labrys, études féministes/ estudos feministas
janvier / juin 2013  -janeiro / junho 2013

Nomadic Feminist Theory in a Global Era

Rosi Braidotti

Abstract

This paper addresses the so-called ‘post-human’ turn in contemporary feminist theory in the light of three main considerations: firstly the shifting perception and understanding of ‘the human’ in the Life sciences. Secondly the effects of globalization as a system that functions by instilling process of ‘timeless time’ and perverse, multiple time-lines. Thirdly, the impact of wars and conflicts in contemporary governmentality and the new forms of discrimination they engender on a planetary scale. Last but not least, I will examine the implications of this historical context for progressive, affirmative politics in general and gender issues in particular.

The critique of humanism by post-structuralist feminists

The poststructuralists’ dynamic social constructivism combines the critique of techniques of subjectivation with the creation of empowering new ontologies of the self and of the self-other relation. At the meta-methodological level, this embodied and embedded brand of materialist philosophy of the subject introduces a break from the pillars on which the Cartesian vision of the rationalist subject rested, namely: universalism and dualism.

As to the former, universalist claims to a subject position that allegedly transcends spatio-temporal and geo-political specificities are criticized as being dis-embodied and dis-embedded, i.e., abstract. Universalism, best exemplified in the notion of ‘transcendent reason’,  ‘abstract masculinity’ (Hartsock, 1987) and triumphant whiteness (Ware, 1992) is objectionable not only on epistemological, but also on ethical grounds. Situated perspectives lay the pre-conditions for ethical accountability for one’s own implications with the very structures one is analyzing and opposing politically. The key concept in the poststructuralists’ ‘enchanted materialism’ is the sexualized nature and the radical immanence of power relations and their effects upon the world. In this Foucauldian perspective, power is not only negative or confining (potestas), but also affirmative (potentia) or productive of alternative subject positions and social relations.

As for the latter, the pivotal notion in poststructuralist thought is the binary relationship between self and other. The notion of ‘otherness’ functions through dualistic oppositions that confirm the dominant vision of ‘sameness’ by positing sub-categories of difference and distributing them along asymmetrical power relations. In other words, the dominant apparatus of subjectivity is organized along a hierarchical scale that rewards the sovereign subject as the zero-degree of difference. Deleuze calls it ‘the Majority subject’ or the Molar centre of being (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987). Irigaray calls it ‘the Same’, or the hyper-inflated, falsely universal ‘He’ (Irigaray, 1985a, 1985b), whereas Hill Collins (1991) calls to account the white and Eurocentric bias of the subject of humanistic knowledge.

Furthermore, in European philosophy, this ‘difference’ has been predicated on relations of domination and exclusion: to be ‘different from’ came to mean to be ‘less than’. In the dialectical scheme of thought, difference or otherness is a constitutive axis which marks off the sexualized other (woman), the racialized other (the native) and the naturalized other (animals, the environment or earth). These others, however, are constitutive in that they are expected to confirm the same in His superior position and thus they are crucial to the assertion of the power of sameness.

The fact that the dominant axes of definition of the humanistic subject of knowledge contribute to defining the axes of difference or of otherness has another important implication. They engender simultaneously the processes of sexualization, racialization and naturalization of those who are marginalized or excluded but also the active production of half-truths, or forms of partial knowledge about these others. Dialectical and pejorative otherness induces structural ignorance about the others who, by being others, are posited as the outside of major categorical divides in the attribution of subjectivity. Power produces through exclusion: the others are included in this script as the necessary outside of the dominant vision of what it means to be human. Their reduction to sub-human status is a constitutive source of ignorance and falsity and bad consciousness for the dominant subject who is responsible for their de-humanization.

Poststructuralist anti-humanism subverts from within the unitary identities indexed on phallocentric, Eurocentric and normative standardized views of what constitutes the humanist ideal of ‘Man’. Philosophical anti-humanism resonates with analogous but other(wise) situated post-colonial and race perspectives, which critique humanism or its racist connotations and racialized bias, and oppose to the biased Western brand many other cultural and ethnic traditions of non-Western humanism (Hill Collins, 1991; Shiva, 1997; Gilroy, 2000). This alliance between Western post-humanist and non-Western anti-humanist positions converges on the impossibility of speaking in one unified voice about women and other marginal subjects, thus stressing issues of diversity and differences among them.

Spectacular developments notably in neural sciences, the study of the earth and ecological systems and bio-genomics, as well as information digital technologies have altered our shared understanding of what counts as the basic unit of reference for the human. The extent to which competing views about the human are central to contemporary scientific enquiry affect feminist practice notably the terms and theoretical framework that shape our shared understanding of a feminist political subject.

We have moved towards a new, subtler and more complex relationship to our planetary destiny. In the geological era that has already known as ‘anthropocene’ – that is to say a chronological time in which human activity is having a significant impact on the Earth’s eco-system and on our collective capacity to survive- or not- what are the foundations of the century-old feminist enquiry about the embodied and embedded status, that is to say specific, localised and sexed nature of humans in general and of the females of the species in particular?

Hence the question which I consider as central to discussions about feminist futures: is the anthropocene the era in which feminists need to re-examine received ideas about what used to be called ‘human nature ‘and hence take at least some critical distance from the method of social constructivism which have been endemic to European and North Atlantic feminist politics since Mary Wollstonecraft’s passionate refutation of J.J.Rousseau’s naturalisation of inequalities between the sexes? How serious is this methodological question?

The post-anthropocentric turn

A range of positions has emerged in contemporary feminist theory that bridge the gap between the classical opposition ‘materialism/idealism’ and move towards a non-essentialist brand of contemporary vitalism, or thought on ‘life itself’ (Rose, 2001).  They converge on discourses about ‘life’ and living matter/bodies: be it under the guise of political reflections on ‘bio-power’, or in the form of analyses of science and technology, they bring us back to the organic reality of ‘real bodies’. After so much emphasis on the linguistic and cultural turn, an ontology of presence replaces textual or other deconstruction.

Let’s take for example Dolly the sheep as the main figuration for the perverse temporalities and contradictions that structure our technological culture. Dolly is that sex which is not one – a collective entity repackaged as a bounded self. She/it is simultaneously the last specimen of her species – descended from the lineage of sheep that were conceived and reproduced as such – and the first specimen of a new species: the electronic and bio-genetic sheep that Phillip Dick dreamed of, the fore-runner of the androids society of Blade Runner (1982). Cloned, not conceived sexually, heterogeneous mix of organism and machine, Dolly simply changes the name of the game. Severed from reproduction and hence divorced from descent, Dolly is no daughter of any member of her/its old species – simultaneously orphan and mother of her/itself.

