Thea Madeleine Potter

As we face the rise of a new global technocracy, an exorbitant transfer of wealth and manipulation on a mass scale under the auspices of ‘protecting human health’, paralleled with ecological devastation and the theft of the global commons in the name of a ‘green revolution’, an investigation into the origins of boundaries, the significance of matter in human language and the conceptual and material limits of the market is timely if not essential. All the more so as these globalist developments are being underwritten by the legally mandated (and potentially even forced) desecration of human bodily integrity and the permanent establishment of a state of exception in which human technologies are used to administer, monitor and rule over all life. Where are the boundaries between nature and human, if there are any? Or what about the distinction between human and nonhuman? Plants have been shown to make decisions, animals and birds make use of tools. As developments in biology lead us closer to the realisation that distinguishing humans from all other creatures on account of the possession of ‘reason’, ‘language’ or ‘psyche’ is nothing more than a figment of our imagination with no actual biological evidence, the last domain to remain exclusively beyond he realm of reason is the lithic. ‘The stone is worldless’ said Martin Heidegger, and his statement has remained without critique, at least not in regards to the stone. However, ancient religions (and possibly even living ones) attributed life to the stone. In the Greek mythological tradition Niobe transformed into rock and continued to weep tears of grief, the stones that built the walls of Thebes moved of their own volition to the sound of Amphion’s lyre, and of course there is Sisyphus’ stone always rolling down on top of him only to be pushed up again.

Normal 0 0 1 128 734 6 1 901 11.1539 0 0 0 A thrown stone raises the question of the position of authority and does so only by remarking us as responsible for our limits and their transgression, but it also raises the problem of boundaries. Are they natural, or are they inscribed in us? In Ancient Athens, boundary-stones were inscribed with a word that raises the problem of definition by implicating a coincidence of meanings. These stones were never supposed to mark a boundary as an adamantine barrier proscribing transgression from one side to the other. And yet they did not for all that cease to be and mark a boundary. Although the identity between the stone and the word for boundary does not provide any answers as to how boundaries should be maintained or dissolved, it does raise the problem of the relation that the boundary engenders and the bond that it poses between two sides as a question of hospitality