as a precursor to answering

the question of being, remains as a questioning of entities (1977a: 226). In other

words, ‘‘metaphysical thinking does not ask about the truth of being itself’’ (1977a:

226), but simply takes over an assumed interpretation of being, which then provides

the foundation for its analysis of entities. Not only does focusing on entities close

thinking off to being, that which allows entities to be, but thinking fails to realise

this choice has been made ensuring that that particular way of proceeding seems to

be the only option. The third aspect of metaphysics, for Heidegger, relates to its

logic. According to Heidegger, metaphysics is based on binary oppositions, wherein

one aspect of the opposition is privileged. Not only has no analysis of the being of

each being been undertaken meaning this privileging is based on an assumption, but

Heidegger suggests two binary oppositions dominate: the division between essence

and existence and that between subject and object (1977a: 232, 234). This leads him

to claim modern thinking ‘‘is defined by the fact that man becomes the measure and

the centre of beings. Man is what lives at the bottom of all beings; that is, in modern

terms, at the bottom of all objectification and representability’’ (1991: 28). The great

problem with this, for Heidegger, is that it forgets the question of being, that which

will allow thinking to truly understand the object under discussion, and simply

distinguishes humans from other entities. We will see what this means for the

human being shortly, but, from this, it is not difficult to see why Heidegger thinks

that Descartes’ thinking is metaphysical: not only does Descartes fail to engage with

the question of being, but he defines the human by differentiating it from other

entities so as to reveal human being’s privileged place as the rational animal.

In-line with his idea that each critique reveals an alternative concealed aspect of

being, Heidegger’s critique of anthropocentrism is accompanied by the revelation of

an alternative understanding of human being. Again, there is not enough space to do

justice to the complexities of Heidegger’s position so I will focus on a schematic

overview. As mentioned, Heidegger’s great problem with anthropocentrism is that it

forgets/ignores the question of being. Rather than overcome metaphysics through

more metaphysics, Heidegger steps back to think the human being through the

question of being (1977a: 234). As a consequence, he comes to a particular

revelation: rather than being defined by its difference to other entities, human being

is defined in relation to being because human being has a unique relationship to

being in that it, and it alone out of all entities, ek-sists in the open clearing of being.

To see what this means it is perhaps easiest to engage with Heidegger’s critique of

binary oppositions, which are problematic for Heidegger because they fail to engage

with the being of each aspect of the opposition. By positing the opposition human–

animal, thinking becomes locked in an opposition, wherein even a reversal of the

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privileged term fails to truly understand the ‘between’ that brings them into relation.

Given that both the human and animal are different forms of being, Heidegger will

claim that, for all their differences, each entails a particular manifestation of being

(1991: 192f.). Once this is recognised, Heidegger maintains that the key question for

understanding both aspects is to engage with the being of each. Importantly,

understanding this relationship does not emanate from looking ‘within’ the entity or

by comparing entities; it comes from looking at the type of being each entity ‘has’.

Heidegger claims that doing this will reveal a fundamentally different

understanding of human being, including its relationship to other entities. In

particular, it reveals the human is the only being defined by ek-sistence, by which he

means a particular relationship to being which is intimately connected to the

possibility emanating from being’s temporality (1977a: 228). For this reason, and

contrary to Descartes’ assertion, human being is not defined by a fixed, ‘internal’

essence, such as reason, but ‘lies in ek-sistence’ (1977a: 248). Lying between being

and other entities means human being is fundamentally different to animals. Indeed,

he agrees with Descartes that the human and animal are separated ‘by an abyss’

(1977a: 230), but rejects Descartes’ ignoring of the question of being to insist that

revealing what human being and animal being entail does not result from thinking

the relation between them, but requires that thinking think each entity’s relation to

being. The abyss between the two entities lies here and ensures that, while animals

exist in an environment, human being exists in a world, meaning human being is

intimately connected to the possibilities inherent to being’s becoming (1977a: 230,

252).

By examining human being’s ek-sistence, Heidegger is led to a fundamental

insight: whereas Descartes’ anthropocentrism holds that human being is unique and

occupies a privileged place amongst entities that allows it to shape being for its own

ends, Heidegger maintains that human being’s ek-sistence reveals otherwise. Its

dependence on being means that human being does not determine being, but rather

is determined by being. Rather than being the lord of being, deciding and shaping

being in terms of its desires and ends, human being is the ‘shepherd of being’

(1977a: 234). Human being looks after being; it does not determine being. While

this initially appears to be a demotion for human being, in so far as human being

goes from being the central pivot point for entities to a position of subordination in

relation to being, such is being’s importance that Heidegger claims that this re-

thinking actually elevates human being. Such is the importance of being that ek-

sisting in a position of subordination to being is still far more privileged than being

dominant over entities. As a consequence, and while defining humans in relation to

entities, such as animals, may reveal an aspect of human being, it doesn’t reveal its

true ek-sistential essence. For this reason, Heidegger maintains that, even as he

displaces human being from its central position, thinking human being’s ek-sistence

allows thinking to recognise ‘the proper dignity of man’ (1977a: 233). The dignity

of human being is not found in being the master of entities, but in being the

shepherd of being.

As Heidegger recognises, this re-thinking does not, nor does it aim to, obliterate

the notion of human being, nor does it even displace human being’s special place in

relation to entities. It is a re-thinking that occurs through a re-positioning of human

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being in relation to being not entities and, as such, remains humanistic. However, by

distinguishing between the metaphysical humanism of anthropocentrism and his re-

thinking of humanism based on human being’s ek-sistence, Heidegger is able to

conclude that not only are there different forms of humanism, but the proper way to

reveal the dignity of human being is by thinking of human being ‘‘in the service of

the truth of being’’ (1977a: 254). While anthropocentrism insists on a fixed

definition of human being based on its difference to entities, this locks human being

within a particular world-view and conceals alternatives which are open to it given

its nearness to being. Rather than being locked within a binary opposition and

reduced to two alternatives, recognising human ek-sistence ‘opens up other vistas’

(1977a: 250). The challenge his thinking on the human sets up is to think the

possibilities inherent to human ek-sistence.

Challenging Heidegger on Being: Derrida, Latour, and Agamben

For all its originality, however, Heidegger’s critique of anthropocentrism was not

uncritically accepted. Jacques Derrida, Bruno Latour, and Giorgio Agamben stand

out as three of his most powerful critics, an occurrence of particular importance to

our inquiry because of their influence on Haraway. While Michelle Bastion (2006:

1032) notes that Haraway was influenced by Derrida’s notion of ‘undecidability,’

and Chris Vanderwess (2009: 75) focuses on the role that Derrida’s notion of

dissemination plays in Haraway’s thinking, Haraway herself recognises that she has

something of an uneasy relationship to Derrida. On the one hand, she specifically

mentions that she travels with Derrida (2006a: 140), in particular recognising (1) his

tremendous contribution to attempts to breakdown (Cartesian-inspired) humanist

oppositions, (2) that his notion of ‘sacrifice’ is important (2008: 334n.15), (3) that

feminist work has much need of the kind of thinking Derrida employs (2008:

334n.15), and (4) that her own method works from ‘‘inside the belly of the monster,

trying to figure out what forms of contestation for nature can exist there’’ (1990: 12)

which, to my mind, sounds suspiciously like Derrida’s method of deconstructive

reading. On the other hand, however, she claims that she always found it much more

useful to think from a Marxist heritage (1995: 510, 1997: 8) and suggests that while

Derrida gives us the most important and powerful tools for overcoming binary

oppositions, he stops short of showing us how to apply them (2006: 99–103). I’ve

stressed the Haraway–Derrida relationship to this extent because of Derrida’s

continued work on Heidegger, which we see from the sheer number of times Derrida

returns to Heidegger’s thinking to develop his own. For example, we see detailed

discussions of Heidegger in the essays ‘The Ends of Man,’ ‘Heidegger’s Hand

(Geschlecht II),’ ‘Heidegger’s Ear: Philopolemology (Geschlecht IV),’ and ‘Of an

Apocalyptic Tone Recently Adopted in Philosophy,’ in the interview ‘Heidegger,

the Philosophers’ Hell’ found in Points …: Interviews, 1974–1975, in the recently

published seminar The Beast and the Sovereign, vol. II, and in the books Aporias,

Rogues, The Animal that Therefore I am, and, of course, Of Spirit, which, to my

mind, justifies Leonard Lawlor’s claim that ‘‘Derrida’s thought would not exist

without that of Heidegger’’ (2007: 46). Haraway’s intimate relationship to Derrida,

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and Derrida’s relationship to Heidegger can, therefore, shed light on Haraway’s

relation to Heidegger.1

While Derrida returns again and again to Heidegger, it is his 1968 essay ‘The

Ends of Man’ that interests us here because it is in this famous essay that Derrida

most explicitly engages with Heidegger’s Letter on Humanism. In this essay,

Derrida addresses himself to then current understandings of the human through a

critique of Heidegger’s raising of the question of the meaning of being and resultant

critique of anthropocentrism. While Derrida recognises the originality of Heideg-

ger’s account, he criticises Heidegger on three counts: first, in a line of critique

developed most explicitly in the essay ‘Differance’ but which finds implicit

expression in ‘The Ends of Man,’ Derrida criticises Heidegger’s notion that the

question of being is foundationally important. If being can only be thought through

its difference to entities, Derrida concludes this means difference is more primordial

than being.2

Second, Derrida suggests that Heidegger doesn’t go far enough in destructing

anthropocentrism. Far from moving beyond human being, the ‘magnetic attraction’

(1982b: 124) of human being means that Heidegger bases his questioning of being

around the human, thereby giving it the same privileged status as anthropocentrism.

As a consequence, Heidegger’s ‘‘thinking of being, the thinking of the truth of

being, in the name of which Heidegger de-limits humanism and metaphysics,

remains as thinking of man’’ (1982b: 128). While Derrida recognises that Heidegger

privileges the question of being over human being, human being continues to

maintain a privileged status over other entities. What is at issue is not human being’s

exalted status, but ‘‘a kind of re-evaluation or revalorization of the essence and

dignity of man’’ (1982b: 128). This leads Derrida to conclude that, for all his

originality, Heidegger does not think deeply enough about the overcoming of

anthropocentrism because his thinking of being remains locked within certain

assumed privilegings, such as its privileging of human being over other entities, that

prevent it from truly thinking difference.3

The third line of critique builds on this to suggest that, while Heidegger

privileges being, which leads him to wrongly downplay difference and privilege

human being, Heidegger’s thinking on being remains ambiguous. This is not

necessarily because of a failing on Heidegger’s part, but because being itself cannot

be thought except through entities. This means that Heidegger’s talk of being is

inherently empty for being ‘‘is not a being, cannot be said, cannot say itself, except

in ontic metaphor’’ (1982b: 131). For Derrida, this shows the limit of Heidegger’s

thinking about being and re-affirms his insistence that thinking must overcome its

fascination with being to think difference not only as the relation between two

entities, but the relation from where these entities emanate. Indeed, in many

respects, this third line of critique is recognised by Heidegger himself who, on

1 Rae (forthcoming) has a more detailed engagement with the Heidegger–Derrida relationship.2 See Derrida (1982a: 22) for his most explicit comments on this.3 This ‘early’ Derridean critique underpins Derrida’s ‘later’ critique, most explicitly found in The Animal

that Therefore I am, of Heidegger’s thinking on animality. Cary Wolfe (2012: 73–86) offers a good

description of the main points of Derrida’s later critique. Indeed, Haraway claims that ‘‘I’m with Derrida

more than others, and with Cary Wolfe’s reading of Derrida’’ (2006a: 140).

