Elemental Difference and the Climate
of the Body
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Elemental Difference
and the Climate
of the Body
E M I LY A N N E PA R K E R
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Preface
This was written as a book about how difficult it is to pay attention to the politics of ecology without recreating the polis. I argue that the polis, the philosophical 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 zoonosis. 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 species.” This is both an open identification with the planet and with other species, 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 identification with animality can hide the question of humanity.
Many speak in the present of dual pandemics: Covid-​19 and racial injustice. 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 challenging 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 entitled “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 invaluable. 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 attention 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 performative 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 attention to global, ahuman forces of ecological change as well as to local spaces of vulnerability and resistance,” 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’ ultimately gets its sense from the question of the way one should live.” The term “philosophy” is etymologically 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 political 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 ecological. 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 predicament,” 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 anthropocentric 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 distinction 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 “dialogue 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 euphemism “climate change.”12 The need for critiques of Man-​ism and anthropocentrism 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 result of a distinct and disordered politics primarily—​not ecology. In the other
direction the philosophy of political ecology suggests that climate disruption 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 between 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 interested 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.
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.
12
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 tradition13 and inspired so many naturalists14 in a nevertheless Platonic philosophical 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 evidence 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, elevation 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.
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.
14
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 participation in the creation of shape, no human created the fact that we participate 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, teleological, oppositionally incommensurable sex.21 So instead I devise a philosophy 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 argument is that the recent model of incommensurability, or the “two-​sex model,” requires a confrontation 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 differentiable 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 elemental 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 gesture 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 problematic 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 category of “women as the lack of the normal sex, the male,”26 that emerges
alongside Man, subordinate and yet parallel in perfection. There is unfortunately 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 philosophies 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.
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.
27
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,” according to which a certain body that is definitive of a woman becomes a distinct 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 picture 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 hypocritically 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 definition 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 complete 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 comment 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 mutually 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 because 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 political 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 myself 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 engendering of what I will call the climate of the body. I will argue that Fanon himself suggests this approach.
Second: Eli Clare writes, “Early on I understood that my body was irrevocably 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 perceived. 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 result 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 approach that I take is to linger over the curious plainness of the power asymmetry 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 obvious 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 situation 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, “repressive 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 significance 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 injustice 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.
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 distinction 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.
36
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 superficial, 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 statement. 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 elemental 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 concern 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, including 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 discovered 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 indigence 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 impossibility 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 constructionist 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 differential 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 construction 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 philosophy 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 disembodied 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 distinction 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 concept 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 understood even by biologists such as Fausto-​Sterling as identities that are political 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 putting 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 hierarchies 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 heterogeneous. 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 biocentric 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 difference 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 difference, 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 ecological 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 difference 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 anthropocentrism.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 political 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, electricity, 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 abstraction from what is going on just in an elbow, where the genes of the bacteria, 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.
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.
55
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 conceptual intervention of political ecology, which is to affirm the “its [who] outnumber 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 distinct 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 account 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, political ecologists must revert to the performative account of difference as unilaterally 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.
Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 112.
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.
59
60
Introduction
19
constructionist) to understand the political-​ecological as a conceptual formation. 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 articulate 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 current 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 ecological, a paradigm of relationality. The political and the ecological are defined
through this contrast. For this reason the political readily becomes the exclusion 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 absolute 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 difference, 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 related 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 beginning 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 performative 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 anthropocentric 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 themselves. 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 political ecology concern about the lack of attention to “nonhuman” agency in
the sense of technology, in the work of Barad, and (2) a performativity concern 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 politics 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 construction 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 distinction 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 philosophy 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 centuries 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 scientific subjects who are the subject matter of biocentric Man. All other modes
of biologically defined difference from the biocentric Man follow from this
63
64
Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, 347.
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 biocentric, 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 development 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 biocentric Man, is a denunciation of the biological. While I am in this way critical 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 advocate 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.
Introduction
23
performativists and political ecologists agree on the problematic character of
this gesture, though for different reasons. For philosopher of performativity
Judith Butler, the human is unjustly a denial of dependence and a denial of
the irreducible negotiations of each “living creature among creatures and in
the midst of forms of living that exceed us.”66 For Bruno Latour, the human
is a denial of actantcy. Latour advocates subduing traditionally humanistic
inquiry in the face of climate disruption, while performativists advocate
(Wynter and Preciado are important exceptions) doubling down on humanistic inquiry in at best an environmental mode. The claim of Chapter 5 is
this: that this seems to be a choice at all is a reappearance of the distinction
between polis and oikos, politics and ecology. Performativity takes the part
of the polis, and political ecology takes the part of the rest of earth. That this
seems to be a choice at all is an indication of the sway of the politics of matter,
the matter that politics or the study of the polis presupposes in its exclusion
of oikos, or the sciences of ecology. Although both sides reject the one of the
body, in some way neither one can fully appreciate the other, precisely because of the polis-​oikos distinction that structures the sides. Each is characteristic of a split that is the climate of the one of the body. I end the book
with affirmation of the question of what it is like to be-​become human amid
the morphology of the polis, offering a beginning of an answer by rereading
the gesture of genre in Sylvia Wynter and by looking more closely at some
passages in Irigaray and Fanon. In this way it is possible to combine both
political ecology and performativity, both of which raise crucial concerns.
I want to suggest that what it is like to be human is to play a part in the eruption and negotiation of elemental difference, neither form nor matter, neither body nor mind, neither what nor who. We should affirm those elements
that we ourselves are.
66
Butler, Notes, 43.
1
A Revised Irigarayan Study of the
Hierarchy of Form and Matter, This Time
without Sexual Difference
This chapter learns from the work of Luce Irigaray without endorsing 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.
For Irigaray, a certain body figures the negation of matter to which the polis
aspires. I seek to rewrite this claim in terms of elemental difference, as opposed to sexual or sexuate difference. The very gesture of the one of the
body, however this emerges, figures the negation of matter to which the polis
aspires.
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 relationalities that flow from assumption of these
concepts. Matter and nature are indications of the relationship of the tradition of the polis to the planet. The denial of elemental difference also anchors
a divide between two gestures closely related to these: the body and bodies. It
is not so much Man that has been at the apex of this framework, but Man insofar as that has been the word for what I will call “the one of the body.” Man
is a manifestation of the body. The one, the body—​this generic affirmation
of one body as the human—​is and has been in some way for the whole of the
legacy of the polis, as this has been passed down from Aristotle, a denial of
elemental difference. And more recently the very notion of a homogeneous
“the two of the body” comes to accompany this longer standing one body, so
that in the modern context the one, the body is defined by an equally naturalized “two-​sex model.” At the same time not all men are the one of the body,
the perfect or complete human form, as Frantz Fanon insists. Many men are
not the body. In contrast to plurality, the very gesture of bodies in the plural,
the one, the body can pretend to be generic. It is the genericness and bizarre
absence of relationality that is the point.
Elemental Difference and the Climate of the Body. Emily Anne Parker, Oxford University Press.
© Oxford University Press 2021. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780197575079.003.0002
28
A Philosophy of Elemental Difference
Irigaray’s work opens up this way of thinking. As I have argued in earlier work, sexual difference in Irigaray is already an ecologically-​motivated
insistence on the persistent plurality of bodies that currently relate via the
gesture of the homogeneous one.1 Irigaray explicitly rejects environmentalism in exactly the way that political ecologists do.2 What is crucial for
my own work is that Irigaray holds this gesture together with readings of
the creations of political hierarchy that emerge precisely when differences
and thus relationalities are denied. Irigaray gives no distinct attention to the
ever-​renewing contexts in which the pretension to a racially generic body
emerges, such that there can be white people. Irigaray misses that the “black
is not a man.”3 She also does not argue that the discourse of biocentric Man as
Sylvia Wynter explains is a racial and colonial fabric, built in response to the
attempt to distinguish human from blackness and darkness.4 Nevertheless
Irigaray’s work makes three indispensable points that inform a philosophy of
elemental difference.
In the later part of the chapter I will articulate in greater detail the philosophy of elemental difference that Irigaray’s philosophy of sexual difference
both opens up and obscures. For now I will state briefly the three helpful
points regarding Irigaray’s philosophy of sexual difference.
First, Irigaray argues that the very notion of political equality is indicative of a certain shape: This shape defines thinking as an immaterial agency
unique to the polis and identifies this as a form that guides matter. Matter
according to this definition is not agential in and of itself. It is not capable
1 Emily Anne Parker, “Precarity and Elemental Difference,” Political Theory 45.3 (2017):
319–​341. See also Helen Fielding, “Questioning Nature: Irigaray, Heidegger, and the Potentiality of
Matter,” Continental Philosophy Review 36 (2003): 1–​26; Alison Stone, Luce Irigaray and the Philosophy
of Sexual Difference (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006); and Astrida Neimanis, Bodies of
Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology (New York: Bloomsbury, 2017), especially Chapter 2,
“Posthuman Gestationality: Luce Irigaray and Water’s Queer Repetitions.”
2 Luce Irigaray, “Starting from Ourselves as Living Beings,” Journal of the British Society for
Phenomenology 46.2 (2015): 101.
3 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, xii. See also Calvin L. Warren, Ontological Terror: Blackness,
Nihilism and Emancipation (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018), especially 26–​61; Simone
Browne, Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015), specifically 99. I read Browne’s project as implicitly a political ecology that is also a critique of the polis.
4 Hortense J. Spillers, Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003); Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments;
Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí, The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender
Discourses (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997); Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí, What Gender
Is Motherhood? Changing Yorùbá Ideals of Power, Procreation, and Identity in the Age of Modernity
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016); María Lugones, “Toward a Decolonial Feminism,” Hypatia
25.4 (Fall 2010): 742–​759; María Lugones, “The Coloniality of Gender,” in Globalization and the
Decolonial Option, ed. Walter D. Mignolo and Arturo Escobar (New York: Routledge, 2010), 369–​
390; Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider (New York: Penguin Random House, 2007).
A Revised Irigarayan Study of the Hierarchy
29
of acting by definition. This is what matter means. The polis is the site of
thinking; it is where and when the uncaused, thinking, happens. The oikos
or households are component parts of the polis, and this is a zone indicated
by the bodies that are explicitly incapable of guiding the polis: women, slaves,
children, property.5 This differentiation between polis on the whole and
oikos as a part,6 Irigaray suggests, while it is unifying of an organic picture
in which all is ultimately the polis, nevertheless is appropriately governed by
the thinking one, the ideal human form. For Irigaray the polis is in this way
most basically a rejection of sexual difference. Bodies falling short of the one,
the ideal human form mark a certain distance from an ideal. In Irigaray’s
terms, the feminine, that which pertains to the bodies of the ones who are not
the one, is suppressed and named matter and subordinated to form, which is
considered to be both a certain body and at the same time abodily precisely
because of this distinction between form (thinking) and matter (bodies). The
very gestures of polis and body are united in Aristotle, for whom “equality is
for equals”7 and the equal body of Man is actually governed by its immaterial
aspect. Political equality, politics as a practice of relating as equals who must
also be the Same, the one, the complete human form, then requires bodily
identity with the idealized body precisely because the distinction between
this body and matter is premised on the absolute power of that body (specifically the capacity for an encased thinking) over matter. What Irigaray
suggests is that the desire for the Same, the desire for absolute continuity in
the form of political equality, is both a desire for a very specific bodily form
of Man and a desire for disembodiment, the desire not to be bodily at all, that
projects the passive role of matter onto others. In other words, the desire for
the Same is a desire for the body that figures thinking, such that it is not a
body at all.
A second crucial aspect of Irigaray’s philosophy of sexual difference is that
no human invented relationality, even the relationality of the polis. There
would be no polis without contrasts between bodies. Not only bodies in a general sense but also human bodies are not all alike and cannot share a generic
morphology. Generic morphology—​having some form—​is an oxymoron.
Aristotle, along with the many in the polis tradition that renews over and
over again, can only elevate one body among all relatively comparable bodies
5
6
7
See Aristotle, Complete Works of Aristotle, Politics 3.1253b1–​1253b13.
See Irigaray, “There Can Be No Democracy, 194.
Aristotle, Politics 3.280a12–​14.
30
A Philosophy of Elemental Difference
precisely because of a ranking of their features. The polis tradition exploits
features and defines people exclusively in terms of these features as they are
understood by others. For Irigaray, the desire for all bodies to be the Same,
the Same as a formal and empty One, is the flip side of the animosity directed
at matter because it is not this privileged gesture of shape. Man is an effort to
install unilateral influence8 in a world of relationality.
Third and finally, Irigaray’s philosophy of sexual difference suggests that
identity politics is only an oxymoron because of this bodied-​yet-​disembodied
structure of the polis. In the polis the study of identity is suppressed insofar
as there is meant to be no identity at all. Obviously Man is an identity. But this
study is denied and suppressed. The polis is a denial of any shape according
to which one understands one’s bodied self, because the shape by which Man
is able to relate to another Man must be denied in order to preserve the structure of the polis as nature.
I will say more about each of these points in the final section of this chapter.
Through each of these three points, Irigaray’s philosophy of sexual difference refuses to analogize the ecological and the political. She is interested in
the distinction itself. These gestures in Irigaray—​the desire for equality and
the desire for a very specific body and at the same time release from bodied
relationality—​are ultimately all the same gesture, figured by Man. And this
gesture is the polis. Man, for Irigaray, is the polis. Irigaray rejects political
equality as the endgame of women’s activism (this is her interest) insofar as
it is an inherently disembodied value established “among men and between
men.”9 Sexual difference as a philosophical claim insists that the subordination of matter is owed not to a perception of difference that should be eliminated, but to the suppression of sexual difference per se.10 The subordination
of women is owed to the relegation of matter to the outside of politics. Denial
of sexual difference for Irigaray is a desire for unilateral influence. It is a denial that structures contemporary relations that exceed the confines of who
and what is considered properly political.11
Irigaray’s philosophy of sexual difference is in this sense consistent with
political ecology, by which I mean a rejection of environmentalism.12
8 See the “Zeusian model of action” in Jane Bennett, Influx and Efflux: Writing Up with Walt
Whitman (Durham: Duke University Press, 2020), 116.
9 Irigaray, “There Can Be No Democracy.”
10 Shaireen Rasheed, “Islam, Sexuality, and the War on Terror: Luce Irigaray’s Post-​colonial Ethics
of Difference,” American Journal of Islamic Studies 31.1 (2014): 1–​15.
11 Rachel Jones, “Vital Matters and Generative Materiality: Between Bennett and Irigaray,” Journal
of the British Society for Phenomenology 46.2 (2015): 156–​172.
12 Neimanis, Bodies of Water, 65–​107.
A Revised Irigarayan Study of the Hierarchy
31
Environmentalism philosophically speaking draws attention to an environment, a previously invisible background of Man. Political ecology, as I will
discuss at greater length subsequently, argues that there is no background.
All act, and all are acted upon. Irigaray shares this appreciation of the powers
of elementality, including the elementality that we ourselves are.
In this respect Irigaray follows in the legacy of Frantz Fanon. Both Irigaray
and Fanon, whom I introduce in what follows and then discuss at length in
Chapter 3, are as committed to the question of what it is like to be-​become
human as they are committed to appreciating this in the context of an agential, relational planet. Neither of them explicitly articulates an exposition of
the gesture of the one of the body or the fate of this concept in the present.
The point is rather that they both reject environmentalism on indistinguishably ecological-​political grounds. Their work defies this distinction and
makes them delightfully difficult to place. Environmentalism is critiqued as
matter in Irigaray and as the biological and zoological in Fanon. These terms
function politically to subordinate specific bodies as well as to devalue the
agency of earth-​air-​fire-​water. To my knowledge these accounts so far have
not been read together in this way.13
I want to explore the three preceding claims in Irigaray’s philosophy of
sexual difference and begin to rewrite them in the final section of this chapter
as the beginning of a philosophy of elemental difference. A full articulation
of this philosophy of elemental difference appears at the end of Chapter 3,
after I have had the chance to discuss the work of Frantz Fanon. But first
I want to discuss my holdup in fully embracing Irigaray’s work, what I will
call Irigaray’s own biocentrism.
13 I am aware of only two other readings of Irigaray and Fanon together, apart from Wilderson, Red,
White, and Black, 86–​87. The two I’m thinking of are the work of practicing psychoanalyst Yukari
Yanagino, “Disintegration, Bisexuality, and Transgender Women of Color: Luce Irigaray and Frantz
Fanon on Gender Transition,” Undecidable Unconscious 4 (2017): 93–​110; and Penelope Ingram,
The Signifying Body: Toward an Ethics of Sexual and Racial Difference (Albany: State University of
New York Press, 2008). Yanagino’s essay underestimates, in my view, the lack of attention to modern,
biomedical sex in Irigaray, and it’s not clear what Fanon and Irigaray have in common beyond their
quite distinct departures from Freudian psychoanalysis. Ingraham’s study is an important one. I disagree with her reading of Fanon as a philosopher of performativity exclusively, and I depart from
her endorsement of Irigarayan sexual difference and sex, which I argue are indistinguishable. Why
should a performative account take race to be entirely performative and sex irreducible? This is an
interesting polarization. I would argue that both race and sex are denials of elemental difference. As
Fanon argues, it is negrophobia, distinguishing this from Man, that inspires the biological and the
zoological as that from which the political must be protected.
32
A Philosophy of Elemental Difference
1.1. The Problem: Irigaray’s Biocentrism
As I have explained in the introduction, I borrow the concern with biocentrism as well as the term itself from the work of Sylvia Wynter. Wynter
understands biocentrism to be defining human excellence with reference
to bodily features. Talia Mae Bettcher describes biocentrism well when she
writes, “Moral resources are differentially distributed on the basis of normatively selected bodies.”14 In this section I argue that Irigaray’s work is biocentric, first, insofar as there is a presupposition of ahistorical sex in her work,
and, second, insofar as her work focuses almost exclusively on the problems
with what Thomas Laqueur has named the one-​sex model. Irigaray’s philosophy does not take into consideration a modern reshaping of the polis in
which a two-​sex model has come to define the body.
Irigaray’s work has been rightly criticized for many years for its hetero
and cis15 normativity and ethnocentrism.16 Cynthia Willett, thinking more
broadly about Irigaray’s philosophy, has argued convincingly that Irigaray
“shares the failure of the Platonic and Hegelian philosophies of human desire to develop democratic conceptions of work and power.”17 Penelope
Deutscher has argued that neither cultural difference nor the history or present of colonization appears in Irigaray’s oeuvre.18 More could be written
on the way in which Irigaray’s philosophy might be questioned for its
idealizations of ability and health,19 as well as on the way in which the image
of blackness is discussed without reference to racialization.20
I add to this that Irigaray’s work is characterized by a lack of appreciation of what Achille Mbembe describes as the age of security. In the age of
14
Bettcher, “Full-​Frontal Morality,” 325.
For understanding the term “cis,” see Talia Mae Bettcher, “Trapped in the Wrong
Theory: Rethinking Trans Oppression and Resistance,” Signs 39.2 (2013): 386.
16 See Shannon Winnubst, Queering Freedom (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006),
104–​107; and Mary Beth Mader, “All Too Familiar: Luce Irigaray’s Recent Thought on Sexuation and
Generation,” Continental Philosophy Review 36 (2003): 367–​390.
17 Cynthia Willett, The Soul of Justice: Social Bonds and Racial Hubris (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 2001), 148–​151.
18 Penelope Deutscher, “Conditionalities, Exclusions, Occlusions,” in Rewriting Difference: Luce
Irigaray and “The Greeks”, ed. Elena Tzelepis and Athena Athanasiou (Albany: State University of
New York Press, 2010), 247–​258; Penelope Deutscher, “Between East and West and the Politics of
‘Cultural Ingénuité,’” Theory, Culture & Society 20.3 (2003): 65–​75; Penelope Deutscher, A Politics of
Impossible Difference: The Later Work of Luce Irigaray (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002).
19 A helpful text in that direction is Rachel Jones’s critique of Irigaray’s “emphasis on harmony”
in “Philosophical Métissage and the Decolonization of Difference: Luce Irigaray, Daniel Maximin,
and the Elemental Sublime,” Journal of Aesthetics and Phenomenology 5.2 (2018): 148. See also Jones,
“Vital Matters,” 164–​165.
20 Irigaray, Speculum, 66.
15
A Revised Irigarayan Study of the Hierarchy
33
security, race is best understood as the cataloging of appearances of bodies
for use as a “security device.”21 Race is “a more or less coded way of dividing
and organizing a multiplicity, fixing and distributing it according to a hierarchy.”22 Race is an appearance that is made real, that “makes it possible
to identify and define population groups in a way that makes each of them
carriers of differentiated and more or less shifting risk.”23 Mbembe argues
that because “the Other is at once difference and similarity, united,” then
“what we must imagine is a politics of humanity that is fundamentally a politics of the similar, but in a context in which what we all share from the beginning is difference. It is our differences that, paradoxically, we must share.”24
Mbembe’s articulation is, in my estimation, exactly right and reintroduces a
gesture of similarity characteristic of the polis. Mbembe himself argues this,
at least with respect to “liberal democracy.”25 Moreover, because difference
has been and still is (as I will explain over the course of the book) so squarely
on the side of a dehumanizing ecological, a side that is defined against an
absolute similarity-​in-​complementarity of the polis, that which is political,
even gestures to difference, is problematic, so overdetermined is racial difference, as again Mbembe himself suggests. I do believe I live in the age of
security as Mbembe articulates this, an age in which racial difference marks
a human as presumptively innocent or guilty, and I am certain that my own
distinctive and white relation to the one of the body needs spelling out. How
is the “politics of humanity” overdetermined as “a politics of the similar”? Is
it a coincidence that the age of security is “the Anthropocene”?26 Can it be
a coincidence that privatized prisons and immigration “detention” centers
constitute the politics of the Anthropocene? What is it like to be Black and
DeafBlind in the age of security? How do the two-​sex model (to be explained
21 Achille Mbembe, Critique of Black Reason, trans. Laurent Dubois (Durham: Duke University
Press, 2017), 35.
