24/02/2018 THE AMODERNS: THINKING WITH ZOE - Amodern

Currents
July 2016

THE AMODERNS:
THINKING WITH ZOE
A Feature Interview with Rosi Braidotti
Heather Davis, Rosi Braidotti

Rosi Braidotti is a force of nature-culture. Her work since Patterns of Di erence and
extending through her trilogy, which includes Nomadic Subjects, Metamorphosis and
Transpositions, has been vital to a resurgence of feminist, anti-racist and materialist
thought. Her incredibly proli c career – which spans multiple languages – engages
with the material realities of politics within the frame of a feminist, Spinozist ethics.
This is one of her many great contributions: the ways in which she can adeptly move
between the realms of theory and on-the-ground politics, never losing sight of what
is at stake in thinking or action. This dual insight is born from her roots in the
women’s movement and feminist activism; Braidotti began her career by publishing
in militant journals and is always writing from and within feminist genealogy. As she
writes in her brilliant essay about her own life and work, “The Untimely”: “more
conceptual creativity is necessary, and more theoretical courage, in order to face the
challenges and also the horrors of our times.” [1] She is an example of both conceptual
creativity and theoretical courage.

I had the immense privilege of sitting down with Braidotti to discuss her work in the
context of the series Boundaries of the Human in the Age of the Life Sciences at Penn
State. [2] Our conversation began with her insistence upon zoe, as a life – an
impersonal force that moves through us and connects us to the other creatures we
share the world and our own bodies with. Zoe is distinct from bios; the latter
representing the political, intelligent and discursive side of life, while the former
“stands for the mindless vitality of Life carrying on independently and regardless of
rational control.” [3] This concept is at “the core of the postanthropocentric feminist
turn: it is a materialist, secular, grounded and unsentimental response to the
opportunistic transspecies commodi cation of Life that is the logic of advanced
capitalism.” [4] From this theoretical foundation we discuss her most recent book, The
Posthuman, and the place of the humanities in the contemporary university. What
follows is an edited transcript of our conversation.

–Heather Davis

I’m interested in the work that zoe does for your thinking, particularly in relation to
this time of extinction. I am thinking about extinction both in terms of biological
species and the way that Félix Guattari would talk of it, as the extinction of
subjectivities and collectivities. I feel like the impetus to think with zoe is even more
imperative at this moment in time.

Yes, psychic constructs and ideas are as mortal and vulnerable as physical species.
What is becoming extinct today is a sense and a measure of the possible. We are
watching our social, political, conceptual and ethical horizons shrink and narrow by
the day. You’ve hit exactly at the conceptual core, which most people miss. I was

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teaching my class at Columbia last week and a student said, “But we’ve had 30 years
of post-structuralism. How could we have missed monism?” And I said, “What a very
good question.” Because a switch to Spinoza is almost the essence of the di erence
between the linguistic branch and the new materialist branch. Althusser’s students
bring back Spinoza as an antidote to the limitations of Hegelianism, best exempli ed
by the catastrophe of Eastern European Communism. It brews up around 1968 and
consolidates after the failure of ’68. It was a fantastic cultural revolution that in many
ways changed the world but politically it didn’t work. So, it’s clear that a dialectical
system of politics doesn’t work, nor does liberal democracy. What do we need? We
need a monistic system. It’s key.

Now, why doesn’t it get through? That’s a key question. There is a revolution and then
a conservative moment. De Gaulle wins the election. The philosophers stay radical –
until 1981. Then Mitterand wins and it’s all over, nished. That’s the French political
logic. In our academic world, we have to look at the phenomenon of French theory in
the United States, what I call the Trans-Atlantic disconnection. We have to look at
what gets imported, where, and for what purposes. The prominence of Derrida and his
derivatives makes it impossible for the new materialisms line to emerge. Foucault is a
case apart. But, he also dies very young, at 54. So the celebrity thing does a lot for
Foucault, but it also kills him. We just don’t have enough of his books.

