Elemental Difference and the Climate of

the Body Emily Anne Parker

Visit to download the full and correct content document:
https://ebookmass.com/product/elemental-difference-and-the-climate-of-the-body-emi
ly-anne-parker/
Elemental Difference and the Climate
of the Body
Studies in Feminist Philosophy is designed to showcase cutting-​edge monographs and collections
that display the full range of feminist approaches to philosophy, that push feminist thought in
important new directions, and that display the outstanding quality of feminist philosophical thought.

STUDIES IN FEMINIST PHILOSOPHY

Linda Martín Alcoff, Hunter College and the
CUNY Graduate Center
Elizabeth Barnes, University of Virginia
Lorraine Code, York University, Toronto, Emerita
Penelope Deutscher, Northwestern University
Ann Garry, California State University, Los Angeles
Sally Haslanger, Massachusetts Institute of
Technology
Alison Jaggar, University of Colorado, Boulder,
Emerita
Serene Khader, Brooklyn College and CUNY
Graduate Center
Helen Longino, Stanford University
Catriona Mackenzie, Macquarie University
Mari Mikkola, University of Amsterdam
Sally Scholz, Villanova University
Laurie Shrage, Florida International University
Lisa Tessman, Binghamton University
Nancy Tuana, Pennsylvania State University

Recent Books in the Series:

Unpopular Privacy: What Must We Hide? The Wrong of Injustice: Dehumanization and Its
Anita L. Allen Role in Feminist Philosophy
Mari Mikkola
Adaptive Preferences and Women’s Empowerment
Serene Khader Beyond Speech: Pornography and Analytic Feminist
Philosophy
Minimizing Marriage: Marriage, Morality, and
Mari Mikkola
the Law
Elizabeth Brake Differences: Between Beauvoir and Irigaray
Edited by Emily Anne Parker and Anne van
Out from the Shadows: Analytic Feminist
Leeuwen
Contributions to Traditional Philosophy
Edited by Sharon L. Crasnow and Anita M. Categories We Live By
Superson Ásta
The Epistemology of Resistance: Gender and Racial Equal Citizenship and Public Reason
Oppression, Epistemic Injustice, and Resistant Christie Hartley and Lori Watson
Imaginations
Decolonizing Universalism: A Transnational
José Medina
Feminist Ethic
Simone de Beauvoir and the Politics of Ambiguity Serene J. Khader
Sonia Kruks
Women’s Activism, Feminism, and Social Justice
Identities and Freedom: Feminist Theory between Margaret A. McLaren
Power and Connection
Being Born: Birth and Philosophy
Allison Weir
Alison Stone
Vulnerability: New Essays in Ethics and Feminist
Theories of the Flesh: Latinx and Latin American
Philosophy
Feminisms, Transformation, and Resistance
Edited by Catriona Mackenzie, Wendy Rogers,
Edited by Andrea J. Pitts, Mariana Ortega, and
and Susan Dodds
José Medina
Sovereign Masculinity: Gender Lessons from the
Hope under Oppression
War on Terror
Katie Stockdale
Bonnie Mann
Elemental Difference and the Climate of the Body
The Physiology of Sexist and Racist Oppression
Emily Anne Parker
Shannon Sullivan
For a complete list of books published in the series,
Disorientation and Moral Life
please visit the Oxford University Press website.
Ami Harbin
Elemental Difference
and the Climate
of the Body
E M I LY A N N E PA R K E R

1
 3
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers
the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education
by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University
Press in the UK and certain other countries.

Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press

198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America.

© Oxford University Press 2021

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in

a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the
prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted
by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction
rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the
above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the
address above.

You must not circulate this work in any other form

and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2021933381

ISBN 978–​0–​19–​757508–​6 (pbk.)
ISBN 978–​0–​19–​757507–​9 (hbk.)

DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780197575079.001.0001

1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Paperback printed by Marquis, Canada
Hardback printed by Bridgeport National Bindery, Inc., United States of America
 Preface

This was written as a book about how difficult it is to pay attention to the pol-
itics of ecology without recreating the polis. I argue that the polis, the philo-
sophical concept according to which there is one complete human form, is to
blame for an indistinguishably political and ecological crisis. The polis shares
the current complex shape of climate change. A certain perfect body figures
the denial of matter of the polis. The book presents a philosophy of elemental
difference from which to address the polis and also to understand why the
prevailing terms for what is called climate change are so misleading.
As I make my final edits, however, I am thinking just as much about zo-
onosis. In July 2020, the United Nations Environment Programme and
International Livestock Research Institute produced a document entitled
“Preventing the Next Pandemic: Zoonotic Diseases and How to Break the
Chain of Transmission.” It argues that zoonosis is caused by human practices
and is responsible for numerous infectious diseases of recent years, including
Ebola, SARS, the Zika virus, and most recently Covid-​19. The manuscript
for my book was written in 2019, but I am sending the final version to the
press in October 2020, as the Covid-​19 pandemic continues. A zoonotic
disease is by definition one that “came to people by way of animals,” writes
Inger Andersen, executive director of the United Nations Environment
Programme. She also writes, “At the heart of our response to zoonoses and
the other challenges humanity faces should be the simple idea that the health
of humanity depends on the health of the planet and the health of other spe-
cies.” This is both an open identification with the planet and with other spe-
cies, and a partitioning of these from a homogeneous humanity, which I argue
constitutes the polis. Writing this book has taught me to ask the following: if
Covid-​19 came to earth by way of human practices, many of which are also
responsible for climate change, and if climate change itself is responsible for
occurrences of zoonosis, then doesn’t it make more sense to say that Covid-​
19 came to the planet by way of the practices of certain people? Why does the
polis selectively identify as and blame animality, a term too broad even to be
meaningful, for its own problems? Why in this case does the agency of matter
get attributed, while the polis denies its own responsibility? My response to
viii Preface

these is that the polis both understands itself to be one sort of animality (one
species) and also blames animality (for “zoonosis”) at the same time. It seems
to me that the problem in the case of zoonosis as well as climate change is not
so much a lack of agency being attributed to matter, and not so much a lack
of identification with a certain natural condition of “animality,” so much as a
shifting distinction between polis and other agencies. Amid myriad agencies,
the polis disguises and authorizes and congratulates itself. Indeed identifica-
tion with animality can hide the question of humanity.
Many speak in the present of dual pandemics: Covid-​19 and racial injus-
tice. This is a crucial claim. My argument is that these pandemics share a
common cause in the polis. In that sense there are not two pandemics, but
instead one concern, to perceive the ways in which the tradition of the polis
takes shape. Since the completion of this book I have discussed this in more
detail in a piece that is forthcoming in a special issue of the International
Journal of Critical Diversity Studies, edited by Shelley L. Tremain, whom
I thank.
That is where the project is today. It is thanks to so many conversation
partners.
With deep gratitude I would like to thank those who advised, mentored,
and showed the way. This book owes much to the influence of Alia Al-​Saji,
Jane Bennett, Debra B. Bergoffen, Elizabeth M. Bounds, William E. Connolly,
Penelope Deutscher, Pamela DiPesa, Noel Leo Erskine, Christos Evangeliou,
Thomas R. Flynn, Pamela M. Hall, Sara Heinamaa, Alice Hines, Rachel
E. Jones, Philip J. Kain, Hilde Lindemann, Jay McDaniel, John Murungi,
Dorothea E. Olkowski, Parimal G. Patil, Laurie L. Patton, Jo-​Ann Pilardi,
Alexis Shotwell, Margaret Simons, Alison Stone, the late Steven K. Strange,
Michael Sullivan, Gail Weiss, and Shannon Winnubst. A very special thanks
to Lynne Huffer and Cynthia Willett, for reading, encouraging, and chal-
lenging my work over so many years. I am so grateful.
Research for parts of this book were originally presented at meetings of the
California Roundtable on Philosophy and Race, the Canadian Philosophical
Association, the Canadian Society for Women in Philosophy, the
International Association for Environmental Philosophy, the Irigaray Circle,
the Pacific Association for the Continental Tradition, philoSOPHIA: Society
for Continental Feminism, and the Society for Phenomenology and
Existential Philosophy. I also thank California State University–​Stanislaus
for the invitation to present what turned out to be the earliest version of
Chapter 1 to the Department of Philosophy.
 Preface ix

For discussion of the work of Sylvia Wynter I wish to thank many

collaborators. Taryn Jordan and Lynne Huffer organized a workshop enti-
tled “A Philosophical Encounter with and against the Human” that focused
on reading Sylvia Wynter and Michel Foucault in the spring of 2018 during
an annual conference of philoSOPHIA: Society for Continental Feminism.
I thank the organizers of that conference as well as other participants in
that workshop. Discussion at that event helped to shape my understanding
of both Foucault and Wynter. That was the event at which I met Elisabeth
Paquette, whom I thank very much for sending me an electronic version
of Wynter’s unpublished manuscript entitled “Black Metamorphosis: New
Natives In a New World.” Linda Martín Alcoff gave me access to an online
collection of Wynter’s writings. I have been so appreciative to have access
to that. I am so grateful to Susan Stryker, Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality
Distinguished Visiting Professor at Johns Hopkins University in the spring
of 2018, who recommended to me the work of Londa Schiebinger as well as
discussed with me the work of Sylvia Wynter.
In the fall of 2019, the Department of Philosophy at Emory University
hosted a presentation of the first half of this project as the William J. Edwards
Undergraduate Lecture. Conversations during that visit were invalu-
able. I especially thank Lynne Huffer, Marta Jimenez, John Lysaker, Rudolf
A. Makkreel, Falguni Sheth, Michael Sullivan, and Cynthia Willett.
I am beholden to many for reading and discussing various pieces of
the manuscript: Deborah Barer, Wesley N. Barker, Jane Bennett, Sierra
Billingslea, William E. Connolly, John Gillespie, Laura Hengehold, Lynne
Huffer, Ada S. Jaarsma, Rachel E. Jones, Ruthanne Crapo Kim, Morgan
LaRocca, Peter W. Milne, M. D. Murtagh, Romy Opperman, Joshua St. Pierre,
Gokboru Tanyildiz, Nancy Tuana, and two readers for Oxford University
Press. The manuscript has improved greatly thanks to your questions and
reading recommendations.
The manuscript came together during a sabbatical granted by the College
of Liberal Arts at Towson University. I am grateful to Towson University
for travel monies and to the staff of Cook Library for research assistance.
In the final months of the sabbatical, if it had not been for the generosity of
Siavash Saffari, who loaned me his office at Seoul National University during
November and December 2019, it is possible that the manuscript would not
have been completed on time.
 Introduction
Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Difference

