Book review: Posthuman Feminism

In the last two decades, the idea of a radical shift in the humanist perspective has found its way into the philosophical debate in favour of a ‘posthuman’ vision over every aspect of life. Rosi Braidotti is among the promoters of such a transformation, as attested by her trilogy composed of The Posthuman (2013), Posthuman Knowledge (2019), and the most recent Posthuman Feminism (2022). In these volumes, her discussion takes a leap from her previous stances about nomadic subjectivity. Here, her attention towards contemporaneity includes a radical reconfiguration of the ideas of subjectivity, perception, and experience. Posthuman subjectivity founds its base within the ‘affirmative perspective’ of new materialism, as it was developed within feminist philosophy in the 2000s. As reconstructed by Braidotti herself, new materialism starts where the limitations of the linguistic turn emerge. According to Braidotti, the complete reliance upon ‘language, representation and the power of the phallic master signifier and the process of subject-formation’ (p. 109) does erase ‘the thick and painful materiality of the current environmental crisis on the one hand and the divisive social implications of the new technologies on the other’ (p. 110). The volume is dedicated to exploring the possibilities for a specific feminist declination of the posthuman perspective. However, it relies upon (and partially takes for granted) the fierce debate that developed in the late 2000s around the relationship between new materialism and feminist theories that Braidotti had addressed in previous writings. Part of the discussion was held within the pages of this same Journal in 2008 and 2009, when Sara Ahmed (15:1), Iris van der Tuin (15:4), and Noela Davis (16:1) engaged in an open discussion about the relationship between feminism and new materialism, primarily concentrating on the different perspectives covered by anti-essentialism and biophobia. During those years, the main concern was which idea of ‘body’ was actually included in feminist theories, influenced mainly by post-structuralism. What appeared as a nearly irreconcilable fracture in those writings has become more and more a stimulus in interrogating anti-essentialist positions. In particular, feminist new materialism needs to take into consideration the bodies according to a theoretical frame averted from traditional anthropocentrism and humanism, which created the power asymmetries and hierarchies that made feminist theories essential in the first place. In the essay that Braidotti published in the collection New Materialism: Ontology, Agency, and Politics, edited by Diana Coole and Samantha Frost (Duke University Press 1144964 EJW0010.1177/13505068221144964European Journal of Women’s StudiesBook review book-review2023