Being Human in a More-Than-Human World: Between a Silence Catalyst for (Re)Aestheticization and an Art Catalyst for Relationships

The contribution moves from highlighting how, in the context of Michel Serres’ and posthumanism’s proposal of rethinking the human and the world in a perspective of inter-implication and universal co-belonging, silence (of the human word) assumes the function of a catalyst for the recognition/re-aestheticization of the human body in its sensory-aesthetic-cognitive-relational-hybrid dimensionality, and, with and for it, of the world in its agency (including artistic). Within the framework of this perspective, the investigation thus proposes a reading of art as a relation/catalyzer of relations, that is, as a (re)activation of positive relations of the human with and for a world that reveals itself to be increasingly hyper-complex, that is, more-than-human, in the continuity/inseparability of nature and culture. Taking Serresian ideas on artistic practices as non(only) human forms of expression and posthumanist “isomorphic” positions on non-human agency as tools, the research then highlights the “more-than-human” scope of art and the fact that artistic practices are responsive actions. So much so that, the human being emerges as co-agent and, of course, co-owner.