The philosophy of performativity understands political differences in race,

sex, gender, ability, class, and sexuality among humans to be matters of human
imposition. It has recently and rightly been criticized by “new materialists,”1
among them political ecologists, who argue that in giving exclusive atten-
tion to this power of human imposition, performativity overestimates the
power of human perception to shape a material world that has powers of its
own. And yet, while political ecological efforts are yielding new avenues of
inquiry in a variety of humanistic disciplines, they do not offer a distinctive
account of political difference other than the performative one. The perfor-
mative philosophy2 of political difference is apparently the only one. This
book gives performativity a conversation partner, a philosophy of elemental

1 “New materialisms” refers to a group of thinkers who advance “rigorous and sustained atten-

tion to global, ahuman forces of ecological change as well as to local spaces of vulnerability and re-
sistance,” in the words of Richard Grusin, ed., Anthropocene Feminism (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2017), ix. See also Rosi Braidotti, Posthuman Knowledge (Medford, MA: Polity,
2019); Diana Coole and Samantha Frost, eds., New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2010); Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman, eds., Material Feminisms
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008). My own approach to “new materialisms” owes much
to Lynne Huffer’s essay “Foucault’s Fossils: Life Itself and the Return to Nature in Feminist Philosophy,”
in Grusin, Anthropocene Feminism, 65–​88. Later I focus my efforts on two new materialists, Karen
Barad and Jane Bennett, both of whom are elaborating political ecologies in Bruno Latour’s sense. See
Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and
Meaning (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007); Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology
of Things (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 5; Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern,
trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993); Bruno Latour, Politics of
Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2004); and Bruno Latour, Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime, trans.
Catherine Porter (Medford, MA: Polity, 2018).
2 By philosophy I mean what Bryan W. Van Norden means: “Philosophy is dialogue about problems

that we agree are important, but don’t agree about the method for solving, where ‘importance’ ulti-
mately gets its sense from the question of the way one should live.” The term “philosophy” is ety-
mologically descended from ancient Greek philosophia, the love of wisdom. As Van Norden argues,
ancient Greek philosophers did not invent wisdom. They had one way of understanding it. Bryan W.
Van Norden, Taking Back Philosophy: A Multicultural Manifesto (New York: Columbia University
Press, 2017), 151. See also Peter K. J. Park, Africa, Asia, and the History of Philosophy: Racism in the
Formation of the Philosophical Canon, 1780–​1830 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2013).

Elemental Difference and the Climate of the Body. Emily Anne Parker, Oxford University Press.
© Oxford University Press 2021. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780197575079.003.0001
2 Introduction

difference that combines the crucial work of performativity with that of po-
litical ecology.
Seeking this new way of understanding political difference is, however, not
the purpose of the project. What I ultimately desire is a way of understanding
bifurcations of the political and the ecological in a time of climate disruption,
characterized by ubiquitous changes on the part of a relational planet: rise
of ocean and sea levels,3 deoxygenation of oceans,4 increased risk of crop
failure,5 global heating,6 “racially driven police brutality, the criminalization
of climate refugees along racial lines, neocolonial tourism, the outsourcing
of toxicity and littering [and] . . . the militarization of practices of resources
extraction.”7 Each of these is an entanglement of the political and the ecolog-
ical. From where did the distinction come?
In a series of works culminating recently in Posthuman Knowledge, Rosi
Braidotti has argued that modernity now gives way to a “posthuman predic-
ament,” the “convergence” of centuries of “critiques of Humanism” with the
“complex challenge of anthropocentrism.”8 She writes, “The former focuses
on the critique of the Humanist ideal of ‘Man’ as the allegedly universal
measure of all things, while the latter criticizes species hierarchy and anthro-
pocentric exceptionalism.”9 But if humanism, as Braidotti so convincingly
argues, was always ever Man-​ism, then wouldn’t it be more to the point to
say that the study of humanities, the question of what it is like to be human,
has so far been thwarted by the study of Man? This is the suggestion of Sylvia
Wynter, and it is the one that I take up in this book.10 I argue that the distinc-
tion between political and ecological is rooted in the concept of the polis,
the ancient Greek term for city, a source of the English word “political.” But

3 Fiona Harvey, “Greenland’s Ice Sheet Melting Seven Times Faster Than in 1990s,” The

Guardian, December 10, 2019, https://​www.theguardian.com/​environment/​2019/​dec/​10/​

greenland-​ice-​sheet-​melting-​seven-​times-​faster-​than-​in-​1990s.
4 Kendra Pierre-​Louis, “World’s Oceans Are Losing Oxygen Rapidly, Study Finds,” New York Times,

December 7, 2019, https://​www.nytimes.com/​2019/​12/​07/​climate/​ocean-​acidification-​climate-​

change.html.
5 Zia Mehrabi, “Food System Collapse,” Nature Climate Change 10 (2019): 16–​17, doi:10.1038/​

s41558-​019-​0643-​1.
6 Yann Chavaillaz, Philippe Roy, Antti-​Ilari Partanen, et al., “Exposure to Excessive Heat and

Impacts on Labour Productivity Linked to Cumulative CO2 Emissions,” Scientific Reports 9 (2019),
article 13711, doi:10.1038/​s41598-​019-​50047-​w.
7 Axelle Karera, “Blackness and the Pitfalls of Anthropocene Ethics,” Critical Philosophy of Race

7.1 (2019): 34.

8 Braidotti, Posthuman Knowledge, especially 2 and 8.
9 Braidotti, Posthuman Knowledge, 2. See also Karera, “Blackness,” 39ff.
10 See especially Sylvia Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/​ Power/​Truth/​
Freedom: Towards the Human, after Man, Its Overrepresentation—​an Argument,” New Centennial
Review 3.3 (Fall 2003): 257–​337.
 Introduction 3

“polis” is no ordinary word. It is a philosophy, one answer emerging in a “di-

alogue about problems that we agree are important, but don’t agree about
the method for solving, where ‘importance’ ultimately gets its sense from the
question of the way one should live.”11 Although in the ancient Greek context
many philosophies of the polis circulated, one seems to have survived: the
leaders of the city, those bodies exemplary of the promise of the polis, were
those capable of disembodied, eternal, immaterial thought. Thus, within the
polis, a discernment among bodies is fundamental. A certain body figures
the denial of matter of the polis. An exposition of the concept of the polis is
in this way the key to understanding events collected currently under the eu-
phemism “climate change.”12 The need for critiques of Man-​ism and anthro-
pocentrism are not convergent events so much as they are the same event
whose shape has yet to be appreciated.
The philosophy of performativity suggests that climate disruption
dramatizes political problems. Climate disruption is understood as the re-
sult of a distinct and disordered politics primarily—​not ecology. In the other
direction the philosophy of political ecology suggests that climate disrup-
tion illustrates the agency of nonhumans—​animal, vegetable, and mineral. It
argues that climate disruption is the result of a naive or absent ecology—​not
politics. The problem according to political ecology is that humans forget
that they, too, are animals. What both sides miss is the bizarre splintering of
these two domains—​the splintering of that which is political from that which
is ecological.
I will argue that elemental difference resides on both sides of the line be-
tween the political and the ecological. It is the inherently relational agency of
elementality. The lack of a philosophy of elemental difference is just one sign
of and result of the splintering of these domains. But the lack of an adequate
account of the event of climate disruption is my ultimate interest. I am in-
terested in the politics of ecology and the ecology of politics. But more than
that: I am interested in the curious divergence of the terms themselves.
Elemental difference refers to singularities of location, movement, living,
aging, dying, valuing, in which humans partake. Elemental difference in the
polis can be appreciated in the fact that empirical bodily nonidentity can be

11 Van Norden, Taking Back Philosophy, 151.

12 The phrase “climate change” was apparently originally suggested by US Republican political
consultant Frank Luntz as an alternative to the more alarming “global warming.” The phrase caught
on. Bruno Latour, Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime, trans. Catherine Porter
(Medford, MA: Polity, 2017), 25.
4 Introduction

called upon to constitute and elevate one group of bodies among the rest. In
the context of the polis and ecological breakdown, differences are too often
taken to be differences from the sole complete human form of Aristotelian
Man. Aristotle, whose philosophy drew from the Chaldean astrological tra-
dition13 and inspired so many naturalists14 in a nevertheless Platonic philo-
sophical tradition, is still the clearest, most consistent advocate of the polis.
He defined the human in this way: as Man, a capacity for nous, for thought,
“which is entirely independent of the body”15 and which disembodied
speech16 conveys.17 This is the definition of agency. “Polis” originally meant
this configuration of a distinct body, and the life of that body, who was evi-
dence of the polis. What is important for me is that the capacity for thought,
that which is by definition not bodily, emerges only in a specific body. This
profoundly influential early biological system has at its apex that which is not
bodily at all. Aristotle calls that body Man. Elemental difference—​difference
that allows Aristotle to locate the thinking body—​is still placed in this way
along a continuum of either more, less, or not-​Man, and discerning among
such elementalities allows Aristotle’s adherents through the ages to identify
the proper rulers of the polis from the oikoi, or households that are only the
beginning of that which is not meant to rule the polis.
This reading of Aristotle is inspired by that of Luce Irigaray.18 The phrase
“elemental difference” grows out of a reading of Luce Irigaray’s philosophy of
sexual difference, though as I will explain, my interest in her work has to do
with everything but her philosophy of sexual difference. For Irigaray, eleva-
tion of one body, Man, is only possible thanks to the denial of all of the many
powers contrasted with Man. Elemental difference is not the differences of

