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Relationality: An Emergent Politics of Life Beyond the Human
This important new book argues that at the root of the contemporary crisis of climate, energy, food, inequality, and meaning is a certain core presupposition that structures the ways in which we live, think, act and design : the assumption of dualism, or the fundamental separateness of things.
The authors contend that the key to constructing livable worlds lies in the cultivation of ways of knowing and acting based on a profound awareness of the fundamental interdependence of everything that exists – what they refer to as relationality . This shift in paradigm is necessary for healing our bodies, ecosystems, cities, and the planet at large.
The book follows two interwoven threads of on the one hand, it explains and exemplifies the modes of operation and the dire consequences of non-relational living; on the other, it elucidates the nature of relationality and explores how it is embodied in transformative practices in multiple spheres of life.
The authors provide an instructive account of the philosophical, scientific, social, and political sources of relational theory and action, with the aim of illuminating the transition from living within seemingly ineluctable 'toxic loops' of unrelational living (based on ontological dualism), to living within 'relational weaves' which we might co-create with multiple human and nonhuman others.
The authors contend that the key to constructing livable worlds lies in the cultivation of ways of knowing and acting based on a profound awareness of the fundamental interdependence of everything that exists – what they refer to as relationality . This shift in paradigm is necessary for healing our bodies, ecosystems, cities, and the planet at large.
The book follows two interwoven threads of on the one hand, it explains and exemplifies the modes of operation and the dire consequences of non-relational living; on the other, it elucidates the nature of relationality and explores how it is embodied in transformative practices in multiple spheres of life.
The authors provide an instructive account of the philosophical, scientific, social, and political sources of relational theory and action, with the aim of illuminating the transition from living within seemingly ineluctable 'toxic loops' of unrelational living (based on ontological dualism), to living within 'relational weaves' which we might co-create with multiple human and nonhuman others.
232 pages, Hardcover
Published June 13, 2024
About the author
Arturo Escobar
58 books86 followersArturo Escobar is the Kenan Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. His most recent book is Territories of Difference.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
May 5, 2026
This is my 1000th book review on GR.
It has taken me a little over 10 years (including two graduate degrees) to get here. As such, it feels like an important milestone for me (however arbitrary).
So I wanted to pick a really good book.
And this one really delivers.
It’s about the essentially non-dual and fundamentally interdependent nature of being.
And more importantly. How this insight can and should inform social, creative, spiritual and political praxis (i.e., the intersection of theory/practice).
Relationality argues that the modern Euro-Capitalist world is organized by a false myth: that humans are 1: separate individuals; 2: living in a world of scarcity, competition; and 3: outside of or somehow apart from nature.
Expanding upon this.
The authors offer the following.
THE DUALISTIC MYTH OF OURSELVES AS INDIVIDUALS:
I am an individual; I was born in a family from two parents, having a particular sex. I am a unique human with a personality, a life cycle, choices to make, options to take; I am not nature, nature is “out there.” Given that scarcity is the iron law of life, my options and choices will be determined by the state of the economy and the resources, commodities, properties, and opportunities I might be able to command in the market (food market, education market, job market, health market, house market, religion market …), which is where I find all the tools and elements for making my life. So, I better listen to the economists and the scientists for information and guidance; even if they might get it wrong sometimes, their knowledge is the only reliable way to know the world and plan ahead. This is what being rational, secular, and realistic is all about: adopting as my own the picture of the world given to us by science, a world that is always external to us, which moves around us without our participation in it, really, because we live within a single world and objective reality, even if different societies might have different beliefs about it, or different “worldviews.” And if there is one real, then there surely must be one possible, or at least a preferable possible, which it is the best we, rational
people, can do to control the conditions of our lives … because science is true, and true is the fact that we live in market-driven societies, and that we are individuals endowed with rights and choice who live in national societies with their institutions and laws, which we can opt to change through a democratic process.
The authors argue that this is not just a moral, existential, practical or political issue but an ontological one.
For those of you who are unfamiliar with this term. Ontological means: relating to the nature of being, reality, or what exists. In simpler terms, an ontological question asks: What kind of thing is this, really? What is its basic nature?
And a given ontology is basically an answer to that question.
And the dominant modern ontology assumes humans are individual and somehow distinct from nature and existence.
Modernist Ontological Dualisms:
The authors assert that ontological “dualism”, is the foundation of the dominant form of Euro-modernity.
The authors emphasize three fundamental dualisms in the consolidation of Euro-modernity:
1: the divide between us/them; 2: the divide between humans/nonhumans; 3: the divide between subject/object.
