How things exceed their relations : toward an object-oriented symbiosis

Abstract

This article rereads the “symbiotic turn” in the Humanities, showing how the widespread adoption of symbiosis as an ontological paradigm tends to slide into relationism, where entities are entirely constituted by their relations. Through a discussion of Lynn Margulis (1991), Donna J. Haraway (2008, 2016), Scott F. Gilbert (2012), Anna Tsing (2015), and Timothy Morton (2018), this article argues that this otherwise productive framework risks dissolving the autonomy and alterity of organisms. To overcome this limit, the paper proposes a model of Object-Oriented Symbiosis grounded in the philosophy of Graham Harman. On this view, symbiosis is relational but not relationist: interactions are selective, punctuated, and capable of generating emergent unities with retroactive effects, without exhausting their relata. Through the concepts of vicarious causation and allure, symbiosis becomes the mechanism explaining how autonomous entities can form real and irreversible alliances without collapsing into an immanent relational totality.