13
Samir Amin, Eurocentrism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2009), 119.
14
For example, Carolus Linnaeus. See Londa Schiebinger, Nature’s Body (New Brunswick,
NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2013), 42. While Linnaeus “abandoned Aristotle’s canonical term,
Quadrupedia,” and invented Mammalia, Linnaeus was nevertheless working in an Aristotelian
mode. I am deeply inspired by Schiebinger’s work. I use this work in order to understand the twists
and turns of the polis tradition. See especially Nature’s Body, 172–​183. However, the literature of
body studies is so far a tradition of performativity and the two-​sex model. See, for example, Londa
Schiebinger, ed., Feminism and the Body (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).
15 David Ross, Aristotle (New York: Routledge, 1995), 151.
16 Joshua St. Pierre, “The Construction of the Disabled Speaker: Locating Stuttering in Disability

Studies,” Canadian Journal of Disability Studies 1.3 (August 2012): 2–​21.

17 See Aristotle, The Complete Works of Aristotle, 2 vols., ed. Jonathan Barnes (Princeton,

NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), Politics 1.1252a1–​1255a1. See also Ross, Aristotle, 151–​157.
18 See especially Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca,

NY: Cornell University Press, 1985); Luce Irigaray, Elemental Passions, trans. Joanne Collie and
Judith Still (London: Athlone Press, 1992); and Luce Irigaray, “There Can Be No Democracy without
a Culture of Difference,” in Under the Sign of Nature: Ecocritical Theory: New European Approaches,
ed. Axel Goodbody and Kate Rigby (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011), 194–​205.
 Introduction 5

Man from all the rest, but what makes it possible for Man to find the polis in
contrast to them. My concern in this book is to try to unpack what is carried
in the gesture of Man in a way that speaks to the concerns of performativity
as well as political ecology. What is responsible for this gesture of Man? It is
the gesture of what I will call “the one of the body,” incomparably exemplary
of one finished state.
I articulate a philosophy of elemental difference in order to decouple
Irigaray’s philosophy of agential and fluid elementality from the philosophy
of sexual difference that hinders the uptake of her otherwise crucial work.
Elemental difference means that, in spite of the fact that each of us elaborates
a shape19 always in process, and thus what it is like20 to be human entails par-
ticipation in the creation of shape, no human created the fact that we partici-
pate in elaborations in the plural. No human invented this. Sexual difference
for Irigaray is not exactly the same thing as sex, and analogously elemental
difference for me is not the same thing as bodily difference. But the notion of
sexual difference in Irigaray is too readily tied to the gesture of fixed, teleo-
logical, oppositionally incommensurable sex.21 So instead I devise a philos-
ophy of elemental difference. I place the emphasis on the multifarious ways
in which Irigaray’s work enables an exposition of the one of the body, the one
complete human form in Aristotle that distinguished proper rulers of the
polis from the larger oikoi and beyond, over and against which these rulers
alone were the exalted thinking part.
Elemental difference affirms the internal heterogeneity of planetary shapes.
Such heterogeneity, whatever shape this takes, is agency that surpasses the
agency of the one of the body, the perfect (in the sense of “completed” or

19 A crucial gesture in the background of the way I use the term “shape” is Irigarayan “morphology,”

a critique of the form-​matter hierarchy in Aristotle. Morphē, or form, according to Aristotle, gives
shape to, and is thus prior to, hylē or matter. For Irigaray, “Matter is neither deadly inertia nor formless
flux, neither passive receptacle nor chaotic excess. Instead [matter] becomes actively self-​shaping in a
fluid giving of forms.” See Rachel Jones, Irigaray: Towards a Sexuate Philosophy (Malden, MA: Polity,
2011), 173–​177.
20 This is an invocation of Sylvia Wynter on whose work I will focus in Chapter 4. See especially

Wynter, “Towards the Sociogenic Principle: Fanon, Identity, and the Puzzle of Conscious Experience,
and What It Is Like to Be ‘Black,’ ” in National Identities and Socio-​political Changes in Latin America,
ed. Mercedes F. Durán-​Cogan and Antonio Gómez-​Moriana (New York: Routledge, 2009); and
Sylvia Wynter, “No Humans Involved: An Open Letter to My Colleagues,” Forum N.H.I.: Knowledge
for the 21st Century 1.1 (Fall 1994): 42–​73.
21 This is of course what Irigaray says it is not. See Lynne Huffer, Are the Lips a Grave? A Queer

Feminist on the Ethics of Sex (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013); and Jones, Irigaray. My ar-
gument is that the recent model of incommensurability, or the “two-​sex model,” requires a confron-
tation that Irigaray does not give it. See also Talia Mae Bettcher, “Full-​Frontal Morality: The Naked
Truth about Gender,” Hypatia 27.2 (2012): 319–​337.
6 Introduction

“finished”) human form of Aristotle’s thinking Man. What it is like to be and

to become human is never homogeneous, no less than any part of earth-​air-​
fire-​water, and this is owed to our very own status as part of that elemental
relationality. We differ as the earth differs, unanticipated, toward no end, for
no reason at all.
Sylvia Wynter has referred to the model of the one, the human, in which
one human body defines humanity itself as “biocentric.” Biocentrism bases
human excellence on bodily features.22 It orders the polis according to a
changing philosophy of bios. This universalizing gesture of the one human
body, biocentric Man, is premised on the assumption that this ideal human
is the completion of all other bodies. Sylvia Wynter argues that first the soul-​
body distinction and later the figure of biocentric Man have occupied the
Platonic tradition, and to this day at least among the footnotes to Plato,23
there has been no adequate account of what it is like to be a co-​participant in
the morphology of humanity.24
Synonymous with this universalizing gesture, I argue, is that of “the body”
and a distancing of this from “bodies.” Whether one speaks of the body or
bodies, this term is rooted in biocentrism.25 I argue that biocentrism is in fact
thought-​centrism. Biocentrism bases human excellence on bodily features
and orders the polis according to bios, but the exalted body is the one that is
the location of a power that is not body. The exalted body is the one that can
think. The exalted matter is that whose form is thinking. This book is, among
other things, an attempt to forward in the context of climate disruption this
amazing Wynterian claim: there hasn’t been a philosophy of internally dif-
ferentiable co-​humanity among what are thought to be the canonical works

22 Two self-​avowed biocentrists are Edward O. Wilson and Paul W. Taylor. See especially Edward

O. Wilson, The Future of Life (New York: Vintage Books, 2002); and Paul W. Taylor, Respect for
Nature: A Theory of Environmental Ethics, Twenty-​Fifth Anniversary ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 2011), 12. The work of biocentric environmental ethics is an explicit articulation in
the present of the long-​standing polis-​oikos split.
23 “Footnotes to Plato” is a line from Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality (New York: Free

Press, 1978), 39.

24 See Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality”; Sylvia Wynter, “The Ceremony Found: Towards

the Autopoetic Turn/​ Overturn, Its Autonomy of Human Agency and Extraterritoriality of
(Self-​)Cognition,” in Black Knowledges /​Black Struggles: Essays in Critical Epistemology,
ed. Jason R. Ambroise and Sabine Broeck (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2015),
184–​ 252; Sylvia Wynter, “1492: A New World View,” in Race, Discourse, and the Origin of
the Americas: A New World View, ed. Vera Lawrence Hyatt and Rex Nettleford (Washington,
DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995), 5–​57; Wynter, “No Humans Involved.”
25 Walter Mignolo advocates engagement in “body-​politics.” I worry that the polis as a concept

is biocentric, and that body politics is in this way tautological. See Walter D. Mignolo, The Darker
Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options (Durham: Duke University Press,
2011), 140.
 Introduction 7

of the philosophical tradition. I argue that what needs tracing is the polis
tradition.
To aid in the effort to address this lack and address simultaneously that
which is parsed as political and ecological, I develop a philosophy of ele-
mental difference as an analysis of the one of the body, the very idea that
there is one culminating and complete human form to which all other bodies
point. Man in Aristotle was and is that very one, “the body.” And Man is “the
body” that thinks. Hereafter I will not repeat the quotation marks. Instead
I will signal that what I mean to do is to question this phrase by reminding
the reader that the one of the body means the one body, the folly that there
is one complete human form, which has most frequently been articulated
as Man. But I will argue that what is problematic about Man is that this ges-
ture is a manifestation of the body, the very notion that there is one complete
body whose decisive feature is not body. The gesture of man is only problem-
atic insofar as it means the body.
While the study of the one of the body is my contribution, I am indebted
to Sylvia Wynter’s naming of biocentric Man. But there is another theme
of Wynter’s work on which I will focus. Wynter laments that recently there
is a complementary biocentric body, a racial and ability and sexuality cat-
egory of “women as the lack of the normal sex, the male,”26 that emerges
alongside Man, subordinate and yet parallel in perfection. There is unfor-
tunately not just one body; now there are two. Not just one completion, but
two completions.27 Like Irigaray, Wynter does conflate female with women.28
However, Wynter’s point is that there is no such thing as either “the normal
sex” or “women” in the generic. She argues that biocentrism is inherently
normalizing, and the science of racial anatomy was the instigation of the
most explicit version of this model of Man. Biocentric Man is constituted of
an ideal pair of mates to which all other mates are compared. This remarkable
historical change from the one of the body to the two of the body forces me to
articulate a philosophy of elemental difference that can pick up from philos-
ophies of feminism such as that of Luce Irigaray that expose the way that the
one of the body seeks to control and incorporate some bodies and to exclude

