Story Telling for Earthly Survival

Donna Haraway is one of the strongest and most relevant voices of our age, someone who enables us to think about what is happening to us today by, as I wrote on the occasion of the translation into French of one her books, “producing hope on the brink of the abyss”. She embodies today what can be described as “ecosophical” thinking – acute, demanding, not taking the easy route, but conveying a propositional power we desperately need.

Admittedly Haraway is only starting now to be translated into French, and this delay can be attributed in part to the difficulty of her language. But when she talks, the intensity, humour and sincerity she expresses make this difficulty disappear. Fabrizio Terranova’s film should be a real revelation to anyone who finds her a difficult writer, and should be shown in several places, including research centres and anywhere in the world where tomorrow’s thinking is being worked on.

Fabrizio Terranova’s cinematic choice, a pseudo-realist but discretely fictional one, corresponds very precisely to the mode of presence that makes this portrait a model of integrity. Neither taking over nor offering a neutral opinion, it is a device that constrains Haraway no more than it constrained Josée Andréi, the subject of his first, admirable film, but leaves them to use their own mode of being honest and entrusts in the work of the image the responsibility of turning this recorded document into a co-created documentary work. I am profoundly grateful to this director for knowing how to use his talent, his intelligence and his sensitivity to serve what will be a real transmission of intelligence and emotion. I would also like to emphasise the exceptional confidence that he was able to inspire in Haraway, whose recorded lectures are so far all we know about her, allowing her to give free rein to a “thought” live.

Isabelle Stengers