Copy made in the absence of one single original, Dolly pushes the logic of the postmodern simulacrum to its ultimate perversion. She/it brings Immaculate Conception into a bio-genetic third century version. The irony reaches a convulsive peak when we remember that Dolly died of a banal and all too familiar disease: rheumatism. After which, to add insult to injury, she suffered a last indignity: taxidermy. She was embalamed and exhibited in a science museum as a scientific rarity (shades of the 19^th century) and a media celebrity (very 20^th century!). Dolly is simultaneously archaic and hyper-modern, she/it is a compound of multiple anachronisms, situated across different chronological axes, she/it inhabits different and self-contradictory time-zones. Like other contemporary techno-teratological animals or entities, (onco-mouse comes to mind), Dolly shatters the linearity of time and exists in a continuous present. This techno-electronic timeless time is saturated with a-synchronicity, that is to say, it is structurally unhinged.

Thinking about Dolly blurs the categories of thought we have inherited from the past – she/it stretches the longitude and latitude of thought itself, adding depth, intensity and contradiction. Because she/it embodies complexity, this entity which is no longer an animal but not yet fully a machine, is THE philosophical problem of today. 

I refer to these neo-realist practices of bodily materialism as: ‘matter-realism’, radical neo-materialism or post-human nomadic feminism which concerns the changing conceptual structure of materialism itself, under the impact of contemporary bio-genetics and information technologies. The switch to a monistic political ontology stresses processes, vital politics and non-deterministic evolutionary theories –  politically, the emphasis falls accordingly on the micro politics of relations, a post humanist ethics that traces transversal connections among material and symbolic, concrete and discursive, lines or forces.  Transversality actualizes an ethics based on the primacy of the relation, of interdependence, which values non-human or a-personal Life. This is what I call Zoe itself (Braidotti, 2006).

The most striking methodological feature is the dislocation of difference from dialectical binaries to complex rhizomatics. Post-poststructuralist theory had already analyzed the dislocation of the dialectical relationships between the traditional axes of difference: sexualization/racialization/naturalization and offered complexity as the alternative. The post-human turn pushes this dislocation further. It can also be described as a sort of ‘anthropological exodus’ from the dominant configurations of the human (Hardt and Negri, 2000: 215) – a massive hybridization of the species which topples the anthropocentric Human from the sovereign position it has enjoyed for so long. This sovereign position was represented in a universal mode as Man, but this pseudo-universal has been widely criticized (Lloyd, 1984) precisely because of its partiality. Universal Man, in fact, is implicitly assumed to be masculine, white, urbanized, speaking a standard language, heterosexually inscribed in a reproductive unit and a full citizen of a recognized polity. Hardly a universal position.

Massumi refers to the post-human as ‘Ex-Man’, ‘a genetic matrix embedded in the materiality of the human’ and undergoing significant mutations: ‘species integrity is lost in a bio-chemical mode expressing the mutability of human matter’ – bodily materialism dis-gregating (Massumi, 1998: 60). Haraway puts it like this: ‘this is Man the taxonomic type become Man the brand’ (1997 : 74). What emerges from this is the vital politics of life, as non-human energy and self-organizing matter.

Considering the extent to which contemporary capitalist economies depend on the commodification of life itself, there is a perverse form of post-human condition emerging from the very post-anthropocentric opportunism of advanced capitalism.  The bio-genetic structure of advanced capitalism is such that it is not only geno-centric (Fausto-Sterling, 2000: 235), but also ruthlessly and structurally unjust.

Furthermore, some grand narratives have come back into fashion through. They tend to be deterministic and evolutionary in a naïve and oddly old-fashioned way. A hierarchical fantasy of vertical perfectibility, a technologically mediated quest for immortality has gained widespread currency, which betrays the nomadic potential of contemporary science (Stengers 1997). In opposition to this master narrative, which corresponds to what Donna Haraway calls ‘the informatics of domination’, feminist and nomadic matter-realist philosophers stress the relevance of materialist, vital and complex philosophies of becoming, as an alternative conceptual framework, in the service of a sustainable future.

The epistemological analysis intersects with the political one: because the self-replicating vitality of living matter is targeted for consumption and commercial exploitation of bio-genetic culture, environmentally-based political struggles have evolved into a new global alliance for sustainable futures. Haraway recognizes this trend and pays tribute to the martyrised body of onco-mouse (Haraway, 1997), as the farming ground for the new genetic revolution and manufacturer of spare parts for other species. Vandana Shiva (1997) also stresses the extent to which the bodies of the empirical subjects who signify difference (woman/native/earth or natural others) have become the disposable bodies of the global economy. Contemporary capitalism is ‘bio-political’ in that it aims at controlling all that lives: it has already turned into a form of bio-piracy in that it aims at exploiting the generative powers of women, animals, plants, genes and cells. This means that human and anthropomorphic others are relocated in a continuum with non-anthropomorphic or ‘earth’ others. The categorical distinction that separated the Human from his naturalized others has shifted, taking the humanist assumptions about what constitutes the basic unit of reference for the ‘human’ into a spin.

The perverse multiple temporalities of globalised advanced capitalism

Advanced capitalism is a difference engine in that it promotes the marketing of pluralistic differences and the commodification of the existence, the culture, the discourses of ‘others’, for the purpose of consumerism. As a consequence, the global system of the post-industrial world produces scattered and poly-centred, profit-oriented power relations. In our post-Cold War era, power functions not so much by binary oppositions, but in a fragmented and all –pervasive manner. This rhizomic or web-like structure of contemporary power and its change of scale, however, do not alter fundamentally its terms of application. If anything, power-relations in globalisation are more ruthless than ever.

Late post-industrial societies have proved far more flexible and adaptable towards the proliferation of differences, than the classical Left expected. These 'differences' have been turned, however, into and constructed as marketable, consumable and often disposable ‘others’. Popular culture – from music to cinema, new media, fashion and gastronomy- is a reliable indicator of this trend, which sells 'world music', or a savvy mixture of the exotic and the domestic, often in the mode of neo-colonial appropriation of multi-cultural others.

An important implication of this situation is that advanced capitalism functions as the great nomad, the organizer of the mobility of commodified products. A generalized practice of 'free circulation' pertains, however, almost exclusively to the domain of goods and commodities, regardless of their place of origin, provided they guarantee maximum profit. People do not circulate nearly as freely (Virno, 2004; Lazzarato, 1996). It is therefore crucial to expose the perverse nomadism of a logic of economic exploitation that equates capitalist flows and flux with profit-minded circulation of commodities. Given that technologies – more specifically the convergence of information and bio-technologies- are intrinsic to the social and discursive structures of post industrial societies, they deserve special attention. The most critical aspect of the technological apparatus is the issue of access and participation. Considering the inequalities in the availability of electricity supplies, let alone telephone-lines and modems, well may one wonder about the 'democratic', or 'revolutionary' potential of the new electronic and bio-genetic frontiers. Thus, access and participation to the new high-tech world is unevenly distributed world-wide, with gender, age and ethnicity acting as major axes of negative differentiation (Eisenstein, 1998).