According to the authors, these three major dualisms create many other divides, such as life/matter, reason/emotion, sacred/profane, individual/collective, science/non-science, fact/fiction, and developed/underdeveloped.
The problem is that these binaries often push aside important parts of reality, including emotion, spirituality, embodied experience, place, nonhuman life, death, and forms of knowledge outside Western science.
The authors argue that this dualistic worldview also supports the modern idea that there is one single reality with many different cultural “interpretations”.
This view may seem reasonable, but it carries a hidden assumption: that the modern West (global north) alone can objectively understand reality because it possesses universal science.
The authors fundamentally disagree.
They counter argure that all things and beings (including so-called humans) do not exist independently first and then relate, but are fundamental constituted through relationships.
In other words. All beings and the environment as a whole are in fact non-dual and interdependent.
The authors further assert that the false myth of modernity, which assumes that humans are separate from others and independent from the environment enables (or rather causes) extractive, capitalist systems of elitist exploitation and its endemic variates of oppression.
For the authors, the struggle is not only over policy or power, but over what is considered real, and valid and worthy.
The authors call politics that question how different assumptions about reality shape social life, institutional policy, access to the commons and power over others as - ontological politics.
Ontological political movements are not just resisting injustice, but are more broadly interested in enacting different worlds and different ways of see/being.
Furthermore, (and for me perhaps most importantly) the authors assert that awakening to non-dual awareness within is the badly needed missing element that engenders a new way forward. I completely agree.
Although the authors did not explicitly rewrite the The Myth of Ourselves as Individuals according to the relational ontology - but if they did. It might go something like this….
THE NON-DUAL RELATIONAL ONTOLOGY:
I am not an isolated individual. I arise within relationships: with parents and ancestors, with culture and history, with land, language, community, and the more-than-human world. What I call “myself” is not a sealed unit but a living knot of interdependence, shaped by countless visible and invisible conditions. I do not stand outside nature, because I am one expression of nature’s ongoing life. My life is not made only through private choice in a field of scarcity and competition. It is made through participation, reciprocity, care, inheritance, and mutual becoming. The food I eat, the words I speak, the knowledge I use, the shelter I inhabit, the technologies I depend on, and the meanings I live by are all relational achievements. They come from webs of labor, ecology, memory, struggle, and gift. My flourishing cannot be separated from the flourishing of the larger wholes that sustain me. Reality is not simply “out there,” finished and external, waiting to be mastered by detached observers. I participate in bringing worlds forth through perception, story, practice, and relation. Knowledge, then, is not only control over an objective world but also attunement to the living processes of which I am a part. To be rational is not to deny relationship, feeling, embodiment, or spirit, but to recognize that none of us exists alone and that every way of knowing carries consequences for the worlds we help create. If there is no separately existing individual, then there is no private future that can be secured apart from the whole. My freedom is entangled with the freedom of others. My safety depends on shared conditions of care. My well-being depends on the well-being of human and more-than-human worlds alike. Politics, therefore, is not merely the management of competing interests among separate selves; it is the ongoing ethical work of shaping relations so that life can continue, deepen, and flourish. I am a person in relations. I am because others are. I become through participation in a world that is also becoming. The task of life is not to dominate, extract, and secure advantage for a separate self, but to learn how to belong, how to care, how to create responsibly, and how to take part in the remaking of shared worlds.
SLIPPAGE
The authors asscert that one of the main challenges to ontological politics is slippage.
Slippage is what happens when people briefly encounter or enact that deeper relational change, but then interpret it or evaluate it through the dominant modern worldview and subsequently fall back into familiar assumptions.
The authors say these are not just ideological disagreements or ordinary mistakes. They are “slipping between different versions, or planes, of reality.” In other words, a relational opening appears, but people quickly translate it back into modern categories, so its transformative force gets lost.
They identify four major slippages:
1: misunderstanding movements because of narrow ideas of success and failure; 2: folding difference back into dualism; 3: reenacting the individual/collective split, and 4: holding onto a good-versus-bad framework that flattens complexity.
Their larger point is that relational politics often emerges, gets celebrated, and then gets denounced as ineffective or as failure because people evaluate it using modernist dualistic assumptions about what politics is supposed to look like.
That denouncement does real damage: it weakens the visibility and durability of the other story that had begun to appear. So the task is not only to practice relationality, but to narrate it, recognize it, and give it shared meaning before it collapses back into the dominant frame.
Anyway.
That’s about all I got for y’all.
