Atmontology is also empathetic of the gap between bios (Life) and geos (Nonlife) as representing human consciousness’s inability to accommodate and reckon with the experiences of other Beings of both Life and Nonlife. That is why the figures of the Airy Imaginary, whether animated (the Fecund Cat) or inanimate (the Sea Cucumber), both admit under the interests and circumstances of biology, as to, somewhat, congregate some ontological propensities of what we might consider familiar (living, breathing, surviving) with those in which the large of humanity fails/refuses to imagine its cognitive participation (nonliving). Yet this mentality is, perhaps, littered with problematics. By accommodating the human’s inability to grasp gaps, do we inadvertently center it in this Airy Imaginary? Or, conversely, has the relentless criticism and refusal of anthropocentric consciousness by contemporary theorists become a feedback loop of futile negation and infinite readdress?

No, there are certainly critical practices that generatively reject anthropocentricity, those that invite us to look beyond the human, to look elsewhere and into radically different ecologies or spaces and places of possibility. Katheryn Yusoff and Anna Tsing do these in the form of deeply researched and richly illustrated case studies, while Catherine Malibou extrapolates and observes the site of the brain in the topography of the Anthropocene. Others, such as Paul B. Preciado and Karen Barad, investigate or experience the queer body as the site of possibility within and beyond the human. i argue, here, that such practices of investigation, of looking in/to Other forms of surviving, thriving, living, do not escape the tendency to place the human into the mess, and that, perhaps, this looking in/to, or formally, this attentive empiricism, while laced with histories of colonial or postcolonial exploration and their violent curiosities, affords a space in which the human, in collaborating with or divulging in its myriad abjections, is most prone to its own destabilization.

For one, i am not necessarily saying the poststructuralist aim to destabilize the human is a means of justifying the violence of the anthropocentricity of exploration. It is pertinent, however, that we acknowledge, or even tolerate the notion that the dispersion of the human across newly procured terrains involves and often requires of its own de/re-composition, which is to also say a sort of preservation. Two, it might be somewhat generative to note that even in instances where we foreground or accredit the agency of the nonhuman, such as in Jane Bennet’s Vibrant Matter, we often do so under the con/perceptual structures of human language and/or thought. Indeed, Bennet remains privy to these problematics as she ventures briefly into Lucretius’s intimately turbulent “primordial swerves,” surmising an ancient atomism that refuses universal determinism, embraces chanciness, and “affirms that so-called inanimate things have a life” (2).

In regards to my titular question—is bios anthropocentric?—i am mainly focused on the third principle, Lucretius’s optimistic vitalism, as intertwined with his “quests for the thing itself” (2). What is a thing? How do we apprehend a thing? And with what do we fill the gap that divaricates the inter-ontological differences between the human and the thing? A Lucretian vitalist, for instance, might employ thought-tactics enframed by curiosity and language in an attempt to realize/enliven the inanimate, to breath life into the thing. But what is life (bios) vis-à-vis some thing that does not speak or interpret within terms humans can understand? How can we know what is ‘truly’ or ‘essentially’ alive if aliveness is expressed, described, and somewhat determined within the structures of the human, only to be further projected onto ex-humans? Does the vitalist’s assignment of aliveness to things ultimately constitute an attempt to close distance on them, to capture or conceptualize them, to colonize them? Are things easier to apprehend, to correspond with, if they are ‘alive?’ Aren’t humans things? my profusion of critical, or overtly cynical, inquiry is, perhaps, best encapsulated by Bennet’s rather succinct and effortless response to the Lucretian “quest” and its failure: “there is…no way for us to grasp or know [the thing itself], for the thing is always already humanized; its object status arises at the very instant something comes into our awareness” (2).

Indeed, the contemporary attempt to escape the human has posed challenges within itself and ultimately fails in its attempt to drown Man as he continually and tenaciously resurfaces, breaking the water. In the words of Fred Moten, “the question here concerns the inevitability of such reproduction even in the denial of it… a refusal of recitation that reproduces what it refuses” (5). We must, therefore, acknowledge the human in order to acknowledge the flaw or lack in its capacity to apprehend reality, in order to recognize its mode(s) of perception as different from those of Other ontologies and ecologies. Acknowledging this lack opens space for unknowability and its infinite and variant possibilities; it makes room for gaps. The object of atmontology is, therefore, not to centralize about the human, but rather, to leave it some breathing room, or, perhaps, to give it side-eye. So let us obsequiously entertain its limitations, incongruences and collusions. Let us be obsequious, for once! And let us give it the attention it craves, sarcastically, even sadistically so.

While the Airy Imaginary and its figures accommodate the limits of human comprehension in their leaning towards Life, they also allow for fluid yet graceless transpositions of the human onto queer animalities (3). They shift the denotations of anthropomorphism, from the figuration of anthropocentric features in nonhumans to terms more akin to those such as “geomorphic,” in which ‘morphing’ occurs within the prefixal subject, rather than around or under it. Anthropomorphism, here, is not so much “the attribution of human characteristics or behavior to a god, animal, or object,” but is the transformation or mutation of humans as conjured or enacted by nonhuman animals; in this Airy Imaginary, queer animalities redirect and reconfigure the analytics of our concepts and materials to re-see and recreate, respectively, the manners and modes in which Man lives, breaths, and survives via a pragmatics of conceptual proximity—a biotic homology (1, 2).