Politik der Antwort. Zum Verhältnis von Politik und Ethik in Neuen Materialismen

In debates on new materialisms, politics is usually discussed with a reference to the distinction between political materiality and material politics. The former expresses the description of matter as agentic, that is, as political in the sense that it stabilizes and destabilizes social phenomena. In contrast, the latter formulates programs for a politics and in some cases political systems that take the material and non-human actors into account. It is important to see, however, that many positions within the heterogeneous new materialisms not only engage with politics but also with ethics. The article explores how the relation between politics and ethics is thought in two conceptions: the micropolitics of Rosi Braidotti and the cosmopolitics of Isabelle Stengers. In a consideration of their accounts the article carves out a perspective of a politics of response as programmatic in new materialisms. This positive reference to a responding in and with the world is a productive orientation for a post-anthropocentric politics. The notion of response, however, also tends to a possessive gesture that fails in theorizing antagonisms. This tendency prospectively should be addressed from a radical democratic perspective.