This article is an expanded commentary on the essay “The Social Life of ‘Scaffolds’: Examining Human Rights in Regenerative Medicine.” In discussing the limits and possibilities of the essay, this commentary suggests that problematizing scaffolds in regenerative medicine as a kind of infrastructure rather than prosthetic opens the way for an understanding of the genesis of regenerative assemblages in ways that help to reframe inherent issues of human rights. Ultimately, it proposes the notion of experimental ecologies as a way of (...) thinking about an ethically driven productive entanglement of bodies, environments, and technology. (shrink)

Biomimicry is a rising popular ecology movement and method that urges the derivation of innovative and environmentally sound design from organic systems. This essay explores the notion of nature in biomimicry as articulated by the movement’s founder, Janine Benyus, and the nature of biomimicry as practiced by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology media ecologist Neri Oxman. Benyus’s approach, I show, promotes biomimicry as a science of nature in which nature is treated as a source for innovative design that can be (...) emulated in technological apparatus. Such an approach is problematic, I argue, for its valorization of organic form, which results in both a rigid system of ethics demanding absolute separation of nature and technology. By contrast, Oxman’s work, I show, pursues biomimicry as a technology of nature. In so doing, I argue, it mobilizes a neomaterialist style of interaction with organic materials that ultimately enjoins a radically different way of thinking nature, technology, and technoethics. (shrink)

Diese Biographie entwirft ein neuartiges Bild von einem der bedeutendsten Denker des 20. Jahrhunderts. Erstmals werden darin die reichen Editionen kürzerer Texte und Vorlesungen Michel Foucaults, die seit Mitte der 1990er Jahre entstanden sind, biographisch ausgewertet und für neue Einsichten in den Zusammenhang von Leben und Werk des einflussreichen Theoretikers fruchtbar gemacht. Stärker als die gängigen biographischen Deutungen lässt diese Biographie Foucaults Texte und seine Stimme selbst sprechen und wird so einem Leben, das im Medium des Denkens nach Freiheit strebte, (...) in besonderer Weise gerecht. (shrink)