A Post-Individual Subject: Contributions for a Chimerical Law in the Anthropocene

Abstract

The individual life that has been consolidated in Western biological thought largely coincides
with modern legal and political conceptions of the individual. Amid geological controversies,
these notions of the individual as a subject of law are insufficient to deal with the challenges of the Anthropocene, since politics, law and other human categories can no longer be conceived as closed in themselves. Possible dialogues between these and the debates in biology may be pertinent, towards a politicization of nature that can help clarify some of the ways of naturalization of a policy in which the exercise of governing populations involves direct intervention in the processes of extraction and management of natural resources. It seems that symbiogenesis theory still has a lot to contribute to this debate, especially for its confluences with socio-environmental agendas of new constitutionalism in Latin America and claims on land. The proposal of the symbiogenic evolutionary unit may have implications not only for evolutionary histories, but also suggest collective subjects whose autonomy is historically constructed with links to different relationships of life and death.