Globalization is primarily about structural injustices in 'post-industrial/ colonial/communist' societies. It is about the becoming-third-world of the first world, while continuing the exploitation of developing countries. It is about the decline of 'legal' economies and the rise of structural illegality as a factor in the world economy - also known as 'capital as cocaine' (Land 1995). It is about the militarization of the technological and also of the social space. It is also about the globalization of pornography and the trafficking and prostitution of women and children, in a ruthless trade in human life. It is about the feminization of poverty and the rising rates of female illiteracy, as well as the structural unemployability of large sectors of the population, especially the youth. This social order is also about the difficulty of the Law to cope with phenomena such as the new reproductive rights, ranging from copy-right laws in the use of photocopiers, video-recorders, and internet, to the regulation of surrogate motherhood and artificial procreation. Not to mention the problem of environmental control, this extensive web of micro-relations of power is at the heart of what Foucault calls 'bio-power', that is to say a centre-less system of diffuse and hence perniciously effective surveillance and overregulation, that takes ‘life itself’ as its target.

Brian Massumi, in his political analysis of the historical condition of post modernity (1998), describes global capitalism as a profit-oriented mix-and-match system that vampirizes everything. The media industry is an integral part of this circular and spectral logic of commodification. Images constitute a serious, never-ending, forever-dead source of capital: a spectral economy of the eternal return. To be a recognizable icon - the kind of face that launches a thousand identifications – is capital value in our economic system. I would argue that in terms of power this system rests on the paradox of the simultaneous occurrence of contradictory trends. On the one hand the globalization of the economic and cultural processes, this engenders increasing conformism in life-style, tele-communication and consumerism. On the other hand, the fragmentation of these processes, with the concomitant effects of increased structural injustices, the marginalization of large sections of the population, and the resurgence of regional, local, ethnic, and cultural differences not only between the geo-political blocks, but also within them (Eisenstein, 1998).

Given that the political economy of global capitalism consists in multiplying and distributing differences for the sake of profit, it produces ever-shifting waves of genderisation and sexualisation, racialisation and naturalisation of multiple ‘others’. It has thus effectively disrupted the traditional dialectical relationship between the empirical referents of Otherness – women, natives and animal or earths others – and the processes of discursive formation of genderisation/racialisation/naturalisation. Once this dialectical bond is unhinged, advanced capitalism looks like a system that promotes feminism without women, racism without races, natural laws without nature, reproduction without sex, sexuality without genders, multiculturalism without ending racism, economic growth without development, and cash flow without money. Late capitalism also produces fat-free ice creams and alcohol-free beer next to genetically modified health food, companion species alongside computer viruses, new animal and human immunity breakdowns and deficiencies, and the increased longevity of these who inhabit the advanced world. Welcome to capitalism as schizophrenia! (Deleuze and Guattari 1977; 1987).

The spasmodic concurrence of these phenomena is the distinctive trait of our age. The commodification of differences turned the 'others' into objects of consumption, granting them alternatively a familiar and a threatening quality that by-passes the doors of the dialectics. We have entered into a zigzagging pattern of dissonant nomadic subjects. How to overcome the dualistic mode that has become so entrenched to our way of thinking remains the main challenge.

The emancipatory project of modernity entails a view of “the knowing subject” (Lloyd 1984) which excludes several ‘boundary markers’ also known as ‘constitutive others’. These are: the sexualised other, also known as women, the ethnic or racialised others and the natural environment. They constitute the three inter-connected facets of structural otherness or difference as pejoration, which simultaneously construct and are excluded in modernity (Beauvoir 1973; Irigaray 1985a; Deleuze 1987). As such they play an important – albeit specular – role in the definition of the norm, the norm-al, the normative view of the subject. More specifically, they have been instrumental to the institution of masculine self-assertion (Woolf, 1938).

  Difference as pejoration is the term that indexes power according to the metaphysical arrogance of a subject that feeds structurally upon the bodies of devalorised others. Also known as ‘metaphysical cannibalism’ (Atkinson, 1974) this dualistic use of violence helps us illuminate the complex and dissymmetrical power relations at work within the dominant subject position.

To say that the structural others of the modern subject re-emerge in post modernity amounts to making them into a paradoxical and polyvalent site. They are simultaneously the symptom of the crisis of the subject, and for conservatives even its ‘cause’, but they also express positive, i.e.: non-reactive alternatives. It is a historical fact that the great emancipatory movements of post-modernity are driven and fuelled by the resurgent ‘others’: the women’s and gay rights movement; the anti-racism and de-colonisation movements; the anti-nuclear and pro-environment movements are the voices of the structural Others of modernity. They also inevitably mark the crisis of the former “centre” or dominant subject-position. In the language of philosophical nomadology, they express both the crisis of the majority and the patterns of becoming of the minorities. The aim of critical theory consists in providing both the methodological navigational tools and an ethical compass to allow us to tell the difference between these different flows of mutation. More specifically, we need normative distinctions between reactive, profit-oriented differences on the one hand and affirmative empowerment of alternative differences on the other. The criterion by which such difference can be established is ethical, and its implications political.

This is all the more salient if we consider that advanced capitalism is a system that tends to constantly stretch its limits and plays with the idea of over-reaching itself, moving towards “timeless time”(Castells, 1996). How shall I put it? All planes are always overbooked, and this is a fitting metaphor for the political economy of profit and its saturation of our social space. In so far as the subject is under constant pressure to function and find points of stability within the ever-shifting limits or boundaries, capitalism is a system that actively generates schizophrenia in the sense of enhancing the value of unfixed meanings: an unlimited semiosis without fixed referents (Holland 1999). This makes the question of negotiation thresholds of sustainability all the more urgent. If the boundaries are forever being stretched and hence blurred, however, perspectival shifts are necessary in order to keep up and account for the process and thus identify points of resistance. Schizophrenia is a molecular mode of undoing the molar aggregates of the commodification system, of inducing flows in to them. This avoids the consolidation and the over-codification (constant control) that are characteristic of the Majority, but in return it runs the danger of fluidity to the point of self-destruction. How to find a point of balance is an ethical question.

Feminist theory looks carefully at the dislocation of the dialectical relationships between the traditional axes of difference: sexualization/racialization/ naturalization and attempts to come to terms with this challenge. A further methodological issue arises as a result: the advanced, bio-genetic structure of capitalism as a schizophrenic global economy does not function in a linear manner, but is web-like, scattered and poly-centered. It is not monolithic, but an internally contradictory process, the effects of which are differentiated geopolitically and along gender and ethnicity lines, to name only the main ones. This creates a few methodological difficulties for the social critic, because it translates into a heteroglossia of data. We need to adopt non-linearity as a major principle and to develop cartographies of power that account for the paradoxes and contradictions of the era of globalization, and which do not take shortcuts through its complexities.

NECRO-POLITICAL GOVERNMENTALITY

If insights about extinction were common in the nuclear era, the post-nuclear condition extends the horizon of extinction to most species. This inaugurates a negative or reactive form of pan-human planetary thinking which recomposes humanity around a commonly shared bond of vulnerability - all humans, though some are definitely more mortal than others and we share this vulnerability with animals and plants. Thanatology or necro-politics is central to our political economy. Michel Foucault’s essential insight into bio-power concerns its necropolitical site. Bio-power is about letting some die as well as actively working towards the survival of others.