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numerous occasions, makes reference to the difficulty and ambiguity of thinking

being. For example, and putting aside the difficulty thinking has in thinking

something it is so unaccustomed to, Heidegger comes to the conclusion that ‘‘being

remains mysterious’’ (1977a: 236), and is nothing but ‘It itself’ (1977a: 234) to

suggest that ‘‘whether and how being is must remain an open question for the

careful attention of thinking’’ (1977a: 238), whose validity can only be confirmed or

denied ‘‘after [each] has tried to go the designated way, or even better, after he has

gone a better way, that is, a way befitting the question’’ (1977a: 247). Now

admittedly, Heidegger continued to grope with the question of being, but the point is

that Heidegger’s valorization of the question of being, as that which overcomes

anthropocentrism, does not appear to enlighten us on what being ‘is’. The issue is

not the validity of these criticisms, but that these criticisms arose at all, especially in

relation to the ambiguity surrounding the possibility of questioning being as a

precursor to thinking human being. While Heidegger thinks such a question is

foundational, given he himself was led to define being as simply ‘‘it is It itself,’’ it is

not difficult to see how readers were left with the impression that the question of

being is a dead-end, ambiguous at best, incomprehensible, and empty at worst.

This brings us to Bruno Latour’s critique of Heidegger. While Jeff Kochan

(2010: 580) and Kasper Schiølin (2012: 775.) have both done a good job of showing

that Latour continually returns to Heidegger’s thinking, for our purposes, it will be

sufficient to highlight Latour’s critique of Heidegger as this is manifested in We

Have Never Been Modern because it is here that Latour engages with the relation

between being and entities to offer an understanding of the ontological difference

that I will suggest is influential to Haraway’s thinking. While Haraway has

continuously noted her affinities to Latour,4 the importance of Heidegger for Latour

re-enforces my argument that Heidegger is the background figure implicitly

influencing and informing Haraway’s position.

Latour starts by noting that, initially, Heidegger’s ontological difference, the

difference between being and entities, seemed like a good way to open up our

understanding. By asking what it means to say that an entity is, we realize that being

is temporal, meaning that, rather than each entity entailing a fixed, determined

essence, each becomes. The problem Latour identifies is that this supposedly simple

question (what is being?) is too abstract, too indeterminate. Despite Heidegger’s

assertion that being is always the being of an entity, Latour claims that Heidegger

turns away from the ‘real’ world of entities to ask about the abstract being of

entities. As a consequence, Heidegger and ‘‘his epigones do not expect to find being

except along the Black Forest Holzwege’’ (1993: 65). In other words, Heidegger has

such difficulty ‘finding’ and ‘describing’ being because he has turned away from the

empirical world, with its different manifestations, to the question of being. For

Latour, however, the question of being is found in and through the world of entities;

in fact, it appears that the question of being does not entail an analysis of entities to

subsequently reveal the essence of being as (the early pre-Kehre) Heidegger

4 For example, in a number of places over the years, Haraway has continually made reference to Latour’s

influence on her (2008: 305n.9, 349n.29, 377n.2; 1997: 33, 43, 163f.; 1990: 9), while being careful to note

differences (1992: 304, 313).

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maintains, but a ‘flat’ ontology whereby to examine the empirical manifestation of

being reveals what the being of that entity entails. While Heidegger would claim

that this perfectly reveals Latour’s metaphysical understanding because, by focusing

on entities as opposed to the question of being, Latour produces ontic descriptions

of our everyday entities, as opposed to asking the more fundamental ontological

question (i.e., what understanding of being reveals entities in that way?), for Latour,

the question of being is empty and obtuse. Privileging the empirical methodology of

the social sciences, Latour claims that, rather than retreat to the Black Forest of

abstract (philosophical) thinking, we must simply immerse ourselves in empirical

studies of objects. Only those who turn to philosophy forget being; those social

scientists who offer empirical studies carry ‘‘out the impossible project undertaken

by Heidegger’’ (1993: 67). While Heidegger would no doubt insist that there are

serious problems with Latour’s understanding, most notably that his reliance on

empirical observation to reveal being fails to recognize that empirical observation is

(1) based on certain presuppositions about the nature of being, and (2) logically

problematic insofar as the claim that empirical observation provides access to the

‘truth’ is not based on empirical observation but philosophical interpretation,

Latour’s analysis is important for our purposes because in claiming that Heidegger’s

thinking on being is abstract, privileging the social sciences over philosophy, and

claiming that, rather than raise the question of being to reveal the truth of entities, it

is sufficient to appeal to empirical observation to reveal the fluid, hybridized nature

of entities, Latour develops a methodology that shares much in common with

Haraway’s.

