Embodied Affirmation: Rosi Braidotti’s Neo-Materialist Ethics Between Biology and Phenomenology

Rosi Braidotti's neo-materialist ethics is grounded in a principle of embodied affirmation that challenges the modern opposition between the human and the non-human, redefining subjectivity as a relational and dynamic process within a vital continuum.Central to this framework is the concept of zoe, understood not as a property of the subject but as an impersonal and immanent force traversing human, animal, and technological forms of life.Ethics thus emerges as a material practice unfolding across bodies, environments, and technologies.Through a genealogical engagement with Foucault, Agamben, Haraway, Varela, and Guattari, this article places Braidotti's thought in dialogue with Lynn Margulis's theory of symbiogenesis and Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of embodiment.It argues that neo-materialist ethics can be situated within a robust empirical-ontological framework, countering interpretations that reduce it to poetic vitalism.The critique advanced by Francesco Paolo Adorno -who warns against the risk of collapsing subjectivity into mere biological life -serves as a critical test of the coherence of posthuman ethics is ontologically supported by both the biology of symbiosis and the phenomenology of flesh; and second, that responsibility and difference must be articulated through practices of care and situated knowledge that recognize the active materiality of the living world.The posthuman thus appears not as a negation of the human, but as an epistemic reconfiguration at the intersection of life sciences, phenomenology, and relational ethics.