On contemporary necro-politics

The emphasis on the politics of life itself and especially the shifting boundaries between life and death add a necro-political dimension to contemporary debates on power, with emphasis on the destructive consequences of bio-genetic capitalism (Foucault 1978, 1985; 1986), in terms of species extinction and environmental disasters.  ‘Life’ can be a threatening force, as evidenced by new epidemics and environmental catastrophes that blur the distinction between the natural and the cultural dimensions. ‘The politics of life itself’ makes technologically mediated ‘life’ into a contested political field (Rose, 2001). Living matter itself becomes the subject and not the object of enquiry. These concerns have both the neo-liberal (Fukuyama, 2002) and the neo-Kantian thinkers struck by high levels of anxiety about the sheer thinkability of human future (Habermas, 2003).

Another field of research concentrates on the brutality of the new wars – governance by fear – and the renewed expressions of violence which refers not only to the government of the living, but also to multiple practices of dying.  Bio-power and necro-politics are two sides of the same coin, as Mbembe (2003) brilliantly argues.  The post-Cold War world has seen not only a dramatic increase in warfare, but also a profound transformation of the war instance as such in the direction of a more complex management of survival and of extinction. ‘Necro-politics’ defines power essentially as the administration of death: “the generalized instrumentalization of human existence and the material destruction of human bodies and population” (Mmembe, 2003:19). And not only human.

The implications of this approach to bio/necro-power are radical: it is not up to the rationality of the Law and the universalism of moral values to structure the exercise of power, but rather the unleashing of the unrestricted sovereign right to kill, maim rape and destroy the life of others. This same power, following Agamben, structures the attribution of different degrees of ‘humanity’ according to hierarchies that are disengaged from the old dialectics and unhinged from any political rationality. They fulfil instead a more instrumental, narrow logic of opportunistic exploitation of the life in you, which is generic and not only individual.  The colonial plantation as the prototype of this political economy of detention, confinement and ultimate destruction turns the slave into the prototype of ‘homo sacer” (Agamben, 1998). 

Contemporary necro-politics has taken the form of the politics of death on a global regional scale. The new forms of industrial-scale warfare rest upon the commercial privatization of the army and the global reach of conflicts, which de-territorialize the use of and the rationale for armed service. Reduced to “infrastructural warfare” (Mbembe, 2003), and to a large-scale logistical operation (Virilio, 2002), war aims at the destruction of all the services that allow civil society to function: roads, electricity lines, airports, hospitals and other necessities. It also aims at protecting mineral extraction and other essential geo-physical resources needed by the global economy. In this respect, the ‘new’ wars look more life guerrilla warfare and terrorist attacks, than the traditional confrontation of enlisted and nationally indexed armies. One thinks specifically of the case of suicide bombers in the war on terror.

The old-fashioned army has now mutated into: “urban militias; private armies; armies of regional lords; private security firms and state armies, all claim the right to exercise violence or to kill” (Mbembe, 2003:32).  As a result, as a political category, the ‘population’ has also become disaggregated into: “rebels, child soldiers, victims or refugees, or civilians incapacitated by mutilation or massacred on the model of ancient sacrifices, while the ‘survivors’, after a horrific exodus, are confined to camps and zones of exception”( Mbembe, 2003: 34). 

Arjun Appadurai (1998) has also provided incisive analyses of the new ‘ethnocidal violence’ of the new forms of warfare which involve friends, kinsmen and neighbours. These confrontations are associated with “appalling brutality and indignity – involving mutilation, cannibalism, rape, sexual abuse, and violence against civilian spaces and populations. Put simply, the focus here is on bodily brutality perpetrated by ordinary persons against other persons with whom they may have – or could have – previously lived in relative amity” (Appadurai, 1998: 907).

Clearly, this exercise of violence cannot be adequately described in terms of disciplining the body, or even as the society of control – we have rather  entered the era of orchestrated and instrumental massacres, a new “semiosis of killing’, leading to the creation of multiple and parallel ‘death-worlds’  (Mbembe, 2003: 37). 

The social reality of refugees and asylum seekers also becomes an emblem of the contemporary necro-power. Diken (2004) argues that refugees are the perfect instantiation of the disposable humanity of ‘homo sacer’and thus constitutes the ultimate necro-political subject. The proliferation of detention and high-security camps and prisons within the once civic-mended space of the European City is a further example of the loss of credibility of the rational bio-political order. The camps – “sterilized, monofunctional enclosures’ (Diken, 2004:91) stand as the symbol of the indictment of  liberal Western democracies.

Duffield (2008) pushes this analysis even further and makes a distinction between developed or insured humans and under-developed or uninsured humans. “Developed life is sustained primarily through regimes of social insurance and bureaucratic protection historically associated with industrial capitalism and the growth of welfare states” (Duffield, 2008: 149). The distinction and the tensions between these two categories constitute the terrain for the ‘global civil war’, which is Duffield’s definition of globalized advanced capitalism. The link to colonialism is clear: de-colonization created nation-states whose people, once enslaved, were now free to circulate globally. These people constitute the bulk of the unwanted immigrants, refugees and asylum seekers who are contained and locked up across the developed world.  In a twist not deprived on ironical force, world migration is perceived as a particular threat in Europe precisely because it endangers Europe’s main infrastructure: the welfare state.

How does the necro-political dimension intervene in the discussion about feminist politics of affirmation? What are its implications for the practice of critical theory? Bio-power since Foucault led to a more sophisticated understanding of practices that latch onto ‘life’ as the main target. But death as a concept remains simultaneously central to political theory – in the form of the horizon of mortality and the concern for human vulnerability – and unspoken. Death as a concept remains unitary and un-differentiated, while the bios-Zoe horizon proliferates and diversifies.  

How shall we think about death today? 

The examples to prove that ‘Life’ can be a threatening force abound: the revival of old and new epidemics; the spread of environmental catastrophes that blur the distinction between the natural and the cultural dimensions are obvious examples. Another clear manifestation of the necro-politics folded within the bio-political management of life is provided by the new forms of warfare, the new ‘intelligent’ weapons on the one hand and the rawness of the bodies of suicide bombers on the other. Equally significant are the changes that have occurred in the political practice of bearing witness to the dead as a form of activism, which can be summarized as the shift from the Human Rights stance of the Argentinean Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo to the more brutal interventionism of the Chechnya war widows. The dislocation of gender roles in relation to death and killing is reflected in the image of women who kill, from recent stage productions of Medea and Hecuba to Lara Croft. The extent to which the killing of children plays a role in this shift of geopolitical belligerency deserves more space than I can grant it here.

From a post-human digital perspective comes the debate about the proliferation of viruses, from computers to humans, animals and back. Illness is clearly not only a privilege of organic entities, but a widespread practice of mutual contamination. A rather complex relationship has emerged in our cyber universe: one in which the mutual dependence between the flesh and the machine is symbiotic. This engenders some significant paradoxes, namely that the corporeal site of subjectivity is simultaneously denied, in a fantasy of escape, and re-enforced. Balsamo (1996) argues that it promotes dreams of immortality and control over life and death. “And yet, such beliefs about the technological future 'life' of the body are complemented by a palpable fear of death and annihilation from uncontrollable and spectacular body-threats: antibiotic-resistant viruses, random contamination, flesh-eating bacteria" (Balsamo 1996: 1-2). 