Noting the three senses of ‘metaphysics’ in Heidegger, I will suggest that

Haraway’s thinking abandons the perceived ambiguity inherent to the question of

being to focus on thinking entities in a way that is not constrained by the logic of

binary oppositions. In other words, it will be my suggestion that while Haraway is

initially implicitly influenced by Heidegger’s critique of anthropocentrism, she

shares Derrida’s and Latour’s rejection of Heidegger’s conclusion that the

overcoming of anthropocentrism can only occur through the re-raising of the

question of the meaning of being to look at the ways in which entities are, pace

Descartes, ontologically entwined. Support for this understanding is found in

Haraway’s work, where, in one of her few explicit comments, placed in a marginal

endnote to When Species Meet, on Heidegger, she claims that ‘‘Heidegger’s notion

of the open is quite different from mine’’ (2008: 367n.28), before going on to

explain that her reading of Heidegger is based on Giorgio Agamben’s reading5

which claims that (1) the notion of profound boredom is crucial to Heidegger’s

understanding of the open, and (2) understanding the human’s capacity for profound

boredom emanates from a comparison of the human to animal. From here, Haraway

claims that her notion of the open is quite different, insofar as it is not based on

5 This is problematic because, by basing her own theory of the open on Agamben’s reading of Heidegger,

Haraway develops her non-Heideggerian understanding from Agamben, which appears to contradict an

earlier endnote that explains that Agamben ‘‘is no help at all for figuring out how to get to another kind of

opening, the kind feminists [of which Haraway is surely one] and others who never had Heidegger’s

starting point for Dasein of profound boredom can discern’’ (2008: 334n.16).

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Heidegger’s negativity (human minus profound boredom leads to animal who

cannot suffer boredom), but on pure affirmation.

While Krzysztof Ziarek (2008: 189f., 196, 201) raises serious concerns over

Agamben’s reading of Heidegger, claiming that Agamben forgets the role the

question of being plays in Heidegger’s analysis of the human–animal relation,

Haraway’s support for Agamben’s reading reveals that she develops her thinking

from (a reading of) Heidegger’s. This appears to lend support to my claim that she is

developing her thinking from a Heidegger-inspired heritage, a relationship that, if

Heidegger’s notion of trace is accurate, would ensure that a trace of Heidegger’s

thinking finds expression in her thinking. Indeed, we see this further once we

recognize that Haraway develops her hybrid-ontology from Agamben’s suggestion

that Heidegger develops his notions of profound boredom, the open, humans, and

animals by comparing humans to animals to reveal the abyss between them. Again,

this reading of Heidegger has been criticised by, for example, Tracy Colony (2007:

7, 10) who argues that Agamben’s and, by extension, Haraway’s reading of

Heidegger on this point fails to recognize that Heidegger not only actually aims to

undermine the binary oppositions upon which modern metaphysics depends, but

does so by questioning and comparing the ‘being’ of humans to the ‘being’ of

animals to show that profound boredom is a ‘possibility’ that emanates from human

being’s unique ek-static relationship to being, a relationship that the non-ek-sistence

of animality cannot share. In contrast, Haraway takes Agamben to be showing that

Heidegger simply compares humans to animals to privilege the former over the

latter. From here, she depends on Latour’s privileging of empirical observation of

entities over philosophical speculation into being, claims that to properly understand

entities requires that we examine the ontological entwinement of entities devoid of

the ambiguity inherent to passing this re-thinking through a questioning of being,

and, in so doing, calls into question the radical division between human, animal, and

machine through which Descartes (and, according to her reading, Heidegger) thinks

and privileges human being. To show this, I will now explore some aspects of

Haraway’s thinking to draw out those currents that show her Cartesian and

Heideggerian heritage. Again, there is not sufficient space to engage with all aspects

of her thinking and so the presentation will be rather brief and schematic, but it will

be sufficient to show that Haraway’s thinking emanates, but also departs, from

Heidegger’s critique of the binary oppositions underpinning Descartes thinking on

the human–machine/animal relationship.

The First Wave: Haraway’s Cyborg Imagery

In her much discussed ‘A Manifesto for Cyborgs,’ Haraway, without ever explicitly

mentioning either figure, returns to Descartes’ questioning of the human–machine

relationship and follows Heidegger’s claim that ‘‘the new fundamental science [is]

cybernetics’’ (1977b: 434), to explain that, such is the dominance of technology,

informational flows, and cybernetic systems in contemporary society, that the

human being is no longer merely organic, but is also part machine (1991: 57). The

conclusion reached is that ‘‘by the late twentieth-century, our time, a mythic time,

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we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in

short, we are cyborgs’’ (1991: 150). Michelle Bastion (2006: 1030) points out that

there are two aspects to this claim: a serious aspect that aims to break down binary

oppositions between human and machine and a playful side that uses metaphor and

cyborg figuration to describe this overcoming. Haraway’s point is not to glorify

cyborgs, but entails an ironic thinking that plays with long dominant boundaries.

