Donna Haraway is not biocentric in the sense of privileging “life” (bios) as the central or supreme value around which all thought and ethics should orbit. Instead, her position resists such totalizing centers—whether anthropocentric, biocentric, or technocentric. What she offers is much more entangled, partial, situated, and relational. Her ethics and ontology unfold in knotted ecologies, not in hierarchies of value.

To articulate her stance more precisely, and coin terms that might clarify it, here are a few proposals:

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1. Sympoietic Relationalism

Haraway borrows the term sympoiesis (making-with) from Maturana and Varela and from Beth Dempster. This is in contrast to autopoiesis (self-making). Her orientation is not toward a sovereign bios or a central self, but toward systems that become through mutual, non-innocent relation.

Coined term: Sympoietic Relationalism — a worldview grounded in co-creation, where no being pre-exists its relations and no unit (not even “life”) is ontologically primary.

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2. Chthulucentric Entanglement

Rather than biocentrism (life-centered), Haraway proposes something more tentacular and chthonic: the Chthulucene, a speculative epoch named to invoke the subterranean, the tentacular, the monstrous, and the tangled. She invites us to think with multispecies kin, compost, and the “critters” we become with.

Coined term: Chthulucentrism — an ethic of orientation not toward life as a fixed good, but toward earthly, embedded, multispecies, and multisystemic entanglement, with an emphasis on the generative, composting, and contaminating processes of becoming-with.

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3. Situated Ethics of Becoming-With

She consistently insists that knowledge is situated, not universal. She promotes “staying with the trouble” rather than solving or transcending it. This is an ethics of commitment to particular, contingent, entangled worlds, rather than universal claims on behalf of “life” or “nature.”

Coined term: Becomial Situatedness — an orientation where ethics and ontology are never abstract or detached but emerge from the specific histories, wounds, dependencies, and kinships of the moment.

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TL;DR

Haraway's position is not biocentric but could be described as:

• Sympoietic Relationalism

• Chthulucentrism

• Becomial Situatedness

Each of these resists purity, centrality, or extraction and instead roots itself in the dense, impure web of co-becoming.