Popular culture and the infotainment industry are quick to pick up the trend.  Relevant cultural practices that reflect this changing status of death can be traced in the success of forensic detectives in contemporary popular culture. The corpse is a daily presence in global media and journalistic news, while it is also an object of entertainment. The currency granted to both legal (Ritalin, Prozac) and illegal drugs in contemporary culture blurs the boundaries between self-destruction and fashionable behaviour and forces a reconsideration of what is the value of ‘life itself’. Last but not least assisted suicide and euthanasia practices are challenging the Law to rest on the tacit assumption of a self-evident value attributed to ‘Life’. Social examples of this new necro-technology of the self are current health practices and the emphasis placed on the individual responsibility for the self-management of one’s health and one’s own life-style. This privatisation of good health is amplified by a social drive towards eternal youth, which is linked to the suspension of time in globally mediated societies and forms the counterpart of euthanasia and other social practices of assisted death. Spiritual death is part of the picture as well; contemporary embodied social practices that are often pathologized and never addressed fully are: addictions, eating disorders and melancholia, ranging from burnout to states of apathy or disaffection.  Instead of being classified as self-destructive practices, these phenomena exemplify in a non normative manner the shifting social relations between living and dying in the era of the politics of ‘life itself’.

In other words, the new necro-political practices mobilize not only generative forces, but also new and subtler degrees of extinction. This type of vitality, unconcerned by clear-cut distinctions between living and dying, composes the notion of ‘zoe’as a non-human yet paradoxically affirmative life-force. This vitalist materialism rests solidly on a neo-Spinozist political ontology of monism and radical immanence.  

This also means that the political representation of embodied subjects nowadays can no longer be understood within the visual economy of bio-politics in Foucault’s (1978) sense of the term. The representation of embodied subjects is no longer visual in the sense of being scopic, as in the post-Platonic sense of the simulacrum. Nor is it specular, as in the psychoanalytic mode of redefining vision within a dialectical scheme of oppositional recognition of self and/as other. It has rather become schizoid, or internally disjointed. It is spectral: the body is represented as a self-replicating system that is caught in a visual economy of endless circulation. The contemporary social imaginary is immersed in this logic of boundless circulation and thus is suspended somewhere beyond the life and death cycle of the imaged self. The social imaginary led by genetics has consequently become forensic in its quest for traces of a life that it no longer controls. Contemporary embodied subjects have to be accounted for in terms of their surplus value as genetic containers on the one hand, and as visual commodities circulating in a global circuit of cash flow on the other hand. Much of this information is not knowledge-driven, but rather media-inflated and thus indistinguishable from sheer entertainment. Today’s capital is spectral and our gaze forensic.

Nomadic theory’s main contribution to this debate rests on the concepts of radical immanence and non-deterministic vitalism, which unfold onto an affirmative ethics of bio-egalitarianism. Bio-centred egalitarianism is a philosophy of radical immanence and affirmative becoming, which activates a nomadic subject into sustainable processes of transformation.

The displacement of anthropocentrism is exposed by Deleuze and Guattari in the theory of becoming minoritarian/becoming-animal. This process of molecularization entails the redefinition of one's sense of attachment and connection to a shared world, a territorial space. It expresses multiple ecologies of belonging, while it enacts the transformation of human sensorial and perceptual co-ordinates, in order to acknowledge the collective nature and outward-bound direction of what we call the self. This ‘self’ is in fact a moveable assemblage within a common life-space which the subject never masters nor possesses, but merely inhabits, crosses, always in a community, a pack, a group, or a cluster. Becoming-animal marks the frame of an embodied subject, which is by no means suspended in an essential distance from the habitat/environment/territory, but is rather radically immanent to it. For philosophical nomadism, the subject is fully immersed in and immanent to a network of non-human (animal, vegetable, viral) relations. The zoe-centred embodied subject is shot through with relational linkages of the symbiotic, contaminating/viral kind which inter-connect it to a variety of others, starting from the environmental or eco-others.

Zoe-power revisited

This has consequences for the status of social and political theory itself. Patrick Hanafin (2010) suggests that this transversal vision of subjectivity may help us provide a political and ethical counter-narrative to “the imposes bounded subject of liberal legalism”.  This involves a move from thinking of legal subjectivity as death bound and always, already male – to thinking about singularities without identity who relate intimately to one another and the environment in which they are located. This points towards a critical politics of rights.  The majoritarian masculine legal social compact is built on the desire to survive. This is not a politics of empowerment, but one of entrapment in an imagined natural order which in our system translates into a bio-political regime of discipline and control of bodies. What this means is that we are recognized as full citizens only through the position of victims, loss an injury and the forms of reparation that come with it.   Nomadic theory raises the question of what political theory might look like if it were not based on the negative instances of wound and loss. In other words another fundamental binary of western philosophical thinking gets uncoupled: that of a political life qualified by death, or a political philosophy which valorizes our mortal condition and creates a politics of survival.

William Connolly’s ‘politics of becoming’(1999) argues a similar case: an ‘ethos of engagement’ with existing social givens which may bring about unexpected consequences and transformations.  This ethics is based on the notion of propelling a new entity into being, out of injury and pain. It actively constructs energy by transforming the negative charge of these experiences. The time-line for this political activity is that of Aion of becoming. This is different form working within or against the Chronos of the hegemonic political order. Hanafin quotes Blanchot in the importance of maintaining a refusal that turns into an affirmation ad to bring about an affirmation that undoes existing arrangements.

The transformative and affirmative character of feminist politics

One of the paradoxes that has become central to my work: how to engage in affirmative politics, which entails the creation of sustainable alternatives geared to the construction of social horizons of hope, while at the same time doing critical theory, which implies resistance to the present.  This is one of the issues  Deleuze and Guattari discuss at length, notably in: What is Philosophy? (1994): the relationship between creation and critique. It is however a problem that has confronted all activists and critical theorists: how to balance the creative potential of critical thought with the dose of negative criticism and oppositional consciousness that such a stance necessarily entails. 

Central to this debate is the question of how to resist the present, more specifically the injustice, violence and vulgarity of the times, while being worthy of our times, so as to engage with them in a in a productive, albeit it oppositional and affirmative manner. I shall return to this issue in the final section of this chapter. There is a contextual and a conceptual side to this problem and I will discuss each one of these and then examine some of their implications.  

This engagement with the present – and the spirit of the times, sets the political agenda in a variety of realms, ranging from sexuality and kinship system to religious and discursive practices.  The analyses of these themes are transmitted through narratives - mytholo­gies or fictions, which I have renamed as "figurati­ons" (Braidotti 2002; 2006), or cartographies of the present. A cartography is a politically informed map of one's historical and social locations, to enable the analysis of situated formations of power and hence the elaboration of adequate forms of resistance. Michel Foucault (1977) worked extensively on the notion of genealogy or counter-memories as a tool to draw the "diagrams of the present" in his analysis of the micro-physics of power in postindustrial societies. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (1987) also stressed the importance of immanent analyses of the singular actualizations of concrete power-formations.

Feminism also pioneered the practice of the politics of locations (Rich, 1987) as a method for grounding activism. It also perfected the strategy of positive renaming and re-signification of the subject. A location is an embedded and embodied memory: it is a set of counter-memories, which are activated by the resisting thinkers against the grain of the dominant social representations of subjectivity. A location is a materialist temporal and spatial site of co-production of the subjects in their diversity. Accounting for this complexity is therefore anything but an instance of relativism. Locations provide the ground for political and ethical accountability. Remembrance, cartographies of locations, political (dis-)identifications and strategic re-configurations are the tools for consci­ousness-raising which were devised by transformative epistemologies such as feminism and race theory (Passerini, 1988; Haraway, 1990; West, 1994).

Both my practice and my concept of the political therefore pay tribute to this tradition of radical politics at a point in history where the general tendency is to dismiss it or deride it as a failed historical experiment. The main thesis I want to defend is that the one of the most significant theoretical innovations it introduced is what later became known as ‘radical immanence’ (Deleuze, 1987). This includes the notions of political passions, affirmative ethics and the rigorous vision of affectivity which they entail. 

Oppositional consciousness 

The conceptual case of my argument rests on the rejection of the traditional equation between political subjectivity and critical oppositional consciousness and the reduction of both to negativity. There is an implicit assumption that political subjectivity or agency is about resistance and that resistance means the negation of the negativity of the present. A positive is supposed to be engendered by this double negative. Being against implies a belligerent act of negation, the erasure of present conditions.  

This assumption shares in a long constituted history of thought, which in Continental philosophy is best exemplified by Hegel. The legacy of Hegelian-Marxist dialectics of consciousness is such that it positions negativity as a necessary structural element of thought. This means that the rejection of conditions or premises that are considered unsatisfactory, unfair or offensive – on either ethical or political grounds- is the necessary pre-condition for their critique. A paradoxical concomitance is thus posited between the conditions which one rejects and the discursive practice of critical philosophy and subsequent actions. This paradox results in establishing negativity as a productive moment in the dialectical scheme which fundamentally aims at overturning the conditions that produced it in the first place. Thus, critical theory banks on negativity and in a perverse way even requires it. The corollary of this assumption is that the same material and discursive conditions that create the negative moment – the experience of oppression, marginality, injury or trauma – are also the condition of their overturning. The material that damages is also that which engenders positive resistance, counter-action or transcendence (Foucault, 1977). The process of consciousness-raising is crucial to the process of overturning or over-coding the negative instance. What triggers and at the same time is engendered by the process of resistance is collective oppositional consciousness. There is consequently a political necessity to elaborate adequate understandings and suitable representations of our real-life conditions. The negative experience can be turned into the matter that critical theory has to engage with. In this process, it turns into the productive source of counter-truths and values, which aim at over-coding the original negative instance. Epistemology therefore clears the ground for the ethical transformation that sustains political action.  

This process is too often rendered in purely functional terms as the equation of political creativity/agency with negativity, or unhappy consciousness. I want to suggest, however, that much is to be gained by adopting a non-Hegelian analysis that foregrounds instead the creative or affirmative elements of this process. This shift of perspective assumes philosophical monism and the recognition of an ethical and affective component of subjectivity; it is thus both an anti-dualistic an anti-rationalist position. A subject’s ethical core is not his/her moral intentionality, as much as the effects of power (as repressive – potestas – and positive – potentia) his/her actions are likely to have upon the world. It is a process of engendering empowering modes of becoming (Deleuze, 1990). Given that in this neo-vitalist view the ethical good is equated with radical relationality aiming at affirmative empowerment, the ethical ideal is to increase one’s ability to enter into modes of relation with multiple others. Oppositional consciousness and the political subjectivity or agency it engenders are processes or assemblages that actualize this ethical urge. This position is affirmative in the sense that it actively works towards the creation of alternatives by working through the negative instance and by cultivating the relations that are conducive to the ethical transmutation of values. 

What this means practically is that the conditions for political and ethical agency are not dependent on the current state of the terrain. They are not oppositional and thus not tied to the present by negation; instead they are affirmative and geared to creating possible futures. Ethical and political relations create possible worlds by mobilizing resources that have been left untapped, including our desires and imagination. The work of critique must focus on creating the conditions for the overturning of negativity precisely because they are not immediately available in the present. Moving beyond the dialectical scheme of thought means abandoning oppositional thinking, so as to index activity in the present upon the task of sustainable possible futures. The sustainability of the future rests on our ability to mobilize, actualize and deploy cognitive, affective and ethical forces that had not been activated so far. These driving forces concretise in actual, material relations and can thus constitute a network, web or rhizome of interconnection with others.  We have to learn to think differently about ourselves. To think means to create new conceptual tools that may enable us to both come to terms and actively interact with empowering others. The ethical gesture is the actualization of our increased ability to act and interact in the world.  

To disengage the process of subject formation from negativity to attach it to affirmative otherness means that reciprocity is redefined not as mutual recognition but rather as mutual definition or specification. We are in this together in a vital political economy of becoming that is both trans-subjective in structure and trans-human in force.  Such a nomadic vision of the subject, moreover, does not restrict the ethical instance within the limits of human otherness, but also opens it up to inter-relations with non-human, post-human and inhuman forces.  The emphasis on non-human ethical relations can also be described as a geo-politics or an eco-philosophy, in that it values one’s reliance on the environment in the broadest sense of the term. Felix Guattari’s idea of the three ecologies: the social, the psychic and the environmental, is very relevant to this discussion. Considering the extent of our technological development, emphasis on the eco-philosophical aspects is not to be mistaken for biological determinism. It rather posits a nature-culture continuum (Haraway, 1997; Guattari, 1995; 2000) within which subjects cultivates and constructs multiple ethical relations. The concepts of immanence, multiple ecologies and of neo-vital politics become relevant here.  

I have argued so far that oppositional consciousness is central to political subjectivity but it is not the same as negativity and that as a consequence, critical theory is about strategies and relations of affirmation. Political subjectivity or agency therefore consists of multiple micro-political practices of daily activism or interventions in and on the world we inhabit for ourselves and for future generations.  As Rich put it in her recent essays the political activist has to think ‘in spite of the times’ and hence ‘out of my time’, thus creating the analytics – the conditions of possibility – of the future (2001: 159). Critical theory occurs somewhere between the no longer and the not yet, not looking for easy reassurances but for evidence that others are struggling with the same questions. Consequently, ‘we’ are in this together indeed.     

What is positive in the ethics of affirmation is the belief that negative affects can be transformed. This implies a dynamic view of all affects, even those that freeze us in pain, horror or mourning.  The slightly de-personalizing effect of the negative or traumatic event involves a loss of ego-indexes perception, which allows for energetic forms of reaction. Clinical psychological research on trauma testifies to this, but I cannot pursue this angle here today. Diasporic subjects of all kinds express the same insight. Multi-locality is the affirmative translation of this negative sense of loss. Following Glissant (1997), the becoming-nomadic marks the process of positive transformation of the pain of loss into the active production of multiple forms of belonging and complex allegiances. Every event contains within it the potential for being overcome and overtaken – its negative charge can be transposed. The moment of the actualisation is also the moment of its neutralization. The ethical subject is the one with the ability to grasp the freedom to depersonalise the event and transform its negative charge.  Affirmative ethics puts the motion back into e-motion and the active back into activism, introducing movement, process, becoming. This shift makes all the difference to the patterns of repetition of negative emotions.  It also repens the debate on secularity, in that it actually promotes an act of faith in our collective capacity to endure and to transform.  

What is negative about negative affects is not a normative value judgment but rather the effect of arrest, blockage, rigidification, that comes as a result of a blow, a shock, an act of violence, betrayal, a trauma, or just intense boredom. Negative passions do not merely destroy the self, but also harm the self’s capacity to relate to others – both human and non human others, and thus to grow in and through others. Negative affects diminish our capacity to express the high levels of inter-dependence, the vital reliance on others that is the key to both a non-unitary vision of the subject and to affirmative ethics. Again, the vitalist notion of Life as ‘zoe’ is important here because it stresses that the Life I inhabit is not mine, it does not bear my name – it is a generative force of becoming, of individuation and differentiation: a-personal, indifferent and  generative.   What is negated by negative passions is the power of life itself, - its potentia - as the dynamic force, vital flows of connections and becoming. And this is why they should neither be encouraged nor should we be rewarded for lingering around them too long. Negative passions are black holes.  

This is an antithesis of the Kantian moral imperative to avoid pain, or to view pain as the obstacle to moral behaviour. This displaces the grounds on which Kantian negotiations of limits can take place. The imperative not to do onto others what you would not want done to you is not rejected as much as enlargened. In affirmative ethics, the harm you do to others is immediately reflected on the harm you do to yourself, in terms of loss of potentia, positivity, capacity to relate and hence freedom. Affirmative ethics is not about the avoidance of pain, but rather about transcending the resignation and passivity that ensue from being hurt, lost and dispossessed. One has to become ethical, as opposed to applying moral rules and protocols as a form of self-protection: one has to endure.  

Endurance is the Spinozist code word for this process. Endurance has a spatial side to do with the space of the body as an enfleshed field of actualization of passions or forces. It evolves affectivity and joy, as in the capacity for being affected by these forces, to the point of pain or extreme pleasure. Endurance points to the struggle to sustain the pain without being annihilated by it. Endurance has also a temporal dimension, about duration in time. This is linked to memory: intense pain, a wrong, a betrayal, a wound are hard to forget. The traumatic impact of painful events fixes them in a rigid eternal present tense, out of which it is difficult to emerge. This is the eternal return of that which precisely cannot be endured and, as such, returns precisely in the mode of the unwanted, the untimely, the un-assimilated or in-appropriate/d. They are also, however, paradoxically difficult to remember, in so far as re-membering entails retrieval and repetition of the pain itself.  

Being worthy of what happens to us   

One of the reasons why the negative associations linked to pain, especially in relation to political processes of change, is ideologically laden. It has to do with the force of habit. Starting from the assumption that a subject is a molar aggregate, that is to say a sedimentation of established habits, these can be seen as patterns of repetitions that consolidate modes of relation and forces of interaction. Habits are the frame within which non-unitary or complex subjects get re-territorialized, albeit temporarily. One of the established habits in our culture is to frame ‘pain’ within a discourse and social practice of suffering which requires rightful compensation.  Equally strong is the urge to understand and empathize with pain. People go to great lengths in order to ease all pain. Great distress follows from not knowing or not being able to articulate the source of one’s suffering, or from knowing it all too well, all the time. The yearning for solace, closure and justice is understandable and worthy of respect.  

This ethical dilemma was already posed by J.F. Lyotard (1983) and, much earlier, by Primo Levi about the survivors of Nazi concentration camps.  Namely that the kind of vulnerability we humans experience in face of events on the scale of small or high horror is something for which no adequate compensation is even thinkable. It is just incommensurable: a hurt, or wound, beyond repair. This means that the notion of justice in the sense of a logic of rights and reparation is not applicable. For the post-structuralist Lyotard, ethics consists in accepting the impossibility of adequate compensation – and living with the open wound. 

This is the road to an ethics of affirmation, which respects the pain but suspends the quest for both claims and compensation and resists the logic of retribution of rights. This is achieved through a sort of de-personalization of the event, which is the ultimate ethical challenge. The dis-placement of the ‘‘zoe’’-indexed reaction reveals the fundamental meaningless-ness of the hurt, the injustice or injury one has suffered. “Why me?” is the refrain most commonly heard in situation of extreme distress. This expresses rage as well as anguish at one’s ill fate. The answer is plain:  actually, for no reason at all. Examples of this are the banality of evil in large-scale genocides like the Holocaust (Arendt, 1963), the randomness of surviving them. There is something intrinsically senseless about the pain, hurt or injustice: lives are lost or saved for all and no reason at all. Why did some go to work in the WTC on 9/11 while others missed the train? Why did Frida Kahlo take that tram which crashed so that she was impaled by a metal rod, and not the next one? For no reason at all. Reason has nothing to do with it. That’s precisely the point. We need to de-link pain from the epistemological obsession that results in the quest for meaning and move beyond, to the next stage. That is the path to transformation of negative into positive passions.  

This is not fatalism, and even less resignation, but rather Nietzschean ethics of overturning the negative. Let us call it: amor fati: we have to be worthy of what happens to us and rework it within an ethics of relation. Of course repugnant and unbearable events do happen. Ethics consists, however, in reworking these events in the direction of positive relations. This is not carelessness or lack of compassion, but rather a form of lucidity that acknowledges the meaningless-ness of pain and the futility of compensation. It also re-asserts that the ethical instance is not that of retaliation or compensation, but it rather rests on active transformation of the negative.  

In other words, the ‘worthiness’ of an event – that which ethically compels us to engage with it, is not its intrinsic or explicit value according to given standards of moral or political evaluation, but rather the extent to which it contributes to conditions of becoming. It is a vital force to move beyond the negative. 

This requires a double shift. Firstly the affect itself moves from the frozen or reactive effect of pain to proactive affirmation of its generative potential. Secondly, the line of questioning also shifts from the quest for the origin or source to a process of elaboration of the questions that express and enhance a subject’s capacity to achieve freedom through the understanding of its limits. 

What is an adequate ethical question?  One, which is capable of sustaining the subject in his/her quest for more inter-relations with others, i.e.: more ‘Life’, motion, change, and transformation. The adequate ethical question provides the subject with a frame for interaction and change, growth and movement. It affirms life as difference-at-work and as endurance. An ethical question had to be adequate in relation to how much a body can take. How much can an embodied entity take in the mode of inter-relations and connections, i.e., how much freedom of action can we endure? Affirmative ethics assumes, following Nietzsche that humanity does not stem out of freedom but rather that freedom is extracted out of the awareness of limitations.  Affirmation is about freedom from the burden of negativity, freedom through the understanding of our bondage.  

Conclusion: on inter-generational justice

The real issue is conceptual: how do we develop a new post-unitary vision of the subject, of ourselves, and how do we adopt a social imaginary that does justice to the complexity? Shifting an imaginary is not like casting away a used garment, but more like shedding an old skin. How do changes of this magnitude take place? It happens often enough at the molecular level, but in the social it is a painful experience, given that identifications constitute an inner scaffolding that supports one’s sense of identity. Part of the answer lies in the formulation of the question: “we” are in this together. This is a collective activity, a group project that connects active, conscious, and desiring citizens. It points towards a virtual destination: post-unitary nomadic identities, floating foundations, etc. but it is not utopian. As a project it is historically grounded, socially embedded, and already partly actualized in the joint endeavor, that is, the community, of those who are actively working toward it. If this be utopian it is only in the sense of the positive affects that are mobilized in the process: the necessary dose of imagination, dreamlike vision, and bonding without which no social project can take off.

The ethical process of transforming negative into positive passions engenders a politics of affirmation, in the sense of creating thew conditions for endurance and hence for a sustainable future.  Virtual futures grow out of sustainable presents and vice versa. Transformative politics takes on the future as the shared collective imagining that endures in processes of becoming.  The ethical-political concept here is the necessity to think with the times and in spite of the times, not in a belligerent mode of oppositional consciousness, but as a humble and empowering gesture of co-construction of social horizons of hope.

The final aspect of affirmative politics I want to spell out is that of the generational time-lines, in the sense of the construction of social horizons of hope, that is, of sustainable futures. The future today is no longer the self-projection of the modernist subject or the gloom of the postmodern one. It is a rather humble act of faith in the possibility of endurance (as duration or continuity) that honours our obligation to the generations to come.  It involves the virtual unfolding of the affirmative aspect of what we manage to actualise in the here and now. Virtual futures grow out of sustainable presents and vice-versa. This is how qualitative transformations can be actualised and transmitted along the genetic/time line. Transformative post-secular ethics takes on the future affirmatively, as the shared collective imagining that is a continual process of becoming, to effect multiple modes of interaction with heterogeneous others. This is what futurity is made of. It is a non-linear evolution: an ethics that moves away from the paradigm of reciprocity and the logic of re-cognition, and that installs a rhizomatic relation of mutual affirmation.

Sustainability expresses the desire to endure, in both space and time. In Spinozist-Deleuzian political terms, this sustainable idea of endurance is linked to the construction of possible futures, in so far as the future is the virtual unfolding of the affirmative aspect of the present. An equation is therefore drawn between the radical politics of dis-identification, the formation of alternative subject positions and the construction of social hope in the future. This equation rests on the strategy of transformation of negative passions into affirmative and empowering modes of relation to the conditions of our historicity. 

In order to appreciate the full impact of this idea, we need to think back to the perverse temporality of advanced capitalism, with which I started this essay.  In so far as the axiomatic of capitalism destroy sustainable futures, resistance to it entails the collective endeavour to construct social horizons of endurance, which is to say of hope and sustainability. It is a political practice of resistance to the present, which activates the past into producing the hope of change and the energy to actualize it. In so doing it processes negative forces and enlists them to the empowering task of engaging with possible futures.  Hope is an anticipatory virtue that activates powerful motivating forces:  counter-memories, imagination, dream work, religion, desire and art. Hope constructs the future in that it opens the spaces to project active desires onto; it gives us the force to process the negativity and emancipate ourselves from the inertia of everyday routines. It is a qualitative leap that carves out active trajectories of becoming and thus can respond to anxieties and uncertainties in a productive manner and negotiate transitions to sustainable futures. 

By targeting those who come after us as the rightful ethical interlocutors and assessors of our own actions, we are taking seriously the implications of our own situated position. This form of inter-generational justice is crucial. This point about intra-generational fairness need not, however, be expressed or conceptualised in the social imaginary as an Oedipal narrative. To be concerned about the future should not necessarily result in linearity, i.e. in re-stating the unity of space and time as the horizon of subjectivity. On the contrary, non-linear genealogical models of intra-generational decency offer up one way of displacing the Oedipal hierarchy.These models involve a becoming-minoritarian of the elderly, the senior, and the parental, but also a de-Oedipalization of the bond of the young to those who preceded them. It calls for new ways of addressing and of solving inter-generational conflicts – other than envy and rivalry - joining forces across the generational divide by working together towards sustainable futures. By practising an ethics of non-reciprocity in the pursuit of affirmation.

An example: the older feminists may feel the cruel pinch of aging, but some of the young ones suffer from 1970’s envy. The middle aged survivors of the second wave may feel like war veterans or survivors, but some of generation Y, as Iris van der Tuin taught me, call themselves ‘born again baby boomers!’So who’s envying whom?

‘”We” are in this together, indeed. Those who go through life under the sign of the desire for change need accelerations that jolt them out of set habits; political thinkers of the post-secular era need to be visionary, prophetic, and upbeat - in so far as they are passionately committed to writing the pre-history of the future. That is to say: to introduce change in the present so as to affect multiple modes of belonging through complex and heterogeneous relations. This is the horizon of sustainable futures.

Hope is a sort of  “dreaming forward” that permeates our lives and activates them. It is a powerful motivating force grounded in our collective imaginings. They express very grounded concerns for the multitude of “any-body” that composes the human community. Lest our greed and selfishness destroy or diminish it for generations to come.  Given that posterity per definition can never pay us back, this gesture is perfectly gratuitous.  Against the general lethargy, the rhetoric of selfish genes and possessive individualism on the one hand, and the dominant ideology of the melancholic lament on the other, hope rests with an affirmative ethics of sustainable futures. A deep and careless generosity, the ethics of non-profit at an ontological level. Why should one pursue this project? For no reason at all. Reason has nothing to do with this.  Let’s just do it for the hell of it – to be worthy of our times while resisting the times and for love of the world.

biography

Rosi Braidotti (B.A. Hons. Australian National University, 1978; PhD Cum Laude, Université de Paris, Panthéon-Sorbonne, 1981; Senior Fulbright Scholar, 1994; Honorary Degree ‘Philosophiae Doctrix Honoris Causa’, University of Helsinki, 2007; Knight in the Order of the Netherlands Lion, 2005; Honorary Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, 2009) is Distinguished University Professor and founding Director of the Centre for the Humanities at Utrecht University. Her books include Patterns of Dissonance, Polity Press, 1991; Nomadic Subjects, Columbia University Press, 1994 and 2011a (second ed.); Metamorphoses, Polity Press, 2002; Transpositions, Polity Press, 2006; La philosophie, lá où on ne l’attend pas, Larousse, 2009; Nomadic Theory. The Portable Rosi Braidotti, Columbia University Press, 2011b and The Posthuman, Polity Press, 2013. Since 2009 she is a board member of CHCI (Consortium of Humanities Centres and Institutes).

Personal website: www.rosibraidotti.com

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labrys, études féministes/ estudos feministas
janvier / juin 2013  -janeiro / junho 2013