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Document Type
Text
Broad Creation Date
2024
Language
English
Location
Portland
Abstract
This dissertation identifies paths of escape from the familiar confines of care as presented by domesticated life. To this end I assert that the human capacity to care is a deeply rooted, creative impulse, which exceeds the visually governed human ontology. In other words, the human approach to the caring relationship presents certain self-centered and self-imposed limits which have served to truncate the relationship to care through the oppressive deployment of utility, roles, and stasis. I argue that wild care, in its a) visceral redolence, b) wavering grief, c) feral excess, and d) fetal potentiality, opens the threshold of human-being beyond the confines of its own domestication; that is to say, from caring for to being-with. By combining the hermeneutics of vital materialism and French surrealism within the ecosystem of the forest, I endeavor to build a new definition of care, which I term wild care. For the depth of the transformation necessary for wild care to emerge, the dynamics of decay and growth in the forest must be implemented into serious theoretical considerations. Hence, I introduce the following analytical concepts: the ambivalent loss, understood as wavering grief, that is a somatically inscribed and perpetually fluctuating state that opens the human threshold to encounter new ways of being;ferality, an ever present condition of the forest, that provides an escape from the captivity of domestic life and, in its excretive excess, bears the persistent residue of wild care; fetality–present in the womb of the woods, that is the most potent site of wild care which resists telos in favor of possibility, awakening the sense of being here, but not here yet. Being, then, as energy acting through material, therefore constantly breaks through the boundaries imposed by human perception, opening us to the wild side of care.
Disciplines
Arts and Humanities | Ecology and Evolutionary Biology | Philosophy
Publisher
Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts
City
Portland ME
Recommended Citation
Jones, Samantha Cherie Stanko, "Wild Care: A Vital Surrealist Inquiry on Loss in the Wood" (2024). Academic Research and Dissertations. 54.
https://digitalmaine.com/academic/54
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