Am I A Posthuman Volunteer? 141-156

Abstract

In-between the constructive-transformative practices of the modern human, volunteering was conceived as an encouragement of the expression of the naivety of the human personality. As such, the voluntarist molding happens directly, or through the indirect cultivation of the characteristics associated with it: altruism, benevolence, helping, the common good, etc. Recently, the exercise of volunteering has become quasi-obligatory to the Western/Nordic human identity construction, acquiring elements of self-validation, egoism, neo-colonialism, etc.; thus maintaining structural relations of power, discrimination, and stereotypical construction. By practicing goal-oriented volunteering, it becomes one of the most important contemporary forces of idea consolidation and redistribution, from and to the West/North. The opposite face of recent volunteering practices is found in its posthuman character, decentering humans as primary beneficiaries, thus including animals, plants, the environment, inert or unconscious. This posthuman reorientation of volunteering is bifid, because it also allows the beneficiaries of volunteering to be its practitioners. The text explores the intertwined relationship between volunteering and posthumanism, filtered through an ethics of care and recognition for our nonhuman partners. The analysis of the phenomenology of the association of volunteering with nonhuman elements is interesting because it could explain the choices of an asocial constitution of life. After giving volunteering a working definition, I will render its perception within human social practices, peaking with an analysis of plant volunteering, that gets exemplified through a case study. My conclusions attempt to answer the question „Thus, what ought we do (as posthuman volunteers)?”.