Amy McLachlan (Field Museum, Chicago)

Substituting a Life in Common: Surrogation and Sense-Work with Uitoto Plant Workers

This paper considers the ethical implications of a capacity that I provisionally call ‘surrogation’: the capacity to bear, or to carry, for another, or, a demand of another to bear or carry something in them that is not of them. This figure emerges as a double-edged and uncanny mode of relation-making work among Uitoto plant healers living in occupied rainforest territories, or displaced to the Colombian capital of Bogotá. Relations of ‘surrogation’ here animate quotidian care and curing work across sensory, affective, chemical, reproductive, and narrative registers. This paper considers the sensory work of Uitoto desplazados to re-make extended kin bodies with moral sensoria in common, through transforming modes of adoptive kin-making with and through plants, and through curing work newly attuned to the uncanny and unknowable relations that constitute the historical and political ecologies of occupied Uitoto territory. As experimental and improvised modes of constituting bodies in common, of claiming and sustaining distributed sensory states or collective embodiments, Uitoto practices of aesthetic surrogation suggest a possible ethics of engagement in the space between unbearable histories and untenable futures.
Keywords: surrogation, affect, sensorium, psychoanalysis, politics

Simon Hajdini (University of Ljubljana)

A Lamellar Ecology of Breastfeeding: The Curious Case of the Hungry Nose

For Freud, breastfeeding is not really about feeding—the enjoyment of sucking trumps any need for taking nourishment. Sucking is incremental to feeding, yet the drive is only after sucking as the excremental increment of feeding. Recent empirical studies support Freud’s arguably antiquarian views, recasting breastfeeding as an occult practice: like ticks, neonates are drawn to the breast by the smell (and not by hunger) and find satisfaction in sucking (and not in taking nourishment). The paper unpacks the significance of the curious case of the hungry nose for a psychoanalytically infused philosophical concept of lamellar ecology.
Keywords: breastfeeding, olfaction, sexuality, psychoanalysis