Response-Ability

Description

Second Renaissance:

"Haraway makes the case for response-ability – an agentic response to our crises that begins with our entanglement in them. Renouncing ‘human exceptionalism’ and becoming sensitive to others and the more-than-human world.

Response-ability starts with our present situation and surroundings; sensing into what’s needed, and preoccupied by neither hope nor despair. Not only do these states limit our connection to the present, but they also limit our agency. Whether we trust blindly that somehow everything will be okay, or believe that we’re doomed, it’s too easy to do nothing.

Beyond this paralysis, Haraway invites us to meet troubled reality just as it is, coming face-to-face with loss, death and, importantly, grief. She writes: “Grief is a path to understanding entangled shared living and dying; human beings must grieve with, because we are in and of this fabric of undoing”

- Donna Harraway (Staying with the Trouble, p.39).

(https://news.secondrenaissance.net/p/seeds-of-a-second-renaissance-2025-02-donna-haraway)