Pluralist Politics, Relational Worlds

Book excerpt: In Pluralist Politics, Relational Worlds, Didier Zúñiga examines the possibility for dialogue and mutual understanding in human and more-than-human worlds. The book responds to the need to find more democratic ways of listening to, giving voice to, and caring for the variety of beings that inhabit the earth. Drawing on ecology and sustainability in democratic theory, Zúñiga demonstrates the transformative potential of a relational ethics that is not only concerned with human animals, but also with the multiplicity of beings on earth, and the relationships in which they are enmeshed. The book offers ways of cultivating and fostering the kinds of relations that are needed to maintain human and more-than-human diversity in order for life to persist. It also calls attention to the quality of the relationships that are needed for life to flourish, advancing our understanding of the diversity of pluralism. Pluralist Politics, Relational Worlds ultimately presses us to question our own condition of human animality so that we may reconsider the relations we entertain with one another and with more-than-human forms of life on earth.