Critical Naturalism: A Quantum Mechanical Ethics

Abstract

Rereading Derrida, both Donna Haraway and Karen Barad are in search for an ethics that is not based on critique but that offers an affirmative alternative to the dualist construction of naturalism today. Whereas Haraway practices this ethics mainly by reading contemporary biology into the humanities, Barad proposes us to take a closer look at natural sciences as a whole (with an emphasis on (quantum) physics). Her quantum mechanics is a critical naturalism is a posthuman feminism. Her deconstructive ethics immanently practices a critical naturalism that is a welcome and responsible alternative to the dualist theories of nature that dominate the discussion today. Correlations have physical reality; that which they correlate does not. (N. David Mermin 753, emphasis removed) Deconstructive Critique [1] In an interview with Karen Barad undertaken by Iris van der Tuin and myself, the mention of the word 'critique', as part of an extensive question that had little to do with this concept, caused her to make a strong statement against the status of critique in the Humanities today: