Online Vortrag "Latency and Liminality: Investing Suspended Life in Cryopreservation Practices"
| WAS: |
Online-Vortrag "Latency and Liminality: Investigating Suspended Life in Cryopreservation Practices" von Prof. Dr. Thomas Lemke, Goethe-Universität Frankfurt Professur für Soziologie mit dem Schwerpunkt Biotechnologie, Natur und Gesellschaft |
|
| WANN: |
Dienstag, 25.01.2022, 19 Uhr c.t. (online) |
|
| WO: |
Zoom-Meeting: https:// ovgu.zoom.us/j/63795413287 Meeting-ID: 637 9541 3287 / Kenncode: Crypto |
Abstract
The talk focusses on the ability of some animals and plants to respond to changing environmental conditions by temporarily suspending metabolic processes. Showing no visible sign of life, these organisms appear to be dead but can return to vital activity once a more favourable environmental constellation arises. In contemporary biology, this liminal state between life and death is commonly labelled “cryptobiosis”, combining the Greek kryptos (hidden, concealed, secret) with biōsis (mode of life).
I argue that the notion “cryptobiosis” does not account sufficiently for the processual and relational dimensions of ametabolic life and propose a new concept, “limbiosis”, which connects the Latin word limen (threshold, doorstep) with the Greek notion of biōsis. While cryptobiosis still nurtures the imaginary of some latent life waiting to become active again, limbiosis stresses the liminality of the neither-nor or in-between life and death. The notion also grasps the dynamic and ongoing transfer between the biological and the technological, the natural and the artificial. As I will show, the conceptual frame of limbiosis offers new theoretical, methodological and empirical avenues for analysing “suspended life”.