22 Mbembe, Critique of Black Reason, 35.
23 Mbembe, Critique of Black Reason, 35. See also Falguni A. Sheth, Toward a Political Philosophy of
Race (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2009); and Browne, Dark Matters.
24 Mbembe, Critique of Black Reason, 178.
25 Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics, trans. Steven Corcoran (Durham: Duke University Press,
2019), 162.
26 With Rachel Jones, I have previously written about this gesture of “the Anthropocene.” See Rachel
Jones and Emily Anne Parker, “The Anthropocene and Elemental Multiplicity,” English Language
Notes 55.1–​2 (Fall 2017): 61–​69; and Parker, “Precarity and Elemental Difference.” See also the invocation of “weather,” “the totality of our environments,” in Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness
and Being (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016). See also Selamawit Terrefe, “What Exceeds the
Hold? An Interview with Christina Sharpe,” Rhizomes 29 (2016): 1–​17. See also Mbembe’s articulation of the Anthropocene in “Africa in the New Century,” Massachusetts Review 57.1 (2016): 103; and
“ecocide” in Mbembe, Necropolitics, 100.
34
A Philosophy of Elemental Difference
below) and the figuring of queer, trans, and intersex as “unnatural” figure
in the age of security? How do these all of these morphologies relate to each
other? In “Africa in the New Century,” Mbembe argues that the “proper
name for democracy” is “humankind ruling in common on behalf of a larger
commons, which includes nonhumans.”27 I worry that putting it this way
reintroduces the polis, with its characteristic human-​nonhuman distinction,
as I will argue in Chapter 3. What makes similarity so attractive? I hope to
understand the overdetermination of this way of thinking about humanity,
in which it is contrasted to an ecology where the differences reside.
Mbembe’s work illustrates in many respects the naivete of Luce Irigaray’s
neglect of colonizations and racializations and the phenomenon of white
people, including especially white women, in that history. Irigaray’s work
does not explicitly contemplate the age of security that Mbembe articulates.
The “contraction, containment, and enclosure . . . [the] matrix of rules mostly
designed for those human bodies deemed either in excess, unwanted, illegal, dispensable, or superfluous”28—​Irigaray does not locate her critique of
“equality is for equals”29 here.
Even though Irigaray does not locate her critique of the polis equality in a
critique of the Anthropocene as the age of security, that is where it belongs.
If Irigaray were thinking about this age of race-​ability-​class-​sex-​gender-​
hierarchizing “security” (above all the question for Mbembe is, “Whose
security?”), she might argue that it is one dedicated to the Masculine. The
feminine, she argues, is not yet understood as having the solidity that body
connotes, and in this way the feminine is at present nothing more than the
mirror image, the opposite of Man, of military might, of fossil fuel extraction, all of which secures the power of the Masculine. Woman, insofar as
there are women, is a mirror image of Man, a complementary aspect of Man’s
shape. This might be Irigaray’s philosophy of sexual difference as a way of understanding the Anthropocene-​age-​of-​security.
And yet there is so much more that needs to be said about this Masculine.
Sylvia Wynter’s reading of Irigaray has not received the attention that it
deserves. Novelist, dramatist, cultural critic, Caribbean studies scholar, and
philosopher, Wynter has suggested in a reading of Irigaray that in modernity this Masculine-​not-​feminine that had been the “symbolic template of
27 Mbembe, “Africa in the New Century,”103. Mbembe revisits his philosophy of democracy in
Necropolitics. See especially 15–​32 and 161–​166.
28 Mbembe, Necropolitics, 96.
29 Aristotle, Politics 3.1280a.12–​14.
A Revised Irigarayan Study of the Hierarchy
35
all traditional and religiously based human orders” prior to the secular turn
of European cultures becomes secondary in modernity to a difference between “ ‘men’ and ‘natives’ ” as a way of orienting political hierarchy.30 In this
modern schema the absence of a place for what Wynter calls “the native’s”
“physiognomically complementary mate” plays a constitutive role. It is no
coincidence that there is no native woman; the absence of a native woman
anchors the hierarchy. The moral authority of modernity requires the absence of what Kimberlé Crenshaw has famously called the “intersection”31 of
these values—​Masculine (who is not feminine) and Man (who is not native).
How do these dynamics interact? How do they as idealizations bolster the
modern gesture of biocentric Man?
In this crucial reading of Irigaray, Sylvia Wynter argues that Shakespeare’s
The Tempest is literary evidence of the drawbacks of Irigaray’s philosophy of
sexual difference. The play demonstrates a “mutational shift” from a model
in which the “patriarchal discourse” is entirely determined to deny sexual
difference to one in which biocentric Man who is not a native emerges and
shifts the terrain:
. . . If, before the sixteenth century, what Irigaray terms as “patriarchal discourse” had erected itself on the “silenced ground” of women, from then
on, the new primarily silenced ground . . . would be that of the majority
population-​groups of the globe . . . with [Shakespeare’s] Miranda becoming . . . a co-​participant, if to a lesser derived extent, in the power and
privileges generated by the empirical supremacy of her own population.32
For Wynter a decisive feature of that which aspires to be modern is the centrality and rigidity of the Man-​native divide and its effects on a preexisting
and ongoing Masculine-​as-​not-​feminine divide. That this set of idealizations
has no place for the vastness of political life, the vastness of the politics of
30 Sylvia Wynter, “Beyond Miranda’s Meanings: Un/​
silencing the ‘Demonic Ground’ of
Caliban’s ‘Woman,’ ” in The Routledge Reader in Caribbean Literature, ed. Alison Donnell and
Sarah Lawson Welch (New York: Routledge, 1996), 478; and Sylvia Wynter, “Afterword: Beyond
Miranda’s Meanings: Un/​silencing the ‘Demonic Ground’ of Caliban’s ‘Woman,’” in Out of the
Kumbla: Caribbean Women and Literature, ed. Carole Boyce Davies and Elaine Savory Fido (Trenton,
NJ: African World Press, 1990), 355–​372. See also Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, “‘Theorizing in a
Void’: Sublimity, Matter, and Physics in Black Feminist Poetics,” South Atlantic Quarterly 117.3
(2018): 620.
31 Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: Black Feminist Critique
of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory, and Antiracist Politics,” University of Chicago Legal
Forum 139 (1989): 139–​152.
32 Wynter, “Beyond Miranda’s Meanings,” 478–​479; emphasis mine.
36
A Philosophy of Elemental Difference
identity, as the Combahee River Collective33 once put it, is not incidental.
That it neglects to have a morphological place for so many bodies is not incidental. Most of the bodies, in fact. The Man-​native divide and the Masculine-​
as-​not-​feminine divide are Man’s own dimensions.
Wynter helpfully suggests that Irigaray participates in the modern defined
against that which is native precisely by giving attention only to one vector
of Man’s identity, the masculine-​as-​not-​feminine one. In doing so Irigaray
gives no place to the “physiognomically complementary mate” of the “native.” She also gives no attention to the imperative of the Same that shows
up among women. In Irigaray there is only the feminine or “women” as a
homogenizing, idealizing figure. Irigaray’s work is in this way deeply committed to the modern and to its imperial project, especially insofar as she
focuses attention exclusively on the continuities of the age of security with
the ancient Greek context. Irigaray does not say anything about the figure
of the barbarian in Aristotle, the one whose speech is indecipherable, in that
ancient context.
Others have taken similar note. Judith Butler argues that Irigaray “fails to
follow through the metonymic link between women and . . . other Others,
idealizing and appropriating the ‘elsewhere’ as the feminine. But what is the
‘elsewhere’ of Irigaray’s ‘elsewhere’?”34 In other words, Irigaray fails to appreciate the full proportions of the negations for which the masculine is responsible. Alia Al-​Saji has elaborated on this point more recently, suggesting
that racialized head covering plays “a constitutive role in many patriarchal
narratives in the West,”35 even as head covering is practiced throughout the
world by people demonstrating a wide variety of political stances as well as
religious traditions. The “image of the Muslim woman forms a kind of ‘constitutive outside’ (to use . . . Butler’s term)” and thereby assists a certain mode
of the purportedly secular other-​ed feminine in becoming “visible.”36 For Al-​
Saji, the hypervisiblity of the headscarf in European contexts is a production of secular space, and the suggestion that modern societies have achieved
gender equality anchors the space.37
33 Combahee River Collective, “A Black Feminist Statement,” in How We Get Free: Black Feminism
and the Combahee River Collective, ed. Keeanga-​Yamahtta Taylor (Chicago: Haymarket Books,
2017), 15–​27. More on the Combahee River Collective and identity later.
34 Butler, Bodies That Matter, 49.
35 Alia Al-​
Saji, “The Racialization of Muslim Veils: A Philosophical Analysis,” Philosophy and
Social Criticism 36.8 (2010): 877.
36 Al-​Saji, “Racialization of Muslim Veils,” 877.
37 Al-​Saji, “Racialization of Muslim Veils,” 879.
A Revised Irigarayan Study of the Hierarchy
37
An Irigarayan response to this specific invocation of feminism would of
course reject the very idea that European culture is at all interested in emancipating the feminine. As I have mentioned previously and will discuss at
greater length later, she considers equality to be a sign of the polis.38 Indeed,
Irigaray makes this case in such a way that it becomes part of the problem: for
Irigaray, what is problematic about European culture is its denial of sexual
difference. As if that’s it. But what Wynter, Butler, and Al-​Saji make very clear
is that this is not the whole of what is problematic about modernity and the
longer tradition in which it emerges.
These critiques point to the fact that exclusive attention to sexual difference can in fact play a role in the elaboration of imperial power. Many
feminists make this plain in seeking protection from misogyny by appeal to
state power. A crucial concern with Irigaray’s philosophy of sexual difference
is that she does not explore whether and how affirmation of sexual difference
by any definition, without a critique of the role of some figuring of sexual difference as the only problem of modernity, could indeed become a practice of
the age of security. What is it about sexual difference as Irigaray understands
it that makes this possible?
An additional aspect of the philosophy of sexual difference in the age of
security is just as troubling. Yes, some can occupy a proximity to Man, can
marginally become a co-​participant in the polis, without quite being Man.
But crucially, Irigaray herself idealizes what Man means. Not only the feminine, but also the masculine in Irigaray is conveyed in purportedly nonracial terms. Consider what William A. Smith in 2010 has articulated as “Black
racial misandry,” “an exaggerated pathological aversion toward Black boys
and men, created and strengthened in societal, institutional, and individual
ideologies and practices.”39 There does seem to be in the age of security a fear
of muscles, scruffy or full-​on facial hair, tall height, large size—​when these
are aspects of anyone Black or brown, and even when these are aspects of
someone white who evidences what Man takes to be natural impairment or
natural indigence.40 As part of no matter whose body is in question, muscles,
38
Irigaray, “There Can Be No Democracy.”
William A. Smith, “Toward an Understanding of Misandric Microaggressions and Racial
Battle Fatigue among African Americans in Historically White Institutions,” in The State of the
African American Male, ed. Eboni M. Zamani-​Gallaher and Vernon C. Polite, 265–​277 (East
Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2010), 267. See also William A. Smith, Jalil Bishop
Mustaffa, Chantal M. Jones, Tommy J. Curry, and Walter R. Allen, “You Make Me Wanna Holler and
Throw Up Both My Hands! Campus Culture, Black Misandric Microaggressions, and Racial Battle
Fatigue,” International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 29.9 (2016): 2.
40 Tremain, Foucault.
39
38
A Philosophy of Elemental Difference
facial hair, height, size (and I am sure other features I am missing), as features
of no matter whose body is in question, these are boxes checked in the
column of masculinity. How can muscles, facial hair, tall height, large size,
all boxes checked in the column of “masculinity,” make someone so distinctly
vulnerable? For Smith, to try to articulate the distinct patterns of misandry is
not to deny Black misogyny,41 what Moira Bailey has named misognynoir,42
but it is to apply intersectionality43 to the vilifications of the race-​gender of
men who are Black. Smith argues that anti-​blackness, vilifications of le nègre,
as Fanon explains, is never experienced as a generic hatred. In other words it
is not racism alone. It is hatred of men.
Defenders of Irigaray’s philosophy of sexual difference will rightly argue
that what Irigaray laments is that the feminine is whatever demonstrates the
limits of Man: strength, individuality, discreteness, power, ability, fitness.
Man is a natural bodily superiority and thus is a racial concept. In this respect
Irigaray is not complacent about racialization and suppression of cultural
difference. But there is a lack of distinct terms for such hierarchies and their
interactions with the figuring of the bodies of women deemed appropriately
part of and subordinated within the morphology of biocentric Man. And this
lack leaves so many questions open. Is there no political difference between
men who are figured as feminine in Irigaray’s terms and women who are
figured as feminine? The Irigarayan terms lack a capacity for exploring the
complexity of differentiations.
There is a point being made by William A. Smith and his coauthors to
which Irigaray’s work is fundamentally resistant and problematically so.
I think we have to ask whose fear and hatred—​and of what exactly—​inspires
the global security industry to build its prisons, jails, and detention centers?
This industry is a denial of differences named race, and it must be theorized
41
Smith, “Toward an Understanding,” 267–​268.
Moya Bailey and Trudy, “On Misogynoir: Citation, Erasure, and Plagiarism,” Feminist Media
Studies 18.4 (2018): 762–​768.
43 “Intersectionality” is a term created by Kimberlé Crenshaw. Crenshaw’s earliest articulations of
intersectionality were critiques of US anti-​discrimination law, which unlike the anti-​discrimination
legislation of other state formations, does not allow a person even to present a legal claim to be discriminated against on the basis of more than one dimension of oppression at a time. Regardless of
whether or not a legal system has this problem, I appreciate Emi Koyama’s claim: “At minimum, I believe, an intersectional analysis would require us to start from the acknowledgement that the state is
a problematic institution, a source of violence against women of color and many others, that cannot
be intrinsically relied on.” The state is one example of the polis that I am trying to understand. See
Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection”; Emi Koyama, “Silencing and Intimidation of Women
of Color at ‘Men against Sexism’ Conference,” accessed October 15, 2019, http://​www.shakesville.
com/​2013/​08/​silencing-​and-​intimidation-​of-​women-​of.html.
42
A Revised Irigarayan Study of the Hierarchy
39
intersectionally. What Smith, Mustaffa, Jones, Curry, and Allen suggest is that
in the age of security it happens that there is grave danger posed, not generically by that which is feminine, but in numerous modes, part of which can
only be named masculine. It just cannot be that the threat to the masculine
is the feminine per se as Irigaray would have it. Again there is a fear of muscles, five o’clock shadow or full beard, tall height, large size, broad shoulders.
It doesn’t matter who is under classification here; these are all boxes checked
in the column of masculinity, that which is supposed to pertain only to Man.
Contra Irigaray, so often in the age of security it is precisely these that draw
agitated attentions, regardless of any other features of a person, wealth and
secularism included. Even elements that are Man’s very own can become the
impetus for security. And the concern for this sort of security all too often
cleanly overrides any concern for what could be called safety: instead of
addressing climate change, a society builds a prison. Instead of being concerned about what a society is adding to its water, a society develops new
identification methods and surveillance technology. The security-​inspiring
bodies in such cases are often explicitly themselves compared with matter,
with monstrous power that must be suppressed precisely because they are
human agency with features that are not human.
Afro-​pessimism necessitates my concerns with Irigaray’s philosophy of
sexual difference. Ultimately my hope is to connect the Afro-​pessimist’s political reading of Fanon with the ecological aspects of his work. Let me say a
bit here now about the centrality of the Afro-​pessimistic reading of Fanon in
the development specifically of my worries about the philosophy of sexual
difference in Irigaray’s oeuvre. I argue that elemental difference is there in
Irigaray, opening up the possibility of perceiving the political-​ecological distinction according to the body, but Irigaray’s philosophy of sexual difference
has so far obscured this possibility. Afro-​pessimism, specifically the reading
of Fanon in this literature, has necessitated my need to disentangle elemental
difference from sexual difference and an adherence to the gesture of ahistorical sex in Irigaray.
Frank Wilderson articulates Afro-​pessimism at least partly as a reading
of Frantz Fanon,44 who will enter this project in earnest in Chapter 3. Fanon
writes that he is “the slave not of an idea others have of me but of my own
appearance.”45 As Wilderson notes, Fanon writes that between an idea and
44 See especially Wilderson, Red, White, and Black; and Saidiya Hartman and Frank B. Wilderson
III, “The Position of the Unthought,” Qui Parle 13.2 (Spring–​Summer 2003): 183–​201.
45 Wilderson, Red, White, and Black, 37. See Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 95.
40
A Philosophy of Elemental Difference
an appearance, and in his text he himself places “idea” in quotation marks.
Wilderson underscores this claim in Fanon and takes Fanon’s point to be
that his body does not become constitutive of the slave owing to an idea that
others have of it, but owing to the way in which this specific body appears, a
sensation of some other body that perceives him. Fanon further argues that
“the body of the black man hinders the closure of the white man’s postural
schema at the very moment when the black man emerges into the white man’s
phenomenal world.”46 The way in which he himself appears is determined for
him, externally, and in a way that ascribes the meanings of his body without
him. I will return to this claim in Chapters 3 and 5.
Fanon is saying, according to Wilderson, that “the visual field, ‘my own appearance,’ is the cut, the mechanism that elaborates the division between the
nonn*ggerness and slavery, the difference between the living and the dead.
Whereas Humans exist on some plane of being and thus can become existentially present through some struggle for, of, or through recognition, Blacks
cannot reach this plane.”47 Wilderson argues that Fanon, Hortense Spillers,
and Saidiya Hartman collectively “maintain that the violence that continually repositions the Black as a void of historical movement is without analog
in the suffering dynamics of the ontologically alive.”48 Jared Sexton has put
the point this way: “ ‘Afro-​pessimism’ . . . [is] a disposition that posits a political ontology dividing the Slave from the world of the Human in a constitutive way.”49 As we saw earlier, Smith’s articulation of Black racial misandry
demonstrates a direct counterexample for Irigaray’s philosophy of the masculine. But Afro-​pessimism deepens the point: the Irigarayan gesture of the
feminine is oblivious to another defining feature of the one of the body, the
human, namely, a mode of the masculine. In other words, the masculine is
in denial of, at least partly, the masculine. This is exactly the tangle to which
Irigaray’s work, I argue, leads.
And then I remember, prompted by Wilderson’s reading, what Hortense
Spillers has argued about the significance of the sex-​gender distinction, a
further distinction that Irigaray’s work makes difficult to place: as Spillers
argues, in the American Grammar Book, a deep preconscious of identities
is a pattern of assigning humanity and animality, body, and flesh. Spillers
46
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 138. I will alter this translation in Chapters 3 and 5.
Wilderson, Red, White, and Black, 37–​38; asterisk mine. Also see 314.
48 Wilderson, Red, White, and Black, 38.
49 Jared Sexton, “The Social Life of Social Death: On Afro-​
Pessimism and Black Optimism,”
Tensions Journal 5 (Fall–​Winter 2011): 23.
47
A Revised Irigarayan Study of the Hierarchy
41
writes: “I would suggest that ‘gendering’ takes place within the confines of the
domestic, an essential metaphor that then spreads its tentacles for male and
female subjects over a wider ground of human and social purposes.”50 Slave
ships were assigned gender when slaves were/​are not.51 In the nineteenth
century Frederick Douglass writes of his envy of ships that can come and go
from the shores of Maryland while he cannot.52
How to get out of this tangle?
In reading together Hortense Spillers, C. Riley Snorton, Thomas Laqueur,
Judith Butler, Paul B. Preciado, and Talia Mae Bettcher, I understand natural
sex as tautological. Sex is a philosophy of matter that demarcates the polis.
It is thought to be prior to the political. Especially C. Riley Snorton’s recent
book Black on Both Sides suggests that natural sex and cultural gender as an
absolute dichotomy is a white gesture in which “black gender becomes fungible.”53 All of these for various reasons undermine the very gesture of nature
as “sex,” of “sex” as matter. What I wish to do here is to use these critiques of
natural/​sex in such a way as to question the one of the body as well as the two
of the body.
I take the gesture of natural sex to be synonymous with matter, a designation that pretends to be culture-​free. Natural sex is synonymous with
both (1) the anti-​feminist notion of “proper gender roles” that conflates
these terms and (2) feminist construals of the sex-​gender distinction according to which gender must be eliminated and “genitalia are the essential
determinants of sex.”54 In fact this gesture of sex, the very idea of natural sex,
needs cultural gender, conceptually speaking. This gesture of natural sex—​
whether it is conflated with or considered to be polarized with respect to
gender—​signals a belief in the practice and monitoring and policing of that
naturalized sex designation.55 But a crucial point is the necessity of flesh for
the knowledge of incommensurable sexual difference.
50 Hortense J. Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” in Black,
White, and in Color, 214.
51 Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe,” 214.
52 Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: An American Slave
(New York: Signet Classics), 75.