This is important because Haraway is sufficiently reflexive to recognize that critique

is itself intimately bound up with the logos of Western philosophical thinking. In

other words, critique is itself a part of the logic to be overcome meaning that to

engage in critique is to perpetuate the logic to be overcome. While Heidegger is also

aware of this and suggests that its resolution requires a prior historical analysis that

destructs the history of metaphysical thinking to subsequently make the leap beyond

metaphysical thinking,6 Haraway disagrees on the need for this prior historical

engagement and instead turns to irony as a means of disrupting long established

oppositions. The reasoning behind this is never made explicit, but runs something

like this: if criticising the logic of Western thinking itself perpetuates this logic then

the only way ‘out’ of this logic is to subvert it from ‘within’ by playing with its

categories, focusing on double meanings, and so on. The use of irony in Haraway’s

critique not only distinguishes her thinking from Heidegger’s, but is also an integral

part of the critique she aims at the binary logic underpinning Western thinking. In

particular, she notes that ‘‘certain dualisms have been persistent in Western thinking

[and have] been systematic to the logics and practices of domination of women,

people of color, nature, workers, animals—in short, domination of all constituted as

others, whose tasks is to mirror the self’’ (1991: 177). Haraway mentions that the

cyborg challenges the human–machine dichotomy, a challenging best summarized

by her comment that ‘‘late twentieth-century machines have made thoroughly

ambiguous the difference between natural and artificial, mind and body, self-

developing and externally designed, and many other distinctions that used to apply

to organisms and machines’’ (1991: 152). As a consequence, Haraway argues that

the anthropocentric opposition pitting a human subject against a machinised object

is redundant as ‘‘our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves

frighteningly inert’’ (1991: 152).

Right from its inception, we see that Haraway’s work re-engages with Descartes

thinking on the human/animal/machine relationship, both in terms of its content and

logic. In particular, Haraway criticises the binary oppositions upon which

Descartes’ thinking rests and, as a consequence, re-engages with these relationships

to re-think them. Mathew Wilson (2009: 499f.) quite correctly notes that there is an

ontological aspect to this, in that Haraway aims to show that the notion of purity (a

‘pure’ human contra a ‘pure’ other) fails to understand our hybrid natures, and an

epistemological aspect that takes account of what our ontological hybridness means

for how we think. Rather than continue to think through ‘pure’ categories, thinking

has to follow being in learning to think through hybrid, ‘messy’ categories of

relations. Combining both aspects, Haraway suggests that ‘‘cyborg imagery can

suggest a way out of the maze of dualisms in which we have explained our bodies

6 For more on Heidegger’s destruction of metaphysics, see Rae (2014a: 102–108).

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and our tools’’ (1991: 181), a comment re-affirming my argument that her thinking

operates from Descartes’ anthropocentric categories by way of Heidegger’s critique

of anthropocentrism’s binary logic. However, while addressing herself to Descartes’

problematic and while influenced by Heidegger’s critique of anthropocentrism’s

binary oppositions, Haraway departs from their conclusions, in the case of Descartes

from his strict divisions and in the case of Heidegger from his insistence they be

overcome through an re-raising of the question of being. Instead, Haraway

implicitly suggests a return to Descartes, by way of (a number of readings of)

Heidegger, to re-think the fundamental oppositions that Descartes insists exist

between the human, animal, and machine. While Heidegger would no doubt reject

such thinking for remaining ontic and not engaging with the ontological

understanding that brings entities to be revealed in that way, Haraway ignores

this to echo Latour’s claim that the dichotomy Descartes poses between humans,

animals, and machines only ever entails a ‘false’ dichotomy. Rather than engage

with the question of being to re-think these anthropocentric oppositions, it appears

that Haraway is claiming that these oppositions simply no longer hold, if, indeed,

they ever did. We do not need to engage with the question of being to overcome

them; thinking simply has to properly attend to the complex inter-relationship

between human, animal, and machine.

Two points stand out from the presentation of Haraway’s position so far: first, by

identifying and criticising the underlying binary oppositions of Western thinking,

Haraway can be read as taking aim at Descartes and, in so doing, sharing a

similarity with Heidegger who also criticises and aims to overcome the binary logic

upon which Descartes’ thinking operates. Second, Haraway links cyborg imagery to

struggles for political emancipation. Cyborg imagery is not to be glorified in-itself,

but is meant to stimulate our thinking in ways that overcome the binary oppositions

upon which, she maintains, relations of domination are based (1991: 154). For this

reason, cyborg imagery is inherently political. However, while Haraway’s use of an

ironic cyborg imagery to undermine the binary oppositions of Cartesian-inspired

thinking was hugely influential, it quickly morphed into a ‘serious’ post/trans-

humanist thinking charting the ways human being and technology were influencing

one another (Bostrom 2005; Gray 2002; Clark 2003; Pepperell 2009). In other

words, the purpose behind Haraway’s cyborg imagery was co-opted away from its

primary purpose of offering a critique of anthropocentric binary oppositions to a

thinking that charted the various potential opportunities and consequences of human

being’s continuing cyborgisation. Of course, this re-thinking did continue to

challenge anthropocentric binary oppositions, but my suggestion is that this was no

longer its primary purpose.

On the one hand, that subsequent post/trans-human thinking no longer addresses

or justifies itself through this problematic but simply takes the critique of binary

oppositions as a given, shows how influential Haraway’s cyborg imagery was. On

the other hand, however, and while there was the recognition that the human and

machine were changing, there was still a tendency to think the changing nature of

both from the perspective of the human. In short, cyborgisation tended to be

anthropomorphized with the result that anthropocentrism was re-admitted leading to

the dominance of what has been called humanist or anthropocentric approaches to

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posthumanism (Wolfe 2010: 62). Furthermore, by downplaying cyborg imagery’s

challenging of anthropocentrism, and focusing on the various ways the human and

machine were melding together, post/trans-human theory often turned to science

fiction to think the cyborg with the consequence that the political intent behind

Haraway’s use of cyborg imagery was downplayed.7 While recent posthuman

theory has taken a noticeable political turn that returns to and emphasises the

political strand in Haraway’s cyborg imagery (Campbell 2011; Cohen 2009; Eposito

2008; Fukuyama 2003; Gray 2002; Protevi 2009; Rose 2007; Thacker 2010), the

initial downplaying of the political implications of cyborg imagery contributed to an

alteration in Haraway’s own thinking.

