Abstract
The critique of human exceptionalism has necessarily led to a renewed questioning of the status of “life” systems more generally. Pursuing a radical deconstruction of those Cartesian dualisms that continue to infiltrate theoretical discourse – mind-body, human-animal, and technology-life – has not merely decentered western anthropology (or re-centered it within a global Anthropocene), but has altered the entire genealogy within which both humanism and its various posts- had previously been conceptualized. The term “entropology,” having begun as a marginal allusion by Claude Lévi-Strauss to a future anthropology of dissipation, has come to far exceed the trajectory laid down for it by structuralism. Indeed, we may go so far as to argue (Armand, Incendiary devices: discourses of the other. Karolinum, Prague, 1993: 135ff; Armand, Technē. Charles University, Prague, 1997: 182ff) that any “entropology” must deconstruct the logic not only of the anthropos but also of (its) dissipation (or loss of plenitude) – requiring that entropy, too, be thought not as a simple “negation” of life (including its human artifacts) but as evolutionary technē, contiguous with the inaugurating and driving force of whatever can be brought under the rubric of “life” itself.
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Acknowledgments
This work was supported by the European Regional Development Fund Project “Creativity and Adaptability as Conditions of the Success of Europe in an Interrelated World” (No. CZ.02.1.01/0.0/0.0/16_019/0000734).
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Armand, L. (2022). Entropology. In: Herbrechter, S., Callus, I., Rossini, M., Grech, M., de Bruin-Molé, M., John Müller, C. (eds) Palgrave Handbook of Critical Posthumanism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-42681-1_56-1
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