This review simply can’t do this amazing book justice. If anything about the above sounds remotely interesting/exciting, then just go, right now and get/read it.
5/5 Non-Dual, Interdependent Stars ⭐️
It has taken me a little over 10 years (including two graduate degrees) to get here. As such, it feels like an important milestone for me (however arbitrary).
So I wanted to pick a really good book.
And this one really delivers.
It’s about the essentially non-dual and fundamentally interdependent nature of being.
And more importantly. How this insight can and should inform social, creative, spiritual and political praxis (i.e., the intersection of theory/practice).
Relationality argues that the modern Euro-Capitalist world is organized by a false myth: that humans are 1: separate individuals; 2: living in a world of scarcity, competition; and 3: outside of or somehow apart from nature.
Expanding upon this.
The authors offer the following.
THE DUALISTIC MYTH OF OURSELVES AS INDIVIDUALS:
I am an individual; I was born in a family from two parents, having a particular sex. I am a unique human with a personality, a life cycle, choices to make, options to take; I am not nature, nature is “out there.” Given that scarcity is the iron law of life, my options and choices will be determined by the state of the economy and the resources, commodities, properties, and opportunities I might be able to command in the market (food market, education market, job market, health market, house market, religion market …), which is where I find all the tools and elements for making my life. So, I better listen to the economists and the scientists for information and guidance; even if they might get it wrong sometimes, their knowledge is the only reliable way to know the world and plan ahead. This is what being rational, secular, and realistic is all about: adopting as my own the picture of the world given to us by science, a world that is always external to us, which moves around us without our participation in it, really, because we live within a single world and objective reality, even if different societies might have different beliefs about it, or different “worldviews.” And if there is one real, then there surely must be one possible, or at least a preferable possible, which it is the best we, rational
people, can do to control the conditions of our lives … because science is true, and true is the fact that we live in market-driven societies, and that we are individuals endowed with rights and choice who live in national societies with their institutions and laws, which we can opt to change through a democratic process.
The authors argue that this is not just a moral, existential, practical or political issue but an ontological one.
For those of you who are unfamiliar with this term. Ontological means: relating to the nature of being, reality, or what exists. In simpler terms, an ontological question asks: What kind of thing is this, really? What is its basic nature?
And a given ontology is basically an answer to that question.
And the dominant modern ontology assumes humans are individual and somehow distinct from nature and existence.
Modernist Ontological Dualisms:
The authors assert that ontological “dualism”, is the foundation of the dominant form of Euro-modernity.
The authors emphasize three fundamental dualisms in the consolidation of Euro-modernity:
1: the divide between us/them; 2: the divide between humans/nonhumans; 3: the divide between subject/object.
According to the authors, these three major dualisms create many other divides, such as life/matter, reason/emotion, sacred/profane, individual/collective, science/non-science, fact/fiction, and developed/underdeveloped.
The problem is that these binaries often push aside important parts of reality, including emotion, spirituality, embodied experience, place, nonhuman life, death, and forms of knowledge outside Western science.
The authors argue that this dualistic worldview also supports the modern idea that there is one single reality with many different cultural “interpretations”.
This view may seem reasonable, but it carries a hidden assumption: that the modern West (global north) alone can objectively understand reality because it possesses universal science.
The authors fundamentally disagree.
They counter argure that all things and beings (including so-called humans) do not exist independently first and then relate, but are fundamental constituted through relationships.
In other words. All beings and the environment as a whole are in fact non-dual and interdependent.
The authors further assert that the false myth of modernity, which assumes that humans are separate from others and independent from the environment enables (or rather causes) extractive, capitalist systems of elitist exploitation and its endemic variates of oppression.
For the authors, the struggle is not only over policy or power, but over what is considered real, and valid and worthy.
The authors call politics that question how different assumptions about reality shape social life, institutional policy, access to the commons and power over others as - ontological politics.
Ontological political movements are not just resisting injustice, but are more broadly interested in enacting different worlds and different ways of see/being.
Furthermore, (and for me perhaps most importantly) the authors assert that awakening to non-dual awareness within is the badly needed missing element that engenders a new way forward. I completely agree.
Although the authors did not explicitly rewrite the The Myth of Ourselves as Individuals according to the relational ontology - but if they did. It might go something like this….
THE NON-DUAL RELATIONAL ONTOLOGY:
I am not an isolated individual. I arise within relationships: with parents and ancestors, with culture and history, with land, language, community, and the more-than-human world. What I call “myself” is not a sealed unit but a living knot of interdependence, shaped by countless visible and invisible conditions. I do not stand outside nature, because I am one expression of nature’s ongoing life. My life is not made only through private choice in a field of scarcity and competition. It is made through participation, reciprocity, care, inheritance, and mutual becoming. The food I eat, the words I speak, the knowledge I use, the shelter I inhabit, the technologies I depend on, and the meanings I live by are all relational achievements. They come from webs of labor, ecology, memory, struggle, and gift. My flourishing cannot be separated from the flourishing of the larger wholes that sustain me. Reality is not simply “out there,” finished and external, waiting to be mastered by detached observers. I participate in bringing worlds forth through perception, story, practice, and relation. Knowledge, then, is not only control over an objective world but also attunement to the living processes of which I am a part. To be rational is not to deny relationship, feeling, embodiment, or spirit, but to recognize that none of us exists alone and that every way of knowing carries consequences for the worlds we help create. If there is no separately existing individual, then there is no private future that can be secured apart from the whole. My freedom is entangled with the freedom of others. My safety depends on shared conditions of care. My well-being depends on the well-being of human and more-than-human worlds alike. Politics, therefore, is not merely the management of competing interests among separate selves; it is the ongoing ethical work of shaping relations so that life can continue, deepen, and flourish. I am a person in relations. I am because others are. I become through participation in a world that is also becoming. The task of life is not to dominate, extract, and secure advantage for a separate self, but to learn how to belong, how to care, how to create responsibly, and how to take part in the remaking of shared worlds.
SLIPPAGE
The authors asscert that one of the main challenges to ontological politics is slippage.
Slippage is what happens when people briefly encounter or enact that deeper relational change, but then interpret it or evaluate it through the dominant modern worldview and subsequently fall back into familiar assumptions.
The authors say these are not just ideological disagreements or ordinary mistakes. They are “slipping between different versions, or planes, of reality.” In other words, a relational opening appears, but people quickly translate it back into modern categories, so its transformative force gets lost.
They identify four major slippages:
1: misunderstanding movements because of narrow ideas of success and failure; 2: folding difference back into dualism; 3: reenacting the individual/collective split, and 4: holding onto a good-versus-bad framework that flattens complexity.
Their larger point is that relational politics often emerges, gets celebrated, and then gets denounced as ineffective or as failure because people evaluate it using modernist dualistic assumptions about what politics is supposed to look like.
That denouncement does real damage: it weakens the visibility and durability of the other story that had begun to appear. So the task is not only to practice relationality, but to narrate it, recognize it, and give it shared meaning before it collapses back into the dominant frame.
Anyway.
That’s about all I got for y’all.
This review simply can’t do this amazing book justice. If anything about the above sounds remotely interesting/exciting, then just go, right now and get/read it.
5/5 Non-Dual, Interdependent Stars ⭐️
December 29, 2024
Among one of the best books that I read. It will provide everyone with power to dream this world better. The book states it well that “the belief in the existence of “the Individual” has been one of modernity’s greatest foundational narratives”. He emphasises the need to understand relatedness- “I am not related to my right hand- I am my hand, and we were never two separate things that were subsequently bound by relation”. The book argues that “the “external” world is not an outside place but an act of participation”. The entire participation debate for three decades has struggled to unpack the role of power, which is intrinsic to participation. Everyone has been trying to instrumentalise participation to dissolve power- relationship. The role of any dominant ideology in influencing Imagining is important to understand. The book states that the dominant systems “put up mirrors everywhere, all it will be able to see is its own reflections”. It further adds, “To rush into designing, making and “problem-solving” without pausing to make space for conscious choosing and intention-setting puts up at risk of simply replicating the dreams and desires of the dominant episteme”. It urges to remake ourselves- which means “rewriting altogether our entire sense of ourselves as neo-liberal individuals whose desires are not allowed to exceed what capitalism has to offer”. Our dreams, within the prism of neoliberalism, often feel stifled and unable to break free. And piercing neo-liberalism requires a revolution. And for revolution, one needs to be able to imagine and reimagine. Escobar et al say, “All plants evolved from algae un the early oceans, who adapted to land to become part the massive and diverse family of land-plants we know as angiosperms. Seagrasses then became some of the very few land plants to return to the ocean”. A must read. My review in linked in
August 15, 2024
I read this in a book group of solidarity economy people - getting to discuss it as we were reading made the experience for me. It helped sharpen my understanding of ontological politics. I find myself with so many more questions than when I started, I presume as the authors intended.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews