Get a Life!

Abstract

Hot on the heels of a spate of her own previous books addressing the posthuman, Rosi Braidotti has turned the full focus of her gaze on the uniquely feminist perspective that has nurtured the development of the field. Posthuman Feminism makes a strong case that feminist thought, as far back as the early second wave, has set out many of the grounds on which this highly pertinent—and urgent—area of study has been built. A scholar at the heart of feminist philosophy as it threw off its more reformist aims in the 1990s, Braidotti has always been notable for her ability to rethink the significance of her own research and not fall into the trap of believing that there is one single answer that would disassemble the structures of patriarchy to the benefit of not just women, but all the other others. Posthuman Feminism is deeply inclusive in its reach and committed to a traversality that demands the attention of academics across the humanities and social sciences.Right from the start, the structure of the book makes clear its investments, with part 1 focusing on posthuman feminism as critique, and the more lengthy part 2 turning to posthuman feminism as creation. Braidotti is nothing if not thoroughly apprised of the dangers of the contemporary global situation—and here COVID-19 is an inevitable intruder into the text, alongside the climate crisis, the reemergence of white supremacist beliefs and values and much more—but she is also optimistic that feminist thought can chart a way out to a more vital and all-encompassing futurity. As in her previous work, she frequently references the two meanings of power, derived from Spinoza, as either potestas—the power to dominate—or potentia, the emergent power of self-affirmative action. The latter is what feminism has always brought to the table, and Braidotti puts great emphasis throughout on her claim that intergenerational feminist analyses have been an important precursor of contemporary posthuman theory. Even though it still clings to the embodied human subject as its major referent, emancipatory thought must be appreciated for its embrace of vilified and devalued subjects—women in general, and especially LGBTQ+, disabled, Indigenous, and colonized peoples—but now is the time for progressive thinkers to dis-identify with what the convention understands as human. In her subsequent critique, Braidotti opens up the field to acknowledge that the voices of the socially and politically unheard have played an extensive role in developing posthuman thought. Her turn to less familiar feminist scholars writing out of the experience of being Black or Indigenous, sexually excluded, environmentally attuned, or anomalously embodied is an important corrective to the mainstream history of (effectively white) feminism. Her contention is that it is precisely these other others who have thought beyond the boundaries of the human and seen the affinities that develop a posthuman understanding of the world and all its living elements. It is telling that Braidotti always prefers the term posthuman to posthumanism, the better I think to stress the materiality of what is at stake.At the heart of her enterprise, Braidotti maps the posthuman convergence of three disparate but interlinked areas marked as zoe-driven with the focus on nonhuman participants, geo-centered in ecological planetary relations, and techno-mediated elements. As she understands it, posthuman feminism has no fixed object of study: “Living matter is materially embedded and embodied, but it flows, transversally across multi-relational entities. All the interesting events happen in transit” (125–26). The irreducible materiality of the posthuman world is conveyed with great vigor, and Braidotti is insistent that there is nothing new about feminist materialism, it being both a central feature of Indigenous knowledge and environmental thought, as well as a guiding light to many earlier feminist scholars of whom Donna Haraway is but one example. I'm a little surprised, though, that Braidotti has very little to say about bioscience. She is at great pains to revisit and upend the conventional nature/culture divide and to explore the technological aspects that cut though the distinction, but aside from an analysis of surrogacy, the authorized narrative of biomedicine, for example, gets a pass. But no matter; the dynamism of her descriptive assemblage of ideas and actions carries the reader forward to the point at which the posthuman and our kinship with the nonhuman and more-than-human world seem unstoppable. And here we become more aware of a characteristic intervention that Braidotti has threaded through her text: that whatever the relations in play, what matters is their ethical framing. It is not enough to embrace posthuman feminism as the deconstruction of boundaries because an affirmative ethics must also preserve and celebrate the positivity of differences within a collectivity. As she writes, “The task . . . is to activate modes of collaborative interconnectedness, mutual interdependence, care and infinite compassion” (241).This will be undoubtedly a core text for advanced students and researchers who want to not just understand the fascination and foreboding of our own age—the Anthropocene—but to look ahead to the hope of better times that Braidotti characterizes as affirmative thought. In contextualizing current work in the recent history of feminist thought, Posthuman Feminism acknowledges a depth of scholarship that has long since crossed disciplinary boundaries to encompass an extraordinary range of both collaborative and competing analyses. Braidotti treats them all with respect, claiming no privilege for her own grounding area of philosophy nor for the hitherto dominance of Western-influenced texts in both the humanist and posthuman arenas. Posthuman Feminism is not a work—and not intended to be—that sets out to break new ground so much as one that brings together a plethora of approaches, including those previously devalued, that together generate novel ways of thinking a shared future. When Braidotti finally exhorts us to “Get a Life!” that call to optimism, affirmation, and activism precisely encapsulates all that has gone before. Life is every thing and everywhere, and if feminism is to prosper, then we—all of us—must embrace the challenges and the promises of the posthuman.