So I think we have here a political economy of import and export to explain why this
question that for you is so obvious – it is the conceptual core – can only be asked now.
I think we can almost do the entire interview around this question. There are number
of things here in place: power, what became postmodernism, and the backlash against
postmodernism that I sometimes feel was set up as a dead horse to be beaten and re-
beaten. It was an easy one to both in ate and de ate, and the political consequences
of this non-debate have been devastating, as they resulted in dismissing the whole
thing as relativistic and amoral. So, then I would say the materialist line is much more
subterranean, to use a term from my teacher François Châtelet. And yet, in the context
of the history of French philosophy, monism is very prominent, if not the dominant
line after 1968. Besides, French philosophy has a tradition of thinking about life and a
strong rationalist tradition in the philosophy of science. Monism turns into a vitalist
philosophy of science. Georges Canguilhem trained Foucault. Gaston Bachelard
supervised both Deleuze and Michel Serres. And then our people come along. They
don’t come out of nothing. There are these geneaologies of philosophies of life.

So, I would keep in mind these large blocks of solid scholarship to say, “Actually, we
could have done this.” This is core business. That’s my rst answer. How do we do
monism and why is it so di cult? Well, because our world is organized in binaries.
And our political system is organized in binaries. And binaries are the most e cient
mechanisms of capture. That’s why they are in place. The gender system is idiotic! It
works because it’s stupid. You Tarzan, me Jane. Brilliant! Stupid, untrue. We know
from Lacan and psychoanalysis that sexuality is polymorphous, perverse, non-
human, all over the place. The gender binary is a mechanism of capture, a mode of
governance, a mode of government mentality.

But then we enter the anatomy of advanced capitalism explicated in Anti-Oedipus and
A Thousand Plateaus. This system is far more sophisticated. It functions by perverse
forms of mobility in striated spaces and quanti ed multiplication of di erences. It
works on life as capital, life as surplus. But biogenetic powers are always quanti ed
for purposes of commodi cation. So the code, the axiom is always the same. Maybe

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the problem has been that until now we could not think about monism because of the
domination of social constructivist binaries.

So, we can, at least, think zoe. The rst thing we need to say about zoe, monism and
the switch to Spinoza, is it actually clearly states that we are part of it. In an immanent
frame, we start by saying we are part of it and looking at the modes of implications,
the ecologies of belonging. We are immanent to the conditions which we are very
often opposed to. The conditions of possibility, the thinkability of zoe has to do with
the new situation that we’re in. And it’s no wonder that A Thousand Plateaus is taught
in business schools. People want to understand how the world works. The punchline
for us is that we are a part of it. This is unbearable for Marxist-Leninists because they
are always assuming a position exterior to and outside of capitalism; they see
themselves as exterior to the system. Here, my feminism comes in, in relation to
immanence, as the politics of location and situated knowledge. Feminism allows you
to look at ways where you can both acknowledge and disengage from this complex and
multi-layered ecology of belonging and make a di erence, a positive di erence. The
feminist, immanent position assumes the humility of saying “we are a part of
capitalism.” That is the beginning of wisdom, that is to say of an adequate
cartography of our real-life conditions. Well, that wise humility is just completely not
in the picture with the neo-Leninists who are still talking as if they are in charge of
the course of history, as if they’ve got the truth in their pocket and they are going to
tell you at which particular point capitalism is going to break so that they can stay in
charge of the revolution. Capitalism doesn’t break, it bends. It enfolds and unfolds.
Welcome to a monistic system.

One of the things that I nd so fascinating about your thought is that you’re clear
about laying out particular genealogies. I see this as a recognition of the feminist
politics of location. This approach entwines immanence with thought. A thought is
coming out of and is immanent with a social milieu and an ecological milieu.
Considering this entanglement of thought and social processes, I’m wondering if
you see the rise of materialist thinking as a result of the increasing pressure of the
ecological situation, of it looking increasingly dire?

I think that you stress something very important. That is, monism gives you a
methodology and it gives you a pedagogy. That was clear for any of us who actually
studied with Deleuze. He gave us a clear anti-oedipal collective pedagogy. He gives
you a toolbox, and concepts, and tells you to go and do your own thing. Doing your
own thing is actualizing your own virtual forces to implement your own praxis. This
also involves a transversal politics which implies a collective. You cannot do anything
if you do not have an assemblage, if you don’t have a “we”, a people. There is no
subject of knowledge waiting there for you to be recognized by and for you to
recognize him – it’s always a him – as the one who holds the key that can unveil the
truth, which puts intellectuality in a totally self aggrandizing and classical position.
Everything starts with the plane of composition of a we: we need to compose that
assemblage and bring out the missing “we” – the people. That we, for me, is a politics
of location. It is also a bibliography. It’s also a genealogy.