The Second Wave: Haraway’s Companion Species

While the ‘serious,’ apolitical uses of cyborg imagery, failure to overcome

anthropocentrism in all its guises, and personal interest in the question of animality

all contributed to a change in Haraway’s focus (1995: 514), there was something

about cyborg imagery itself that Haraway felt was inadequate. First, focusing on the

human–machine relationship downplays the other ways in which human being is

entangled with the ‘other’. Second, and more fundamentally, by unquestioningly

taking over cyborg imagery to think how the male, female, human, and animal are

being mechanised, thinking failed to recognise that we need to take a more patient

look at the ‘‘troubled categories of woman and human’’ (2008: 17). Simply taking

over these categories and showing how they are being cyborgised does not truly

entail a radical thinking of the fluid, embedded, and entangled nature of these

categories, but risks simply maintaining pre-determined entities that are compli-

cated through their machinisation; a thinking that tends to simply re-affirm the

binary oppositions of the anthropocentrism Haraway questions.

Rather than focus on cyborg imagery through the human–machine relation,

Haraway denounced the way post/trans-human thought had co-opted her earlier

work, going so far as to state ‘‘I am not a posthumanist’’ (2008: 19), and

subsequently altered her thinking from the human–machine relation to the human–

animal relation. As a consequence, she could be said to, implicitly, return to

Descartes’ problematic, a problematic split into two strands engaging with human–

machine differences and human–animal differences, to complement her earlier work

on the human–machine opposition by engaging with the human–animal opposition

(2006a: 140).8 This is not a rupture from her early work on cyborgs, but entails a

7 See Abrams (2004: 255) for a defence of the turn to science fiction and Bergsma (2000: 401f.) and

Thacker (2003: 78) for a critique.8 There is, of course, a third division (animal-technology) inherent to Descartes’ schema. While space

constraints prevent extensive discussion of it, it is important to note that Haraway recognises that the

animal-technology division is also an issue and so tentatively discusses it in Modest Witness’ discussion

of OncoMouseTM (1997: 79–84) and the relationship between animality and technoscience in general

(1997: 98f.), and in When Species Meet where, while appreciating its general message regarding the

entwined relationship between animality-technology, she criticises the National Geographic show

Crittercam for imposing technology onto animality rather than exploring the entwined relationship

between animality and technology (2008: 262f.). While underdeveloped in relation to her comments on

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distancing that complements her previous thinking by (1) appealing to the logic of

cyborg imagery to call into question the anthropocentric division between human

and animal; (2) re-engaging with the ‘Cyborg Manifesto’s’ fleeting talk of the

human–animal relation; and (3) appealing to ‘boundary creatures’ (1991a: 21) or

‘monsters’ (1990: 12), to complicate our thinking on things. This re-focusing is,

therefore, at one and the same time a development resulting from her disagreement

with the way subsequent thinkers co-opted her initial cyborg imagery and

complementary to her earlier work, in so far as she now comes to claim that

studying companion species (more specifically dogs) as opposed to cyborgs, will

better cut through the binary oppositions that modern, Cartesian-inspired thinking

has operated from (2003: 60f.).

While Descartes maintains a strict division between the human and animal based

on the latter’s lack of language and reason, and Heidegger calls into question the

logic of anthropocentric binary oppositions upon which this division is based before

re-instantiating the human over the animal based on their different relationships to

being (Derrida 2008: 40f.), Haraway rejects both, instead maintaining that the

human and animal exist with and through one another. Indeed, she claims this

thinking of ‘‘becoming with [is] a much richer web to inhabit than any of the

posthumanism[s] on display after (or in reference to) the ever-deferred demise of

man’’ (2008: 16f.). Again distancing herself from post/trans-humanism, Haraway

claims her analysis calls for a new style of thinking wherein human embeddedness,

as opposed to exceptionalism, is the basis that grounds thought. In other words, she

asks us to think an ontology of human entanglement as opposed to an ontology of

human exceptionalism. Here, Haraway follows Karen Barad’s distinction between

‘inter-action,’ defined as the idea ‘‘that there are separate individual agencies that

precede their interaction,’’ and ‘intra-action’ which ‘‘recognizes that distinct

agencies do not precede, but rather emerge through, their intra-action’’ with the

‘distinct’ agencies of intra-action only being ‘‘distinct in a relational, not an absolute

sense, that is, agencies are only distinct in relation to their mutual entanglement;

they don’t exist as individual elements’’ (Barad 2007: 33). In other words, human

being is an effect of relations with ‘others’ as opposed to the cause of these

relations, meaning we must study these relations to determine what the human being

is (2006a: 146; 1997: 37; 1991a: 21). Far from species-distinction, there is species-

entanglement.

Jacob von Uexkull famously describes this concept by offering the example of

‘‘the oak [which] offers a changing shelter for hundreds of guests, feathered or not,

in its canopy and bark, sometimes for summer guests and sometimes for winter

guests’’ (2010: 170). The oak tree is not singular nor is it distinct from others, but is

composed of the swarming creatures (bacteria, germs, molecules, parasites,

animals) that not only shape the oak’s structure and existence, but who, in turn,

simply could not exist without it. As a consequence, the oak tree is entangled with

Footnote 8 continued

the human-technology, human-animal oppositions, I take this to show that Haraway’s thinking takes aim

at, and so can be said to be developed from, a re-thinking of all three of the configurations that emanate

from the binary oppositions inherent to Descartes’ thinking on the relationship between humans, animals,

and technology.

