ABSTRACT
If we follow Marx in assuming that species-being is always determined by specific social and historical conditions, we might wonder whether we have reached a stage at which the massive intervention into the natural order of things forces us to recognize the entanglement of the fate of humans with that of other species and therefore compels us to extend our sense of species-being to include all living species. Analyzing Robert J. Lifton’s notion of “species self” as an extension of the individual and communal self, I argue that we must extend the notion of species self to include other species as well as humans. This would mean facing the challenge of thinking of humans as transspecies beings—not in the sense of a posthuman transspecies reproduction but in the sense that humans are always already co-constructed in relation with other species. As corporeal, sensuous beings, humans share vulnerability and mortality with other species and are dependent on sustainable environments for their well-being. The extent to which human capitalist economies have threatened the life of a sustainable planet by exploiting its resources generates a particular responsibility and obligation to care. We are, in other words, at a historical conjuncture where our ethics of care needs to include transspecies care and our ecologies of mind and personhood need to become grounded in a sense of transspecies selves.