The thinkability of materialism is de nitely connected with the life sciences, bio-
genetics, and nano-technologies: all the new matters, new materials, and wearable
technologies that are now being developed. We are surrounded by the fabrication of
life, the manufacturing of life. [5] And then we try to make an ethical, qualitative
distinction. This is a massive university, a major agent of cognitive capitalism; we are

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agents of cognitive capitalism. And then there is the negative part, the anxiety about
the future. The Anthropocene, however shaky it may be as a scienti c concept, is one
of the factors that enables the thinkability of extinction and the possibility of
recomposing a humanity. [6] But the Anthropocene is by now almost disregarded as a
concept. I see nothing but criticism of it.

I think in this moment I become a true rst generation Spinozist calling for a di erent
ethics. The ethics of a rmation, the ethics of actualization. And that is the theoretical
battle line. That’s where we are not getting through at all. That’s where we are losing
massively because the Marxists attack us to say that we don’t have a politics. The neo-
Kantians attack us saying “you hate humanity in a time of such su ering that requires
that we join forces.” And we are left exactly where we were in the 1980s with the
discussion of postmodernism: as the alleged enemies of Humanity and of the
humanities. We are back to that.

One of the things that I nd fascinating about the ways in which you take up the
Spinozist ethics around the question of a rmation is that it isn’t only about
positivity. You also engage with di cult subject matters such as death, su ering,
suicide and depression. These other things don’t look like a rmation, especially not
in this age of self-help and the perfectibility of the subject, but a rmation can also
look like an acknowledgment of the di culties of getting through the day.

Spinoza’s Ethics has entire chapters on poisoning and death. He is living in terrible
times – the end of the Dutch Republic, political assassination, chaos. He himself is a
pariah and experiences marginalization – out of the synagogue, out of the city, living
in the Hague. He talks about poison and being intoxicated by negativity. That’s exactly
how the negative functions. It’s toxic, toxic for the earth, the social, psychic and
environmental. It’s not just killing. It’s a slow death. To get that out of a system is
clinical as well as critical. So, we should make the clinical exercise of the detox from
negativity our number one priority to live a life of the mind that constructs
a rmation. It’s not about optimism and feeling good. Who cares about how you feel?

Reason left to itself is a horror. Einstein took it all back, the poor guy, when he saw
what they had done with his thought, saying “if I had known I would never have
thought it.” He was so against the violent application of the bomb. Freud had a
psychopathology of philosophy project. Then came Nazism and he had to ee. But
before then Freud had several meetings to look at the pathologies of the philosophers.
Kant with his maniacal obsessive behavior: people could set their watches to his
walks. Rousseau, the great pedagogue, sends his children to the local institution
because he couldn’t be bothered. I mean, the “great philosophers” are a bunch of
dysfunctional nuts! Or, to put it more a rmatively, they are expressing a kind of
psychopathology as they are dealing with intensities and they are cracking. You have
to crack a little. If you do it in a Spinozist ethics of a rmation, you are pursuing the
crack as a way of opening up to further intensities. But, you need people who have
been wounded. You need some wound. If you haven’t been wounded you are a very
dangerous person in critical theory because you are just another white male barking at
the moon in a frenzy of me-too-ism.

We need to acknowledge the pain, the di culty of it, and to proceed with the humility
and the lucidity necessary to create basic conditions by which you can sustain a life.
Do people think it is easy to sustain the life of the mind in the years 1967-1968? Look
what happens to that class of academics. Look at the alcoholism, the burn out. Those

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who swap wives every ve minutes. It’s all so heavily masculine. Look at the dropout
rates. Sustainability is extremely important because it’s a marathon run. It’s not a
sprint.

You’re absolutely right that the politics of sustainability must also apply to
subjectivity and to building collectives…

Sustainability for me has to do with what we used to call the life of the mind, how we
sustain a project. You know, Spinoza left the academy to sustain his project.

The way in which you are re-imagining the university in The Posthuman is extremely
compelling, but to sustain these institutions as non-pro t seems really di cult.
Students are being charged exceptional amounts of money for tuition. Academic
labour is being increasingly undervalued. There are so many people who are
exceptionally talented scholars who end up working sessional or contract labour.
Obviously, universities are a microcosm of the larger structures of labour under
advanced capitalism. So the question is, if we recognize the immanence of capitalism
and the immanence of the university to the life of the mind, at least at this particular
historical moment, then where are the points that we can put pressure on to actually
make conditions more livable?

