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Paper short abstract:

As a case study of ’natural’ enmity, the paper approaches cancer critically as an effect of Anthropocene necropolitics, but it also suggests an undoing of the ’enemy’ image through a posthumanist, new materialist and immanence philosophical framing of cancer.

Paper long abstract:

The presentation will draw on my present research on cancer ecologies, and discuss how cancer spells out multilayered aspects of ’nature as enemy’ discourses and their relation to material practices. Firstly, I focus critically on the discrepancy between mainstream cancer discourses, focused on ’war’ against a ’natural enemy’, instead offering an ecological understanding of cancer as primarily a disease, produced by Anthropocene necropolitics, in particular the tsunami of carcinogens that have been spread all over the planet as part of the chemicalization of capitalist production, agriculture , household practices as well as modern war technologies since WWII. I foreground how public anti-cancer campaigns testify to this discrepancy, insofar as they most often are directed towards socalled lifestyle factors (smoking, drinking and obesity), while human-induced carcinogenic toxification of enviroments are kept in the background as reason for the current worldwide cancer epidemic. Secondly, I discuss how cancer, in contrast to ’attacks’ from viruses and bacteria that are perceived by human subjects as coming from ’outside’, are threatening human self/other distinctions, when modern cancer biology tells us that cancerous processes are set in motion by our own cells going awry (being blocked in performing apoptosis, programmed cell death). I shall make clear how cancer, in this sense, comes to stand out as a very ’intimate enemy’. Thirdly, I shall philosophically undo the ’enemy’ image, reontologizing cancer within a posthumanist, new materialist and immanence philosophical framing of life/death, becoming/decomposition as intense, dynamic continua rather than opposites.