26 Wynter, “1492,” 42.

27 Bettcher, “Full-​Frontal Morality.”
28 In the case of Irigaray, I will explain in Chapter 1. In the case of Wynter, this can be found in

the otherwise excellent “‘Genital Mutilation’ or ‘Symbolic Birth’? Female Circumcision, Lost
Origins, and the Aculturalism of Feminist/​Western Thought,” Case Western Reserve Law Review 47
(1997): 501–​552.
8 Introduction

and destroy other bodies. For this reason also, I draw on Wynter’s philosophy
of biocentrism.
Wynter’s illustrations of woman as a new racial ideal are consistent with
other work, done primarily in the field of history, on sexual difference.29
Wynter’s account I argue is consistent with what historian Thomas Laqueur
has named the model of incommensurability or the “two-​sex model,” ac-
cording to which a certain body that is definitive of a woman becomes a dis-
tinct type in the eighteenth century, and serves to complement the body of
the one, perfect human. Prior to that historical event, Man alone was the pic-
ture of perfection. Putting Wynter and Laqueur together, I observe that the
one, the body, is now, in a development just as bad, the two. The two, the body
offers a discrete form for the “sex which is not one,”30 even as the one of the
body is still there. The one, the body has shifted in shape but is no less hyp-
ocritically generic: the two-​sex model, no less than the one, is the source of
race, ability, sex, gender, religion, and size meanings. This two-​sex model is
the two of the body. It is now two that are the body, two that are constitutive
parts of the body according to biocentric Man. The bodily but generic defini-
tion of a woman as something distinct from a man still means that there is a
guiding morphology of the one of the body, biocentric Man. The biocentric
woman does not ultimately differ from the biocentric Man in morphology.
There are now two complementary generics, not one, and so there is still the
body, the gesture of there being no body in the polis.
The development of the two of the body, namely the generic modeling of
Man and Woman, hasn’t eliminated the one of the body, namely the generic,
superior body of Man. This is a reading of Sylvia Wynter’s claim that the effort
to distinguish black from the very notion of the human results in a cascade
of sharp delineations based on Man’s empirical readings of bodies, but in fact
entirely shaped around biocentric Man, the one of the body, the only com-
plete human form who isn’t a body (because the decisive feature, thinking,
is not body) and is figured by a very specific body (because Man is identified
by a capacity for thought). I mean to build on that. I understand the one, the

29 See especially Londa Schiebinger, The Mind Has No Sex? Women in the Origins of Modern Science

(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989); and Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and
Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990).
30 This is the title of one of Luce Irigaray’s most famous works, This Sex Which Is Not One, trans.

Catherine Porter and Carolyn Burke (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985). Irigaray’s claim,
I argue, is that what Laqueur calls the two-​sex model is ultimately the historically longer-​standing
one-​sex model. I find that a very helpful claim. However, the very idea of “this sex” as opposed to that
sex is a recent development, historically speaking, and change in the modeling of sex deserves com-
ment that Irigaray does not give it.
 Introduction 9

body to refer to this entire picture, which conveys racial, class, geography,
sexual, sex, gender, ability, religion, size, and nationality meanings in a mu-
tually reinforcing way that serves to distinguish the homogeneous masterful
human from a therefore inert and passive flatly heterogeneous earth.
Homogeneous body, the body, is an oxymoron. It only makes sense be-
cause of the gesture of the one of the body, the complete human form,
which was stabilized as an ideal form in contrast to heterogeneous matter.
To name the plurality of human bodily events in this climate (following
Irigaray, Fanon, and Wynter, I mean this literally), one that fundamentally
subordinates them precisely in their heterogeneity, is extremely risky, for the
body has overdetermined the entire terrain of elemental difference, hiding
the body’s very own elementality and relationality in a scheme that denies
elemental difference. But this is the way to begin to trace the polis tradition.
The notion of elemental difference is bound to seem at first too abstract.
Allow me to offer two glimpses of elemental difference, then, as a way into
this project. The first comes from the work of philosopher and decolonial
psychiatrist Frantz Fanon, a crucial source for the argumentation of this
book, and the second comes from an early essay of poet, essayist, and polit-
ical activist Eli Clare.
First, Fanon: of a train ride in Paris, Fanon writes, “Instead of one seat,
they left me two or three.”31 A white child yells at him. A sycophantic white
person tells him not to get upset. Fanon writes, “Where should I put my-
self from now on? I can feel that familiar rush of blood surge up from the
numerous dispersions of my being.” This is a non-​universal bodily event. It
is not a universal event. It has not happened to everyone. I want to suggest
that it is no coincidence that such events happen in the context of the engen-
dering of what I will call the climate of the body. I will argue that Fanon him-
self suggests this approach.
Second: Eli Clare writes, “Early on I understood that my body was irrevo-
cably different from my neighbors, classmates, playmates, siblings: shaky, off-​
balance, speech hard to understand, a body that moved slow, wrists cocked
at odd angles, muscles knotted with tremors. But really, I am telling a kind
of lie, a half-​truth. Irrevocably different would have meant one thing. Bad,
wrong, broken, in need of repair meant quite another. I heard these every
day as my classmates called retard, monkey, defect; as nearly everyone I met

31 Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press,

2008), 92–​94.
10 Introduction

gawked at me, as my parents grew impatient with my clumsiness.”32 This is a

non-​universal bodily event. It is not a universal event. It has not happened to
everyone. Again, I want to suggest that it is no coincidence that such events
happen in the context of the climate of the body. Interestingly both Fanon
and Clare33 are philosophers of ecology.
The philosophy of performativity searches for the origin of such events
in the socialized gaze projected onto another. Performativity attributes
differences, if there are any at all, to human agency, to human power. What
is important is not the differences, but the way in which differences are per-
ceived. The differences themselves are not significant.34 The philosophy of
political difference of performativity is this: if there are non-​universal human
bodily events, such as those cataloged by Fanon and Clare, these are the re-
sult of projection. Differences among humans are not so much the cause of
these events; differences are caused by these events. What causes the events
is the way in which differences are figured. A white child sees a foreign body,
darkness, blackness. Neighbors, classmates, playmates, siblings see a body
unlike their own; they see animality, in this moment, as something in which
they do not share. Interestingly, in both cases those seeing are not only adults
but kids, children who have already learned how to live. I do agree that in
each case it is crucial to talk about the sociality that overdetermines these
encounters.
While I do agree that paying attention to the specific shaping of these
perceptions is crucial, I make a different emphasis in this book. The ap-
proach that I take is to linger over the curious plainness of the power asym-
metry on display in the white child’s animosity in Fanon’s story and in the
able cisstraight classmates’ animosity in Clare’s. Such asymmetry is as ob-
vious to observe as it is problematic to articulate. I want to ask about that
asymmetry—​of power, of bodily situation. The power and the bodily situ-
ation are inextricable. To say that difference is not there or not important
obscures the role of both denials and affirmations of difference in the making
of the one, the body. To say that difference is not important presupposes

32 Eli Clare, “Body Shame, Body Pride: Lessons from the Disability Rights Movement,” in The

Transgender Studies Reader 2, ed. Susan Stryker and Aren Aizura (New York: Routledge, 2013), 261–​
262. The philosophy of irrevocable difference in this essay has been very helpful.
33 See Eli Clare, Exile and Pride: Disability, Queerness, and Liberation (Durham: Duke University

Press, 2015) and Brilliant Imperfection: Grappling with Cure (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017).
34 This is the position of Ghassan Hage, whose work I discuss in Chapters 4 and 5. See Ghassan

Hage, Is Racism an Environmental Threat? (Malden, MA: Polity, 2017), 98.

 Introduction 11

difference, reifies it, and then obscures the role of its denial in the making of
the one of the body.
By non-​universal events I’m thinking not only about these examples.
I’m also thinking of Linda Martín Alcoff ’s rejection of white racial
eliminativism,35 my own anger at my fellow white people’s insistence that
“All Lives Matter,” Rosemarie Garland-​Thomson’s “Case for Conserving
Disability,”36 the yellow-​ization of the most recent coronavirus.37 This project
also takes shape in response to the fact that, as Axelle Karera puts it, “repres-
sive uses of police force and judicial proceedings like immigration detentions
and criminal trials of migrants (including young children) have become
standard practice both in Europe and the United States.”38 Embroideries of
dissimilarities appear in harmful as well as exhilarating ways, and so the sig-
nificance of their tenor seems to be a separate question. Isn’t it significant
in itself that humans so readily produce departures within and from and by
means of each other? You can say that political differences among humanity
are unjust; I agree. You can say that they are a way of dividing people from
each other; I agree. Doesn’t all of this mean that political differences ought
not to exist? I disagree. It is also the case that certain modes of political injus-
tice operate precisely through insistence on universality.39 Does that mean
that political difference per se is good? Clearly not. It is neither inherently

