Abstract

GRASSI, Martín. Living on one’s own: the paradigm of life as autarchy in Western biology. Franciscanum [online]. 2021, vol.63, n.176, pp.2-2.  Epub Oct 26, 2021. ISSN 0120-1468.  https://doi.org/10.21500/01201468.4993.

The living body has been defined in our Western culture by its capacity of self- regulation and self-administration, and also by its strategies towards self-preservation. Under the general idea of self-organization, the living being must face the imminent threat of its own decomposition. Hence, the biological theories seem to be under the spell of death when considering life. Due to this kind of obsession about self-preservation, biology has left aside the categories of relationality and alterity, as being something accidental to the definition of life. In a way, that which is not an organic part of the living body, that which is alien to its own dynamics, seems to be a deadly threat. In order to show this continuity in Western biology, I will examine the concept of pneuma/spiritus in Galenic physiology and its aftermath in Descartes, the figure of animal economy forwarded by the Montpellier School, and the concepts of modern physiology, such as organism, metabolism, homeostasis and autopoiesis. By reading these different traditions and biological theories under the hypothesis that they are all dependent on the definition of life as autarchy, I wish to show the need to deconstruct this paradigm so we can think on alterity and relationality without subsuming them into the logic of unity and totalization proper to the metaphor of organization.

Keywords : Life; Autarchy; Spiritus; Organism; Metabolism.

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