Summary: | Can we analyse the human and material dimensions of “removal from the world” on the same level? Isn’t the term “irrecoverable” imbued with a moral tone which irremediably condemns what it describes, especially when that is human individuals? What epistemic and ethical issues emerge when the same term is used to describe things and people? This conversation between Sophie Houdart and Delphine Corteel enables the comparison of the on-the-ground perspectives of these two researchers, both of whom focus on ethnographic details and this important to-ing and fro-ing between humans and non-humans. This interview covers situations where individuals attempt to cope with the continuous production of intractable things, and try to deal with it by developing, on a daily basis, new techniques and new strategies to enable them to try either to salvage or restore what cannot be considered lost, or to live as well as possible with the irrecoverable in a finite world.
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