35 Linda Martín Alcoff, The Future of Whiteness (Malden, MA: Polity, 2015), 149ff.
36 Rosemarie Garland-​ Thomson, “The Case for Conserving Disability,” Bioethical Inquiry 9
(2012): 339–​355. See also Garland-​Thomson, Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in
American Culture and Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 8. Garland-​Thomson
writes, “This neologism names the veiled subject position of cultural self, the figure outlined by
an array of deviant others whose marked bodies shore up the normate’s boundaries.” In “Misfits,”
Garland-​Thomson offers a very helpful reading of Karen Barad’s performativity. See Garland-​
Thomson, “Misfits: A Feminist Materialist Disability Concept,” Hypatia 26.3 (Summer 2011): 591–​
609. I have also found instructive “Forum Introduction: Reflections on Fiftieth Anniversary of Erving
Goffman’s Stigma,” Disability Studies Quarterly 34.1 (2014): 1–​21, in which Garland-​Thomson
credits Erving Goffman’s depiction of her “worst disability nightmares” with suggesting to her the
notion of the normate, the identity that denies disability, as well as a newfound sense of identity for
herself. See Erving Goffman, Stigma: Notes on Spoiled Identity (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1963).
See also Shelley L. Tremain, Foucault and Feminist Philosophy of Disability (Ann Arbor: University
of Michigan Press, 2017), 122–​128. Tremain argues that the impairment-​social construction dis-
tinction is itself constructed, and she compares this with the sex-​gender distinction. While I find
Tremain’s work convincing, I am troubled by the use of analogy. Also, as with the work of Butler, there
is still an argument to be made regarding the philosophy of political difference in Tremain.
37 This book was written in the summer and fall of 2019, and the Covid-​19 pandemic emerged in

the spring of 2020. I have written something about the ways this book has led me to think about the
pandemic in a more recent article, “Zoonosis and the Polis: COVID-​19 and Frantz Fanon’s Critique
of the Modern Colony,” forthcoming in a special issue of The International Journal of Critical Diversity
Studies, edited by Shelley L. Tremain.
38 Karera, “Blackness,” 53 n. 8.
39 Kathryn Sophia Belle [formerly Kathryn T. Gines], “Fanon and Sartre 50 Years Later: To Retain

or Reject the Concept of Race,” Sartre Studies International 9.2 (2003): 55–​67.
12 Introduction

good nor inherently bad. Beneath all of this, there is one question that re-​
emerges for me again and again: if differences among humanity are superfi-
cial, why does the polis exclude them?
In order to think such asymmetries and discontinuities as human at all, in
order to begin to ruminate over elemental difference and its role in climate
disruption, a critique of the one of the body, the lone perfection of the one
human is crucial. This is neither a benign nor a context-​free gesture, the one,
the body. It is simultaneously a racial statement, a settler statement, an ability
statement, a sex-​gender statement. In other words it is an ecological state-
ment. It is a statement of one who both owns the earth and despises those it
associates with earth. The exaltation of thinking as disembodied is of course
a denial of the powers of water, fire, earth, air. The one of the body defines
politics and allows politics to be distinguishable from all things ecological,
relational, blatantly comparable. The one of the body forces a hierarchy of
bodies. When one speaks of “bodies,” for example, one has already somehow
exited the zone of the straightforwardly political. A planet is a body; a fish is
a body. But only in relation to the one of the body is anyone considered to be
human. This body-​bodies hierarchy is a key to appreciating the complexity
of the body’s responsibility for climate disruption: an inability to value ele-
mental difference and therefore relationality, an earth of which I am a part
but of which I am not the whole.

I.1. Putting Together Performativity and

Political Ecology

The arguments of the book put together performativity and political ecology.
This book is an extension of the tradition of performativity, which in the work
of Judith Butler involves a fundamental revision of social construction.40
However I take issue with the account of political difference embedded
in performativity. I am at the same time inspired by new materialists and

40 I will stick to naming the gesture at issue “social construction” rather than “construction” in

order to underscore what is at stake conceptually. Naming this notion only “construction” makes it
all too easy to underestimate the role of sociality in the making. There is always the risk of thinking of
construction as if it were an individual endeavor and/​or an ahistorical one. Construction or building
is too bare a metaphor for taking measure of human relational power and its abuse. As Linda Martín
Alcoff suggests, the key to understanding social construction is in attending to the complexities of
sociality (The Future of Whiteness, 46). I want to keep this at the forefront.
 Introduction 13

especially political ecologists’ critiques of performativity,41 and yet I find that

political ecologists offer no distinct account of political difference.
While I side with neither political ecology nor performativity, the project
understands these as crucial parts of a larger picture of the one of the body,
the finished human form and the way that it forces people into one side or the
other—​the one of the polis or the depoliticized bodies of the ecological. My con-
cern is that both philosophers of performativity and political ecology ultimately
dissociate what is considered political from what is considered ecological. An
unintended outcome of this pattern is the unilateral shift from understanding
differences among humans as strictly empirical in the eighteenth to nineteenth
centuries to understanding differences among humans as strictly political in the
present.
I do not take issue with performativity, but rather with its philosophy of
political difference. Consider the fact that in eighteenth-​century Europe, in-
cluding the “frightening proportions” of the second Europe that is the United
States, as Fanon writes,42 differences among human bodies were understood
to be matters of scientific classification. The dispassionate scientist discov-
ered and studied such categories as race, sex, ability, poverty, sexuality. The
one of the body studied everything but itself. According to the one of the
body to this day, bodies differ from each other empirically. At the height of
scientific acceptance, it was unthinkable that race or sex or diagnosis or indi-
gence were inventions. They were the inherent truth of the bodies in question.
Performativity is the philosophical intervention into this way of thinking.
The work of Saidiya Hartman, discussed in Chapter 2, demonstrates the im-
possibility of jettisoning performativity in the present insofar as this legacy
continues, trapping all in the complete Aristotelian definition of Man. Social
construction, and performativity along with it, represents a paradigm change
in human self-​understanding that it would be catastrophic to abandon.43
Social constructionist philosophical accounts rightly understand differences
in race, sex, ability, class, and sexuality to be collaboratively created, not

41 See note 1 for my understanding of new materialisms. I find that this phrase is too general since

so many concepts are associated with it. The far reach of the phrase is an indication of the deep need
for new ways of appreciating what Jane Bennett has named “thing-​power.” In this book I focus on one
corner of the new materialist literature, those writers engaged in “political ecology.”
42 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press, 2004),

236–​237.
43 Karera, “Blackness.”
14 Introduction

“discovered.”44 I take the most systematic and thoroughgoing social construc-

tionist account to be that of Judith Butler, whose concept of performativity
provides both a trenchant critique and a revision of social constructionism.45
Performativity takes political difference to be a presupposition that creates
uneven distributions of precarity on a global level.46 As Frank Wilderson has
pointed out,47 Hartman registers a subtle doubt in performativity. I cast this
as Hartman’s performative concern with the philosophy of performativity,
to which her work is rightly committed. Performativity allows biologists
such as Anne Fausto-​Sterling to study how narratives carve out sharply dif-
ferential experiences of health, for example. In her landmark work Sexing
the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality48 as well as more
recent writing, including an October 2018 opinion piece in the New York
Times,49 Fausto-​Sterling argues that discrete races and binarily defined and
oppositionally defined sexes are the narrative engines of the dubious con-
struction of differential bone densities in racial groups and coerced surgeries

44 Alcoff, The Future of Whiteness, 39. For more on Alcoff see Chapter 1. I regard Alcoff ’s philos-

ophy of identity as a source of wisdom regarding elemental difference, though I take it she is (rightly,
for political reasons) wary of political ecology. Consider The Future of Whiteness, 48–​52.
45 Butler’s work seeks to articulate the “limits of constructivism” as much as to rewrite its crucial

contributions. Performativity is not the same thing as social construction. Judith Butler, Bodies That
Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993), 4, 15.
46 Judith Butler, Notes toward a Performative Theory of Assembly (Cambridge, MA: Harvard

University Press, 2015), 119. Indeed performativity offers a distinct way of thinking about climate
crisis, as I will explain later. This can be seen not only in Butler’s most recent work, but also in the
elaboration of performativity in Sylvia Wynter’s writings and in the subtle gestures throughout the
oeuvre of Saidiya Hartman to the “Anthropocene.” See, for example, Hartman’s critique of disem-
bodied universality in Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-​Making in
Nineteenth-​Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 21, 153–​154; the attention
to the politics of “things,” water, and electricity in Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother: Journey along
the Atlantic Slave Route (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007), 173; and the explicit gestures
to climate politics in Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of
Social Upheaval (New York: Norton, 2019), 270, 347.
47 Frank B. Wilderson III, Red, White, and Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms

(Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 311–​313.

