Legacy documentation from institutional repositories:
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ECLB-E01-G/G03
Chapter 7:
The Unfinished Kin: Toward an Ethics of Wild Knowing
A Poetic,
Open-Ended Finale:
Knowledge as
an Endless Dialogue:
In a
world often clamouring for clear
answers and definitive truths, the
poetic, open-ended finale stands as
a small but defiant act of
rebellion. It resists the temptation
of the final word and instead
invites us to conceive the pursuit
of knowledge as a collective,
ever-unfolding process—wild,
vulnerable, and resonant. This
stance turns the notion of knowledge
as a closed possession on its head,
echoing Donna Haraway’s conception
of knowledge as a situated practice:
never final, always contingent upon
context and relationships.^1 In this
spirit, knowledge is no fixed
endpoint but an unfinished
dialogue—a choreography of seeking
where proximity and difference,
familiarity and otherness, are
constantly dancing together. The
“wildness” of this process denotes
the disorder, unpredictability, and
open-endedness that accompany any
serious pursuit of understanding.
This wildness is no romanticised
wilderness; rather, it is a precise
and radical admission of
complexity—an admission that
embraces vulnerability and leaves
space for what is yet to be
revealed.^2 The resonance spoken of
here points to a network of voices,
a mutual sounding that unfolds in
collective exchange.
As Isabelle
Stengers puts it, this resonance is
no echo in a void but a living
kinship, one that neither fixes
knowledge nor freezes it, but
continues to write and transform
it.^3 Thus, the open-ended finale is
not a sign of incompleteness as
deficiency but an aesthetic and
ethical posture. It is a promise
that recognises the limits of
knowledge while celebrating the joy
of joint exploration—always
beginning anew.
Footnotes:
1. Donna J. Haraway, Situated
Knowledges: The Science Question in
Feminism and the Privilege of
Partial Perspective, Feminist
Studies 14, no. 3 (1988): 575–599.
2. Anna Tsing, The Mushroom at the
End of the World: On the Possibility
of Life in Capitalist Ruins
(Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 2015).
3. Isabelle Stengers,
Thinking with Whitehead: A Free and
Wild Creation of Concepts, trans.
Michael Chase (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2011)