53 C. Riley Snorton, Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 2017), 126.
54 Talia Mae Bettcher, “Evil Deceivers and Make-​
Believers: On Transphobic Violence and the
Politics of Illusion,” Hypatia 22.3 (2007): 51.
55 Paul B. Preciado, TestoJunkie: Sex, Drugs and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era
(New York: Feminist Press, 2013), 100; and Paul B. Preciado, Countersexual Manifesto, trans. Kevin
Gerry Dunn (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018).
42
A Philosophy of Elemental Difference
Hortense J. Spillers, writing at the height of the feminist distinction between sex as matter and gender as culture, offers nevertheless a radical use
of this distinction. Spillers suggests that the mid-​twentieth-​century distinction between sex and gender is not so much inventive as it is a more explicit
commitment to a distinction that has always attended the two-​sex model,
as well as the one-​sex one. Spillers argues that gender, as something distinct
from the assignment of sex, is a mode of conferral and denial of humanity.
She understands sex as synonymous with dehumanization as flesh. Gender is
the conferral of a human status; sex is the conferral of a non-​species-​specific
biological status. As Frank Wilderson points out, this distinction is a way of
understanding the difference between flesh and the body. For Spillers flesh is
precisely the denial of body.56 Flesh is to sex as body is to gender. In this way
the body as a concept is entirely distinct from the status of mere flesh.
C. Riley Snorton’s work seems to confirm that Spillers’s philosophy of sex
and gender is a feature of the dehumanization that sex entails. As Snorton has
more recently explained in a reading of Spillers, the status of flesh was instrumental in the making of the contemporary arrangement of sex and gender,
insofar as both of these concepts rely upon the nineteenth-​century studies of
sexual anatomy.57 Knowledge of sex was consolidated in the study of flesh.
The practice of gynecology, literally the study of women, was developed
through experimentation on enslaved people such as Anarcha, Lucy, Betsey.
Anarcha was experimented upon without anesthesia by nineteenth-​century
white physician James Marion Sims over thirty times.58 Sims, the “father of
modern gynecology,” Snorton notes, confuses Lucy for Betsey.59 The fungibility of Lucy and Betsey for Snorton is the fungibility that constitutes flesh.
The “vaginal speculum,” the instrument playfully mimicked by the structure of Irigaray’s 1977 text, Speculum of the Other Woman, was developed by
J. Marion Sims60 in his experimentations on Lucy, Betsey, and Anarcha, who
were loaned to Sims for this experimentation by their enslavers on southern
plantations. In the war between the states, Sims wrote of his belonging to
the Confederacy and to white family members fighting for it.61 In this way
“captive flesh expressed an engendered position that defines race as the sine
56
Wilderson, Red, White, and Black, 313. See also Snorton, Black on Both Sides, 48.
Snorton, Black on Both Sides, 52.
58 Snorton, Black on Both Sides, 28.
59 Snorton, Black on Both Sides, 20–​22.
60 Snorton, Black on Both Sides, 31. See also Rachel Jones, “Thinking Otherwise with Irigaray and
Maximin,” unpublished manuscript.
61 Snorton, Black on Both Sides, 37–​39.
57
A Revised Irigarayan Study of the Hierarchy
43
qua non of sex.”62 As Snorton explains, “White female genitalia”63 could not
possibly have served as the abrupt field of un-​anesthetized exploration. “The
narratives of American gynecology’s founding,” Snorton writes, “clarify how
chattel slavery functioned as one cultural apparatus that brought sex and
gender into arrangement; the instrument in such an encounter occurred in
and as flesh.”64
Talia Mae Bettcher’s phenomenology of the “natural attitude about sex”
illustrates the very notion of natural sex to be a tautological phrase. Bettcher’s
reading of the “natural attitude” is a reading of the work of Harold Garfinkel.
Bettcher’s interest is that sex is a term for the kernel of truth of about a body,
something that cannot be wrongly designated or changed, according to this
natural attitude. Bettcher demonstrates just how crafted and aspirational nature is by examining the concept “naked.” The notion of naked, she argues,
is crafted. She writes, “The natural attitude is not merely a set of beliefs that
are taken as axiomatic. Rather, it reflects the way that intimate personhood
and the intimate body are actually constituted in Eurocentered culture. It is
therefore far more than a pre-​theoretical ‘common-​sense’ about sex; and to
change it involves more than a mere change in belief. In this view, genitalia
are viewed as essential to sex determination in the natural attitude because
they’re distinct from all other features with regard to nakedness: they’re
completion of the naked body and the locus of moral boundaries between
people.”65 A body’s status as naked requires that that body already have a
status as whole, as complete. Men’s and women’s bodies, according to the
customary attitude (the two of the body), have distinct moral structures,
requiring distinct features to make them count as naturally naked. In this
way naked is an extensively crafted perception, culturally specific and hierarchical. In an earlier essay, which Bettcher links directly to this one,66
she argues that this natural attitude ignores gender in favor of sex: “In this
framework, gender presentation (attire, in particular) constitutes a gendered appearance, whereas the sexed body constitutes the hidden, sexual
reality.”67 And it is this contrast that overdetermines a “dangerous double
bind”: cis people, “normals,” sense trans people as either lying to others or
62
63
64
65
66
67
Snorton, Black on Both Sides, 33.
Snorton, Black on Both Sides, 33.
Snorton, Black on Both Sides, 52.
Bettcher, “Full-​Frontal Morality,” 331.
Bettcher, “Full-​Frontal Morality,” 332.
Bettcher, “Evil Deceivers and Make-​Believers,” 48.
44
A Philosophy of Elemental Difference
lying to themselves.68 It must be one or the other. In the natural attitude there
is no possibility for trans bodily authenticity, for trans as nature. The natural
attitude’s contrast between appearance and reality means that a trans person,
according to the natural attitude, can never be naked. For Bettcher this is the
reason why “one needs—​we need—​new kinds of self, new modalities of intimacy, in order to exist.”69
Bettcher’s explication of the crafted naturalism inherent in the perception
of someone as naked is, I would argue, consistent with the racialized flesh
and humanized body distinction in Spillers and Snorton. Together they articulate the hypocrisy and the political salience of the tautological gesture of
natural body. Naked and body are concepts constituted by normativity. What
is flesh, and who is a whole body: these are integral to what the body means
in the present.
The polarizing of flesh and body, sex and gender, polis and oikos, the body
and bodies, are key to thinking about how the one of the body, the complete
human form distinguishes itself from differentiating, hierarchically studiable
matter over and over again. It should be remembered that oikos is only the
start of that which is not capable of ruling the polis; there is also the world beyond the city walls. At any rate a distinction is made that allows a homogenization to be hierarchically elevated. While Irigaray has taught me to find this
pattern of polarization over and over and trace it back to the form-​matter distinction, a critique especially of Aristotle, these other literatures—​on Black
misandry, on Afro-​pessimism, on the critique of race-​sex and the dehumanizing practice of sexing flesh—​require me to play Irigaray’s exposition of the
polis in a different key.
What would an Irigarayan critique of the human or the body be, instead of
a critique of the denial of sexual difference? As Elizabeth Grosz has pointed
out, in “the Cratylus, Plato claims that the word body (soma) was introduced
by Orphic priests, who believed that man was a spiritual or noncorporeal
being trapped in the body as in a dungeon (sēma).”70 Irigaray’s work thoroughly debunks this marred-​shell debasement of bodies, indicating a fluid
gesture of elemental difference. Irigaray’s work is committed to the importance of morphology, a sense of one’s own body. But in order to head off the
polis of Irigaray’s own writings, indeed the apolitical gestures to flesh and
68
Bettcher, “Evil Deceivers and Make-​Believers,” 50–​51.
Bettcher, “Full-​Frontal Morality,” 334.
70 Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1994), 5.
69
A Revised Irigarayan Study of the Hierarchy
45
nakedness on which she draws, an Irigarayan critique of the one of the body,
the perfect human form would need to be a critique of the normalization and
naturalization of racialization and sex designation. It would also need to be a
critique that gives respect to all of the ways that humans seek and find themselves, the abuses of this as well as the beauty. This critique would need to ask
how all of this relates to the form-​matter hierarchy and what are called ecological devastations. Such a critique would likewise—​in order to be a critique
of the one, the human, the body—​need to learn from the writings of Clare
and Fanon, which I have discussed in the introduction. Neither of these is
considered to instantiate the one, the body. What is needed is an exposition
of the very gesture of the body. What would that Irigarayan articulation be?
And why is the body, while so explicitly an appeal to physicality, in constant need of de-​idealization? Could it be that when Plato suggests that “the
word body (soma) was introduced by Orphic priests, who believed that man
was a spiritual or noncorporeal being trapped in the body as in a dungeon
(sēma),”71 he was giving me some evidence that the one, the body itself is
a fundamental conceptual misunderstanding of myself? Am I really an encasement with a soft gooey agency within?
When Aristotle departs from his teacher and naturalizes organisms, including human organisms, he holds the organism seemingly by the head,
and dips the rest down. The head escapes the dip down into naturalization,
and nous is retained as “immaterial.” Of course it is now explained, even
by scientists of the body, in literatures of which Frantz Fanon was already
reading, that thinking is not in the head. Thinking is full body. But Aristotle
didn’t understand thinking in that way at all. He dips the natural organism
into murky depths and retains an immaterial part at the top. In this way
the Aristotelian gesture of bios only goes so far in appreciating the earth-​
fire-​water-​air that we ourselves are. His work maintains in the concept of
thinking a supra-​bodily agency, what can really only be understood in contrast with the body and with bodies. As sociologist Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí has
pointed out, already from the time of Socrates “Men had no bodies—​they
were walking minds.”72 If according to Aristotle it is only Greek freemen who
are capable of nous, that is because the one of the body, this specific encasement, offers the uniquely right environment for thinking.
71
72
Grosz, Volatile Bodies, 5.
Oyěwùmí, The Invention of Women, 6.
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A Philosophy of Elemental Difference
When read together with the critique of what Sylvia Wynter calls biocentrism, a regarding of people in relation to the one, the body, the biocentric Man as a definition of humanity per se, the elementality of relationality
and difference in Irigaray’s philosophy of sexual difference becomes newly
indispensable—​not just the idea of bodies, but the way the differences between bodies allow for a partitioning of ecological from political, and a subordinating of ecological to political. Irigaray’s subtle philosophy of elemental
difference is indispensable to a critique of the polis as an ongoing concept
that tends to define what natural Man means. An Irigarayan approach could
additionally articulate not so much the historicity of a transition from a religious to a de-​godded secular polis organized around the agency of a Man
who is historically recent, which is how Sylvia Wynter has it, but an articulation of the ongoing features of a hierarchized polis (the hierarch being the
one of the body, as I will argue) that has its roots in a certain ancient Greek
philosophical distinction between polis and everything else.
Before I can fully articulate what in Irigaray’s work I want to elaborate
(and in later chapters what I will put together with a Fanonian critique of
the very gesture of the biological and the zoological), I want to discuss in
what ways Irigaray’s work is itself biocentric in Wynter’s sense. In explaining
this I follow Bruno Latour in understanding “modern” as an attempt to
polarize political and ecological, not only to distinguish these but the attempt to eliminate the ecological from political and vice versa. The modern
for Latour is the attempt to distinguish absolutely that which is subject to
human deliberations and therefore “political” from that which is capable of
being apolitically studied and therefore “ecological.” Though Irigaray doesn’t
make this distinction, and thus her work is not modern in a Latourian sense,
her work remains at least a little bit a part of a polis tradition of which biocentrism is a primary characteristic. In this tradition sex, gender, race,
class, enslaved-​or-​free status, ability, age are all presupposed in relation to
the one of the body, the human as a complete human form. In this sense
Irigaray’s philosophy of sexual difference is itself biocentric: It presupposes
natural-​apolitical sex, a biomedical designation that is first medicalized in
the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries73 and which then gets left behind
in the interest of concentrating on gender, and the elimination of gender, in
a further medical iteration in the middle of the twentieth.74 Irigaray’s work
73
74
See especially Laqueur, Making Sex.
See especially Preciado, TestoJunkie and Countersexual Manifesto.
A Revised Irigarayan Study of the Hierarchy
47
does not trace these developments in part because she is so focused on the
long-​running overdetermination of them in the one, the body. But a subtle
biocentrism in Irigaray’s work commits her to the practice of understanding
the truth of bodies in exclusive terms of their appearance to others insofar as
she doesn’t trace these developments. This work must be done in order for
Irigaray’s philosophy of elemental difference to be taken up in a way that does
not aspire to biocentrism, or, as we might put it, considering that it stretches
back to Aristotle, bios-​centrism.
Michel Foucault said in an interview published in 1978,
It is true, European thought finds itself at a turning point. This turning
point, on a historical scale, is nothing other than the end of imperialism.
The crisis of Western thought is identical to the end of imperialism. This
crisis has produced no supreme philosopher who excels in signifying that
crisis. For Western thought in crisis expresses itself by discourses which can
be very interesting, but which are neither specific nor extraordinary. There
is no philosopher who marks out this period. For it is the end of the era of
Western philosophy. Thus, if philosophy of the future exists, it must be born
outside of Europe or equally born in consequence of meetings and impacts
between Europe and non-​Europe.75
What is Foucault saying here, especially when he says that “Western thought
in crisis expresses itself by discourses which can be very interesting, but
which are neither specific nor extraordinary”? I think he’s saying that one of
the reasons European thought, even when it is in crisis, cannot articulate its
own problems is that it is not able to think about itself, from without, with
an awareness of itself as one society among other societies. In the very same
manner in which Aristotle understands there to be one body, one complete
human form, Europe is a gesture to the one society, one complete political
form. Europe, and what Fanon designated the second and an even more
frightening Europe, the United States,76 still lacks a sense of itself as a distinct, much less a distinctively problematic, polis. Forty years after Foucault
75 Michel Foucault, “Michel Foucault and Zen: A Stay in a Zen Temple (1978),” in Religion and
Culture, ed. Jeremy R. Carrette (New York: Routledge, 1999), 113. Many thanks to Navid Hassanzadeh
for showing me this passage.
76 Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 236–​237. Fanon writes, “Two centuries ago, a former European
colony took into its head to catch up with Europe. It has been so successful that the United States of
America has become a master where the flaws, sickness, and inhumanity of Europe have reached
frightening proportions. Comrades, have we nothing else to do but create a third Europe?”
48
A Philosophy of Elemental Difference
said these words, I think the claim is still on the mark: “Western thought”77 or
what I would call human-​environmental or polis-​oikos thought, is in crisis,
and there is no philosopher of this tradition that can go further than articulating its problems from within precisely because the polis as a morphology
conceives of itself as the one, thus taking itself to be ultimately incomparable.
Irigaray’s philosophy of sexual difference, and any philosophy of sexual
difference that shares a presupposed gesture of natural dimorphic sex, is a
helpful illustration of this problem. A presupposed incomparability is not a
problem that begins or ends with reading Irigaray, but her philosophy of elemental difference deserves to be iterated in new ways. What is needed is
to appreciate the implications of the polis-​oikos morphology. For example,
Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí has argued that gender is a Western concept, and that
prior to the nineteenth century and the era of British colonization of Oyo-​
Yoruba society, which is located roughly in the southwest corner of the
British-​created contemporary state of Nigeria, there were no women, strictly
speaking.78 The concept of women as “the second sex,” as Simone de Beauvoir
cheekily put it,79 is an indication of the polis. Contrast this to the society of
which Oywěùmí writes, Oyo-​Yoruba society, in which it is seniority, “chronological age,” that structures relational hierarchy instead of what she calls
“somatocentricity,” a “biologic,” and “biologization.”80
The practice of determining political order by somatocentricity is another way of putting what Wynter means by biocentrism. Is Oyěwùmí
speaking of another polis, or another way of life altogether? It’s not clear to
me. But the point is that because the capacity for membership in the sociality Oyěwùmí describes is not based on “the use of the biological as an ideology for mapping the social world,” in this society prior to colonization,
there was no such thing as females who had to be women. In European societies, Oyěwùmí helpfully points out, men and women are socially instituted,
lived types based on an original biological sorting practiced in the prevailing
cultures of European-​descended societies. Oyěwùmí suggests that this is the
morphology of the West, the practice of biologization or biocentrism. The
77 Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979) and Culture and Imperialism
(New York: Vintage Books, 1993).
78 Oyěwùmí, The Invention of Women, xiii, 13.
79 Beauvoir argues in the chapter “The Lesbian,” “There is no rigorous biological distinction between the two sexes.” Beauvoir’s two-​volume book The Second Sex ultimately registers a complaint
with the one-​sex as well as the two-​sex presupposition, toward a critique of the body. The Second Sex,
trans. Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-​Chevallier (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010), 419.
80 Oyěwùmí, The Invention of Women, 3, 17, and 9 respectively.
A Revised Irigarayan Study of the Hierarchy
49
problems that feminist philosophy aims to address arise because of this practice of biologization, which has implications beyond the social ranking of
“the second sex” and the denial of sexual difference. Oyěwùmí writes,
The splitting of hairs over the relationship between gender and sex, the
debate on essentialism, the debates about differences among women, and
the preoccupation with gender bending/​blending that have characterized
feminism are actually feminist versions of the enduring debate over nature
versus nurture that is inherent in Western thought and in the logic of its social hierarchies.
Because feminist philosophers do not appreciate the long roots of biocentrism, they cannot properly appreciate where their own problems are. For
Oyěwùmí this means that the unmooring of gender has not managed to result in the most needed questioning—​the questioning of practices of ranking
by body. This is a way to begin to think about the inherent problems with naturalization and its concomitant concept of the one of the body.
I do worry that Oyěwùmí’s own book reinstates a gesture of natural sex, in
spite of a clear effort not to do this. Oyěwùmí is of course not alone in this,
but she invokes a notion of “anatomical female,” or “anafemale,” as she puts
it, the latter a neologism that she develops in order to demonstrate that to be
“anafemale” in Oyo-​Yoruba society does not correspond to a social role.81
This is worrisome not because Oyěwùmí herself subscribes to the notion
of an “anatomical female”; she does not. But the gesture itself is worrisome.
For example, the book is not about the invention of “the biomedical binary
cisfemale”; the book is about the invention of women. The book is in a way
about the invention of the biomedical binary cisfemale, but it is not written
that way. This is not a heteronormative gesture, but it is a cisnormative one. In
effect the book advocates questioning gender, but not the naturalness of body
as sex. It leaves sex in a relatively apolitical realm, even though Oyěwùmí
herself is arguing just the opposite, that there is no apolitical realm. The book
repeats too clearly the very sex-​gender distinction that Oyěwùmí critiques,
as well as the context of the very unfortunate renaturalization of sex that this
distinction conceptually entails. The very idea of an “anatomical female” is
troubling, but Oyěwùmí’s work leads me to ask what other possible words
81
Oyěwùmí, The Invention of Women, 34.
50
A Philosophy of Elemental Difference
in English there are for making her argument, because it is a really helpful
redirecting of attention to somatocentricity itself.
Oyěwùmí’s book is too tied to the sex-​gender distinction, but ultimately
the thesis is crucial: the basic problem of the invention of roles according to
body is the one that Western feminist philosophers have needed to be asking.
. Other ways of life are possible. Oyěwùmí is entirely right that the biocentrism of polis discourses overdetermines a naturalized body hierarchy that
sex-​gender feminists themselves do not appreciate as culturally located. Thus
feminism “remains enframed by the tunnel vision and bio-​logic of other
Western discourses.”82
This critique of “biologic” and “somatocentricity” is the very biocentrism
of which Wynter writes. Following Wynter, as I will attempt to do in the
second half of this book, white feminists need to turn their attention to biocentrism as opposed gender, the invention not of biocentric Man, but the
very presupposition of the one of the body, the multidimensionally complete
human body, and this will include challenging not only race and gender but
also natural sex itself. This way of thinking about feminist philosophy, what it
should become in the context of the age of security that is the Anthropocene,
leads me to ask about the invention of the gesture of the one of the body, the
lone complete human form.
Thinking in terms of biocentrism, putting the modern in the context of a
longer-​standing practice of ranking by body, I can appreciate not only that
biocentric Man is the body, but also that by means of a generic two, the body
more recently has replaced the one of the body with the two of the body. And
this corresponds to a reshaping of the polis in which the polis is no longer
a word for the whole (as it is in Aristotle, for example), but a word for that
which is not ecological (in the modern polis). The two of the body correspond to a defining of the polis, and yet any aspect of a body’s life in conflict
with the body is still cast outside of what the polis entails. If for Aristotle the
one, the body was the apex of the polis, for those who aspire to be modern, an
awkward two-​sex foundation of a polis is distinguishable from that which is
not human. Oyěwùmí suggests that to really address the problems of biocentrism, I must admit that a certain feminism is “in origin, by definition, and by
practice a universalizing discourse”83 that is absorbed in questioning a subset
of the problems of biocentrism, and so cannot fully respond to the elevation
82
83
Oyěwùmí, The Invention of Women, 13.
Oyěwùmí, The Invention of Women, 13.
A Revised Irigarayan Study of the Hierarchy
51
of the one, the body, and the relations of the polis to the oikos. I am not saying
that I’m not committed to feminism, but instead that feminism is a need that
the polis creates. This has to be appreciated. This leaves me with the following
claim: feminism rightly understood cannot only be an intervention in the
one, the body. It must also debunk the two, the body. Both are instantiations
of the body.