48 Anne Fausto-​Sterling, Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality, updated

ed. (New York: Basic Books, 2020). While I have found Fausto-​Sterling’s research, especially her work
on the multiplicity of sex, indispensable for my own, in Chapter 1 I argue that the sex-​gender distinc-
tion is the form-​matter distinction. Fausto-​Sterling writes that “second-​wave feminists of the 1970s
also argued that sex is distinct from gender” and “did not question the realm of physical sex” (4) as
they should have done. I agree. However, Fausto-​Sterling’s project, as I read it, is to expand the con-
cept of gender to include sex, so that sex becomes understood as the practice of gender in a Butlerian
mode: “Our bodies are too complex to provide clear-​cut answers about sexual difference. The more
we look for a simple physical basis for ‘sex,’ the more it becomes clear that ‘sex’ is not a pure physical
category. What bodily signals and functions we define as male or female come already entangled in
our ideas about gender” (5). Fausto-​Sterling argues that sex and gender should not be dualistically
understood, and she works to understand them in relation, but what concerns me is that the dualistic
gesture of apolitical sex versus political gender remains in her work.
49 Anne Fausto-​Sterling, “Why Sex Is Not Binary,” New York Times, October 25, 2018, https://​www.

nytimes.com/​2018/​10/​25/​opinion/​sex-​biology-​binary.html.
 Introduction 15

on intersex infants. Human bodies are too complex to locate sex as a “pure
physical category.”50 The classifications of the eighteenth century are now un-
derstood even by biologists such as Fausto-​Sterling as identities that are po-
litical and humanistic in origin.
It is thus not performativity per se with which I take issue. I take issue
with the philosophy of political difference embedded in it. In Judith Butler’s
more recent work, and especially in Sylvia Wynter’s work on performativity,
one can see that performativity does offer a critique of the current political
ecological formation of climate disruption. However it cannot offer a way
of making sense of the generation of differences among humans because it
takes these to be caused by norms. This book is in large part motivated by a
search for a way of holding onto the tradition of performativity while put-
ting it together with political ecology. If there is a difference between two
groups in quality of life or life expectancy, philosophies of performativity
rightly guide one to examine the human practices, the phobias, the hierar-
chies that produce the disparate outcomes. The aim is rightly to eliminate the
unjust political difference in question. For me the question is not whether
the one of the body performatively produces political differences. Certainly
this genre is responsible for political difference in some sense. The question
is why the one of the body is performatively produced at all. I argue that the
one and the two of the body are performative productions in response to the
fact that no human created participation in elaborations that are heteroge-
neous. The body bases all meanings of all bodies on its own. Difference, by
which I mean that there is heterogeneity making the political possible at all,
is ultimately owed to elementality. The body seeks sameness as a retreat from
this elementality. The body is a seeking of sameness in denial of an earth of
which I am a part, each is a part, but which is largely not me, which is largely
not any one of us.
The philosophy of political difference embedded in performativity
is so well established as to confront no currently viable alternatives.
Even Karen Barad, as I will explain in Chapter 2, subscribes to it, though
her work is one of the most important political-​ecological critiques of
performativity. Performativity alone currently offers a way of explaining
the origin of classifications that continue to structure the life of biocen-
tric Man, even among political ecologists who either reject or depart in
some way from performativity. Right now political difference has only one

50 Fausto-​Sterling, Sexing the Body, 5.

16 Introduction

philosophy: performativity. While I am critical of the philosophy of political

difference of performativity, I don’t think there is enough appreciation yet of
the extent of the reliance even of political ecologists—​its fiercest critics—​on
performativity.
Karen Barad, as I will discuss in Chapter 2, argues that the trouble with
performativity is that it does not appreciate the agency of matter. Barad’s
work then addresses this problem and extends performativity to the
agency of matter. However, I argue that the trouble with performativity is
not only that it does not appreciate the agency of matter. The trouble with
performativity is also that as a philosophy of political difference it leaves in
place the long-​standing Aristotelian hoped-​for homogeneity of the human,
or in Aristotelian terms Man. This is an aspect of performativity that is not
remarked upon in Barad’s revision of performativity. Performativists,51
Barad included, rightly lament political difference insofar as political dif-
ference is a sign of domination, but political difference is not always a sign
of domination. Sometimes it is a sign of morphological hope and challenge.
And so ultimately this work seeks a new way of understanding political dif-
ference, one that is not performative in this respect.
While the account of difference embedded in performativity confronts no
currently viable alternatives, political ecologists have called performativity
into question more broadly.52 Political ecologists argue that social practices
have been given far too much attention and that performativity thinkers and
social constructionists more generally overestimate the power of humans to
shape a material world that has its own powers.
Political ecologists tend to embrace ecological difference insofar as ecolog-
ical difference is inherent in matter. Indeed this is the meaning of the “new”
of new materialists: political ecologists and new materialists more generally
affirm the human as part of ecological systems. The human itself is a part of
the materiality that humans seek to understand.53 And yet this gesture to “the
human,” together with the flip-​side gesture of “nonhuman” that explicitly
accompanies it, leaves open the question of the significance of elemental dif-
ference in politics and the significance of the one of the body that looms over
and is the external studier of ecology. In this way political ecology, in spite of

51 Interestingly, this is a neologism. I would argue that this is precisely because until now there has

been no rival of performativity for thinking about political difference. Because so far nearly everyone
has been a performativist, the word itself has been unnecessary.
52 See especially Karen Barad, “Getting Real: Technoscientific Practices and the Materialization of

Reality,” in Meeting the Universe Halfway, 189–​222, and Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 17.
53 Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, 26, 67.
 Introduction 17

its inroads into human hubris, can nevertheless maintain the intuitive feel of
a political-​ecological hierarchy.
Such political ecological concerns have centered on two interventions.
The first is the work of physicist Karen Barad, who argues that an “agential
realist ontology” and a “new materialism” are necessary to unseat anthro-
pocentrism.54 While performativity isolates human narratives and studies
how these alone structure the material world, for Barad it is necessary to
look further than human agencies, to the agencies of necessary technological
equipment, such as ultrasound technology, as critical components without
which certain human practices would not be possible. The tools that humans
create often surprise them and become indispensable working partners in
the elaborations of new worlds both political and ecological. This aspect of
Barad’s work is crucial for my own: the significance of technology for human
morphologies is undeniable.
The second inspiration for political ecologists who are critical of
performativity and social construction more generally is the work of po-
litical scientist Jane Bennett, who develops a concept of “thing-​power” for
the agency, as opposed to the mechanism, of materiality. Bennett advocates
affirmation of the collaborations with matter and articulates with Bruno
Latour a thoroughgoing rejection of “environmentalism,” which contrasts
humans with their “environs.”55 While the field of political science largely
continues to regard agency as a power to act that is characteristically and
uniquely human, Bennett argues that thing-​power is no more mechanical
than human behaviors. Humans are also acted upon—​by caffeine, lead, elec-
tricity, cocaine, radiation, birth control, carbon dioxide, fentanyl. Humans
participate in networks of agency that exceed them. Bennett writes, “If
environmentalists are selves who live on earth, vital materialists are selves
who live as earth.”56 To speak of a human body is in fact a remarkable ab-
straction from what is going on just in an elbow, where the genes of the bac-
teria, the “microbiome,” outnumber by at least one hundred times the genes
of that elbow’s genome. To this Bennett replies that—​with respect just to
an elbow—​“the its outnumber the mes.”57 At this microscopic level these
terms, “me” for example, begin to unwind. For this reason Bennett rejects the

54 Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, 137.

55 Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 110–​111. Karen Barad similarly rejects “environmentalism,” Meeting
the Universe Halfway, 170. See also Bruno Latour’s critique of nature in We Have Never Been Modern
and Politics of Nature.
56 Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 111.
57 Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 112.
18 Introduction

notion that any human is “embodied” and says instead that each is “an array
of bodies, many different kinds of them in a nested set of microbiomes.”58 All
of this is the case regardless of what humans think or say about themselves
and each other.
This contribution of political ecology has not yet gotten enough attention.
Many scholars seem to conflate ecology with environmentalism, often using
these terms interchangeably. This threatens to undermine the crucial con-
ceptual intervention of political ecology, which is to affirm the “its [who] out-
number the mes,”59 without which there would be no humanity, no what it is
like to become human at all.
Despite their helpful rejections of environmentalism and illustrations of
the limits of performativity, I will argue that political ecologists offer no dis-
tinct account of the political differences among humans to converse with
this crucial offering of performativity, its philosophy of political difference.
Indeed, because of its nearly by-​design potential for dehumanization insofar
as it flattens the agencies of all into a continuous web of influence,60 political
ecologists have a complicated relationship to political difference. At times
they speak of humans as if there were no important differences among them
at all, and at times they speak of differences in terms of performativity. In
other words political ecologists in practice ascribe to the performative ac-
count when it comes to the status of human differences, precisely because
no new account of difference has appeared. Either way, political ecologists
reinforce the sense of difference as political-​as-​opposed-​to-​ecological, and
in this sense they concur with performativity. Political ecologists are rightly
interested in debunking the anthropocentrism of the concept of agency.
However, when it comes to human relationality and political identities, po-
litical ecologists must revert to the performative account of difference as uni-
laterally political, humanistic-​agential in origin, in order not to renaturalize
the polis and its inherent hierarchy.
Attempting a broader approach and appreciating the insights of both
performativity and political ecologists, this book devises a philosophy
of elemental difference primarily by rereading the work of Bruno Latour
(a recognized political ecologist) and Frantz Fanon (a recognized social

58 Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 112–​113.

59 Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 112.
60 Alfred J. López, “Contesting the Material Turn; or the Persistence of Agency,” Cambridge Journal
of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry 5.3 (September 2018): 371–​386; John Gillespie, “Protected: Black
Power as Thing Power: The Limits of Bennett’s Eco-​philosophy,” unpublished manuscript, September
4, 2018, Microsoft Word file.
 Introduction 19

constructionist) to understand the political-​ecological as a conceptual for-

mation. Both Latour and Fanon cross this divide in ways that have not yet
been appreciated sufficiently. By exploring the crossing over of these two, it
is possible to begin to explore the implications of what is as difficult to artic-
ulate as it is easy to observe: there are non-​universal bodily events currently
denied, barred from political life.
The denial of non-​universal bodily events is as fundamental to the cur-
rent sense of the political as the affirmation of empirical, fixed-​in-​difference,
bodies are fundamental to the current sense of the ecological. The political, a
paradigm of homogeneity, gets its sense from a mutual contrast with the eco-
logical, a paradigm of relationality. The political and the ecological are defined
through this contrast. For this reason the political readily becomes the ex-
clusion of the ecological. To accomplish this exclusion, non-​universal bodily
events must get excluded too. In this context the affirmation of difference
all too quickly becomes the conflation of elemental difference with bodies
alone, and eliminates the possibility of engaging in humanities,61 a question
about what it is like to be-​become human as terrestrials whose practices are
still plagued by what Frantz Fanon called “delirious Manichaeanism,” the ab-
solute distinction between the political, that which is of the polis and the one
complete human form that serves as the “fate” of all other bodies,62 and the
ecological, that which is relationality.

