Thinking through Symbionts: Spenser with Donna Haraway

In Staying with the Trouble (2016), the feminist philosopher Donna Haraway argues for a practice of speculative, collective fabulation, or sympoiesis, allied to cross-species relation, generation, and continuity, as our only means of survival on a devastated planet. Placing her trust in the intricate knots of biological relationality and mutual dependence that persist in earth’s muddy soil, or compost, she offers, in the story of the symbiont Camille, a fable of symbiogenesis, or “becoming-with-others for a habitable, flourishing world.” This essay argues that The Faerie Queene, a poem centrally concerned with the opposition of waste and fertility, is an open, unfinished, sympoietic work deeply interested in soil and its generative admixtures, producing its own version of what Haraway describes as material-semiotic composting, or theory in the mud. Denying privilege to the human, Spenser employs speculative, interlaced fictions to argue for the persistence of life-forms emerging from earth’s damaged soil.