White feminism has mostly been an attempt to redress the status of “the
second sex” with respect to biocentric Man without thinking of or contesting
either the invention of the dimorphism that accounts for this second-​sex
status or the mutual indebtedness of this dimorphic gesture to Enlightenment
study of racial anatomy.84 White feminists took up the psychoanalytic and
medical invention of gender and articulated this as discrimination in order
to defend what was ultimately a still-​naturalized sex, in which sex is taken to
be pre-​political. What else is left pre-​political when feminism does not perceive the polis? What is left is every other possible departure from biocentric
Man. It is all left unquestioned in a philosophy that does not question the
very gestures of matter, biocentrism, the idealization of the one, the body, the
ideal human as form.
What I am arguing is that feminism as “opposition to sexist oppression”85
is needed only because the polis is at work; it’s only a hopeful project if feminism gives way to a deeper criticism of a culture that produces the need for
feminism because of biocentrism, the ranking orchestrated by an idealization of the one of the body. Feminism would not be needed in a society that
has no such concept as natural yet morphologically hierarchical body, which
functions to keep the wrong bodies out of the polis and that dehumanizes
those identified as flesh entirely. Oyěwùmí suggests that feminism was not
needed in pre-​nineteenth-​century Oyo culture. This is a claim that I don’t
think those who espouse feminism have fully taken in.
I do consider myself a (trans)feminist with respect to my time and my
place. But the problem for me is that the need for feminism is necessary to
the polis. In this sense it is a sign of the polis. To be a feminist is to my mind
to acknowledge an ongoing problem, to which I do commit myself over and
over again. But feminism, even transfeminism, isn’t enough of a response so
84
Schiebinger, Nature’s Body; and Jackson, “Theorizing in a Void.”
Serene J. Khader, Decolonizing Universalism: A Transnational Feminist Ethic (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2019), 3. Khader argues that feminism “as opposition to sexist oppression” must be
coupled with anti-​imperialism in order to avoid “missionary feminism.” Khader’s is an important
decolonial intervention in the tradition of feminisms of the sex-​gender distinction.
85
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A Philosophy of Elemental Difference
long as these are both necessitated by biocentrism (which is to say, by the
body, by the polis). Biocentrism entails rankings of bodily features from the
blatant to the inscrutable. The problem is to address the biocentrism and especially what is beneath it: the one of the body, and its recent arrangement,
the two of the body.
The problem is thus how to live in and as the midst of a tradition, as I myself do, having lived all of my years in the “frightening proportions”86 of the
United States, and almost all of them in the southeastern states no less, which
are, as Edouard Glissant has suggested, the political-​ecological northernmost
parts of the Caribbean.87 A consequence of this location of my life and body
is that thought is very difficult. I encounter problems with almost every word
I find myself thinking. Certainly my own morphology does harm. Aristotle
was so wrong about the immateriality of thinking; my nous (thinking or
thought) emerges here. The problem is how to escalate the turn, this crisis
of which Foucault speaks, but even more how to say something new that can
carry forward the wisdom of what has already been said. One of the distinct
problems in the way of this effort is the lack of specificity to which Foucault
and Oyěwùmí point.
This lack of specificity is a function of biocentrism, a way of life that Sylvia
Wynter argues is at odds with any appreciation of the role of genre, her own
philosophy of performativity, in what it is like to be human. Biocentrism is
a genre, a nature-​culture that defines Man as the human per se, a specimen-​
pinnacle of all nature.88 The trouble is that according to Man biocentrism
is nature per se. It is incomparable because it is the teleological end of all
humanity. Oyěwùmí offers a helpful way of thinking about this: in the West,
“Society . . . is seen as an accurate reflection of genetic endowment—​those
with a superior biology inevitably are those in superior social positions.”89
Biocentrism is a sanctioning of the ranking of the body-​bodies according to
criteria of which biocentrism is either in denial or it admits and on which
it doubles down. It is actually a praxis of ranking the bodies, but biocentrism is by definition a denial of the process of the ranking. Man just is the
complete human form, according to biocentrism as a genre. The biocentric
definition of the one, the human takes biocentric Man to be both the fully
86
Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 236–​237.
Diawara, “One World in Relation.”
For an explicit endorsement of biocentrism, see Taylor, Respect for Nature, 11–​14. This work of
environmental ethics can be contrasted with the philosophy of political ecology as a rejection of environmentalism by Bruno Latour, Karen Barad, and Jane Bennett, discussed subsequently.
89 Oyěwùmí, The Invention of Women, 8.
87
88
A Revised Irigarayan Study of the Hierarchy
53
formed human, and at the same time there is an at best confused appreciation of Man’s others as human because they simply serve to demonstrate the
natural superiority of Man. Wynter demonstrates that this natural organism
definition of biocentric Man has never been a truly universal appreciation
that gathers all of the humans up into a single, homogeneous sense of self.
The very idea of biocentric Man entails a philosophy of race, gender, disability, sexuality, religion, which establishes who is Man by means of who fails
to instantiate Homo economicus.90
Wynter’s account will allow me to argue in Chapter 4 that biocentrism is
bios-​centrism, as a way of thinking about the shift from what we could call
Aristotelian and Augustinian Man, whose body is a proper encasement of
immaterial agency (nous) that animates the one of the body, to an account of
bodily plurality that is just as ambivalently naturalized. Biocentrism, Wynter
argues, is the basis for the very idea of secularism, which Wynter herself
points out is not actually secular at all. The problem with secularism, Wynter
suggests, is that there is no such thing as secularism. Secularism is in fact
a cultural practice of Christianity, replacing immaterial divinity with a certain human body. Secularism as a genre still has a calendar.91 A member of
this genre still has a memory full of a distinct set of stories and histories.92
There is still the divinization of some spaces and demonization of other
spaces. Racialization, Wynter argues, is not only part of the genre of biocentrism. It is its most basic practice. Race functions as the religion of secular
life. Secular biocentric Man is a triumph over others in body. Biocentrism as
Wynter demonstrates it is the establishment in the morphology of the West
of a nonreligious religion, a philosophy of biocentric Man that emerges in
the Renaissance to divinize a particular arrangement of matter, wielded by
Homo economicus. Prior to this time there was no science of bodiment. Even
though Wynter argues that biocentrism is a recent turn, she nevertheless also
writes that biocentrism is a “neo-​Aristotelian concept of a by-​Nature difference of rationality between its referent ‘Western humanity’ . . . vis-​à-​vis all
other humans now classified and subordinated as the West’s ostensible irrational Human Others.”93 In other words, biocentrism, Wynter laments, is an
account of what human is, which is nevertheless dripping in evaluations that
90
Wynter, “1492,” 40–​42; Wynter, “No Humans Involved,” 47–​49.
Al-​Saji, “Racialization of Muslim Veils,” 881.
Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 2003).
93 Wynter, “The Ceremony Found,” 187.
91
92
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rank bodies and that marginalize in some way everyone who doesn’t share in
the fullness of biocentric Man.
Fanon will put it differently. In the Fanonian account I discuss in Chapters 3
and 5, biocentrism means applying to humanity inherently dualistic terms
that produce concepts of the biological and the zoological in contrast to that
which can master the biological. While Wynter is right to point out that the
turn to the secular in the Renaissance is grounded in an Aristotelian philosophy of bios, it still needs underscoring that this morphology prevails at least
since Aristotle. It does not begin or even get renewed in the Renaissance;
it is there continuously in some way since Aristotle, this philosopher who
has inspired so many naturalists. Biocentrism is in fact bios-​centrism, an
application of the unstable priority of the body as bios politikos over that
which is designated as matter.94 Biocentrism, as Oyěwùmí argues, has been
characteristic of Western philosophical approaches at least since Aristotle.
Modern science, which exploits a long-​standing distinction and intensifies this Manichaeanism as its method, is biocentric or bios-​centric in that
it seeks to understand the human as a natural organism whose problematic
elements are matter-​of-​factly so. And this morphology repeats in myriad unspoken values that have marked in some way the entire European tradition,
its philosophy of mind as well as body. Built into this pursuit is a resistance
to reflection on the morphology of the politician, the scientist, and the philosopher, Fanon worries. The biological and zoological are ways of speaking
of inferior bodies, over which Man is a bodily triumph. For Fanon what is
crucial is the polarization with which this philosophy of Man is synonymous.
What is crucial for Wynter is that while biocentrism purports to be naturalism, in fact a specific One takes the ecological-​political first held by
Platonic form, Aristotelian nous, Christian God. Wynter argues that biocentrism is the first invention of Man—​as opposed to the immaterial nous or
soul that has a body, instead of is a body. But it would seem that immateriality is what defines the biocentric body, even on Wynter’s own account.
That is my own contribution, to underscore that point: the deepest value of
biocentrism is in fact immateriality, a transcending of matter, a denunciation of matter. Biocentrism isn’t biocentric at all. It is immaterial-​centric.
Immateriality is nothing more than the negation of matter (by means if the
prefix im-​, which means “not”). A valuing of immateriality is constituted by
94 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 13. Arendt
writes that bios politkos for Aristotle meant “the realm of human affairs,” a realm demarcated by the
difference between polis and oikos. That’s the sense of the bios of biocentrism.
A Revised Irigarayan Study of the Hierarchy
55
bodiment, and that is what is responsible for this strange figure of the body.
In fact the body is no body at all.
In a 2015 essay, Wynter criticizes the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change95 (IPCC) for its attribution of global heating to a generic, acultural,
ahistorical man, whom they call human. Wynter argues that the IPCC
exhibits biocentrism in the very document in which they are attempting to
chart extensive damage to matter. Wynter, as a scholar of the Caribbean,
is cognizant of low-​lying islands as well as the geographical history of the
transatlantic slave trade. Why, her work suggests, are these aspects not pieced
together by the IPCC? She is interested in the fact that there is both a very
committed study of the planet in the IPCC report without any critique of the
politics of modernity that collaborates with hurricanes, rising ocean levels,
increasing ocean acidity, the proliferation of microplastics, global heating.
She cites Judith Butler as having
proposed that the notion of gender roles/​identities as the expression of
abiding (or immutable, biological) substances—​i.e., of man and woman
as noun—​should not be considered a transcultural, transhistorical, “universal” truth. Instead, these roles/​identities should be rightfully viewed as
“fictive constructions” that are themselves produced as “artificial effects”
through the “compulsory ordering of [behavioral] attributes into coherent
gender sequences.”96
Wynter argues that this critique of gender can be extended to think about the
performativities that are so integral to what it is like to be the genre of biocentric Man, one instance of what it is like to be human. Living, contrary to the
philosophy of biocentrism, requires some sort of local fictive construction
that produces one’s own sense of self, and the performativity of biocentric
Man has planetary implications.
Wynter’s ultimate claim is that the European sciences, and the IPCC is part
of this tradition, presuppose their own sense of self even as they pursue a
merely descriptive account of the human as a biological organism, an apolitical gesture. This is how evolutionary accounts of the development of Homo
sapiens can be explicitly a biological account of a biological organism and at
95 Again, it is crucial to appreciate that the phrase “climate change” was apparently originally
suggested by US Republican political consultant Frank Luntz in place of “global warming.” The
phrase caught on. Latour, Facing Gaia, 25.
96 Wynter, “The Ceremony Found,” 195.
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A Philosophy of Elemental Difference
the same time a story of Man that is very clearly a story about what it pretends
only to describe. The biology and the pretension to a generic idealization are
indistinguishable for those who presumptively take European culture to be
a pinnacle of what is described as biological subject matter, the very idea of
which is apolitical.
One mundane example of the biocentrism to which Wynter points can help
to make this concept more palpable. In most modern doctor’s offices, there
are pictures hanging of such things as “the skeletal system” and “the muscular
system.” These pictures of the human are of course meant to be purely descriptive charts, but Wynter asks her reader to understand that they are pictures of
the idealization of Man. The skeleton is unfailingly symmetrical and upright.
Skin (white) and even eye color (blue or light brown) are often apparent, even
in medical pictures in which they are unnecessary. Size and stance are indicated
as well. These are never just descriptions. They are of course idealizations of the
one, the body, the complete human. To insist on a range of bodies in a medical
picture is often received as antithetical to the very practice of medicine. The aim
is to achieve the one, the body. This is biocentrism, a way of thinking geared entirely toward reproducing Man.
For Wynter such a picture illustrates not humanity, but biocentric Man, a specific genre. It captures an entire way of life that seeks to understand itself in a de-​
godded or explicitly secular way, but which in fact replaces an immaterial divine
with a specific body. This is a way of thinking responsible not only for the isolation of certain dehumanized body parts but also for the very idea of a “patient,”
one who is meant only to undergo, to lie back, to be examined by someone else.
Meanwhile, moderns largely insist that knowledge, including knowledge
of human anatomy, is independent of religion or race or self-​understanding.
For Wynter, as I have mentioned, the religion of science is, in fact, race, the
total picture of the flatly descriptive one, the body, the human. Race is in
this sense for Wynter a decisive feature of the genre biocentric Man. Wynter
argues that race, specifically the attempt to distinguish between black and
Man, was the original biological concept in the modern sense: “From this
ultimate mode of otherness based on ‘race,’ other subtypes of otherness are
then generated.” Black—​not cultures created by Black peoples, but a designation invented by European scientists who then set out to explain it among
themselves—​was “proof of a biogenetic nonhomogeneity of the species.”97
97 Wynter, “1492,” 42. See also Londa Schiebinger’s work on Prussian doctor, anatomist, and paleontologist Samuel Thomas von Sömmerring in Mind Has No Sex and Nature’s Body. Sömmerring
A Revised Irigarayan Study of the Hierarchy
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Wynter extends Judith Butler’s work in order to argue that genres are
performatively elaborated—​biocentric Man being one genre. Genre-​making
is what it is like to be human, Wynter argues. Gender is the name of one moment within the genre of biocentric Man, and so what is called gender is impossible to isolate as a stand-​alone theme. Wynter suggests that the genders
of biocentric Man are a racial concept and an ability concept and a wealth
concept because all of these aspects augment the rest. After Wynter it is impossible to think about gender as an independent, isolatable dynamic. It is
crucial instead to think in terms of genre.
Irigaray herself appears to join in Wynter’s lamentation of biocentrism. Most notably in the essay in This Sex Which Is Not One entitled “The
‘Mechanics’ of Fluids,” Irigaray demonstrates the very specific features of a
science that cannot interpret the economy of fluids. She argues that European
sciences have understood nature to be without its own “motive force,”98
which must instead be provided by an ideal order of truth. Biomedical
images of biocentric Man as the human, the sort to which I gestured previously, Irigaray would argue are conveying an ideal order of truth, an idealized
account of the masculine as the human. Certainly Irigaray would reject symmetrical pictures of an idealized Man and an idealized Woman—​the Man
the broader and taller one, the Woman a shorter and smaller one—​as one of
sexual difference. Famously Irigaray will argue that such portraits of symmetrical sexuation are pictures of the masculine, pictures that enlist an opposite in order to elaborate and prove the coherence of the Same, the Same as
the one, the one body, the Same as that which is deemed masculine, authorized, and solid.
For this reason, arguably for Irigaray there is ultimately no such thing as
biocentrism. Every gesture is ultimately some sort of valuation. It is located
and contingent. It evidences a way of life that is in denial of the powers of
relationality. Irigaray even uses the language of genre herself to articulate the
indistinguishability of biology and culture of the genre Man.99 In this respect
Irigaray’s work is compatible with Wynter’s.
created “one of the first distinctly female skeletons”; however, he “was not primarily interested in
women’s anatomy but in the anatomical basis of racial differences” (Nature’s Body, 211).
98
Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, 117.
Luce Irigaray, I Love to You: Sketch for a Felicity within History, trans. Alison Martin
(New York: Routledge, 1996), 39. See also Jones, Irigaray, 191.
99
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But Wynter’s charge of biocentrism does not just mean appreciating genre.
It means taking for granted an apolitical and universal status of one’s own
genre. Irigaray’s work is biocentric in this sense, in two respects.
First, Irigaray’s work maintains a concept of presupposed natural sex. She
does not question the recent practice of sex designation at birth or how that
has come about. Second, and closely related to this is that, because of the
presupposition of the concept of sex, there is little room in Irigaray’s work to
question the race-​, sex-​, gender-​, ability-​, size-​, religion-​, class-​, language-​
positioning of “the sex that is not one” in a distinctively modern polis. Let
me say a bit more about these respects in which Irigaray’s work is biocentric.
Although Irigaray questions the inertness that she argues characterizes
Aristotelian matter and that gets booted out of the politics corresponding
to modern biology, and although she argues that such a discourse is synonymous with a morphology of the Same, Same as that which is deemed masculine, she nevertheless takes no issue with practices of biological-​medical
sex designation.100 Why is that? I would argue that it is because her work
does not appreciate the fact that, in contrast to Man according to Galen and
Aristotle, there are now two idealized, internally homogeneous bodies, one
of which is made in European societies to be the ultimate model for all other
bodies, and that are these two sorts of bodies are stuck in a pattern of hierarchy. It is precisely these two bodies that “are human invariants that obtain
universally” in Irigaray’s oeuvre.101 This sex which is not one is a sign of a culture that begins to practice biomedical sex certification and designation in
the modern period. The two bodies to which Irigaray gestures, one of which
has no morphology of its own on her account, are in tandem the bodies idealized in modern biomedicine as naturalistically “male” and “female.” It’s not
that Irigaray’s work is advocating biomedical discourse. Not at all. It’s that
she inherits an idealized yet medicalized dimorphism that she then argues
must rise to a level of new “democratic”102 dimorphic cultural recognition
100 See also Gayle Salamon, “An Ethics of Transsexual Difference: Luce Irigaray and the
Place of Sexual Undecideability,” in Assuming a Body: Transgender and Rhetorics of Materiality
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 131–​144. I seek to take this aspect of Irigaray and
rewrite it without sexual difference at all, precisely because I am convinced of the reservations that
Salamon discusses in Assuming a Body, 136–​139. For a reading of Irigaray as a thinker of subjectivity
instead of body, see Claire Colebrook, “Is Sexual Difference a Problem?,” in Deleuze and Feminist
Theory (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000), 110–​127.
101 Mary Beth Mader, “All Too Familiar: Luce Irigaray’s Recent Thoughts on Sexuation and
Generation,” Continental Philosophy Review 36 (2003): 368.
102 Irigaray argues that a new practice of the European Union as democracy is possible, one that
recognizes “the rights of the two sexes or genders.” It is claims such as this that make me desire something other than democracy, when it means the rule of the polis by the body. See Irigaray, Democracy
Begins between Two, trans. Kirsteen Anderson (New York: Routledge, 2001), 68.
A Revised Irigarayan Study of the Hierarchy
59
in order to eliminate the hierarchy, the authority of the Same, the Same as
that which is deemed masculine. Currently there is only the one sex, Irigaray
argues, and the supposed second has no morphology of its own to which to
aspire because that which is feminine is figured only as the lack of that which
is masculine, as part of Man.
But from where does it come in Irigaray’s work that there are two that need
to be morphologically elaborated? From where does this number come?
Prior to what Thomas Laqueur argues is the invention of the two-​sex model
(more on this subsequently), there was only one sex, the one, the body, the
ideal human form, and all other bodies were approximations of that one.
Laqueur writes, “Sometime in the eighteenth century, sex as we know it was
invented. The reproductive organs went from being paradigmatic sites for
displaying hierarchy, resonant throughout the cosmos, to being the foundation of incommensurable difference: ‘women owe their manner of being to
their organs of generation, and especially to the uterus,’ as one eighteenth
century physician put it.”103 It is only according to the latter, what Laqueur
calls the model of incommensurability, or two-​sex model, that there is a
“second sex,” a “sex which is not one,” a distinctive sex in the sense in which
this word is used today. Laqueur argues that the shift was a purely political one: “When, for many reasons, a preexisting transcendental order or
time-​immemorial custom became a less and less plausible justification for
social relations, the battleground . . . shifted to nature, to biological sex.”104
However, Laqueur maintains the invention of the two-​sex model does not
eliminate but complements the one-​sex one.
This recent political context is the context of Irigaray’s work. In this context in which what sex means is no longer one, but two, Irigaray argues that
the gesture of two sexes must be understood as reducing to a hierarchy of
one sex.
But also, and more importantly, from where does it come that a number
can be assigned to morphology at all? The question should not only be from
103 Laqueur, Making Sex, 149. There is at least one classicist who disputes Thomas Laqueur’s thesis.
In The One-​Sex Body on Trial: The Classical and Early Modern Evidence (New York: Routledge, 2013),
148, Helen King argues that Laqueur’s account is flawed insofar as his argument relies exclusively
on natural philosophy and medical sources. On my reading, King takes Laqueur’s thesis too literally. It’s not that the one-​sex model has no philosophy of “female”; it’s that the basis of this term
changes from a one-​sex to the two-​sex version. From what I can tell, King subscribes to the two-​sex
model. Laqueur’s work demonstrates the inherently political character of both models. See especially
Laqueur, 154ff.
104 Laqueur, Making Sex, 152. See also Schiebinger, Nature’s Body, especially Chapter 5, “Theories
of Gender and Race,” 143–​183.
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where the number two has come, but why is one or two or any other number
something to which a genre should aspire?
I would argue that the number two in particular illustrates the biocentrism
of Irigaray’s work. This number is enshrined in the European marriage concept and appears as early as Plato’s Symposium as a divine form of the one of
the body, the human that then does get biomedicalized in modern terms.
Aristotle reiterates this number when he articulates the nature of the family,
as I will discuss subsequently.