I.2. Outline of the Book

The book begins with what should be the go-​to philosophy of elemental dif-
ference, the work of Luce Irigaray. Chapter 1 attempts to learn from the work
of Luce Irigaray without taking on her philosophy of sexual difference. For
Irigaray, no human invented the fact that human bodies are not all alike and
cannot share a generic morphology. I seek to rewrite this claim in terms of
elemental difference, as opposed to sexual or sexuate difference. The denial
of the elementality of difference anchors a divide between concepts of form
and matter, polis and its matter, oikos, and thus anchors matter’s politics, the

61 Following Édouard Glissant’s poetics and philosophy of relation, I seek to understand what

is meant by “humanities” and plural practices of humanity. Manthia Diawara, “One World in
Relation: Édouard Glissant in Conversation with Manthia Diawara,” Nka: Journal of Contemporary
African Art 28 (2011): 15.
62 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, xiv, 160, and 160 n. 48.
20 Introduction

relationalities that flow from assumption of these concepts. The denial of

elemental difference also anchors a divide between two gestures closely re-
lated to these: the body and bodies. Ultimately I will argue that it is not so
much Man that has been at the apex of this framework, pace both Irigaray
and Wynter, but the one of the body. Man is a manifestation of the body.
Explaining my concerns with the philosophy of sexual difference and begin-
ning to articulate a philosophy of elemental difference is the aim of the first
chapter.
Having begun to articulate this philosophy of elemental difference, in
the second chapter I back up to consider a pertinent pair of traditions that
are currently distinguishable. I consider the work of Karen Barad, placing
her account of the need for a concept of agential realism beside the perfor-
mative account of racial difference in the work of Saidiya Hartman. I take
Karen Barad’s Meeting the Universe Halfway to be a crucial political ecology
text. Barad’s book is a powerful illustration of the limits of performativity,
achieved through an extension of the work of Judith Butler. I argue that this
text sidelines the philosophical question of political difference because of
the need to direct attention away from politics in the usual anthropocen-
tric sense. There is a need to think from a specific sense of the “nonhuman.”
When differences among humans do come up, specifically differences in
ability, Barad employs the performative approach that gives all credit and
blame for non-​universal experiences among humans to humans them-
selves. For Barad, the key articulation of performativity is that of Judith
Butler, whose concept of performativity does not take into account the
agencies of material technologies or physical particles. Barad articulates
the project of Meeting the Universe Halfway as a broadening of Butlerian
performativity. Saidiya Hartman expresses an entirely separate frustration
with performativity: its considerable powers cannot explain the depth and
dynamics of the animosity toward racialized bodies. There is in Hartman
thus also a need to think in terms of a distinct “nonhuman” that is obscured
and arguably trivialized by political ecologists’ use of this word. Chapter 2
shows that there are not one but two concerns with performativity: (1) a po-
litical ecology concern about the lack of attention to “nonhuman” agency in
the sense of technology, in the work of Barad, and (2) a performativity con-
cern about whether performativity can contain the intensity of the bodily
conscription that whiteness requires, in the work of Hartman. Performativity
has drawbacks not only in the direction illustrated by political ecology, but
also in the work of Hartman, who I will argue is a performative thinker
 Introduction 21

whose work articulates something of a political ecology in the sense of a poli-

tics of, as she puts it, a “disavowed geography of the world.”63
The third chapter looks to the work of Bruno Latour and Frantz Fanon,
each of whom offers a way of bridging the concerns of Barad and Hartman.
Latour and Fanon are often read as primary sources in political ecology and
performativity respectively. And yet political ecology and social construc-
tion each represent a polarization explored in different ways by Latour and
Fanon themselves. For Latour, the modern scientific practice of biological
classification was thought to be a practice of nature classification by those
who distinguished absolutely between biology and politics.64 For this reason,
Latour rejects the very notion of nature. Latour’s efforts focus instead on
bringing the actantcy of ecological “nonhumans” into a politics from which
they have been alienated, a project that is necessary due to a modern dis-
tinction between the political and the ecological. I trace the disappearance
of content of the term “human” in Latour’s crucial work. I argue that Latour’s
work does not confront the polis, and thus his concerns with the modern
cannot address another tendency that accompanies it, ecological fascism,
or ecofascism, as it is called by Janet Biehl and Peter Staudenmaier. I argue
that Fanon’s exposition offers a better framework. Although Fanon’s work
concurs with Latour that that which is biological is polarized with respect
to the political, Fanon suggests that the biological is not understood to be
without agency so much as it is problematically agential. This point allows
me to revise Irigaray’s philosophy of elemental difference, and that revision is
the final section of Chapter 3.
The final two chapters of the book explore the implications of this phi-
losophy of elemental difference. Chapter 4 is a reading of what I take to
be the most successful oeuvre for understanding the disastrous role of the
form-​matter distinction and the politics of the one of the body, that of Sylvia
Wynter. Wynter’s work extends that of Fanon into a philosophy of genre.
Wynter argues that the inspiration for the sciences of sex, madness, illness,
indigence, and sexuality classification of the seventeenth to nineteenth cen-
turies in Western Europe is the science of racial anatomy. A fear of black as
the very sign of material fluidity and contagion inspires efforts to chart scien-
tific subjects who are the subject matter of biocentric Man. All other modes
of biologically defined difference from the biocentric Man follow from this

63 Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, 347.

64 Latour, We Have Never Been Modern.
22 Introduction

one. For Wynter this targeting of black is the original modern gesture of
“the biological” as something of which biocentric Man is the epitome, the
completion, the culmination. All the bodies point to the natural superiority
of this one. This genre of biocentric Man is for Wynter the genre of climate
crisis, the climate of biocentric Man, constituted by these performativities.
However, this account remains a performative one, I argue, because Wynter
does not take up the rejection of Manichaeanism in Fanon, which requires
an affirmation of the powers of soil and subsoil and a rejection of dualism in
the study of cortico-​viscerality. Wynter does not maintain Fanon’s point that
the biological is primarily a gesture of praise for the nonbodily and disdain
for that which is bodily. Wynter argues that biocentric Man is in fact biocen-
tric, centering on a specific body as natural pinnacle. Instead of a rejection
of the very gesture of the biological in Fanon, which I argue is a rejection of
the very gesture of matter that is in Irigaray, Wynter argues that biocentric
Man is a selective affirmation of a hierarchized biological. She reads Fanon
and Butler as consistent in her account of political difference and the devel-
opment of the climate of Man. Wynter recommends affirming hybridity,65
an embrace of a surprisingly Aristotelian distinction between humanity and
the rest of earth. My own understanding, following the work of Fanon, is that
biocentric Man, especially the body that is the gesture responsible for bio-
centric Man, is a denunciation of the biological. While I am in this way crit-
ical of the gesture of hybridity in the work of both Bruno Latour and Sylvia
Wynter, I take Wynter’s work ultimately to point the way to a non-​hybrid
philosophy of genre, in which hybridity can be questioned in the way that
Fanon questioned it.
In Chapter 5 I argue that subtle features of Fanon’s approach as well as
the affirmation of elemental difference at which I arrived at the end of Part
I serve to fill out Wynter’s critique of the climate of biocentric Man. I advo-
cate re-​engagement, following Wynter, with the question of what it is like
to be human. This is an indistinguishably ecological and political question.
I want to suggest that this question is not just productive but necessary.
The Manichaean project of biocentric Man is best understood as a problem
of the one of the body, the lone perfect human form. I point out that both

65 I will use the term “hybridity” throughout the book, and I use it exclusively in the way that

Wynter and Latour do, to mean mixing the political with something else, the biological (Wynter) or
the ecological (Latour). I am interested in what makes the boundary between the political and these
others. I argue that what makes the boundary is the identity of the polis with the capacity for nous,
which is uncaused. On the concept of nous, see Emanuela Bianchi, The Feminine Symptom: Aleatory
Matter in the Aristotelian Cosmos (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014), 171–​173.
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
 ERICA imbricata.

CHARACTER SPECIFICUS.

Erica, antheris muticis, exsertis; corollis urceolatis; calycibus duplicatis,

viscosis, imbricatis, coloratis, corollam sub-æquantibus; foliis ternis,
lævibus, truncatis, linearibus.

DESCRIPTIO.

Caulis fruticosus, erectus, spithamæus; rami et ramuli frequentissimi,

foliosi, erecti.
Folia terna, linearia, recta, truncata, plana, lævia, petiolis brevissimis
adpressis.
Flores in ramulis terminales, sub-terni, umbellati, cernui; pedunculis
longitudine calycis.
Calyx. Perianthium duplicatum, adpressum, imbricatum: foliolis ovatis,
viscosis, incarnatis.
Corolla urceolata, apice incarnata, laciniis obtusis, minutis, erectis.
Stamina. Filamenta octo capillaria, incurvata. Antheræ muticæ, exsertæ.
Pistillum. Germen subrotundum. Stylus filiformis, longitudine
staminum. Stigma tetragonum.
Habitat ad Caput Bonæ Spei.
Floret a mense Julii in Octobrem.

REFERENTIA.

1. Calyx et Corolla.
2. Corolla et Stamina.
3. Calyx lente auctus.
4. Stamina a Pistillo diducta, antherâ unâ lente auctâ.
 5. Stylus et Stigma, lente aucta.

SPECIFIC CHARACTER.

Heath, with beardless tips without the blossoms, which are pitcher-shaped;
cup double, clammy, tiled, coloured, and almost the length of the blossoms;
leaves grow by threes, even, appearing cut off at the point, and linear.

DESCRIPTION.

