Reframing Human Individuality as Radically Relational
摘要
This second chapter contingently theorizes the conceptual tool called the Radical Relational Individual (RRI) which can help us modern humans think about ourselves, in awareness of our own embodiment, embeddedness, and entanglement, rather than in terms of abstract-liberal individuality, and explores the latter notion’s coloniality. RRI is presented as a clumsy and lovable “decolonial golem” that is displaced from being the object of a cult as in the “cult of individuality,” and that aspires to freedom. The chapter explains why abstract-liberal individuality does not yield freedom, but an illusion of freedom for embodied humans. RRI is proposed as an entity capable of autonomous agency, yet in clear awareness of its own embodied, embedded, and entangled situation in deep relationality and interdependence with people as well as the more-than-human.