What inspires the transition, shift of the “battleground” to nature, to
biomedicalization? Wynter argues that it is the need to draw a hard line between blackness and humanity. More on this in Chapter 4.
Paul B. Preciado has argued that “in the 1950s, which were confronted
with the rise of feminism and with homosexuality, as well as with the desire
of ‘transvestites,’ ‘deviants,’ and ‘transexuals’ to escape or transform birth sex
assignment, the dimorphism epistemology of sexual difference was simply
crumbling.”105 And at the point, instead of embracing multimorphism and
an open access to “the production, circulation, and interpretation of somato-​
politic biocodes,”106 the 1950s medical establishment sought to impose its
own constructions and enforcements of sexual dimorphism. As many have
observed107 (but which I learned from Preciado), this medical discourse thus
maintains the notion that sex is pre-​political, even as it introduces the concept of gender as voluntary and malleable in contrast. The malleability inherent in the very invention of the conceptual gesture of gender, Preciado
argues, contains much promise in spite of the aims of its inventors.
In the eighteenth century the invention of the science of sexual anatomy
and the incommensurability of two sexes as the medical subject matter
emerges, not because of any new scientific discovery, but because there
was a need for a new strategy of delineation of the polis. But in the twentieth century, gender is articulated as something distinguishable from sex.
Preciado writes, “If the concept of gender has introduced a rift, the precise reason is that it represents the first self-​conscious moment within the
105
Preciado, TestoJunkie, 105.
Preciado, TestoJunkie, 129.
107 See Fausto-​Sterling, Sexing the Body, 4; and Moira Gatens, Imaginary Bodies: Ethics, Power and
Corporeality (New York: Routledge, 1996), 5. These are both denunciations of the sex-​gender distinction. My own denunciation of the sex-​gender distinction aims neither to “question the realm of
physical sex” (Fausto-​Sterling, 4) nor to question enthusiasm for the notion of gender (Gatens), but
to undermine the claim that sex is pre-​political. My concern is that the polis (the definition of that
which is political) denies its own morphology.
106
A Revised Irigarayan Study of the Hierarchy
61
epistemology of sexual difference.”108 Gender as something that can be opposed to eighteenth-​century sex first appears in the work of child psychologist and surgeon John Money, “who treated ‘hermaphrodites’ and ‘intersex
babies,’ [and] became the first to make use of the grammatical category of
gender as a clinical and diagnosis tool.”109 Money argued that just because a
(political) body is assigned a particular sex designation at birth (Money did
not trouble the eighteenth-​century concept of sex), that does not determine
any particular gender role for that body. A body can be taught her “gender”;
a body cannot be taught sex, which is a fact about a body. As Preciado
explains, Money was “essentially thinking of the possibilities of using technologies . . . to modify the body or to produce subjectivity intentionally in
order to conform to a preexisting visual and biopolitical order, which was
prescriptive for what was supposed to be a female or male human body.”110
John Money was not a feminist. His aim was to correct bodies medically for a
naturalized sex system. His aim was to correct the mistakes of nature. He was
in many ways biocentric Man seeking to order nature. This was the concept
of the sex-​gender distinction that Kate Millett and others would use to redefine what it meant to be a feminist in the so-​called second wave of feminism.
It was no longer sticking up for the members of one’s own sex, but instead
feminism as a project of ending the unnatural practice of gender.
Except that the project of ending the unnatural practice of gender has so
far been a new iteration of sticking up for members of one’s own sex. The sex-​
gender distinction presupposes the two-​sex model, insofar as sex is apolitical by definition. This distinction of gender from sex gets taken up, Preciado
explains, by sex-​gender feminists who are seeking to argue for the release
of the (still naturalized) second sex from prescribed roles. Millett argues,
citing John Money but also psychiatrist Robert Stoller, “Whatever the ‘real’
differences between the sexes may be, we are not likely to know them until
the sexes are treated differently, that is alike. And this is very far from being
the case at present.”111 As Anne Fausto-​Sterling argues, these feminists “did
not question the realm of physical sex.”112 This gesture of gender as unnatural
was a doubling down on a gesture of sex as natural. It distinguishes sharply
108
Preciado, TestoJunkie, 113.
Preciado, TestoJunkie, 100.
110 Preciado, TestoJunkie, 100.
111 Kate Millett, Sexual Politics (New York: Doubleday, 2000), 29. This book was first published
in 1970. On Stoller’s role in the Anglo-​American feminist tradition, see Tina Chanter, Ethics of
Eros: Irigaray’s Rewriting of the Philosophers (New York: Routledge, 1995), 39–​42.
112 Fausto-​Sterling, Sexing the Body, 4.
109
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between them in order to focus all attention on gender, and not only that
but in order to eliminate gender, making feminists who adhere to it deeply
worried about gender practices of any sort. According to this account, sex
alone is considered to be a bare-​bones fact of bodiment. Gender roles are the
problem and must be eliminated. Sex is a fact. Gender is taught and learned
and should be unlearned. This claim appears in many forms in thinkers as
diverse as Kate Millett and Elizabeth Grosz.113
For Preciado, it is crucial to be grateful for the invention of gender, however philosophically problematic and simplistically polarized, because the
gesture of gender as something malleable is what made it possible for Judith
Butler to wonder later whether “sex” isn’t malleable, too. If gender isn’t sex, is
sex even sex? The invention of gender makes this question possible.
I argue that what needs acknowledging is just that the trouble with this
development is that the very notion of gender emerges in contrast to sex as
matter. And though sex has as a concept always been an index of the one of
the body, its reinvention as an index of the two of the body does not change
that. Gender as a concept is a welcome rift, but it was and continues to be defined by this dualism. What I want to argue is that it is unfortunate that sex
is still considered to be matter, even as gender has something of the agency
of the polis. And so, though Butler explicitly states that performativity is not
a voluntaristic notion,114 the connotation of gender retains a flavor of its by-​
definition contrast with the notion of sex. Butler herself clearly rejects this
distinction. And my own sympathies, too, are squarely on the side of gender,
if the choice is between these two concepts. I take gender to be both something that the polis continues to think it can legislate, and some dimension
in relation to that larger negotiation that a person can appreciate about herself, himself, themself. If, as Hortense Spillers and C. Riley Snorton argue,
denying a person’s gender is a mode of dehumanization, then gender as a
practice of morphology must be defended. And so of course if the choice is
113 While this claim is explicit in Millett, Sexual Politics, compare it to the re-​articulating of sex
in Elizabeth Grosz, “The Evolution of Sex and Race,” in The Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution and
the Untimely (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 64–​92. I even think that one can appreciate
a twist on this line of thinking in the work of Myra Hird, who argues that there is more fluidity in
the one-​sex model, even though she herself rejects the very idea of sex as inherently an invention.
Hird suggests that the one-​sex model is closer to pre-​political fact than the two-​sex one. There is
something of the ecological-​political distinction in that claim. Myra J. Hird, Sex, Gender, and Science
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 143ff. While I can appreciate the point about the fluidity of
the one-​sex model over the two-​sex model, my point is that both of these are hierarchical assessments
that center on the very idea of the one of the body, an ultimately disembodied body against which all
bodies are defined.
114 Butler, Bodies That Matter, 15.
A Revised Irigarayan Study of the Hierarchy
63
between sex and gender, I give respect to the latter, what a person can appreciate about themself, herself, himself.
Irigaray scholars have tended either to side at least implicitly with sex
or to read Irigaray’s work as oblivious to the distinction altogether. Butler’s
work has provided something of an alternative. In one essay she articulates
an abiding interest in the philosophy of sexual difference, in the hope of pluralizing that, and I have previously tried to understand her work as an interpretation of Irigaray because of that aspect of Butler’s work and to follow that
method.115
I now hold that a philosophy of elemental difference considers the sex-​
gender distinction to be a crucial but insufficient critique of the one body
of the polis. Irigaray does not acknowledge this development. It is so important to undermine the very presupposition that there is one complete
body. But the two of the body only recreates the problem of the body. In the
eighteenth century, when the two of the body was being invented (by the
one of the body), the best response would have been a critique of the polis.
Several centuries later, I think that is still the best response. My hope is for
a respect for multimorphism as Preciado defines that, with attention to the
morphology of the polis as well as an emphasis on the agency of all that the
polis calls matter. This is an emphasis that is between the lines of Preciado’s
performative-​political ecology critique of the pharmacopornographic era as
well as between the lines of the countersexual manifesto.116
For Preciado, it is Butler who has made it possible to ask whether sex isn’t
just as performative as gender. Preciado, like Karen Barad, seeks to extend
Butler’s work into political ecology.117 But ultimately Preciado maintains that
the invention of gender relies on a polarization of the malleability of gender
from the inertness of dimorphic sex, bodies sorted according to what come
to be called “reproductive organs”118 that are themselves understood as part
of a biomedical framework geared toward the reproduction of white, capital-​
wielding, plastic-​inventing Man.119 There is the one of the body again,
claiming the sole right to order earth.
What Preciado makes clear, what Irigaray does not appreciate, is the
sudden parallel genericism of what Thomas Laqueur names the “two-​sex
115 See Judith Butler, “The End of Sexual Difference?,” in Undoing Gender (New York: Routledge,
2004), 186; and Parker, “Precarity and Elemental Difference.”
116 Preciado, Countersexual Manifesto.
117 See especially Chapter 6, “Technogender,” in Preciado, TestoJunkie.
118 Hird, Sex, Gender, and Science.
119 See especially Preciado, TestoJunkie.
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A Philosophy of Elemental Difference
model,” in which there is no longer just one (race, ability, ethnicity, religion,
geographical, national) ideal of human, but two. The two is an idealized biocentric practice constitutive of biocentric Man. The sex that is not one is no
longer only the negation of masculinity, though that aspect is still present, but
additionally, the two, the body has replaced the one, the body as a distinctive
morphology, one of which a person must be to be complete. Both “the male
and [the] female human body”120 are what Preciado names as definitive of
the pharmacopornographic era, in which a person can and should aspire to
one or the other to be perceived as a (white, Homo economicus, able) human.
Preciado writes, “The term [pharmacopornographic] refers to the processes
of a bimolecular (pharmacy) and semiotic-​technical (pornographic) government of sexual subjectivity—​of which ‘the Pill’ and Playboy are two paradigmatic offspring.”121 This regime emerges, he argues, in the mid-​twentieth
century, roughly with the appearance of plastic,122 canned food, nuclear energy, and television, and defines gender as a pure biomedical malleability.123
This regime involves both the state and biomedical management of sex, and
the absolute freedom of gender that is thought to be bottomlessly performative and attainable, floating to some extent freer of sex designation in practice
for those who can access it, but which is also considered to be a requirement
for proper gender performance. Women of a certain political positionality
can and should (that’s the “regime” part) take birth control and either never
reproduce at all or only in nice, manageable amounts of white healthy self-​
sufficient children, while men can and should worship the cishetero fantasy
of Playboy in which what it means to be a Man is to be effortlessly orgasmic
and heterosexually dominating. With the proper biomedical approval, one
can alter one’s body, and yet one is only supposed to do so in ways that reinforce the one of the body’s estimations of nature. And even as so many have to
fight for the right to alter their bodies, nevertheless proper bodies of the polis
are idealized as “somatic fictions,” living blends of agencies indistinguishably
real and imagined.124 Experimentation is celebrated, but only for the two of
the body. In short, for Preciado gender in the pharmacopornographic era,
whether cis or trans or neither, is “technogender,” a technologically enabled
performativity in which anything is possible and yet all possibilities are
120
Preciado, TestoJunkie, 100.
Preciado, TestoJunkie, 34.
Preciado discusses the “Trash Vortex,” otherwise known as the Giant Patch of Garbage, plastic
bits both visible and sub-​visible swirling in the Pacific Ocean (TestoJunkie, 33).
123 Preciado, TestoJunkie, 99.
124 Preciado, TestoJunkie, 101.
121
122
A Revised Irigarayan Study of the Hierarchy
65
subject to punitive repercussions if one does them wrong, if one is revealed
as unnatural, counter to the dimorphism of the pharmacopornographic, all
with a presupposition of the normalcy of biomedically and state-​supervised
sex-​designation and certification.
While she does not confront the two-​sex model, at the same time Irigaray
has only expressed concern with the abuses of technology in recent history.
In one essay, for example, she laments reproductive technologies, writing
that “it would be a pity if technical mediation would become substituted
for an amorous union in the reproduction of the living.”125 Here Irigaray
opposes “technique” to “life” and ecology, in a way that is at odds with her
otherwise trenchant critiques of Aristotelian teleological naturalism. I take
this to be indicative of an adherence to the polis and its philosophy of nature,
the natural organicism that is indicative of the polis. (More on the theme of
the dangers of “natural organicism” in Chapter 3.) In this respect Irigaray is
part of the literature of those that Preciado has described as “focusing on an
analysis of female difference” and “unable to imagine dissident uses of technology and queering of techniques as a possible political strategy by which to
resist domination.”126
Whereas Irigaray’s work is attentive to the ways in which the polis as a concept denies elemental difference, she makes this argument in the name of a
gesture of sex that does not appreciate the status that the two-​sex model has
afforded to some women, to all gender-​binary people, and to all white people.
Power relationships among women are absent in Irigaray’s oeuvre. And certainly the power of the “second sex” that can be wielded over men who are
not the one of the body is missing. Masculinity is unilaterally powerful for
Irigaray. It is impossible in her work to think about how masculinity might
actually make someone vulnerable, because this is just so far from what masculinity means in her work. Preciado’s analysis suggests that retaining the
two-​sex model in this way means naturalizing one of the most dearly held
values of the pharmacopornographic era, that all is possible with respect to
gender performativity, but only if one makes use of technologies in keeping
with one’s mandated sex designation, which as Snorton and Wynter suggest
is inspired by the method of the science of racial anatomy.
The point is that this external designation and ranking of bodies, and the
lack of appreciation for practice of ranking as a unique way of life, is precisely
125
126
Irigaray, “Starting from Ourselves,” 103.
Preciado, Countersexual Manifesto, 123–​124.
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what Wynter means by biocentrism: assessing and assigning roles to bodies
externally based on bodily characteristics understood more or less strictly
externally. This is a distinct culture that sees itself as what it calls nature,
unquestionable, incomparable. Irigaray may partially contest the ranking
aspects of biocentric Man, but she subscribes to its method insofar as who
is a woman for Irigaray is a matter of body, and especially insofar as Irigaray
considers racial difference, religious difference, ethnic difference, linguistic
difference, class difference, ability difference to be auxiliary practices of
sexual difference. She has not explicitly written about ability difference, but
that is always there when there is no mention of ability. So I gather that in
Irigaray this would also be an auxiliary practice of sexual difference.
Making all bodily differences instances of sexual difference, and defining
difference implicitly according to the two-​sex model, makes Irigaray’s philosophy of elemental difference deeply problematic. Irigaray’s philosophy of
sexual difference, as Gayle Salamon has argued, “is categorically and functionally indistinguishable from genital difference, which is itself understood
to manifest (as) binary” and thus “sexual difference is genital difference is
genital dimorphism.”127 In short, Irigaray presupposes dimorphic, biocentric
Man’s concept of sex. In that sense she shares in the biocentrism of the polis.
While Irigaray’s ascription to dimorphic, biocentric Man’s definition of
sex is seemingly very obvious, this has not been so easy to appreciate. While
Gayle Salamon has argued that in Irigaray “sexual difference is genital difference is genital dimorphism,”128 this critique has not convinced Irigaray
scholars. Sexual difference seems to be something other than genital difference and genital dimorphism, something distinguishable. And it is true
that Irigaray’s philosophy of sexual difference is fundamentally devoted to
questioning the hierarchical shape of sex in the usual sense. I realize that I am
going against the still-​established reading of Irigaray.
Consider the work of two of the leading Irigaray scholars, Tina Chanter
and Rachel Jones, which has informed my own. They argue that the power
of Irigaray’s work lies precisely in the fact that she makes no distinction between sex and gender. On this reading it is the imposition of this distinction
127 Salamon, Assuming a Body, 138. See also Neimanis, Bodies of Water, 126. Although Neimanis
worries about the mixture of the “retrograde and avant-​garde” (69) in Irigaray, she argues that in
Irigaray’s “descriptions of our bodies of water in Marine Lover . . . [she herself] queers the simple
relations between the feminine and the fluid that are too easily extrapolated from her work” (85).
For Neimanis there is an ambiguity in Irigaray herself about whether sexual difference is irreducible
or not.
128 Salamon, Assuming a Body, 138.
A Revised Irigarayan Study of the Hierarchy
67
on Irigaray’s work that has made it so difficult to read her in an Anglo-​
American feminist context in which the work of Kate Millett, who opposes
sex to gender, is so foundational for what it even means to be feminist.
Tina Chanter argues that Irigaray’s work neither conflates sex with gender
nor polarizes them. Irigaray’s notion of sexual difference is neither sex nor
gender. It “contests the simplicity with which the nature/​culture split and the
biology/​history distinction have been used to interpret the sex/​gender distinction.”129 Chanter cites Butler as having made the distinction already very
helpfully murky, and yet this distinction for Chanter still is relevant because
of the possibilities opened up by gender, largely in line with Preciado’s sympathy with the promises that attend the invention of gender. For Chanter,
Irigaray’s work offers a way of thinking about the gendering of sex, and also
the multimorphic sexual difference that gendering in practice denies.130
The important part of Irigaray’s work is not anything that she says about
sexuation, but the very fact that Irigaray “brings the body back into play, not
as ‘the rock of feminism’ but as the mobile site of differences.”131
Rachel Jones makes a similar claim, focusing specifically on Irigaray’s neologism of “the sexuate.” The sexuate in Irigaray is neither sex nor gender. It
“refers neither to a mode of being determined by biological sex nor to a cultural overlay of gendered meanings inscribed on a ‘tabula rasa’ of passively
receptive matter. The ‘sexuate’ does not separate the becomings that shape
our bodily being from the production of social and cultural meanings or behavioral dispositions.”132
Chanter’s and Jones’s readings of Irigaray are convincing articulations of
the irrelevance of the sex-​gender distinction in Irigaray’s work. And, as I have
said, my own reading of Irigaray is deeply influenced by these. Still I worry
that Irigaray’s oeuvre, as Salamon argues, presupposes “genital difference,”133
the very idea of which is synonymous with the two-​sex model. And what’s
more her work does so without appreciating the changes in the polis to which
129
Chanter, Ethics of Eros, 44.
Chanter, Ethics of Eros, 44–​46.
131 Chanter, Ethics of Eros, 46. In this way, Chanter identifies a claim in Irigaray that I want to rearticulate, this time without the notion of sexual difference. The distinction between sex and gender,
Chanter argues, is the nature-​culture distinction. See also Oyěwùmí, The Invention of Women, 13.
132 See Jones, Irigaray, 4.
133 The most obvious example of this would be the gesture of the “two lips.” See Irigaray, This Sex
Which Is Not One, 205–​218. See also Rachel Jones, “The Status of Sexual Difference,” in Irigaray,
160–​198. See also Lynne Huffer’s morphology of lips as well, “an experiment in thinking-​feeling that
contested the inner workings of biopower’s self-​referential logic.” Lynne Huffer, Foucault’s Strange
Eros (New York: Columbia University Press, 2020), 7. See also Huffer, Are the Lips a Grave?; Lynne
Huffer, “Lipwork,” in “Critical Exchange on Are the Lips a Grave?,” Differences 27.3 (2016): 93–​105.
130
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dramatic reinterpretation of sex corresponds. Insofar as the notion of sexual
difference according to Irigaray has yet to be made properly dimorphic,134
and at least to that extent its goal is fixed, it is sex and sexual difference in the
eighteenth century, modern medical European mode. Irigaray worries about
the very gesture of multimorphism. Dimorphism for her seems to preserve
a plurality that multimorphism inexplicably risks losing. While that dimorphism of bodily “reproductive organs,”135 bodies parsed according to biological reproductive contribution in the “two-​sex model,” is not what Irigaray
means, her account does not confront that directly or comprehensively. She
does not address the privileges that a certain relationship to the two-​sex
model enables. My concern is that this very noteworthy historical transition
vanishes in Irigaray.
The “two-​sex model” is a phrase introduced by historian Thomas Laqueur
for the mechanistic theory of “opposite and incommensurable biological
sexes” that develops among eighteenth-​century European scientists. Prior
to the eighteenth century, “the female body” was understood strictly “as a
lesser version of the male’s. Orgasms [were] . . . common property”136 in this
account of Man. Every body that wasn’t an instantiation of the fullness of
“the male sex” was by default “female.” When orgasms were thought to be
common property of all the bodies that were at least potentially men, it was
not bizarre at all to contemplate “female orgasms” because they were conceived of as the orgasms of an incomplete human form, as opposed to a “female” human form.137 In the one-​sex model there was no such thing as “the
female” one human form, the female as a generic. All “females” were morphologically imperfect humans. It is only when the two-​sex model appears
that the very idea of “the female orgasm” disappears. It becomes an oxymoron with the oppositional and incommensurable account of the newly
differentiated secondary sex, sex according to the two-​sex model.
134
See Mader, “Luce Irigaray’s Recent Thoughts.”
Thomas Laqueur explains that the very concept of reproduction emerges with the concept of
“the two sexes,” opposite and incommensurable biological sexes, as opposed to the one-​sex model
according to which women are isomorphically men whose bodies haven’t fully developed /​become
men. See Laqueur, Making Sex, 154–​155. See also Hird, Sex, Gender, and Science.