Stem shrubby, upright, a span high; the larger and smaller branches are
numerous, covered with leaves, and upright.
Leaves grow by threes, straight out, appearing cut off at the point, flat,
even, and having their footstalks pressed to the branches.
Flowers grow in bunches, generally three together, at the ends of the
smaller branches, hanging downward; footstalks the length of the cup.
Empalement. Cup double, pressed to the blossom, tiled: the leaves are
egg-shaped, clammy, and flesh-coloured.
Blossom pitcher-shaped, flesh-coloured at the mouth, which has its
segments blunt, small, and upright.
Chives. Eight hair-like threads, bent inwards. Tips beardless, and without
the blossom.
Pointal. Seed-bud nearly round. Shaft thread-shaped, the length of the
chives. Summit four-cornered.
Native of the Cape of Good Hope.
Flowers from July till October.

REFERENCE.

1. The Empalement and Blossom.

2. The Blossom and Chives.
3. The Empalement magnified.
4. The Chives detached from the Pointal, one tip magnified.
5. The Shaft and its Summit, magnified.
 ERICA incarnata.

CHARACTER SPECIFICUS.

Erica, antheris cristatis, subinclusis; corollis subovatis, carneis; pedunculis

longissimis, coloratis; foliis quaternis.

DESCRIPTIO.

Caulis suberectus, pedalis ramosissimus, rami, et ramuli, flexuosi,

divaricato patente.
Folia quaterna, obtusa, linearia, glabra, subtus sulcata; petiolis
brevissimis, adpressis.
Flores terminales, racemum densé formantes; pedunculi longissimi,
purpurei, bracteis tribus instructi.
Calyx. Perianthium tetraphyllum, foliolis ovatis, carinatis, acuminatis.
Corolla subovata, cernua, carnea, ore contracto, lævissime quadrisido,
laciniis erectis.
Stamina. Filamenta octo capillaria, receptaculo inserta. Antheræ cristatæ,
sub-inclusæ.
Pistillum. Germen subrotundum. Stylus filiformis, exsertus. Stigma
tetragonum.
Habitat ad Caput Bonæ Spei.
Floret a mensi Julii, in Octobrem.

REFERENTIA.

1. Calyx, et Corolla.
2. Calyx lente auctus.
3. Stamina, et Pistillum.
4. Stamina a Pistillo diducta; anthera una lente aucta.
 5. Stylus, et Stigma, lente aucta.

SPECIFIC CHARACTER.

Heath, with crested tips, nearly within the blossoms, which are almost egg-
shaped, and flesh-coloured; the foot-stalks are very long, and coloured; the
leaves grow by fours.

DESCRIPTION.

Stem nearly upright, a foot high, and very much branched; the larger and
smaller branches grow zigzag, and spread outward.
Leaves grow by fours, are blunt, linear, smooth, and furrowed
underneath; with short foot-stalks pressed to the branches.
The Flowers grow at the end of the smaller branches, forming a close
bunch; the foot-stalks are very long, and purple, having three floral leaves.
Empalement. Cup four-leaved, which are egg-shaped, keeled, and
pointed.
Blossom nearly egg-shaped, bending downward, and flesh-coloured, the
mouth contracted, but slightly cut into four upright segments.
Chives. Eight hair-like threads, fixed into the receptacle. Tips crested,
nearly within the blossom.
Pointal. Seed-vessel nearly round. Shaft thread-shaped, and without the
blossom. Summit four-cornered.
Native of the Cape of Good Hope.
Flowers from July, till October.

REFERENCE.

1. The Empalement, and Blossom.

2. The Empalement magnified.
3. The Chives, and Pointal.
4. The Chives detached from the Pointal; one tip magnified.
5. The Shaft, and its Summit, magnified.
 ERICA jasminiflora.

CHARACTER SPECIFICUS.

Erica, antheris basi bicornibus, inclusis; stylo exserto; corollis ampullaceis,

sesquipollicaribus, laciniis cordatis, patentibus; floribus subternis; foliis
ternis, trigonis, subulatis, patenti-erectis.

DESCRIPTIO.

Caulis filiformis, erectus; rami simplicissimi, filiformes, longi, patenti.

Folia terna, trigona, acuta, subulata, margine serrata, basi adpressa,
apicem versus patula, sexfariam imbricata.
Flores terminales, sub-terni, horizontales, umbellati; pedunculi purpurei,
bracteis tribus, ovatis, coloratis, instructi.
Calyx. Perianthium tetraphyllum, foliolis ovatis, viscosis, purpureis.
Corolla viscosa, sesquipollicaris, summa cylindracea, ad basin inflata,
ore arctata; laciniis expansis, sub-ovatis, maximis.
Stamina. Filamenta octo capillaria; antheræ basi bicornes, apice
acuminatæ, inclusæ.
Pistillum. Germen ovatum, sulcatum. Stylus filiformis, exsertus. Stigma
tetragonum.
Habitat ad Caput Bonæ Spei.
Floret a mensi Julii, in Novembrem.

REFERENTIA.

1. Folium unum, lente auctum.

2. Calyx, lente auctus.
3. Calyx, et Corolla.
4. Stamina, et Pistillum.
 5. Stamina a Pistillo diducta, anthera una, lente aucta.
6. Stylus et Stigma lente aucta.

SPECIFIC CHARACTER.

Heath with tips two horned at the base and within the blossom, the shaft
without; blossoms flask-shaped, an inch and a half long, the segments heart-
shaped and spreading; flowers growing by threes mostly; leaves grow by
threes, are three-sided, awl-shaped, upright and spreading.

DESCRIPTION.

Stem thread-shaped and upright; the branches are quite simple, thread
shaped, long, and spreading.
Leaves grow by threes, are three-sided, sharp, awl-shaped, sawed at the
edge, pressed to the stem at the base, spreading towards the end, and forming
six angles.
Flowers terminate the branches generally by threes, grow horizontal,
and in bunches; the foot-stalks are purple, having three oval, coloured floral
leaves.
Empalement. Cup of four leaves, which are egg-shaped, clammy, and
purple.
Blossom, clammy, an inch and a half long, the upper part cylindrical,
swelled at the base, and pinched in at the mouth; the segments spreading,
nearly egg-shaped and very large.
Chives. Eight hair-like threads. Tips two horned at the base, tapered to
the points and within the blossom.
Pointal. Seed-bud egg-shaped and furrowed. Shaft thread-shaped and
without the blossom. Summit four-cornered.
Native of the Cape of Good Hope.
Flowers from July, till November.

REFERENCE.
1. A Leaf, magnified.
2. The Empalement, magnified.
3. The Empalement, and Blossom.
4. The Chives, and Pointal.
5. The Chives detached from the Pointal, one tip magnified.
6. The Shaft and its Summit magnified.
 ERICA lateralis.

CHARACTER SPECIFICUS.

Erica antheris cristatis, inclulis; corolla purpurea, urceolato-campanulata, ad

basin plana; pedunculis longissimis; floribus umbellatis, ternminalibus,
fecundis, cernuis; foliis quaternis, obtusis, glaberrimis.

DESCRIPTIO.

Caulis fruticosus, erectus, pedalis; rami sub-simplices, virgati, filiformes.

Folia quaterna, linearia, obtusa, sub-trigona, crassiuscula, brevissime
petiolata, petiolis adpressis.
Flores ad apices ramorum ramulorumque umbellati, cernui, secundi,
purpurei; pedunculi florum triplo longitudine colorati, bracteis tribus minutis
instructi.
Calyx. Perianthium tetraphyllum, foliolis minutis, adpressis, ciliatis,
subulatis.
Corolla sub-campanulata ad basin plana, purpurea; laciniis limbi
obtusis, suberectis.
Stamina. Filamenta octo, capillaria, apice incurvata. Antheras cristatæ,
atro-purpureæ, inclusæ.
Pistillum. Germen turbinatum, sulcatum, ad basin glandulosum. Stylus
staminibus longior, exsertus. Stigma tetragonum, virescens.
Habitat ad Caput Bonæ Spei.
Floret a mense Augusti, in Decembrem.

REFERENTIA.

1. Calyx et Corolla.
2. Calyx, auctus.
 3. Corolla.
4. Stamina, et Pistillum.
5. Stamina a Pistillo diducta, anthera una lente aucta.
6. Pistillum, lente auctum.

SPECIFIC CHARACTER.

Heath with crested tips, within the blossom; which is purple, between bell
and pitcher-shaped, flat at the base; foot-stalks very long; flowers grow in
umbels at the end of the branches, point all one way and hang down; leaves
grow by fours, are blunt and very smooth.

DESCRIPTION.

Stem shrubby, upright, grows a foot high; branches nearly simple, twiggy
and thread-shaped.
Leaves grow by fours, linear, blunt, almost three-sided, thickish, very
short foot-stalks, which are pressed to the stem.
Flowers grow in umbels, at the end of the larger and smaller branches,
nodding, all pointing one way, and are purple; foot-stalks thrice the length of
the flowers, coloured, and three small floral leaves upon them.
Empalement. Cup four-leaved, leaflets small, pressed to the blossom,
fringed and awl-shaped.
Blossom approaching to bell-shape; the lower part flat, and purple; the
segments of the border are blunt and rather upright
Chives. Eight hair-like threads, turned inwards at the upper part. Tips
crested, deep purple, and within the blossom.
Pointal. Seed-bud turban-shaped, furrowed, glandular at the base. Shaft
longer than the chives, without the blossom. Summit four-cornered and
greenish.
Native of the Cape of Good Hope.
Flowers from August, till December.

REFERENCE.
1. The Empalement, and Blossom.
2. The Empalement, magnified.
3. The Blossom.
4. The Chives, and Pointal.
5. The Chives detached from the Pointal, one Tip magnified.
6. The Pointal, magnified.