Andreas Weber

Symposium Lecture:

• Poetics of the Flesh

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www.autor-andreas-weber.de

Dr. phil. Andreas Weber (* 1967) is a Berlin based book and magazine writer, translator and independent scholar. He has degrees in Marine Biology and Cultural Studies, having collaborated with theoretical biologist Francisco Varela in Paris. Andreas' work is focusing on a re-evaluation of our understanding of the living. He is proposing to understand organsims as subjects and hence the biosphere as a meaning-creating and poetic reality. Accordingly, Andreas holds that an economy inspired by nature should not be designed as a mechanistic optimization machine (as it currently is), but rather as an ecosystem which transforms mutual sharing of matter and energy in a deepened meaning.
He has put forth his ideas in several books and is contributing to major German newspapapers and magazines, such as GEO, Die Zeit, and mare. Weber is regularly lecturing and teaching his topics in various workshops. He teaches at Leuphana University Lüneburg, the Berlin University of the Fine Arts, and at Schumacher College, UK. His latest books are Enlivenment. Eine Kultur des Lebens, Matthes & Seitz 2016, and Biology of Wonder. Feeling, Aliveness, and the Metamorphosis of Science, New Society Publishers, 2016.

Poetics of the Flesh

Sense and Existence Beyond Body and Culture. Towards a Nondualistic Eros

At the beginning of the Anthropocene, dualism – the position consolidated in the enlightenment age assuming that this world is made from bodies which are machines on the one hand, and mind, language or culture, which is the sole realm of the human, on the other hand – has finally come to an end. But what should come next?
The question what is body, and what is personal and emotional identity, is crucial for personal life orientation, but also for our general attitude to other humans and other beings, and finally for our choice of a fair and equal society. At the moment, although there are different „new materialisms“ dawning, dualism seems to have been given up in favour of techniques of radical self-construction, which often are labeled as „transhumanism“ or „posthumanism“.
They emphasize body-transcendence, the primacy of culture, and choice. But what if the own living body supplied the basic possibilities for creativity, freedom and the construction of identies? What if being a body did not mean to be a deterministic wet machine, but to exist within a sphere of meaning, a poetic space of relating and meaningful identity-generation?
I propose a third way of construing human identities which is not in contradiction to other organisms, but dependend on embodied worldmaking. Exactly for this reason this approach is able to generate freedom, meaning, and to sustain the paradox of choice.

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