Ombre Tarragnat

Ombre Tarragnat (they/she) is a PhD student in gender studies and philosophy based in Paris. Their research attempts to generate fruitful conversations between feminist and queer posthumanities, neurodiversity studies, and nondualistic approches in the philosophy of biology, ethology, and anthropology.

Their doctoral project, provisionally entitled “Autism as Ethodivergence: Philosophical Ethology, Posthumanism, Phenomenology” contributes to this endeavour through the situated location of autistic-being. First, it reads autism into modern and contemporary philosophies and theories of human-being and animal-being, as a way to highlight the complex entanglement of the figures of the autistic, the human, the animal, and the posthuman. This section, which forays into the writings of  Frederik Buytendijk, Arnold Gehlen, Kurt Goldstein, Henry and Kamila Markham, Niko and Elizabeth Tinbergen, Jakob von Uexküll, and others, aims at formulating a more-than-human and more-than-neurological approach to neurodiversity.

The second dimension, which takes the form of a philosophy of ethodiversity and ethodivergence, claims the nondualistic embodiment of freedom and worry, desire and exhaustion, pleasure and pain, as central to animal-being. This post-humanist and post-humanistic approach to neurodiversity and neurodivergence funds itself on a philosophical ethology which, in the context of the (post-)human, takes the name of a philosophical post-anthropology, and is inspired by the writings of Florence Burgat and Roberto Marchesini. There, styles of being like autism appear no longer as reductionist lists of symptoms and traits but as a particularly intense form of existing in the world and somatising the world, characterised by an exhaustingly strong desire for more-than-human relationality.

Last, this project aims to generate a new mode of understanding the situated knowledges of autistic people, whose somatic styles can be thought as ethologies of pleasure and pain. Through a posthuman feminist phenomenology framework, the aim is to reframe autistic experiences, affects and behaviours as allowing new modes of becoming-with the “more-than”. This draws from the writings of Stacy Alaimo, Donna Haraway, Nina Lykke, Erin Manning, Astrida Neimanis, and others, to ask questions and open new directions of thinking: How to turn autistics’ proximity to nonhuman animals into noninnocent multispecies coalitions, for instance in the context of the lab animal models of autism? How do autistics’ heightened sensoriality allow for queer somatic ethologies of weathering? How can autistic stimscapes and autistic perception help us generate new forms of pleasure and pain as well as an expanded form of self-consciousness beyond the human?

Previously, Ombre completed an MA in Gender Studies at University Paris 8 (2022), an MA in Social and Political Philosophy at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (2022), a 2-year degree in Psychology at University Paris 8 (2020), as well as a Double Major BA in Philosophy and Political Science at University Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne (2020).

Recent publications

Ombre Tarragnat, “ ‘Le personnel est climatique’. Les corps-météo autistes et le posthumanisme féministe entre météorisation et (dés)acclimatation / ‘The Personal is Climatic’: Autistic Weather-Bodies and Posthuman Feminism Between Weathering and (De)Acclimatisation“, Sextant – Revue de recherche interdisciplinaire sur le genre et la sexualité, accepted for publication, spring 2024.

Ombre Tarragnat, “A Foray into the Bubbles of Autistics: The Phenomenology of Being-in-the-World from UmweltTheory to Intense World Theory”, Minority Reports: Cultural Disability Studies, accepted for publication, spring 2024.

Ombre Tarragnat, “Les Communautés du compost de Donna Haraway à l’ère du Pathocène / Donna Haraway’s Communities of Compost in the Era of the Pathocene”, Fabula / Les colloques, Penser une seule éthique pour les vivants ?, Existences collectives (dir. Denis Bertrand, Pauline Hachette, Everardo Reyes), 2023, URL: http://www.fabula.org/colloques/document9949.php.

Ombre Tarragnat, “Judith Butler et les corps qui comptent des animaux : une cartographie des articulations esthético-politiques dans les performances militantes antispécistes / Judith Butler and the Bodies That Matter of Animals: A Cartography of Aesthetic-Political Articulations in Activist Antispeciesist Performances”, In Vivo Arts ANIMAUX, n° 1, July 2023, URL : http://invivoarts.fr/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/Ombre-TARRAGNAT-Judith-Butler-et-les-corps-qui-comptent-des-animaux-une-cartographie-des-articulations-esthetico-politiques-dans-les-performances-militantes-antispecistes.pdf.

A More-than-Human Humanities Research Group