136 Laqueur, Making Sex, viii. For Preciado’s discussion of Laqueur, see TestoJunkie, 72–​73.
137 Emanuela Bianchi notes that Aristotle does not mention the notion of “female genital organs.”
In other words, in Aristotle’s day there simply was no such thing. There were only, as Nancy Tuana
puts it, “misbegotten men” who lacked the necessary “generative heat for completion.” Bianchi, The
Feminine Symptom, 175. Nancy Tuana, The Less Noble Sex: Scientific Religious, and Philosophical
Conceptions of Woman’s Nature (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 19.
135
A Revised Irigarayan Study of the Hierarchy
69
The much older account of the one-​sex model found its most influential
theorist in the physician Galen of Pergamum, who lived from 130 to 200 of
the Common Era. It continued as the sole medical account for almost two
millennia. Only since the end of the eighteenth century has sex meant one
of two distinctly equipped mechanistic anatomies that are made to seem to
constitute the entirety of humanity.
On Galen’s account, which—​again—​reigned for roughly two millennia in
the polis tradition, the evidence of the incompleteness of some anatomies
was that “you could not find a single male part left over that had not simply
changed its position.”138 There weren’t separate words for two separate sets of
organs. All of the organs were those of Man, which happened to be appearing
in lesser or inverted form. The organs were differently positioned, but there
was only one possible set of them. The name for all bodies that were considered to be lesser versions of this complete form was “female.” There wasn’t
one complete anatomy that instantiated this name. For Galen, “Women, in
other words, are inverted, and hence less than perfect, men. They have exact
the same organs but in exactly the wrong places.”139 Galen wrote,
Think first, please, of the man’s [external genitalia] turned in and extending
inward between the rectum and the bladder. If this should happen, the
scrotum would necessarily take the place of the uterus with the testes lying
outside, next to it on either side.140
In this way, what was called female was, for Galen, inverted and incomplete
body. As Laqueur explains, the one-​sex model had one vocabulary for all
human organs, and thus there was by definition one finished state. It pointed
toward the complete human form, the one, the body. Woman did not have
its own end, its own distinct “moral completion,” in Talia Mae Bettcher’s
terms.141 There was no such thing as the opposite sex of Man. Man was the
lone generic, the one of the body, entirely alone in instantiating the human.
It is not until the eighteenth century that a second model comes to sit alongside this one-​sex model. During that century the one-​sex model comes to be
accompanied by a two-​sex model: two anatomies, two sets of vocabulary for
the first time in this tradition, two distinct sets of “reproductive organs.” It is
138
139
140
141
Laqueur, Making Sex, 26.
Laqueur, Making Sex, 26.
Laqueur, Making Sex, 25.
Bettcher, “Full-​Frontal Morality,” 331.
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then that the second of the two types is by definition not orgasmic.142 Indeed,
Laqueur argues that part and parcel of the appearance of the two-​sex model
is the replacement of the ancient notion of “generation,” “the quotidian repetition of God’s act of creation with all its attendant heat and light,”143 with the
notion of “reproduction” and two distinct and oppositionally defined mechanistic reproductive organs. The two-​sex model doesn’t replace the one-​sex
model, but the two models coexist from the eighteenth century onward, on
Laqueur’s understanding.
Why does the two-​sex model emerge in the eighteenth century? In the
final chapter of his book, Laqueur argues that the two-​sex model is not an
empirical one, no more empirical than the one-​sex model was. No new discoveries justified the shift from one model to the other. What produces the
two-​sex model is rather, Laqueur argues, the effort to block those deemed
(white cissex-​cisgender) women from the political sphere and to justify this
blockade with “reasons based in ‘nature.’ ”144 The older universal model did
not offer a decisive account of the disqualification of women from political
inclusion. Women had to be newly perceived as, by nature, incommensurable, incompatible with bodies definitive of politics. Those deemed men and
those deemed women fought in the eighteenth century and to this day over
whether there was something natural about what it means to be a man that
fits one for public office or other nonpublic role of influence and authority.
The fight on the part of the two of the body, and feminism insofar as it is
a fight on the part of the second of the two of the body, is a fight for solidifying the polis anew. It is not a fight for the dissolution of its biocentrism. It
is not the fight for the dissolution of sex as a hallmark of the polis, a demand
to dismantle the polis, which is in my view what it always should have been.
Instead in the eighteenth century feminism changed from being a denunciation of the one of the body to being a defense of members of one’s sex, a philosophy of humanity imposed by the one of the body. In other words, those
who benefited in limited ways from this new concept of sex made use of it,
instead of disputing the two-​sex model as a defunct philosophy of humanity,
a new version of the one of the body. This sadly has not meant that the two of
the body is really a change in the polis. Any aspect of a body is still defined
by this designation “body.” This means that if that body exceeds that of the
142
143
144
Laqueur, Making Sex, 150.
Laqueur, Making Sex, 155.
Laqueur, Making Sex, 196. See also Schiebinger, Nature’s Body.
A Revised Irigarayan Study of the Hierarchy
71
one, it will continue to be understood as outside of that which is proper to the
polis. It will be considered apolitical, matter of fact.
Bruno Latour names this period of European history modern because of
this fight over who does and doesn’t count as a member of the polis, though
he is thinking primarily of what he calls “nonhumans,” a deceptively simple
gesture about which I will have much more to say in Chapters 2 and 3. For
Latour the modern is the effort to distinguish science in an absolute way
from politics.145 “Modern” has a technical sense for Latour. Scientists and
politicians distinguished between nature and politics, even as they made a
certain body a requirement for political participation within European society. A certain homogeneous one, the body, the complete human form that
is distinguishable from the scientific realm, and therefore at the same time
wasn’t taken to be bodily at all, simply was politics. Science was the domain
of bodies, not politics. And so politics is devoid of all the things pertaining to
science—​soil, rain, hurricane, corn. For Latour the modern was an attempt
to distinguish nature from culture, in an absolute and sharp manner. And
for Latour certain people are barred from politics because of this barring of
nonhumans (by which he means, for example, asbestos, water, corn) from
politics. (I’ll take issue with that way of putting it in Chapter 3.) For Latour,
modern means this attempt to distinguish absolutely between nature, the
domain of science, and culture, the domain of politics. This has secondary
repercussions in the form of certain people barred from politics.
Part of what I want to consider in response to this Latourian account of the
modern is that the ancient polis was already modern in Latour’s sense: the
polis may have been constituted by various oikoi, but these were already differentiable terms with corresponding bodies in terms of sex and race and
language and location. The modern polis is in this respect not exactly the
same as the ancient polis, but it is nevertheless an iteration of it. The ancient
polis, especially in the writings of Aristotle, was the apex growing out of a
deeper world. The polis is a natural formation, Aristotle wrote, and “man is
by nature a political animal,” bios politikos.146 Not all of the people living in
the homes of the city were citizens. Homes were, Aristotle argued, not complete without wives and slaves, and it was not Man but “nature [that] distinguished between the female and the slave,”147 because, as Aristotle argues,
145
146
147
See especially Latour, We Have Never Been Modern and Politics of Nature.
Aristotle, Politics 1.1253a1.
Aristotle, Politics 1.1252b1.
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one shouldn’t use a body for more than one purpose. The home or oikos in
which these relationalities reside was not just the substrate of a functioning
polis. It was the polis. Here’s a crucial point: only Man the bearer of nous
(thought or thinking) was a proper citizen of the polis, a proper ruler.148
Aristotle writes, “For what each thing is when fully developed, we call its nature, whether we are speaking of a man, a horse, or a family. Besides, the final
cause and end of a thing is the best, and to be self-​sufficing is the end and the
best.”149 Man was the word for this fully developed nature, and his capacity
for thinking and thought was what set Man apart from the rest. Man alone
was the agent of the polis, and his capacity for thought was the site of this
agency. Man is not matter; Man is a word for the agency that is meant by nature to guide matter.
Man’s capacity for thought is explicitly distinguished by Plato from necessity150 and by Aristotle from that which cannot make comparisons and
try to predict future outcomes.151 The polis, in the sense that I argue needs
exposing, takes shape when a certain body comes to figure this uncaused,
immaterial agency in Aristotle. Thought as nous is on both accounts an
agency that is by definition immaterial, but it can apparently only be encased
by a specific body: race, class, ability, sex, gender, age, size, and on and on are
already more or less there if biocentrism is there, centering on the one, the
body. And here this one and only, the body, the perfect—​as in complete—​
human form, characterizes the best of the polis, its free and guiding part. The
oikos is part of a larger entity that is the polis, but the polis also refers to its
own most free (because thinking) and guiding part. It is a body that points to
an abodily escape from the relationality of earth-​water-​air-​fire.
Contrast this holistic picture of the polis with what Bruno Latour has
suggested is the shape of the modern polis. In the modern polis the political, that which is of the polis, is not nature, not ecology, not ecological.
The polis that had been both a term for the whole of the city, including the
oikoi, is in the modern context distinguishable from rest. Arguably beginning with medieval Christendom’s distinction between “imperium,” or state,
and “sacerdotum,” or church, the polis fractures. What was formerly the
governing part of the polis breaks off and becomes its own distinct, agential
148
149
150
151
Bianchi, The Feminine Symptom, 171–​173.
Aristotle, Politics 1.1252b30–​1253a2.
Bianchi, The Feminine Symptom, 89.
Bianchi, The Feminine Symptom, 172–​173.
A Revised Irigarayan Study of the Hierarchy
73
zone.152 The modern suggests a polis that is a sharply delineated space meant
only for certain bodies whose bodiment was as uniform as that of the best
part of the ancient polis. And yet the sense of the relationship of this body to
other bodies is not the same. The uniformity of the bodies that constitutes the
polis as a concept that is born in ancient Greek philosophy makes it possible
to think that the polis is an uninterrupted space, in which there is nothing
else but a distinctively uncaused political agency that is absolutely inconsistent with what comes to be thought of as a scientific realm that biocentric
Man, the political agency, can study. And yet of course this line between polis
and scientific matter was worked out in a mishmash of political-​scientific
discourse.153
In this book I will add to Latour’s account, but also dispute it via a reading
of Fanon. Fanon argues not that the ecological needs to be given back its
agency, but rather that the biological and zoological are agencies from which
the polis needs to protect itself. For Latour the ecological needs to be given
back its agency. In contrast with this, I wish to argue that the domain of politics carries forward in a new way the tyrannies of the practice of the ancient concept of the polis, which understands itself as at least conceptually
distinguishable from the ecological. That prehistory is not acknowledged by
Latour. For this reason Latour’s crucial questioning of the nature-​culture divide does not do away with the polis.154 After the nature-​culture distinction
is questioned, the polis can problematically, hierarchically, live on. Although
what Latour recommends is an alteration to the polis and the very concept of
the political, a gesture that is fundamental for me, there is no way to get there
without examining the dynamics of the polis that Irigaray, Butler, Wynter,
Fanon, and others understand. Performativity and social construction more
generally have been the needed critique of the polis. And so I pair Latour’s
concept of the modern with Fanon’s concept of “the Manichaean,” according
to which a suddenly absolute distinction between polis and oikos splinters—​
in an exploitation of a split that is already there in the Platonic-​Aristotelian
equation of immateriality with a certain the one, the body—​into Latour’s
modern divide. What Fanon suggests is that the polis is already disturbingly
Manichaean in its teleological bodily apex. Colonization and racialization
152 Stephen Taylor Holmes, “Aristippus in and out of Athens,” American Political Science Review
73.1 (March 1979): 124.
153 Schiebinger, Nature’s Body; and Londa Schiebinger, “Skelettestreit,” Isis 94 (2003): 307–​313.
154 As Karen Barad has argued, Latour has no critique of power. Meeting the Universe Halfway, 59.
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exploit the very idea of the biological as something that needs primarily to be
subdued. These are for Fanon inextricable manifestations of Manichaeanism.
Before I can get to what I take to be the fundamental import of Irigaray’s
work for understanding the limitations of both political ecology and
performativity and the distinction between matter and politics, it is crucial
to make this point: Irigaray does not ask why the two-​sex model appears
in the eighteenth century and in what respects this subtly alters the polis.
This is a positioning of a homogeneous secondary sex that is in practice present and yet not conceptually positioned in the same way in Aristotle. For
Aristotle there was no parallel body with its own complete form. Today that
is not the case. “The female” is a generic body equated with womanhood, and
yet this ideal body—​ideal in terms of race, ability, class, sex, gender, sexuality, religion—​is used to define who is a human-​woman and who isn’t. Why
did the one-​sex model persist for so very long, and then suddenly change so
much and become orthodox so abruptly, roughly over the course of a century, in Laqueur’s account?
Wynter argues convincingly that the effort to definitively distinguish black
from human seems to have redefined Man, which is now defined by the two-​
sex model. The two, the body, complicates the one of the body, as the lone
perfect human form. Now there are two complete humans, and yet at the
same time the one, the body still defines the polis. Whatever exceeds this
morphology is barred from the polis. This two-​sex model was made possible, C. Riley Snorton argues, through experiments on “living laboratories,” “Anarcha, Betsey, Lucy and unnamed others.”155 Snorton explains that
Anarcha in particular was operated on by J. Marion Sims in Alabama on the
eve of secession over thirty times in an effort to produce knowledge that was
intimate and improper for Man to have of the proper second sex. So Sims
experiments on flesh. Snorton writes that this “unrelenting scopic availability
that defined blackness within the visual economy of racial slavery becomes
the necessary context for producing a field of sex/​gender knowledge.”156
What makes the two generic bodies constitutive of the one, the body of the
present is a certain positioning with respect to morphologies of ability, race,
class, sex, gender, accent, speech that are all a privileging of the one, the body,
the complete human form, and the equating of the polis with this one body.
155
156
Snorton, Black on Both Sides, 18.
Snorton, Black on Both Sides, 33.
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75
In a crucial but quiet passage of Making Sex Thomas Laqueur argues that
his account of the emergence of what he names the two-​sex model “is part of
what would be a more comprehensive history of exclusive biological categories in relation to culture”157 that would explore the relationship of the development of the two-​sex model of sexual difference and the scientific concept
of racial difference. Laqueur doesn’t venture that larger history, but he points
in that direction. Because Irigaray does not take there to be a two-​sex model,
insofar as the one-​sex model reduces to the one-​sex one, she cannot begin
to ask the question of what “a more comprehensive history” would look like.
The two-​sex model has its own distinct causes and problematic features that
are historically recent and enormously significant. Sylvia Wynter offers that
more comprehensive history, as I will explain in Chapter 4.
In spite of the reading of Irigaray according to which what she means by
sexuation is neither sex nor gender, I am arguing that the subtle aspects of
the polis in her work need greater confrontation. The concept of sex needs
a more detailed exposition. This is the first of two key problems with sexual
difference: that Irigaray does presuppose a gesture of sex, in the historical
context of the two-​sex model that understands organs to come in two incompatible sets. She doesn’t seem to consider this to be an ideal of a certain philosophy of sex, much less a racial and ability ideal. She is tuned into
only the problems that attend failing-​to-​be-​Man, a failure that she suggests
all women share.
We could say that she takes up the two-​sex model in order to indict the
one-​sex model that is its basis. However, this is not helpful because she does
not expose the problems of the one-​sex model in all of its dimensions. In addition, the two-​sex model has distinct problems of its own.
This is the second concern. The two-​sex model entails an altered arrangement of hierarchies that reconstitute the polis anew. Irigaray’s project
reinvents the polis, and the task is as I understand it to undermine the polis.
There has been as yet no critique of the polis itself. That is what is needed
now. But first it is necessary to point out that elemental difference in Irigaray
is the philosophy of sexual difference of Irigaray, and this is the meaning of
“the sex which is not one”: a hope to constitute a new generic, a supposed generic just like the one, the body in that it is in fact specific. Problematically,
“the sex” is the body in a specific mode.
157
Laqueur, Making Sex, 155.
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Irigaray does not appreciate the distinctive character of the modern, absolute splintering between the political and the ecological. The invention
of “the sex which is not one,” as a distinctive generic ideal with an idealized
body considered to be ahistorically natural in an Aristotelian sense, corresponds to a new shaping of the polis. The ultimate concern, the space between
elemental difference and sexual difference, is an appreciation of the two-​sex
model and its role in the making of the polis of the present. As Paul Preciado
laments, “Most . . . feminist criticisms call for an anti-​technology revolution that would free women’s bodies from coercive, repressive male power
and modern technology in order to join with nature. In fact, however, these
feminist theories of the 1970s and 1980s ended in a double renaturalization”
in which white normate158 men and women are suddenly christened as
uniquely “natural.” If Preciado is right, then it seems that the two-​sex model
offers a new generic configuration of its very own, allowed to bear official
(subordinate) titles of the polis, even if biocentric Man is still the body synonymous with the polis.
Both supposed generics of the two-​sex model—​insofar as they are distinct
biomedically—​are imperatives that demand that all bodies conform to one
of these two Sames. This is precisely what Irigaray argues Man alone does
to that which falls short of the completion that is masculine, named merely
the feminine, that he, she, or they (anyone can be the feminine in Irigaray’s
sense) be the Same as the masculine, the solid, the strong, the independent-​
even-​without-​having-​been-​well-​parented, the grown and never growing
old. Irigaray argues that the bodies that are not masculine are simply considered to be masculinity’s negation, even when figured as his opposite, such
that there is no gender in the feminine to become that isn’t already figured by
the masculine. There is, Irigaray laments, only the masculine. But as Preciado
shows, the bodies of the two biomedical types, the two-​sex model, contra
Irigaray, are two generic types. The two-​sex model instantiates not just a
masculine whole, but a feminine one, too. Both supposed generics are in
fact fully racialized, capital-​wielding types. They are the picture of what is
thought to be the nature of ability. And this is also the figuring of agency, the
agency that characterizes the polis. Irigaray’s critique of the two, the body
being an instantiation of the one, the body, does not eliminate the need to
address the problematic power of the two, the body. Irigaray’s critique of the
one of the body, the lone complete human form, is important, but there is so
158
Garland-​Thomson, Extraordinary Bodies, 8.
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77
much more to say. There is so much more to say that to leave it there is to say
worse than nothing.
Emanuela Bianchi has described the ancient polis, “in its ideal form, as the
privileged and sui generis site of beautiful dialogue among equals, sharing
rule by turns, and bound by affective ties of friendship.”159 And yet at the
same time this polis encompasses a larger society, or oikos. The polis was the
oikos, though a privileged part of it.160 Reading together the work of Bruno
Latour, Frantz Fanon, and Sylvia Wynter suggests that the boundary line of
the polis, if not the “equality of equals” with which it is synonymous, is dramatically transformed in the gesture of the modern.161 As I have discussed
already, whereas the ancient polis was a term for a larger society, though also
figuring its best part, the modern polis is distinguished abruptly from “the
biological” or “ecological.”162 The modern polis is not ecological. Now, the
Aristotelian polis is already at least conceptually modern, and in this respect,
Irigaray is appropriately critical of it. But Irigaray does not appreciate that
that original split of the polis has deepened. Irigaray misses the modern absolute distinction between that which is political and that which is ecological, an ecological that is no longer the one, the body of the polis.
The upshot of this is that the two-​sex model reiterates the problems of the
one, the body, the polis. As Thomas Laqueur suggests, the two-​sex model
emerges in eighteenth-​century Europe. The ancient polis was a term for a
larger earth, and biocentric Man was a sort of apex of all of this life. However,
in the modern period, there is a sharp break. Fanon suggests that black is distinguished from the one, the body of biocentric Man, and so the concept of
oikos must figure a breaking from polis. Sylvia Wynter takes up this moment
in Fanon’s work, extending his project. The changes in the way the one of the
body is figured are part of a pattern that Wynter argues is set in motion by the
very gesture of the externally readable body. This genre of biocentric Man
includes the two-​sex model as its content.
159
Bianchi, The Feminine Symptom, 225.
Richard Kraut, Aristotle (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 12–​14.
161 This dramatic transformation could be the reason why Emanuela Bianchi warns those interested in the promise of the Aristotelian polis in the present. She writes, “I am not convinced . . . that
the multitude . . . can be any more diverse than any group of elite males” (The Feminine Symptom, 285
n. 5). In this respect she seems to agree with Stephen Taylor Holmes, who argues that attempting to
institute the ancient polis in modern Europe will result in “tyranny,” an argument that he borrows
from Benjamin Constant, who made the case in eighteenth-​century France on behalf of the new and
distinctive “freedom of the moderns,” as opposed to the ancients. See Holmes, “Aristippus.”
162 This is the focus of Chapters 3 and 4. See also Holmes, “Aristippus.”
160
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A Philosophy of Elemental Difference
Thus in two ways Irigaray’s philosophy of sexual difference is itself biocentric. Both have to do with how closely related sexual difference is to the
shape of the polis. First, there is a presupposition of a natural, ahistorical sex
in her work, a certain dualistic universality of the bodies that is similar to the
universality of the body that she does criticize, and, second, there is a lack of
attention to the modern reshaping of the polis, as a confluence of the one-​sex
and two-​sex models.
Though Irigaray’s philosophy of sexual difference is in my estimation
unprecedentedly critical of the polis and its bodily commitments, it is not
critical enough. And not to be critical enough, I fear, is to become, to invoke Audre Lorde, a tool of social control, a means of contributing to more
basic problems.163 I want to speak directly to political-​ecological devastation.
These are not two distinct devastations. They are intimately tied, as I will
argue in Part II of the book. I seek to understand how what Mbembe means
by the age of security relates to the Anthropocene.
