Rosi Braidotti

Posthuman, All Too Human Towards a New Process Ontology

This article looks at Donna Haraway’s work in the light of Continental philosophy, and especially post-structuralism, and examines both the post-humanist and the post-anthropocentric aspects of her thought. The article argues that the great contribution of Haraway’s work is the re-grounding of the subject in material practice. This neo-foundationalist approach is combined, however, with a firm commitment to a process ontology that looks at subjectivity as a complex and open-ended set of relations. The article argues for the centrality of the notion of relationality in Haraway’s thought, and in this respect her work can be compared to Deleuze’s rhizomic thinking. Special emphasis is placed on the analysis of the relation to other species in comparison with Deleuze’s notion of becoming-animal.

Becoming Woman: Or Sexual Difference Revisited

This article revisits Irigarays theory of sexual difference in the light of more contemporary developments in terms of nomadic becomings and non-unitary subjectivity, especially in Deleuze. It defends the notion of embodied materiality on philosophical grounds, by linking it to the issues of power, access, hegemony and exclusion, which are central to post-structuralism. Through a detailed analysis of the sexual politics of difference feminism, the author argues for a non-reactive redefinition of the feminine as a project of becoming, and connects it firmly to feminist discussions about gender and queer theory.

The way we were: Some post-structuralist memoirs

Abstract This article accounts in a personal, historical, and political mode for both the context and the activities of the study group in which the author participated together with Clarie Duchen in Paris in the 1980s. It raises issues that not only are related to the content of the philosophy and culture of what has become known as the post-structural generations, but it also engages with issues of the import–export of ideas, travelling theories, and the increasing commodification of the academic market.

A Critical Cartography of Feminist Post-postmodernism

The common trait of these new master narratives is the return of different forms of determinism, be it the neo-liberal or the genetic brand: the former defends the superiority of capitalism, the latter the despotic authority of the DNA. Their joint impact has caused both inflation and reification of the notion of ‘difference’. For instance, on the right of the political spectrum in Europe today, contemporary neo-liberalism is a differential ideology: it celebrates rather than denying differences. In this conservative discourse, however, differences of identity, culture, religion, abilities and opportunities are defined in a very deterministic manner. They get attached to firm beliefs about national, regional, provincial or at times town-based parameters of identity-formation (see the French National Front, the Italian Northern ‘lega’, the Vlaamse Blok and, in the Netherlands, the Pim Fortuijn phenomenon). Such firm beliefs about national and cultural identities are organised in a hierarchical scale of cultural development, which is not only deterministic, but also exclusive and xenophobic. In this context, ‘difference’ is indexed on a hierarchy of values which is governed by binary oppositions: ‘us and them’ on a micro, as well as a macro-scale. What this hierarchical differential ideology conveys is the necessity to re-assert differences as markers of specific forms of cultural—and even civilisational—belonging. In other words, the re-assertion of differences introduces structural patterns of mutual exclusion at the national, regional, provincial or even more local level. These master narratives are not ‘new’ in any historical or theoretical sense, but they have gained a renewal of interest and a new momentum in the present context, under the combined impact of the new technologies and the triumph of the market economy. Nothing expresses this cultural climate better than the media’s insistence on celebrating, with an insuppressable glee, ‘the end of ideologies’. For the last twenty years I have sat through regular waves of celebration of the multiple deaths of every available ‘ideology’. So much so, that I am almost tempted to define ideologies as movements that never cease to end. When will a new one

Nomadism with a difference : Deleuze's legacy in a feminist perspective

In the complex landscape of poststructuralist philosophies of difference, Deleuze’s thought strikes a uniquely positive note. His theory of nomadic subjectivity stresses the affirmative structure of the subject and therefore distances Deleuze from the more nihilistic or relativistic edge of contemporary philosophy. Deleuze’s thought offers more than a reflection on the contemporary configurations of power and on the forms of resistance available in the postindustrial regime of the global economy. Even more than his “frere ennemi” Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze re-inscribes the reflection on the politics of the subject within an aesthetic and ethical framework centred on affirmation, that is to say, on the affectivity and the positivity of the subject’s desires. I find it important to stress this point now that the long and in some way impossible task of living with Deleuze’s ‘anti-Oedipal’ legacy is upon us. I see a real danger that the complex and highly articulate structure of Deleuze’s redefinition of subjectivity becomes split between, on the one hand, a more “socio-economic” angle, which inscribes the French master alongside other leading thinkers of the “post-industrial” or “post-fordist” economic system, and on the other, a more “aesthetic” aspect, which inscribes Deleuze in a continuum with the cultural and literary generation who invented “the linguistic turn”. This would be in my eyes a reductive reception of Deleuze’s work and one which would spectacularly miss the point of his complex re-articulation of subjectivity as an assembled singularity of forces. As I have often pointed out,1 Deleuze strikes a unique position also as a careful reader of the problem of the ‘becoming-woman’ of philosophy, a question which he inscribes at the heart of the philosophy of modernity. From Nietzsche to the contemporary variations on the theme of Woman as the philosophical Other, the “feminine” side of philosophy has emerged as the site of crucial questions which challenge the classical conceptions of subjectivity and threaten its humanistic foundations. Deleuze faces up to this challenge, without paying lip service to feminism or pretending to be a “feminist”, let alone a “feminine” philosopher, but rather by raising the question of the becoming-woman at the heart of his conceptual structure. In

