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 Difference 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 prolific 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 commodification 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
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 difference
between the linguistic branch and the new materialist branch. Althusser’s students
bring back Spinoza as an antidote to the limitations of Hegelianism, best exemplified
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, finished. 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

Heather Davis, Rosi Braidotti, THE AMODERNS: THINKING WITH ZOE

Amodern: Currents, July 2016

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 inflate and deflate, 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 first answer. How do we do
monism and why is it so difficult? Well, because our world is organized in binaries.
And our political system is organized in binaries. And binaries are the most efficient
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 quantified multiplication of
differences. It works on life as capital, life as surplus. But biogenetic powers are
always quantified for purposes of commodification. So the code, the axiom is always
the same. Maybe 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 first thing we need to say about zoe, monism and

Heather Davis, Rosi Braidotti, THE AMODERNS: THINKING WITH ZOE

Amodern: Currents, July 2016

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 difference, a
positive difference. 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 find 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

Heather Davis, Rosi Braidotti, THE AMODERNS: THINKING WITH ZOE

Amodern: Currents, July 2016

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 definitely 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
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 scientific 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 first generation Spinozist calling for a
different ethics. The ethics of affirmation, 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
suffering 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 find fascinating about the ways in which you take up
the Spinozist ethics around the question of affirmation is that it isn’t only
about positivity. You also engage with difficult subject matters such as death,
suffering, suicide and depression. These other things don’t look like
affirmation, especially not in this age of self-help and the perfectibility of the
subject, but affirmation can also look like an acknowledgment of the
difficulties 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

Heather Davis, Rosi Braidotti, THE AMODERNS: THINKING WITH ZOE

Amodern: Currents, July 2016

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
affirmation. 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 flee. 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 affirmatively, 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 affirmation, 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 difficulty 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 who swap wives every five 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-profit
seems really difficult. Students are beingHeather
charged exceptional amounts of
Davis, Rosi Braidotti, THE AMODERNS: THINKING WITH ZOE

Amodern: Currents, July 2016

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 Cardiff 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 difficult moment. I am not
sure the university for our field can make it.

What they did at Utrecht was select bits of the Humanities that were profitable and
the rest was cut down to a teaching curriculum, which is sort of effective 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.

Heather Davis, Rosi Braidotti, THE AMODERNS: THINKING WITH ZOE

Amodern: Currents, July 2016

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-profitability of what would happen if most
of our think-tanks were run by private business.

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 profit-motive would be.
What is non-profit? I see the profit-motive as purely instrumental, only looking for
applied results. So, for me the opposite of profit 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 differences: 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 modifies and is one with differential
variations. This does not mean that anything goes, it is not ethical anarchy. No, it’s a
different 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 simplifications 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

Heather Davis, Rosi Braidotti, THE AMODERNS: THINKING WITH ZOE

Amodern: Currents, July 2016

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 affected, 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 differentiated 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
fixation on otherness as the ethical turn.

I wanted to address the difference between Levinas and Spinoza, two branches of
Judaism that have become clear to me – Simon Critchley’s Infinitely Demanding is
the book that clarified this for me, even more than Butler’s work on precarious life.
The Levinasian other, the Derridean other is what you are accountable to and for till
the end. To infinity. 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 affirmation. 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 ramification. 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

Heather Davis, Rosi Braidotti, THE AMODERNS: THINKING WITH ZOE

Amodern: Currents, July 2016

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 affirmation 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 different 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 off 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 affirmative, 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 difficulties with it. I think it needs different
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 affirmation. The speeds and
intensities that compose you, we really do differ. 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

Heather Davis, Rosi Braidotti, THE AMODERNS: THINKING WITH ZOE

Amodern: Currents, July 2016

 , edited by Bolette Blaagaard and Iris Van Der Tuin (London: Bloomsbury,
2014), 240. ↩

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). ↩

Heather Davis, Rosi Braidotti, THE AMODERNS: THINKING WITH ZOE

Amodern: Currents, July 2016