1.2. The Promise: Elemental Difference,
Neither Form nor Matter
I’ve so far claimed that Irigaray’s work leaves uninterrogated the recent
practice of biomedical dimorphic sex designation and the reshaping of the
polis. I have taken so much space to describe the problems with Irigaray’s
philosophy of sexual difference because I want to draw out her philosophy
of elemental difference, specifically three features that I mentioned earlier.
Irigaray’s philosophy of elemental difference is a critique of the polis and
the political-​ecological distinction that defines it. A revised Irigarayan approach could take up three of her claims that undermine the political and
ecological hierarchy, precisely and provocatively as the polis as a concept
forbids. The political and the ecological are synonymous with the polis for
Irigaray, but I want to do something different with this intervention. Instead
of denouncing the masculine, I think it is the one, the body, the very idea that
there is one complete human form that needs denouncing, the very presupposition of the one of the body.
163 See Lorde, Sister Outsider, 115. I have made this argument in earlier work. Emily Anne
Parker, “Toward a New and Possible Meeting,” in Emily Anne Parker and Anne van Leeuwen,
Differences: Rereading Beauvoir and Irigaray (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 85–​113.
A Revised Irigarayan Study of the Hierarchy
79
The body, the very idea of a universal body or a body in common, is ultimately an oxymoronic celebration of being without a body. In Chapters 2, 3,
and 5 I’ll try to show that literatures of performativity and political ecology
each take up only half of this project.164 Insofar as a generic sense of the polis
is suggested, the hierarchy between polis and oikos is there, together with
a hostility toward relational water-​fire-​earth-​air. Performativity is indispensable for thinking the political; political ecology is indispensable for thinking
the ecological. What is powerful about Irigaray’s concept of elemental difference is that it contains both, even if her work does not adequately discuss the
full dimensions of the polis.
The first way in which Irigaray undermines the conceptual distinction between the political and ecological is in offering a fundamental critique of the
form-​matter hierarchy. This hierarchy is both a politics and a way of understanding what becomes ecology in cultures indebted to Aristotle, as Irigaray
puts it.165 Form and matter are not merely a distinction; these designations
share a hierarchical relation. In this hierarchy, form is the hierarch, etymologically the sacred ruler or high priest of the two.166 Form is the ruling of
that which is matter. Any hierarchy, the very concept of hierarchy, is therefore
an aspiration to immateriality and the unilateral rule that only immateriality
can be. There is no such thing as unilateral rule among earth-​air-​fire-​water.
There is no first mover. For Irigaray the presumption of form-​matter hierarchy explains morphological features of the polis. As I have argued, the two-​
sex model (which Irigaray argues reduces to a one-​sex model) is the one, the
body of the polis, so it’s split in a new way, but still Irigaray’s critique of the
form-​matter hierarchy is helpful for understanding both the apolitical way in
which ecology is often practiced, hostile to the encroachment of political critique, and also the oblivious way in which politics is often practiced in denial
or complacency regarding agencies that are relational. The attribution of unilateral power to biocentric Man is the form-​matter hierarchy at work. In short,
the form-​matter hierarchy lives on in the identification of agency with politics
as the positing of unilateral power and the denial of agency of that which is
164 In the case especially of the work of Saidiya Hartman (discussed in Chapter 2), the exploration
of “the political” in the modern polis is crucial and not in my view adequately addressed in Irigaray.
165 Luce Irigaray, An Ethics of Sexual Difference, trans. Carolyn Burke and Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press, 1984), 10.
166 Kevin Corrigan and L. Michael Harrington, “Pseudo-​Dionysius the Areopagite,” The Stanford
Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2019), ed. Edward N. Zalta, https://​plato.stanford.edu/​archives/​
sum2019/​entries/​pseudo-​dionysius-​areopagite/​.
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A Philosophy of Elemental Difference
relational matter. Irigaray’s work goes to the heart of this predicament, the
form-​matter hierarchy. Not merely the distinction. The hierarchy.
In Speculum of the Other Woman, Irigaray includes a section on Aristotle
entitled “How to Conceive (of) a Girl.”167 She writes, “Whereas at the beginning of epistemology, the philosopher was still marveling at such things as
air, fire, and water, now they must be submitted to a rigorous scientific analysis so that their excessive power can be checked. They must be put in their
place, within a general theory of being so as to lessen our fascination with
them.”168 It is too much already to surrender to the notion of distinct elements of any number: air, fire, water, earth. (Carl Linnaeus apparently used
precisely this number of items, four, and these names to organize his knowledge of “distinct human races.”)169 But I take Irigaray to be pointing to the
ongoing fascination of elementality, an elementality of which she considers
herself to be a confluence, which Aristotle replaces with an inherently hierarchical ontology. Irigaray writes of “woman,” “In her share of substance, not
only is she secondary to man but she may just as well not be as be. Ontological
status makes her incomplete and uncompletable. She can never achieve the
wholeness of her form. Or perhaps her form has to be seen—​paradoxically—​
as mere privation?”170 Her form, Irigaray continues, may be “that which can
never achieve the status of subject, at least for/​by herself. Is she the indispensable condition whereby the living entity retains and maintains and perfects
himself in his self-​likeness?”171 The “living entity” that is man for Aristotle
in other words seeks and finds himself by means of contrasting bodies. For
Aristotle, “Mother-​matter affords man the means to realize his form.”172
In Sexes and Genealogies, there is a subsection entitled “The Double
Meaning of the Word Nature.” This is a subsection of an essay entitled “Each
Sex Must Have Its Own Rights.” In other words, this passage is another of
Irigaray’s most sex-​naturalizing texts. But this is the difficult aspect of
reading Irigaray: The most problematic aspect of her work is how she locates
the polis. She wants to talk about the fact that there is no such thing as a generic Man, precisely because there is no such thing as a universal body. She
locates this gesture in sex. But an articulation of the form-​matter hierarchy
167
168
169
170
171
172
Irigaray, Speculum, 166. See also Bianchi, The Feminine Symptom.
Irigaray, Speculum, 160.
Schiebinger, Nature’s Body, 119.
Irigaray, Speculum, 165.
Irigaray, Speculum, 165.
Irigaray, Speculum, 166.
A Revised Irigarayan Study of the Hierarchy
81
appears in this essay as well. I’d like to take up that aspect of her work without
the philosophy of sexual difference.
Irigaray argues that the masculine and feminine genealogies (les généalogies
masculines et féminines), by which she means the relation of a father to a son
and the relation of a mother to a daughter, respectively, are collapsed into
one genealogy, “that of the husband.”173 The shape of this family is made of
a denial of her own body. The way every member of the family, according to
Man, is meant to relate is to the husband as a husband. In other words the
wife’s role in the family unit is to relate first and foremost to husband, not to
child(ren). Her role is to be the wife, and only as a wife does she have a child.
The child is meant to relate to the father not directly but insofar as the father
is a husband, only through the woman who is his wife. A care for the quality
of relationality is the responsibility of the wife in the family, according to
Man. And the apex of this family unit is a husband who is ultimately a “male
child. In fact, despite the incest taboo, there seems to be little indication that
man has sublimated the natural immediacy of his relationship to the mother.
Rather, man has transferred that relationship to his wife as mother substitute.”174 In other words, everyone relates to the father in his role primarily
as husband, a role that he only has, strictly speaking, to his wife. And yet this
husband looks to that wife to carry on the nurturing, consoling work that
his mother was meant to do for him. This family structure is organized in
such a way that the power dynamics are both confused, and yet the power of
the husband is absolute. The husband is clearly the representative nous of the
family unit. These are the contours of the family of Man, for Irigaray.
Irigaray’s writings are, as I have explained, on my reading a detailed analysis of the one-​sex model, and an argument that the symmetry of the sexes
is owed to one sex, the sex that is man, in thinly veiled disguise. In short,
Irigaray holds that there is ultimately no two-​sex model. And for this
reason her work is marked by a denial of the relative privileges and thus actual dynamics of woman as a morphology according to the two-​sex model.
Arguably those privileges were always there, but they are there anew because
173 The English translation renders masculine as “male” and féminine as “female.” This is not exactly what Irigaray means, but as I have explained earlier, the Masculine (that which is understood
to be “of men”) and the feminine (that which is understood to be “of women,” which for Irigaray is
to say nothing) are, I argue, following Butler and Salamon, inextricable in Irigaray from the notion
of dimorphic sex. Luce Irigaray, Sexes and Genealogies, trans. Gillian C. Gill (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1993), 2. Compare to the French, Sexes et parentés (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit,
1987), 14–​15.
174 Irigaray, Sexes and Genealogies, 2.
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of the two-​sex model. Insofar as her critique of the one, the body is a critique
of the form-​matter distinction, she nevertheless offers subtle explanations of
vilifications of the plurality of familial relations. Irigaray suggests that nature
is what corresponds to the desires of the one; Man defines what is sanctioned
as nature. For Irigaray birth is instead precisely a moment in which we ourselves are earth-​air-​fire-​water, together with all that breathe (thus the Latin
animalis, having breath) and touch. Birth is on this account no more an instance of earth-​air-​fire-​water agency than thinking or activity, and yet birth
can be castigated as matter when it is in a position of resistance to the polis.
It is in this context that I read Irigaray’s claims in the subsection on the
“double meaning of the word nature.”175 There the family unit takes its justification from appeals to one sense of the word “nature.” According to Man,
nature is an “immediate natural” (l’immédiateté naturelle). The most useful
example of this immediacy is “the obligation to give birth.”176 There is an obligation on the part of the wife to reproduce Man, and in doing so the family
unit “marks the beginning of a failure of respect for nature [non-​respect de la
nature].”177 There is in this way a second “meaning of the word nature” that
is incompatible with the first one. This failure of respect for nature attempts
to substitute itself for “the earth’s fertility” (la fertilité de la terre).178 Nature
in the first sense is the normative desire of Man. Nature in the second sense
has a “fertility” of its own that is trivialized or denied by Man. Man seeks to
replace that second nature.
The point that Irigaray is making here is that there is no such thing as immediate nature (l’immédiateté naturelle). Nature means art.179 All appeals to
mechanistic nature are oxymorons for Irigaray. They point to a desire of Man
for passivity in that which would limit Man’s influence.
In this respect Irigaray shares an understanding of this Latin term “nature” with Jane Bennett.180 Bennett also argues that nature has two meanings,
though she finds these in the work of Baruch Spinoza: natura naturata and
natura naturans: “Natura naturata is passive matter organized into an eternal
order of Creation; natura naturans is the uncaused causality that ceaselessly
175
Irigaray, Sexes and Genealogies, 3.
Irigaray, Sexes and Genealogies, 3.
177 Irigaray, Sexes and Genealogies, 3.
178 Irigaray, Sexes and Genealogies, 3.
179 Helen Fielding’s work suggests that this aspect of Irigaray’s work comes out of a reading of
Empedocles, for whom “there was no confrontation between physis and technē, nor between matter
(hylē) and form (eidos/​morphē).” See Fielding, “Questioning Nature,” 12.
180 For a reading that contrasts Bennett and Irigaray, see Jones, “Vital Matters.”
176
A Revised Irigarayan Study of the Hierarchy
83
generates new forms.”181 Irigaray would argue that natura naturata in the
world of Man is organizable, shapable according to the desires of the one.
Through the privileging of the bodies that alone align with this valuation,
Man is a capacity to be perfect nature.
We will see in Chapter 3 that Bruno Latour understands nature to have one
sense only, the passive matter understanding that, for Irigaray, Man gives to
nature. Latour argues that “nature” is problematically a word for the mechanistic half of a modern world divided into politics, the realm of governing,
and science, that which can be studied. Nature is for this reason, according
to Latour, by definition neither spontaneous nor recuperable as a concept.
Judith Butler likewise rejects whole cloth the term “nature” because of its
entrapping connotations.
When a word is so overworked, what does that say? For me, it is crucial to
listen to how someone uses this term, since people mean such vastly different
things by it.
At any rate, for Irigaray it is necessary to distinguish between the nature of
Man and nature as a term for a generativity that Man seeks overwrite. What it
is to be Man is to neglect this generativity. To deny it. Ultimately to consider
it to be pliant, however threatening it might sometimes be. For Irigaray this
neglect of the fertility of the earth-​air-​fire-​water would seem to be a claim
specific to the development of Man according to an ethics of sexuality as reproduction of Man, in a way that distinguishes Man. She writes in this same
section of a second meaning of nature as an ever-​shifting and internally inconsistent earth. There is always an art of living as this earth, and thus an “art
of the sexual,”182 according to which it is even possible to invent the notion of
genealogy. However, when humans must produce new humans “within the
genealogy of the husband, this historically marks the beginning of a failure
of respect for nature. A new notion or concept of nature is set up, which takes
the place of earth’s fertility, abandons its religious quality, its link to the divinity of women and to the mother-​daughter relation.” A new nature is set
up: it’s as if one of the things that Man means for Irigaray is that the birth of
a human, the simple and stunning birth of a human—​as part of a planet that
produces all sorts of life and for no reason at all—​is not enough. The simple
eruption of a new human is never enough for Man to celebrate. To be human,
one must be blanketed in something, given a genealogy, in order to be a new
181
182
Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 117.
Irigaray, Sexes and Genealogies, 3.
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human. What Irigaray laments is a genealogy in which that something is the
masculine, which is the source of a new and denying concept of nature, in
contrast to which certain bodies become unnatural—​namely everything that
departs from that which is Man.
Sylvia Wynter will think of this need to blanket a new human in some
naming pattern as coming from genre, the very character of what it is like to
be human. This is a point of confluence with Irigaray. Interestingly, genre is
the French term that Irigaray sometimes uses to articulate sexual difference
rightly understood, an art of the irreducible difference that is as necessary to
humanity as it is to air-​fire-​earth-​water. For Irigaray, as for Wynter, the point
would be that there is always more than one way of engaging in this welcoming of a new participant in genre. What is wrong for both is the gesture of
trying to establish oneself as universal body, as the whole of earth. For both
Irigaray and Wynter, the problem is Man.
Irigaray, in other words, sounds very much like Sylvia Wynter on this
point. And yet Wynter would argue, I think, that this first meaning of nature
is biocentrism, the insistence on a pure, because political, bios, bios defined
by biocentric Man, an inherently racial concept, with a very specific Man as
its center. She is speaking of Man and of the nature that Man by definition
directs as an inherently hierarchical way of life.
If the polis is a site of exclusion of matter, then Irigaray is quite critical
not of modernity but of the entire polis tradition. However, Irigaray doesn’t
appreciate the racial imperialism anticipated by Aristotle, or the distinctiveness of the modern nature/​culture distinction. So I would want to extend her
claim to argue that it is a crucial sign of the polis that a child born outside
of the genealogy of the one of the body, the lone complete human form, is
considered in some sense not really to have been born at all, at least not into
the political, the zone of that which is the Same as the body. Biomedical sex,
race, class, sexuality, ability assignment is a necessary part of this political-​
ecological structure that denies from the start the authority of that which is
matter. This is a fundamental modern rite, not only the biomedical sex assignment and the name, both at birth, but also biocentrism generally. The
practice is inherently problematic: it is organized around the very idea of
the one, the body, that there is one complete human form to which all are
directed, and according to which a certain definition of the two-​sex model is
natural. The child at birth into biocentrism is ranked by perceptions of that
child’s body, the family of origin, the quality of health, symmetry or lack of
symmetry, size, and other features that I am sure to be missing. Is it ironic or
A Revised Irigarayan Study of the Hierarchy
85
simply perfect that in such a biocentric genre when a person moves to name
themself, to name their own morphology, they are regarded as stepping outside of the polis? This gesture, articulating one’s own shape, is a disruption of
the nature of Man, which is inherently hierarchical. Likewise the lament of
the racialized “female-​headed household” is a fear of generation outside of
the modern definition of “the body” biocentric.183 What a revised Irigarayan
approach suggests is that these dynamics are shaped by a respect for the one,
the body and a corresponding failure of respect for the earth-​water-​fire-​air,
the birth event that no human invented but in which humans participate by
virtue of relationality itself. We are the agencies of earth-​water-​fire-​air, the
fertility of these, but we cannot pretend to find some way of becoming this
in which the way we describe ourselves to ourselves does not have a role to
play. Our rites, our myths should somehow reflect both that we are of earth-​
air-​water-​fire and that we have this creative relational role in that. There is
no “immediate natural,” no unilateral nature. The polis would have it that
each must be born into a de-​historicized human genealogy, which begins
again purely with each new, boundaried, national husband, and that doctors,
hierarchs of birth of the polis, can read the truth of another’s matter and implicitly or openly rank it. But this is an elemental denial, a denial simultaneously political and ecological.
Irigaray also writes in this essay of a theme begun in Speculum of the ways
in which a “phallic earth-​mother” can take the place of an appreciation of
earth-​water-​fire-​air.184 Is this a moment of an implicit critique of the two-​sex
model? In Sexes and Genealogies she writes, “Paradoxically, the cult of the
mother in our cultures today is often associated with a scorn or neglect of
nature.”185 This cult of the mother celebrates a mother who is meant to be a
replacement for relationality; she is frozen in a generic role. Her presupposed
fertility, her capacity for relating, is not her own. Her agency is compelled
in a confirmation of the fertility of a husband whose accomplishment must
be carried full term, and who is—​hypocritically—​generically understood insofar as the entire family is one unit, that of the husband. This renders the
very notion of the earth mother in a European or second European (the
“frightening proportions” of the United States, as Fanon understood it)186
context not even remotely an ecological notion. It’s a political notion strictly;
183
184
185
186
Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe.”
Irigaray, Speculum, 76. See also Jones, “Vital Matters,” 160, 163.
Irigaray, Sexes and Genealogies, 3.
Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 236–​237.
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a gesture of the polis. This gesture of the mother of the husband, Irigaray
is suggesting, is a denial of the status of human generation as relational, instead of Man. The earth mother becomes a kind of oxymoron that ultimately
serves to celebrate a two-​sex model mother who gives birth to the formal,
the one of the body, the human form of the polis. If this is a momentary exposition of some aspects of the two-​sex model by Irigaray, it is not sustained.
How does the earth mother relate to other mothers? Does she use them as
her envelope-​thing? There is much more to say.
It is this formality and genericness of the one, the body that I would argue
continues to inform contemporary language of the body even in attempts to
move past it. Though Irigaray is not explicitly critical of this English phrase
“the body” and even uses it herself, she is arguing throughout her work that
there is no generic the one, the body. The one of the body is a denial of her
own body. But the larger implication of this is that there is no so thing as
human in a generic sense, without shape, without one’s own shaping. That is
the elemental difference on which Irigaray’s work intermittently insists.
If I transpose Irigaray’s philosophy of elemental difference and place
it within the critique of biocentrism articulated by Wynter, then certain
features of Irigaray’s oeuvre come through. This critique of the birth of the
one in fact illustrates the biocentrism of the genealogy of the husband. Only
one sort of birth is recognized as legitimate by the one, the body, and this legitimacy denies the fertility of earth-​air-​water-​fire.
From where does the shape of this belief in the one, the body come? The
priority of the husband is for Irigaray synonymous with the priority of form
in “Aristotelianism and . . . the philosophical systems derived from it.”187
Irigaray argues that “the maternal-​feminine . . . serves as an envelope, a container” for Man. She is his “place,” in the way that the nurturing parent (I
believe this is not necessarily a sexuate role for Irigaray, but that is not totally
clear to me) is “the place” or horizon or framing for a child. This suggests
a way of understanding an Irigarayan sense of what it means to parent: to
parent is to provide a place from which a human can begin to sense their
own body, to contribute to a collective genre. There is nothing automatic or
guaranteed about this capacity for cultivation of one’s own shape, a shape
that is unchosen and in this sense unlearnable. A human requires nourishment of this sort. This Hegelian theme Irigaray translates into elemental
psychopolitical terms. For Irigaray, parenting and also a wider society that
187
Irigaray, Ethics of Sexual Difference, 10.
A Revised Irigarayan Study of the Hierarchy
87
is characterized by a mode of relations conducive to it are building blocks
for the formation, the development in practice, of a sense of one’s own life
for oneself. The problem, of course, as I have discussed above, is that in the
modern family “unit,” the homogenized family unit, everyone is ultimately
an undifferentiated appendage of the morphology of the husband. And in
this way the husband is likewise not a distinguishable self. The husband
requires a wife who serves as his envelope, his background, and a thing insofar as this wife and role player has no place of her own, no one relating to
the wife /​role player as a distinguishable self. This is a relational “becoming
which appropriates the other for itself by consuming it, introjecting it into
itself, to the point where the other disappears.”188 In this respect for the Same
there is ultimately no other at all. Others are part of a universal body devoted
to a flourishing of the Same, the body.
This mode of undifferentiated morphology for Irigaray is a continued
intuitive sanctioning in the present of what was originally an Aristotelian
ontological account of form or formal cause and matter or material cause.
All organisms, including humans, for Aristotle are composed of form and
matter. For Aristotle these were not diametrically opposed, as Emanuela
Bianchi explains. A thing’s formal cause for Aristotle “inheres in the thing,
resides within it as its immanent essence.”189 “Matter,” or a thing’s material
cause, is much harder to define or even locate because Aristotle “insists that
matter cannot exist apart from some form, cannot be spoken of by itself,
and is unknowable in itself.”190 “Matter” is the substrate or environment of
form. It is the “place” of form. Hylē emerges for the first time in the work of
Aristotle as a generalized term for “matter” as opposed to its “morphism,”
“form,” shape.191 This “hylomorphism” is a way of explaining the being of
all natural organisms for Aristotle and is at the same time an implicit declaration of the agency of form and the inherent lack of agency of that which is
matter.