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its environment and those animals constitutive with that environment. Far from

being distinct and individuated, von Uexkull’s point, a point Haraway mirrors, is

that entities exist ‘in,’ from, and because of their environments. They are not

unencumbered from them, nor are they unique monads in them, but are an effect of

their ontological entanglements with the ‘other’ species and components of their

particular environment. As Haraway concludes, ‘‘the kinds of relating that these

introductions perform entangle a motley crowd of differentially situated species,

including landscapes, animals, plants, microorganisms, people, and technologies’’

(2008: 41), which leads her to claim that ‘‘to be one is always to become with many’’

(2008: 4).

There are two aspects to this idea of ‘becoming-with’ both of which work

simultaneously to undermine the central tenet of human exceptionalism: ‘‘the

premise that humanity alone is not a spatial and temporal web of interspecies

dependencies. That to be human is to be on the opposite side of the Great divide

from all the others’’ (2008: 11). First, far from being a unique, independent monad,

Haraway emphasises the embedded nature of human being. She quickly goes

beyond this, however, because simply insisting on the embedded nature of human

being may mean that the human being is: (1) an embedded individual monad

different to its world; or (2) an uncumbered being from its world. Rather than

maintain that human being is fundamentally other than its world, or an embedded

being different from its world, Haraway points to an ontology of swarming

interaction between beings. As a consequence, and second, entities are not separate

from each other, but are ‘‘ecosystems of genomes, consortia, communities, partly

digested dinners, mortal boundary formations’’ (2008: 31). In other words, entities

are never singular, but ‘‘are compound… made up of combinations of other things

co-ordinated to magnify power, to making something happen, to engage the world,

to risk fleshly acts of interpretation’’ (2008: 250). In short, entities, whether

technologies or so-called organic entities, are composed of multiple component

parts which constantly become together and through their ‘individual’ component

parts. From this, Haraway develops the concept ‘companion species,’ in particular

the companionship of humans and dogs, to address the way entities interact with and

become-with one another.

The notion of ‘companion species’ has three senses: first, it ‘‘refers to the old co-

constitutive link between dogs and people, where dogs have been actors and not just

recipients of action’’ (2008: 134). In short, companion species refers to the ways

dogs become with human being, meaning that the human–dog relation is that from

which both dogs and humans emanate. Of course, two objections open up at this

point: first, the notion that humans exist in relationships of companionship with dogs

may be thought to posit two independent objects who relate to one another and so

does nothing to upset the human–dog binary opposition. Haraway recognizes this

possible interpretation but dismisses it claiming that ‘‘I actually don’t think that [the

idea of] companion species reinforces species boundaries but I can see how I set

myself up to be read that way’’ (2006a: 144). Understanding why she rejects this

interpretation must, however, wait until we outline the third sense of companion

species. Second, the human–dog relationship Haraway describes is by no means

universal. Not only do many humans despise dogs, but it is not clear that, accepting

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this type of relationship is possible, the human–dog relationship is transferrable to

other animals.

As such, Haraway moves to the second meaning of companion species to

highlight that ‘‘companion species also points to the sorts of being made possible at

interfaces among different human communities of practice from whom ‘love of the

breed’ or ‘love of dogs’ is a practical and ethical imperative in an always specific,

historical context, one that involves science, technology, and medicine at every

turn’’ (2008: 134). Here again, we find an empirical relationship based on an

external bond wherein the human cares for the animal, and where this care involves

a complex intersection of science, technology, and medicine coalescing together to

inform a particular ethic based around questions such as ‘‘how does a companion

animal’s human make judgments about the right time to let her dog die or, indeed, to

kill her dog? How much care is too much? Is the issue quality of life? Money?

Pain?’’ (2008: 50). Again, however, there are problems with this description: (1) it

remains inherently external, insofar as it involves a relation of two distinct species;

and (2) it seems to depend on some universal ethical imperative emanating across

all human–animal relationships, which not only calls into question Haraway’s claim

that all knowledge is situated, but is also questionable in terms of whether humans

feel an ‘instinctual’ empathy towards all dogs (I certainly don’t instinctively feel

any empathy for the packs of, obviously malnourished, wild, rabid dogs who are my

‘companions’ as I walk through the streets of Cairo), let alone whether, even if it is

granted that this relationship holds for dogs, it is applicable to all animals; and (3) it

appears to be inherently anthropocentric, insofar as the issue concerns how humans

are to treat animals and, specifically, the issues that arise for humans of keeping

animals.

As a consequence, Haraway’s third sense of ‘companion species’ refers not to

empirical relations between species or a universal ethical imperative, but to the

‘‘webbed bio-socio-technological apparatuses of humans, animals, artifacts, and

institutions in which particular ways of being emerge and are sustained. Or not’’

(2008: 134). In other words, Haraway moves from the empirico-relational level, a

level that I’ve suggested is not applicable to everyone in so far as not everyone cares

for animals, to an ontological level that recognises species are not singular, but are

multiple, moving constellations of different animals, viruses, bacteria, parasites,

each of which combines to create that particular entity. This ontological level aims

to show the applicability of the notion of companion species to those who don’t care

for animals, by showing that ‘other’ species are constitutive of the human body and

being. Far from being individual monads shut off from and unaffected by other

species, human being is created out of our relationship to and companionship with

these species. Some are necessary for our being, others are unwanted. Regardless of

how we view them, however, Haraway’s point is to show our intimate ontological

connection to our world, including our companionship with ‘other’ animal species.