It’s a great question. It’s a real question. The contemporary university is a place where
thinking – not even in the terms of critical theory – but where the creation of
concepts can occur. Making the university a think tank for innovation for the good of
humanity with labs and structures that would allow us to explore methodologies and
pedagogies would be ideal. That would be my university. Now, who is going to pay for
it? I think that the private sector has everything to gain because they understand that
innovation is crucial. They know that in cognitive capitalism, ideas matter. Concepts
matter. Look at the success of Deleuze in business schools from Cardi to Copenhagen
to LSE, they are teaching it because it is the correct anatomy of advanced capitalism
and these people don’t have any time to waste. It is there that we go into deep water.
Okay, then when do we start negotiations? I provide you with cognitive capitalism – I
am working at the radical edge – what do I get in return? Will they listen? The serious
ones may. Most will not. And so you may get an exodus of people out towards the new
infrastructures that we’re getting institutionally. People are moving to the art world.
They are moving to private industry. They are going home and doing the Spinoza “I do
this on weekends.” It’s a di cult moment. I am not sure the university for our eld
can make it.

What they did at Utrecht was select bits of the Humanities that were pro table and the
rest was cut down to a teaching curriculum, which is sort of e ective but also short-
sighted. And the writers and the bloggers and the designers and the hackers – they are
the people who are the motor of productivity. They are the creators, particularly in
algorithmic culture, where the university is miles and miles behind.

So, the fact that the interesting things seemed to be funded by private foundations,
both in terms of the arts and the humanities, to me this is worrying because even
though it allows for certain kinds of innovations that maybe don’t happen
elsewhere, it also really feels like it shuts it down. I really am concerned about the
for-pro tability of what would happen if most of our think-tanks were run by
private business.

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I think there is a question there, a real question whether we could have a market
economy that isn’t capitalism. Capitalism is, after all, only one of the readings of the
market economy. There are other market economies: the commons, the digital
commons, Indigenous-driven, ecological commons. What, then, would be the
institutional structures that would go with those? This would be some sort of an
academy, some sort of cooperative model as opposed to the hierarchical university. I
was also toying with the idea of what the opposite of the pro t-motive would be. What
is non-pro t? I see the pro t-motive as purely instrumental, only looking for applied
results. So, for me the opposite of pro t is fundamental research. Fundamental
research means experimenting with the virtual. We need places, laboratories,
fundamental labs to discuss the terminology, the conceptual schemes, the
pedagogies, and the value systems. We need to work on this. This is what the
humanities should be doing. Fundamental research like they are doing in the labs. We
are digging our own graves by enacting repetitions without di erences: re-embracing
the classics, or re-hashing universalism just because it’s what everybody knows. This
reterritorialization of philosophy by what they call ethics – in fact neo-Kantian moral
philosophy – is a catastrophe. It’s a domination of power by Kantian morality. They
don’t mean anything else. It’s a major reterritorialization, and that becomes the value
system and under that they can neglect the analysis of the most atrocious
exploitations, both of matter and of the chunks of humanity who do not matter in
wars and migrations. We need variations and gradations of ethical assessment within
a system that continuously modi es and is one with di erential variations. This does
not mean that anything goes, it is not ethical anarchy. No, it’s a di erent way of
evaluating for forces and relation that requires a little bit of work – it’s called an
ethology. Oh, that’s too much work? So, we have complexity in the sciences and
simpli cations in the humanities? Kill me. The humanities need to be the complexity
theory. We need to be the humanities branch of complexity theory. Otherwise you are
killing us. We need to update. That’s why my post-humanism is post-humanism, and
not neo-humanism. I think we need to go with this. And we are capable in the
humanities to come up with schemes – this is precisely what Deleuze teaches, the
vitality of actualizing the multiple virtuals.

One of the things that I was curious about when I was reading through The
Posthuman is that you’re very careful to move away from this issue of shared
vulnerability. I was initially surprised by that because to be vulnerable is part of the
body’s capacity to be a ected, right? I was thinking of vulnerability in a relational
mode, because it is being open to being wounded. But, I understand your hesitation
to shared vulnerability in the political sense that we aren’t all in this together, we
don’t experience vulnerability neutrally, it is a politically di erentiated reality and
corresponds to questions of gender and class and racialization and ability.

