I.
Every day, different structures call upon us in different ways, a phenomenon that Louis Althusser called interpellation. We are called upon by the state—interpellated by the state—as citizens. We are called upon by a digital platform as users. We are called upon by religious figures as members of the community of believers. We are called upon by the hetero-patriarchal society as beings that must conform to the gender binary and to the associated behavioral expectations. Each mode of interpellation thus comes with a mode of subjectivity that furthermore implies a mode of belonging—a community, a form of polis. Analogously, one may ask: how am I called upon by the planet? The answer I will argue for in this essay is the following: from the planetary perspective, I matter as a member of a particular layer of the planet—the biosphere. To be a member of the biosphere means to be a biological organism, i.e. a body. And to be a biological organism means to carry a certain template of existence inherited from the planet. This template boils down to constantly renegotiating the boundary between interior and exterior. As an autonomous entity, an organism achieves a degree of separation from the outside, but it still needs the outside for its existence. After all, an organism is a metabolism: a self-sustaining process that maintains stable conditions in its interior by an intake of outside resources and the disposal of waste energy or material back into the environment. The organism’s boundary is thus always perforated—it is not a wall but a filtration membrane, a tactical interface.
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