Nomadology and Subjectivity: Deleuze, Guattari and Critical Disability Studies

Over the last two decades, impairment has become a tricky issue and remains under-theorised in disability studies (see Hughes and Paterson, 1997; Corker, 2001; Tremain, 2002). In the UK the social model of disability has dominated disability theory. In this frame of reference, a distinction is made between ‘impairment’ and ‘disability’. In the social model of disability, impairment is conceptualised as the lack or defect of a limb, organ or mechanism of the body, and analyses focus on the ways in which ‘disability’ is created through the historical, social, economic, political, cultural and relational exclusion of people with ‘impairments’ (UPIAS, 1976; Oliver, 1990, 1996). For many disability theorists and activists, impairment refers to an individualised phenomenon and implies negativities, including pathology, pathos, social death, inertia, lack, limitation, loss, deficit and/or tragedy (Goodley and Roets, 2008). Even quite recently it is argued that, after all, impairment is a tragic, biological reality (Shakespeare, 2006). Our question consequently becomes: can we return impaired bodies to their material roots, which means adopting a unified vision of bodies and minds as presocial, biological essences and unchanging phenomena without discrediting the social and political project of disability studies?

Discontinuous Becomings. Deleuze on the Becoming-Woman of Philosophy

(1993). Discontinuous Becomings. Deleuze on the Becoming-Woman of Philosophy. Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology: Vol. 24, No. 1, pp. 44-55.

The exile, the nomad, and the migrant: Reflections on international feminism

Abstract This article raises some of the problems contained within the notion of international feminism . It asks whether claims of international or global (or simply European) sisterhood do not hide an inability to deal with womens relation to specific national cultural contexts, and it discusses woman as exile, nomad, and migrant both literally and metaphorically.

Nomadism: against methodological nationalism

The theoretical core of a nomadic philosophy of the subject consists of a firm stand against the traditional image of thought and the pedagogical practices that assume a unitary vision of the self. This humanistic subject claims to be structured and ordained along the axis of self-reflexive individualism and scientific rationality, which are indexed on a linear and progressive temporal line. Nomadic subjectivity on the contrary moves beyond identitarian categories and it rests on a process ontology that challenges the traditional equation of subjectivity with rational consciousness and resists the reduction of both to a linear vision of progress. Thus, instead of deference to the authority of the past, we have the fleeting co-presence of multiple time-zones, in a continuum that activates and de-territorializes stable identities. This dynamic vision of the subject enlists the creative resources of the imagination to the task of enacting transformative relations and actions in the present. This ontological non linearity rests on a Spinozist ethics of affirmation and becoming that predicates the positivity of difference. I will return to this later on in the essay.

Of Poststructuralist Ethics and Nomadic Subjects

This chapter rests on a number of assumptions that need to be clarified from the outset. The first point is that I approach the question of ethics from the background of Continental, notably modern French philosophy. It is therefore important to clear the grounds of the on-going polemic regarding French theory in general and poststructuralism in particular. More specifically for the purpose of this collection, I want to dispel from the start any association between poststructuralist ethics and the charges of moral relativism, of a-moral anarchy or romantic radicalism that are often moved against it (Sokal and Bricmont 1998). These negative charges are allegedly motivated by the emphasis post-structuralism has placed on questioning, deconstructing and de-territorializing the unitary vision of the subject, which postulates the coincidence of the subject with his conscious, rational and reflexive self, in keeping with a humanist idea of the individual. The systematic critique of this implicit or explicit humanist assumption by Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze or Irigaray – to name but a few – has fuelled an over-defensive reaction on the part of those who believe that only a centralized, rationally-based and consciousness-driven notion of the subject – as in the traditional notion of liberal individualism – can guarantee ethical and political agency and a sense of responsibility. One may want to argue that a great deal of this reaction can be read as expressing the fear of loss of cognitive and political mastery on the part of professional philosophers. Such a polemic, however, falls outside the scope of my paper, hence my desire to clear it out from the very start. Rather than falling into reductive simplifications that equate post-structuralism with relativism, I would like to focus on the specific contribution this tradition of thought can make to the debates on ethics in general and bio-ethics in particular. The charges of moral relativism are incorrect, both historically and conceptually: conceptually, French philosophy does not correspond to postmodernism, but rather refers back to a rich and established tradition of materialism and practical ethics.