From this, we can discern three lines through which Haraway thinks companion

species: (1) an epistemological line that calls into question the hard and fast

oppositions between ‘human’ and ‘dog’ constitutive of Cartesian-inspired thinking,

(2) an ethical line in which (some) humans are defined through a relation of care for

other entities or species; and (3) an ontological line based on a radical questioning

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of the human exceptionalism constitutive of anthropocentrism. Rather than being

distinct to other animals, human being only is through its relations to others. While

influenced by Heidegger’s critique of binary oppositions, Haraway rejects

Heidegger’s continued glorification of the human over the animal by calling into

question his continued privileging of human being. While Heidegger maintains that

the animal is poor in world because it lacks ek-sistence, Haraway claims that the

human and animal exist ‘in’ the same world, are constituted by this world, and are

co-shapers of this world (1997: 97). While Heidegger aims to overcome

anthropocentrism by examining the being of each to re-introduce a continued

privileging of the human over the animal, Haraway rejects Heidegger’s insistence

that the human and animal be thought through the question of being to focus on the

way the human and animal, in their concrete, existential comportment and

companionship, shape and interact with one another. Rather than appeal to an

ambiguous notion of being, Haraway points to the complexity of the human–animal

relationship ‘‘not to celebrate complexity [for the sake of complexity] but to become

worldly and respond’’ (2008: 41). Becoming aware of our intimate relational and

ontological entwinement with the world around us including our entwinement with

animals will help bring us to examine: (1) the entwined beings we are; (2) our

relationship to the ‘other’ including animals and the world; and (3) undermine our

previous anthropocentric tendencies.

Concluding Remarks

From this, we see that Haraway’s project aims to rethink what it is to be ‘human’

and ‘dog’ by thinking each through their entanglement. As Don Handelman

recognizes, Haraway undertakes ‘‘a meta-inquiry, asking about how to ask about the

dogginess of dog, of dogs in their different breeds and mixtures in relation to human

beings’’ (2007: 256). Put differently, Haraway is attempting to identify the ‘essence’

or ‘dogginess’ of dogs (i.e., what makes a dog a dog and not, for example, a cat), by

thinking this ‘essence’ through the dog–human relation. If this is what Haraway is

doing, and it seems a good way to think about it, then despite her Latourian-inspired

critique of Heidegger’s ontological difference, it shares a direct connection to

Heidegger’s thinking because, as we have seen, his thinking also aims to identify the

being of entities, in this case, the being of dogs, which, put more concretely, seeks to

answer the question: what is it to say that something is a dog, which, in turn,

depends on a prior question: what makes a dog a dog or, put differently, what is the

‘dogginess’ (read being) of dog? In other words, if we accept Handelman’s

description, we see that Haraway’s attempt to understand the dogginess of dogs

mirrors Heidegger’s privileging of being in that she asks about what it is to be a dog

and so echoes Heidegger in recognizing that to understand an entity (dog) requires

an inquiry into the being (dogginess) of that entity (dog). While Haraway’s

Latourian connection means that she rejects the need to explicitly ask about the

‘dogginess,’ or being, of the dog to understand the dog, instead claiming that we

simply have to examine the empirical relations inherent to an actual concrete dog to

understand it, by claiming that the dog is, in its essence, relational, Haraway is

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actually implicitly asking about the ‘dogginess’ of the dog, which brings her

thinking back to the question of the being of dog and from there to Heidegger’s

thinking.

Of course, Haraway would most probably argue that she is doing something else,

but, as we saw with Latour, Heidegger’s rejoinder would be that any questioning of

empirical entities depends on, and so is always brought back to, a questioning of the

‘essence’ or being of those entities. To focus on empirical observation alone is to

think from certain assumptions about the essence or being of the thing, such as the

notion that entities are ontologically relational, that empirical observation discloses

what the being truly is, that a mediating aspect exists that allows entities to be

simultaneously entwined and individuated, while also assuming certain understand-

ings of space and time that allow entities to become through one another. By

showing that Haraway’s thinking assumes a certain ontological understanding and is

inspired by a long philosophical history which she overlooks to privilege the

method(s) of empirical social science, we not only show her intimate companion-

ship to Heidegger, but also open a space to better explore how to become with her

thinking. In particular, I want to conclude by suggesting that Haraway’s

Heideggerian heritage leads to three lines of future research: first, Haraway’s

analysis brings us to question the nature of ‘overcoming’ including whether we can,

in fact, overcome anthropocentrism and what this overcoming will look like given

her recognition that to criticise anthropocentrism is itself to perpetuate the mode of

Western thinking underpinning anthropocentrism. Second, Haraway’s thinking

brings us to question the nature of ‘identity’ and the role that relationships play in

the formation of identity. While the notion of relational identity is not new to the

social sciences (think of Latour’s actor-network theory) or philosophy (think of

Hegel’s master–slave dialectic), Haraway pushes us to think identity and

relationships non-anthropocentrically. One of the things her analyses shows, and

on this Heidegger would agree, is that this is far harder than it initially appears. And

third, to truly understand and justify her conclusions, the ontological assumptions

upon which her analysis is based need to be brought to the fore and questioned. This

does not entail the slavish replication of Heidegger’s thinking on being, but the

recognition that the ontological question he brought to the fore continues to offer

possibilities that can deepen Haraway’s analyses.

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