Nikolas Kompridis, Agency: Human and Non-Human (Ethics@Noon)

Ethics at Noon

Agency: Human and Non-Human

Recent discussions of non-human agency—the agency of “things” or of “actants”—have challenged the putative differences between human and non-human agency, particularly in the work of Jane Bennett and Bruno Latour. But their reliance on an insufficiently questioned picture of human agency continues to undermine their attempts to make sense of non-human agency, and to think anew the relation between human and non-human agency, a task which has become all the more urgent as we come to grips with the implications of the Anthropocene. In this paper, I propose an alternative conception of agency that better captures what is distinctive to both human and non-human agency.

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Nikolas Kompridis

Nikolas Kompridis
Visting Scholar 

Centre for Ethics

Wed, Jan 15, 2020
12:30 PM - 02:00 PM
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin