Lykke, Nina, Katja Aglert, and Line Henriksen. 2024. Feminist Reconfigurings of Alien Encounters: Ethical Co-Existence in More-Than-Human Worlds. Routledge. ISBN: 978-1-032-44756-8 (hbk); 978-1-032-44757-5 (pbk); 978-1-003-37376-6 (ebk)
One never really writes alone. Even when typing is a solitary process, writing is also shaped by exchanges with multiple others: co-authors, editors, and peers who give feedback; previous work by other scholars; family members and pets who set the rhythm of writing; operating systems and other writing tools; and unexpected events that give us food for thought. Human and more-than-human encounters accompany and affect one’s own writing. Sometimes, it is these very encounters that set research in motion.
Feminist Reconfigurings of Alien Encounters: Ethical Co-Existence in More-Than-Human Worlds takes more-than-human encounters as the starting point for an ethical reflection on a troubled world. The book is written collaboratively by queerfeminist poet-philosopher Nina Lykke, artist and scholar Katja Aglert, and theorist and writer Line Henriksen, for the More Than Human Humanities series edited by Cecilia Åsberg and Marietta Radomska for Routledge. Each author’s research is set in motion by an unexpected encounter: with diatoms, slugs, and familiars (witches’ helper spirits), respectively. Radically different from humans, these beings are generally regarded as incompatible with the human and thus as lesser, to be regulated. The authors boldly reclaim the ‘alien’ character and attend to these encounters in a way that is simultaneously vulnerable, unsettling, revealing, and powerfully generative. These entities have not only spurred research interests but also become figures to research with. For its experimental methodology and creative approach, the book is a valuable contribution to the field of artistic research.
The structure, style, and methodology of the book are experimental while remaining rigorous. The authors employ a set of methods that include audio recording, automatic writing, poetry, transcribed dialogue, and photographic collage. Rather than being merely ‘accompanied by’ these materials, the philosophical work unfolds through them. These methods are meant to encourage non-linearity and hybridization of registers to creatively support the philosophical inquiry. The methodology can be described as a ‘postqualitative and emerging approach’ (St. Pierre 2017; Lykke 2022). In such an open-ended process, few elements are set at the outset; only afterwards is it possible to discern and discuss how the research has developed. This is particularly relevant to discussions of method in artistic research, given its inherent tension between the individuality of the research, open methods, creative practice, and transdisciplinarity.
The collaborative writing is described through the symbol of the triquetra. With a complex cultural history, the triquetra was historically appropriated by Christianity, but kept its meaning in occultism and witchcraft. The human triquetra of the authors is mirrored by that of their three alien companions, forming a ‘double triquetra’, which Aglert interprets in the photographic collages included in the chapters. The collaborative writing is ‘spectral’, that is, it happens not only between the authors but also with the ‘present absent’ ones (Derrida 1994), to borrow Derrida’s concept: alien figures, book editors, and authors whose ideas have informed the research.
But how can one write about spectral presence and alien figures in a way that is accountable for the troubles of the present world? Lykke, Aglert, and Henriksen aim not only to write fabulations but also to inquire into coexistence in this very world. To do so, they borrow the narrative techniques of estrangement and defamiliarization from classical and feminist science fiction to prompt ‘unlearning and relearning’ (p. 5) by allowing fictive elements ‘to act as twisted mirrors, apt for putting the problems of the here-and-now on display’ (p. 6). Lykke, Aglert, and Henriksen go a step beyond the ‘cognitive’ discontinuity of science fiction. Their embodied engagement with the alien companions spurs a sensory and affective estrangement. This ‘productive disorientation’ results in the generation of ‘alternative sense-abilities’ (6). Unlearning and relearning begin with the senses.
Aglert draws on her artistic research with vulgar slugs (Arion vulgaris), a species considered an invasive alien where she lives. In ecology, the term ‘alien species’ indicates plants or animals introduced by humans, intentionally or accidentally, to new ecosystems. If the new environment is suitable and lacks balancing factors such as predators, these species may adapt, thrive, and even pose a challenge to local ecosystems; they are then labelled ‘invasive’. Not all alien species are invasive. Invasive alien species are often subject to containment policies. Aglert’s engagement with the invasive slug began with discomfort in her garden but turned into curiosity in her artistic research, resulting in videos, collages, and writing. A playful gesture of kneeling down and ‘inviting’ the slug with a finger was met with interest by the animal and has since become a performative act of encounter. Yet, that tender moment of proximity turned into a terrifying shift in perspective when one slug bit the author, causing bleeding. The cognitive framework is pierced by the sensorial affect of potentially being eaten. For most humans in the Global North, becoming food remains taboo: humans eat others (plants or animals), not the other way around. Despite its small size, a slug manifests the possibility of dislocating humans from their hierarchical safeness.
Particularly noteworthy is Henriksen’s engagement with the so-called ‘inner critic’, the inner voice, familiar to writers and art practitioners (myself included), that interferes with the work in various ways. Psychology has investigated the phenomenon and suggests ways to come to terms with this destabilizing voice, such as understanding it as a defence mechanism against potential failures. Henriksen goes further and recognizes the inner critic as one of the odd creatures, called familiars, that are said to accompany witches in their deeds. So, rather than attempting to suppress it, Henriksen reclaims the oddity of this companionship. The inner critic is a dynamic presence, terrifying but perhaps also soothing in its continuity. A moment I found particularly moving is the dialogue between the authors about the writing process, towards the end of the book. For Lykke, writing is a place of contentment; for Henriksen, a place of struggle. After all, this is also an encounter across difference.
While Aglert’s encounter is with an animal species and Henriksen’s with a figurative presence, Lykke’s is with diatoms, the microalgae with calcareous shells that deposit on the seabed once dead and shape rock formations over geological time. Her encounter emerged from the depth of her grief for her life partner: her partner’s ashes were scattered in the sea beneath calcareous cliffs. Her queer grief has since mobilized modes of becoming and being-with across more-than-human and geological scales, which have been at the centre of her recent work (Lykke 2022). Death is contemplated as a ‘radical becoming-other, a becoming-inhuman, which is also a becoming-alien’ (p. 43). Death is vibrant and opens to transformation into ashes, sand, seabed: the individual enters a dance of vital matter that exceeds the clear-cut dualism between life and death. Lykke’s contribution unfolds through poetry and philosophy, interweaving memories of her visits to the island, the fleshy pain of grief, and sensuous reflections on bodies of water with geological and ecological observations. The grief and the encounter that have spurred much of her work in recent years are here contemplated in direct dialogue with diatoms.
From my perspective as an artist and researcher working with ecology and biotechnology, Feminist Reconfigurings of Alien Encounters: Ethical Co-Existence in More-Than-Human Worlds is a relevant contribution to feminist, queer, and more-than-human discourse for two main reasons.
The first reason is that slugs, diatoms, and familiars are never tamed on human terms, neither anthropomorphized nor relegated to an insurmountable divide. The book crosses the Derridean abyss between the Human and the Animal (Derrida 2008) to include those that are neither human nor animal, such as diatoms and familiars, and thus challenges hierarchies between species. Radically alien, they are also recalcitrant: ‘resisting control; not obedient, refractory, resistant’ (Pevere 2025). They do not comply with human superiority, authority, and even communication: knowing them requires unlearning and relearning. These alien encounters open up an uncertain space. The authors use the verb ‘to unlearn’, which is a powerful pointer. While it is not possible to abandon the human experience, the agency of the alien (a biting slug, a destabilizing inner critic) reveals one’s own vulnerability. What to make of this vulnerability is perhaps an art (Pevere 2022), a skill, something that can be learnt. Rather than reinforcing divides and hierarchies, difference and unsettlement enable a creative encounter.
The book contributes to more-than-human discourse precisely in that uncertain and vulnerable space. The question stays open: what is a book for slugs, diatoms, and familiars? Slugs may decompose it, provided the paper is not too heavily infused with chemicals. The embodied experience of diatoms and familiars may remain inaccessible to humans. This is precisely where the book is successful, since its authors do not aim to take the perspective of the alien entities: it is about encounters, not about being slug. The explicit aim is to undo human exceptionalism and trouble it beyond cognitive terms. The first step in that direction is to challenge the desubjectivation of the alien entity, which all three authors do. Aglert does so by wondering whether slugs enjoy being in her artworks, and whether the slime is released as a stress reaction. The next step is to imagine ‘ways to invite Vulgar slugs to come and participate on their own terms’ (28), which led the artist to change pace and posture, and to depart from her linguistic habits in favour of the sensorial world of gastropods. It is not about taking the perspective of the slug, but about opening a space where human exceptionalism dissipates.
The second reason is the book’s combination of sensorial, poetic, and epistemic registers. Philosophical inquiry is rooted in lived experience; it never forgets the ‘I’ but moves beyond it to produce knowledge that is ‘relevant for the world’ (Varto 2018). The book is rich in references across artistic disciplines, including fiction, poetry, and contemporary and classical visual arts, weaving them into a conversation that transgresses disciplinary boundaries and established historicization.
To conclude, the book is a passionate invitation to engage creatively with the irreducible alienness that marks our more-than-human being on Earth, to acknowledge the complexity and frictions that it brings, and to subvert human exceptionalism.
References
Derrida, Jacques. 1994. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International. (Routledge)
Derrida Jaques. 2008. The Animal that Therefore I am (More to follow). (Fordham University Press)
Lykke, Nina. 2022. Vibrant Death: A Posthuman Phenomenology of Mourning. (Bloomsbury)
Pevere, Margherita. 2022. ‘Vulnerability as a Queer Art’, Technoetic Arts: A Journal of Speculative Research, 20 (1–2), pp. 95–110
Pevere, Margherita. 2025. ‘Recalcitrant Practices’ in Developing Practices Using Living Systems and Establishing Bio Art Labs: Guidelines and Perspectives from the Field, ed. by Đorđe Petrović and Adrienn Újházi (Citizens’ Association Reactor), pp. 25-32
St. Pierre, Elizabeth Adams. 2018. ‘Writing Post Qualitative Inquiry’, Qualitative Inquiry, 24 (9), pp. 603–8.
Varto, Juha. 2018. Artistic Research: What Is It? Who Does It? Why? (Aalto University)
Biography
Known for her work with living matter, ecology, and biotechnology, Dr Margherita Pevere is an artist and researcher addressing taboos like death, sex, and vulnerability. Her publications cover arts, aesthetics, and environmental humanities.
