Nomadic Theory by Braidotti Rosi

Author:Braidotti, Rosi
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2011-02-26T16:00:00+00:00

My argument has shown that there is no logical necessity to assume that the Western model of emancipation, based on secularism and the equation of liberation with sexual freedom, is the only, let alone the best paradigm for feminist activism. A plurality of other models—both of secularity and of women’s emancipation—is both feasible and desirable. Lest this be mistaken for cultural relativism, let me reiterate again the point about the feminist politics of location as both a methodology and a strategy. The link between political subjectivity and oppositional consciousness and the tendency to reduce the latter to negativity also need to be reviewed. Critical theory can be just as and more persuasively theoretical if it embraces philosophical monism, nomadic subjectivity and vital politics, and disengages the process of consciousness-raising from the logic of negativity, connecting it instead to creative affirmation. The corollary of this shift is twofold: firstly, it proves that political subjectivity or agency need not be aimed solely at the production of radical countersubjectivities. It is not a destructive oppositional strategy that aims at storming the Bastille of phallocentrism or undoing the winter palace of gender. It rather involves negotiations with dominant norms or technologies of the self. Secondly, it argues that political subjectivity rests on an ethics of otherness that values reciprocity as mutual specification or creation, but not as the recognition of sameness.

The political economy of subjectivity I have been arguing for does not condition the emergence of the subject on negation but on creative affirmation, not on loss but on vital generative forces. This shift is central to the postsecular turn in feminist theory, which imagines a subject whose existence, ethics, and politics are not indexed on negativity and hence on the horizon of alterity and melancholia. The nomadic subject is looking for the ways in which otherness prompts, mobilizes, and allows for the affirmation of what is not contained in the present conditions.

This has implications for the link between sexuality, politics, and desire. Nomadic vitalist politics stresses the need to return to sexuality as an ontological, polymorphous, and complex force and consequently to disengage it from both identity issues and all dualistic oppositions. Feminist and gay activists may want to look for subversion not in counteridentity formations and all the embattled identity politics that goes with it—but rather in deterritorialization of all identities indexed on sex. This means by extension that sexuality is to be approached as a force, or constitutive element, that is capable of deterritorializing gender identity and institutions.

A renewed emphasis on sexuality, as opposed to classical feminist or queer theories of sex and gender, emerges from this shift of perspective, as I argued in chapter 6. I would reappraise the radical critique Foucault developed of the overemphasis our culture places on sex-gender as an indicator of identities and inner truths about ourselves. As an operator of power, a conveyor of major social regulations, and a tool for consumerism, sex-indexed identities are a trap from which we need to liberate ourselves. Foucault’s

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