That’s interesting. I think that in between the two books – Transpositions and The
Posthuman – the discussions of vulnerability sharpens. Vulnerability is not part of the
terminology that I inherited from my teachers. I get perishability. I get some sort of
mortality. Vulnerability is very much the language of the Levinasian phase of Derrida.
And it becomes the language of Judith Butler, but also Simon Critchley and Paul
Gilroy’s postcolonial melancholia. So, it is the latest reincarnation of this xation on
otherness as the ethical turn.

I wanted to address the di erence between Levinas and Spinoza, two branches of
Judaism that have become clear to me – Simon Critchley’s In nitely Demanding is the
book that clari ed this for me, even more than Butler’s work on precarious life. The

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Levinasian other, the Derridean other is what you are accountable to and for till the
end. To in nity. It is the face of the other that you can not get past. Then you stand
still by the graves or by the wound, and you honour them. I have enormous respect for
that. It’s just not my ethical system. I am now more careful in defending the ethics of
a rmation. It’s another way of reworking the wound. It assumes a relationality on all
sides. It does not assume a dialectic or dualism of self/other whereby there is one pole
that needs to be responsible for the other in whichever order. No, it’s a rami cation.
The rhizome is lots of us. I’m responsible for the air I breathe. I’m responsible for, at
least, the three ecologies. At least! Processing negativity is training. You get better.
Age really helps. I’m going to write on aging next. Why it helps? I don’t know why, but
it helps. It goes faster. I’m tracking it carefully around me, as if the organism growing
slower somehow facilitates this. Most extraordinary. I’m going to focus on this in my
next book, which is going to be on death and dying.

Now, the other argument I want to make about vulnerability is the larger frame. That
comes from Foucault. A culture that runs on milking the wound and the pain – in
popular culture, on television, in the legal system through litigation – we are really
milking pain. This country, the United States, is truly demented. The pornography of
pain in this culture, the litigation. The money that goes with it. The voyeurism, the
exhibitionism that goes with it. I am really so opposed to that. And then, the claims
that I am the most persecuted person who ever walked the earth. The exceptionalism
of the wound. It marries into narcissism, this exceptionalism.

We need complexity to assert that you can be simultaneously really wounded and
really powerful. And to live with that, you need an ethics of a rmation that allows
you to process it, to take distance, with humour, maybe, with love and compassion. I
mean, there is a lot of crying and a lot of pain involved. Our business is extracting
knowledge from pain. That’s what we do. And we are crazy to do it! Why aren’t we on
Wall Street extracting money from human misery? No! There must be something
wrong – ie: totally right – with us. There are di erent methodologies for dealing with
this. Also, it’s a question of temperament. There are many factors. I get very impatient
standing by the dead. I prefer to go o and clean the cemetery or do something. So
there is a question of wanting to actually get active in the world. And the passivity of
Levinas can be a rmative, but it doesn’t have the speed that I need to cope with the
pressures that I feel, particularly for as long as I am in cognitive capitalism as a
professor. It may change when I am a civilian. When I am in the world doing my bee-
keeping and the other alternative hippie things that I will do. But as long as I am an
agent of this, I need to do things. Standing very still and remembering the dead, I
think, yes, okay, I actually do that regularly, but it’s not my ethical system. I have
enormous di culties with it. I think it needs di erent institutional practices. I think
you should do a study of how people function in an institution, at the front of
melancholia, at the front of a rmation. The speeds and intensities that compose you,
we really do di er. So I think the more the merrier. And anything is better than Neo-
Kantian universalism.

1. Rosi Braidotti, “The Untimely” in The Subject of Rosi Braidotti: Politics and Concepts, edited by
Bolette Blaagaard and Iris Van Der Tuin (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 240. ↩

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2. For more on the series, including the video of Braidotti’s lecture see
http://sites.psu.edu/iahboundaries/. ↩
3. Rosi Braidotti, Transpositions (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2006), 37. ↩
4. Rosi Braidotti, “The Posthuman in Feminist Theory” in The Oxford Handbook of Feminist Theory,
edited by Lisa Disch and Mary Hawkesworth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming),
10. ↩
5. For more on the intersection of biological sciences, biotech and neoliberalism, see Melinda
Cooper, Life as Surplus (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2015). ↩
6. Donna Haraway’s work on the Capitalocene is very important here. See Staying with the Trouble:
Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016). Claire Colebrook has
written extensively on the thinkability of extinction in the two volume series, The Death of the
PostHuman: Essays on Extinction, Volume One (London: Open Humanities Press, 2014) and Sex
After Life: Essays on Extinction Volume Two (London: Open Humanities Press, 2014). ↩

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