It is because of this Aristotelian subordination of matter to form that
Irigaray suggests that there is such a tight relationship between envelopes and
things in “Aristotelianism and . . . the philosophical systems derived from
it.”192 Those who are the envelope of Man can also be made into the thing of
188
Irigaray, Elemental Passions, 27.
Bianchi, The Feminine Symptom, 33.
190 Bianchi, The Feminine Symptom, 36.
191 Bianchi explains that hylē is “an Aristotelian innovation.” In Plato there is no matter as such, and
the word hylē means wood. See The Feminine Symptom, 117.
192 Irigaray, Ethics of Sexual Difference, 10.
189
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Man. The aporia of envelope and thing is for Irigaray the morphological fate
of the feminine. It is not one of the aporias but the aporia of Aristotelianism,
Irigaray argues. While certainly women otherwise privileged in a European
and second European context (in Fanon’s sense, an intensification and not
just continuation of the dynamics of the European polis) can be treated as
things, it is also obvious that this account is incomplete. Thing is a political
non-​role that must be understood in the way that Saidiya Hartman writes of
it as a persistent condition of political denial. I will have much more to say
about this gesture of thing in Chapter 2 in a reading of Hartman.
Rachel Jones and Alison Stone have both argued that Irigaray seeks to redefine precisely this relationality—​of form to its matter—​that one finds in
Aristotle. Jones writes that Irigaray’s “project . . . demands that we find social
and symbolic forms in which matter’s own form-​giving powers are acknowledged, given value and even celebrated.”193 Alison Stone, citing Karen Barad,
argues that Irigaray suggests that because of the elusive position assigned to
matter in the tradition to which she responds, it is necessary to “reconceive
matter as having inherent shape and character, which it strives to realize.”194
It is possible to appreciate Irigaray’s concern with this hylomorphism or
form-​matter hierarchy in her articulation of the way in which what it is to
become Man is to regard all else as one’s “matter” or substrate that offers a
passive medium for Man’s own agency. In Elemental Passions, Irigaray writes
of a search for her own humanity, “between nature and culture,” as a kind
of letter to a generalized Man: “the matter and the tool which I remain to
build your dwelling place. Adhering to this mother earth always at hand and
so close that it mingles with yourself, intermingles in your self.”195 Irigaray
also writes, again as a kind of letter directed to the polarized nature-​culture
of Man, “You had form, I was matter for you. You were seeking the earth,
taking pleasure in being back on your ground, in burying yourself in it, using
your labour as a measure of your work, your possession, your production.”196
What it is to be Man on Irigaray’s account, which she takes to be well articulated by Aristotle and continuing in prevailing features of relationality in
the present, is to assume the role of form, who governs a compliant material
193
Jones, Irigaray, 176. See also Jones, “Philosophical Métissage,” 141–​142.
Stone, Luce Irigaray, 37; my emphasis. See also Alison Stone, “Irigaray’s Ecological
Phenomenology: Towards an Elemental Materialism,” Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology
46.2 (2015): 117–​131.
195 Irigaray, Elemental Passions, 48.
196 Irigaray, Elemental Passions, 60. See also the discussion of this passage in Jones, “Philosophical
Métissage,” 142.
194
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world that is man’s “environment,” neither distinguishable from Man nor
having powers of its own.
This form-​matter hierarchy is arguably the source of the very concept of
environment, with which political ecology by definition takes issue. Political
ecologist Jane Bennett writes that it is due to hylomorphism that “raw matter
can be given organic ‘form’ only by the agency of something that is not itself material. The hylomorphic model is thus a kind of vitalism, positing
some nonmaterial supplement with the power to transform mere matter
into embodied life.”197 Bennett argues that “the aim here is to rattle the adamantine chain that has bound materiality to inert substance and that has
placed the organic across a chasm from the inorganic. The aim is to articulate
the elusive idea of a materiality that is itself heterogeneous, itself a differential of intensities, itself a life.”198 The very notion of political ecology is to
see relationalities, among which humans also act. They are acted upon, and
they contribute action as well. I will have more to say about this crucial aspect of political ecology, the rejection of the concept of environmentalism, in
Chapter 2. Irigaray contributes the following: this notion of environment is
the form-​matter hierarchy, and Man is form. Man unilaterally presupposes a
substrate, the environment, which is an appendage of Man.
This critique of the form-​matter hierarchy is crucial. But I think that
in order to put it to good-​enough purpose, it is going to take a deeper appreciation, an appreciation that one finds in the work of Frantz Fanon and
discussed here in Chapter 3, of not the inertness but the threat, the inherently active threat of that which is taken to be matter and persistent thing
and positioned outside of the family that Irigaray critiques as Man’s nature.
For Aristotle, no household, no oikos was complete without the slave. And
there is also a beyond of the boundaries of the polis. Irigaray is silent about
these features of the polis. However as Frantz Fanon suggests, the biological
is another word for matter, and the biological indicates a political denial that
constitutes white morphology. In the modern polis, the basic structure articulated in Aristotle survives but also polarizes the polis. What makes the
modern polis the absolute polarization that Bruno Latour observes is in fact
the specter of the biological, as articulated by Frantz Fanon. Through this
concept Fanon suggests that the polis contrasts itself not only to a lack of
agency of matter, but precisely in response to a felt agency and threat of the
197
198
Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 56.
Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 57.
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biological. It is the threat of the extra-​political agency of the biological that is
distinguished from the polis in the modern version. I will discuss this in further detail in Chapter 3.
Neither Irigaray nor most of the literature of political ecology appreciates
sufficiently this threatening quality of matter, a projection of hostility, such
that it must be distinguished from the polis. This is why Irigaray can desire
an appreciation of the fertility of earth-​air-​water-​fire, an affirmation of the
agency of relationality. Irigaray can desire a reassignment of agency to matter
because she takes Man’s matter to be for the most part benign, according to
him. Fanon worries that matter—​“the biological”—​is for Europe and second
Europe a threat.
Nevertheless the Irigarayan critique of the form-​matter hierarchy is compelling because of the way that this becomes uncontroversially political in
her work. It is so compelling that I wonder whether the notion of matter can
be invoked at all without also invoking this notion of immaterial form. What
is “matter”? Is this not a word inherently invoking a contrast with agency?
Judith Butler, as I will discuss in Chapter 2, gives up the concept of matter
precisely because of these political implications, and it is possible to appreciate that decision when one considers the stakes of the label of matter in the
polis. Political ecologists such as Barad use the term without acknowledging
Butler’s rejection of matter on philosophical grounds, but at the same time
Barad is right to insist on a turn toward that which is named ecological.
There is a second way in which Irigaray undermines the political and ecological distinction. She argues that a problematic idealization of a “formal
and empty” one and the identification of this with the polis is a failure of respect for earth-​air-​fire-​water. As Axelle Karera has argued, “Anthropocene
thinking has generally been unable to yield a sustained critique of the racist
origins of global warming capable, in turn, of exposing the limits of its desire
to rethink—​to ‘revamp’ perhaps—​the concept of the ‘human.’ ”199 Irigaray’s
work opens a possible way to bridge the work of performativity and political ecology in drawing attention to the basic problem of the polis. As I have
argued, there are many limitations in Irigaray’s work, but there is a beginning
of an exposition there of the “formal and empty one” that contrasts itself with
the agency of earth-​air-​water-​fire.
I offer this work to others who might be able to extend it further than
I have been able to manage so far. As I will show in Chapter 2, performativity
199
Karera, “Blackness,” 38.
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and political ecology need to be put back together, not because they are
discourses that need to confront each other for a Hegelian sublation, but because they are evidence of the polis even in the work of those who do not
agree with the polis. They are evidence of a split made long ago that has been
renewed and renewed so much that the polis has convinced too many of its
own nature. Instead of our own elementality, there is the matter of the polis.
Of course there are no adequate terms for what is happening, whether in political or ecological discourse. And there are other ways of living around the
planet that we might turn to instead. Irigaray’s work is one possible way to
begin to expose the polis. Fanon’s is another, discussed in earnest beginning
in Chapter 3.
In Speculum of the Other Woman, in the chapter entitled “Any Theory of the
‘Subject’ Has Always Been Appropriated by the ‘Masculine,’ ” Irigaray writes
that a properly masculine subject “can sustain himself only by bouncing back
off some objectiveness, some objective. If there is no more ‘earth’ to press
down/​repress, to work, to represent, but also and always to desire (for one’s
own), no opaque matter which in theory does not know herself, then what
pedestal remains for the ex-​sistence of the ‘subject’?”200 Irigaray is not using
earth and matter here as metaphors.201 This theme has become much more
explicit in Irigaray’s more recent work, but the theme has been there from
her earliest writing. She is suggesting that the Same is a denial of variegations
and relationalities that are forced into a role that earth alone plays, a role of
receiving only. The masculine, in Irigaray’s sense of this term, makes use of
bodies it deems unlike itself. Masculinity is only capable of residing in certain
body, but not bodies; when it must come close, it is the one, an unrelational
gesture. The necessary remainder of the masculine is a relationality that the
one considers foreign to itself, which it treats as a pedestal in order to prop up
a unilaterally powerful Man. The environment as a concept is another way of
speaking about this pedestal without sufficiently criticizing it.
In this way for Irigaray the variations among bodies are always at least
in part what humanity means and thus are in some way constitutive of the
relationalities that vary with every human community. Or at least this would
be a way of translating Irigaray’s interest in what she names difference in
the essay “There Can Be No Democracy without a Culture of Difference.”202
200
201
202
Irigaray, Speculum, 133.
Neimanis, Bodies of Water, 77.
Irigaray, “There Can Be No Democracy.”
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There Irigaray argues that contemporary democracies deny the relationalities
that are not themselves uniform because of the original way in which the
polis was practiced. In the societies that make the polis of Aristotle their
model,203 there is a widespread understanding that the best of the worst political models is democracy. For Irigaray, it is important to remember the original design of the polis in which democracy was born as a concept, even if it
was not at the time universally celebrated as a mode of governance. Western
European societies from the eighteenth century to the present have been inspired by this ancient Greek notion of democracy. Irigaray writes, “What we
call democracy, in fact, was born in ancient Greece and had as its more or less
explicit stakes the differentiation of the masculine body from nature and the
mother, who was assimilated to the natural world. It was a matter of favoring
the emergence of man as such, especially of his sexuate body, thanks notably
to the constitution of language, of a logic, and of a society formed only by
men and between men . . . . man asserted his own forms—​including art—​
but the difference between one man and another man was not really taken
into account.”204 This was the ancient polis that was the universal body of a
larger society. The polis on this model was differentiable from the rest of the
world only by being its guiding agent. In precisely the way that form relates
to its matter, indistinguishably and yet hierarchically, the polis related to its
constituent parts, or oikoi. Irigaray writes that this notion of the polis can be
altered only if “legislation today . . . start[s]‌again from the person’s right to
exist in his or her difference, and from the duties toward himself or herself
as a person toward other persons respected in their difference, that is to say
from duties regarding coexistence.”205
This is a helpful critique of the polis in its ancient manifestation. But the
modern metropolis is no longer thought to be the continuous best part of a
larger unified organism. Irigaray makes clear how problematic the ancient
mode was, and yet she has little if anything to say that can address what Bruno
Latour rightly characterizes as the absolute distinction between politics and
ecology, in what he names the modern political-​ecological divide. Moreover,
Irigaray cannot address what Frantz Fanon names the Manichaeanism of this
polis, the absolute partitioning of native from the one that brings about, as
203 Not everyone holds that there are contemporary poleis. For two different answers to this question, see Kraut, Aristotle and Holmes, “Aristippus.” Holmes argues that efforts to institute a polis in a
contemporary society will result in tyranny. Even if this is true, does that prevent it from happening?
204 Irigaray, “There Can Be No Democracy,” 194.
205 Irigaray, “There Can Be No Democracy,” 197.
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Sylvia Wynter argues, the full panoply of Man’s classifications of differences
according to Man. To this day there is just this one discourse of biocentric difference among humanity, a difference that is either natural (Man’s
classifications) or imposed on humans by humans who are either ultimately
all the same or whose differences are not what make for political difference
(performativity).
In order to address the modern polis, I want to elaborate precisely the elemental difference that appears in Irigaray’s reading of the problems with democracy, in spite of the fact that her own work is directed only at the ancient
polis and at only a subset of its aspects. Irigaray writes that elemental difference is denied precisely as it is not appreciated that “our planet . . . is itself
in peril; our daily atmosphere is polluted in various ways; our food is often
toxic; our place of habitation, when it exists, is in various ways subjected
to the law of profit rather than that of respect for life; murderous wars are
carried out by supposedly democratic regimes with arguments and economic means and technologies beyond the reach of their adversaries; the
death penalty exists in countries that present themselves as models of democracy, etc. To put the accent back on life is simultaneously to begin with
the individual citizen and to provide him or her with a chance equivalent to
that of every other citizen of resuming a process of human individualization.
If one wishes to speak of an equality of opportunities, it is from this reality
and elementary and universal value that it is necessary to begin again.”206
The individualization that Irigaray argues is necessary for a democracy to be
possible is another way of speaking of a mutual relationality that treats every
person as a mutual place for others, instead of establishing patterns in which
certain persons routinely make others the envelope and thing for themselves.
This unilateral tool use of another as one’s own place, as extensions of one’s
undifferentiated self, without reciprocity, is what Irigaray names the one, the
body, Man. For Irigaray, “In order to be democratic, culture must take into
consideration the duality of genders and the quality of their relation. Our
supposedly democratic culture has been elaborated starting from the necessities of only one gender and in opposition to the other gender, considered
as a natural pole to be overcome in order to differentiate oneself from it.”207
In this English translation of an essay that to my knowledge has not been
published in French, Irigaray uses the term “gender,” but the word that would
206
207
Irigaray, “There Can Be No Democracy,” 198.
Irigaray, “There Can Be No Democracy,” 198–​199.
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connect this piece with other writings would be “the sexuate,” which I have
argued following Gayle Salamon is inextricable from the notion of inherently
dimorphic practice of sex in Irigaray’s oeuvre, what Thomas Laqueur names
the model of incommensurability. At any rate, achieving a duality, and not a
multiplicity, remains Irigaray’s answer to the denial of elemental difference of
the polis-​oikos.
The point that Irigaray is making should be rearticulated without the
gesture of sex and sexual difference as ahistorical. Insofar as sex and sexual
difference are for Irigaray ahistorical, they are apolitical, too. Sex, in the biocentric genre of Man, is considered to be unquestioned in shape, and in
the polarization between natural sex and unnatural gender, gender alone is
taken to be hierarchical and composed strictly of restrictive social roles and
tasks. Sex, it is suggested, is matter of fact. It is apolitical. This furnishes a
philosophy of dehumanization in the present: when a person is considered a
what, and not a who at all, this is precisely the moment of dehumanization.
But I think it is fair to say that likewise when a person is considered a disembodied who, and not understood as having any what at all, or whose what
is inconsequential, that is no less a dehumanization. The distinction itself is
intriguing. Natural sex and unnatural gender replicate this pattern. A revised
Irigarayan approach draws attention to the generic, oddly immaterial, the
one, the body of the polis and the multifarious implications of this hierarchical authority. This is precisely the mistake that is liberal democracy: the
exclusion or trivializing of elemental difference of the polis. This is synonymous with the exclusion of that which is ecological from what it means to be
political.
Elemental here doesn’t mean fundamental or foundational. It means what
it means for Irigaray: altering or maintaining, of itself. Difference refers to
the non-​reducibility of elementalities to each other. Each elementality is to
some extent a collaboration of elementalities, in the plural. But this is, following Irigaray, precisely why what it means to be elemental, the second
of the two natures mentioned earlier, must be understood in terms of art.
For Irigaray elementality—​properly understood as a fertility or productive power—​and art cannot be opposed. Nature properly understood is
artistic and multimorphic. In the chapters that follow this one I seek to combine Irigaray’s approach with that of Karen Barad, Judith Butler, Saidiya
Hartman, Bruno Latour, Frantz Fanon, and especially Sylvia Wynter. But
none of these places the emphasis precisely where Irigaray places it, on the
importance of appreciating the powers of non-​continuity per se within and
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across morphologies for improving the quality of relationality, including the
relationality that is humanity.
This brings me to one final aspect of Irigaray’s crucial lack of respect for
that which is only political and that which is only ecological: she insists on
attention to morphology. Morphology in Irigaray is the start of an elemental
sense of self that has so far been explored as identity. Criticisms of identity
are as common as invocations of it. As historian Susan Stryker has observed,
“Identity . . . [is] a word with a paradox at its core. It means that two things
that are not exactly the same can be substituted for one another as if they
are the same.”208 The paradoxical feature of identity as a concept is partly responsible for widespread disagreement as to the value of identity in the polis.
But as political theorist William Connolly has written, “When ‘identity politics’ is attacked as impervious to the larger whole upon which it depends, a
majority identity is implicitly invoked to characterize the whole.”209 Irigaray
suggests that regardless of whether one reflects on it or not, identification of
some sort is involved in what it is like to become human because what it is
like to become human is always an orientation of elemental difference. It is
the performative enactment of some shaping. But here is the very Irigarayan
moment: no human, no one society invented that feature of our very own
existence.
In keeping with the divisive way in which elemental difference is denied,
there is today an attempt to re-​establish hierarchy in the polis as a morphology via the homogenizing gesture of Man. But as a homogenizing gesture, Man is never successful. It is not meant to be successful. It is meant to
create dependencies. And along with this there is generally an animosity toward identity politics that truly misunderstands the hopefulness with which
the phrase was first uttered. It cannot be forgotten that it was the Combahee
River Collective that first articulated this phrase, identity politics.210 What
is “identity politics” in its original utterance? For them it meant cultivating
an understanding of one’s place at the junctures of what had been morphologically unified political movements, at least in terms of aspiration. The
Combahee River Collective advocated embracing their own role as the
overlap of political movements, as a mode of political engagement. If this
208 Susan Stryker, Transgender History: The Roots of Today’s Revolution (New York: Seal Press,
2017), 27.
209 William E. Connolly, Identity/​
Difference: Democratic Negotiations of Political Paradox
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), xiii.
210 Combahee River Collective, “A Black Feminist Statement,” 19.
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seems to be an oxymoron, identity in the polis, the combining of attention to
identity and to politics, that is only because of the homogeneous imperative
that is the hallmark of the polis, a tradition that uses an opposition between
morphology (literally, the logos of form or shape) and bodies to figure itself.
I will have more to say about the Combahee River Collective and the importance of the gesture of identity politics later.
Irigaray’s gesture of elemental difference offers a way of thinking about the
value of reflecting on rather than denying the complexity of identity, the cultivation of sense of self that is necessary for what it is to become human, including why this effort is perceived with such hostility in the polis. Irigarayan
morphology, Rachel Jones has explained, guides one’s attention to the ways
in which form is not the instruction of matter. Form doesn’t instruct matter.
It is not that which is the agency of matter. The hierarchy of form and matter
is undermined by Irigarayan morphology, to such an extent that form itself
becomes something of a troubling concept. Form is a troubling concept insofar as it is defined in contrast to matter.
Elemental difference is ultimately neither form nor matter. It is neither active nor passive. It is an attempt to get beneath these distinctions to the presupposition of the polis that makes them. It defies such distinction-​making
that privileges the one of the body. It seems that for Aristotle, avoidance of
elemental difference justifies making the distinction between polis and oikos
in the first place. The modern polis is likewise differentiable from matter, but
matter is cast outside of it, barred from it. This makes it difficult to talk about
elemental difference among humans (as we will see in the work of Karen
Barad, which I discuss in Chapter 2) because the presupposition of a generic
humanity, the one, the body, the one finished human form, is so central to
the distinction between human (political) and nonhuman (ecology). In what
way, even in the midst of the modern polis, could it be possible to articulate
an appreciation of the elemental difference that is a necessary part of what it
is like to become human? An appreciation of what is called identity has so
far been one way of addressing this. But as Susan Stryker indicates, as I mentioned earlier, the word “identity” is conceptually fraught.
Linda Martín Alcoff articulates an affirmation of identity in The Future of
Whiteness that is compatible, I think, with that of Luce Irigaray.211 While this
is largely what I will take in Chapter 2 to be a social constructionist account,
insofar as I am not sure whether or not Alcoff would dispute my reading of
211
Alcoff, The Future of Whiteness, 46.
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her work as engaged in a philosophy of elemental difference, Alcoff is also interested in the degree to which crafted identities are currently shaped by hierarchies of “perceptible differences” that therefore shape human relationality.
Identities are made, but they also convey evaluations of what I am calling elemental difference. Alcoff argues that “social identity categories . . . are [first]
explanatory, [second] an aspect of our material existence, [third] a feature
of collective or group subjectivity, and [fourth] the necessary effect, at least
in some cases, of historical experiences.” Alcoff offers this as a philosophy of
race and ethnic identity specifically, but she does mention in the early pages
of the book the degree to which bodies are sorted according to the notion of
(two-​sex model) sexual difference, which is “biological,” biocentric; in other
words the bodies are sorted according to the dictates of biocentric Man.
Irigaray offers no distinct account of race or ethnicity. And I fear that
Irigaray’s work does precisely what Alcoff argues all white feminist theory
tends to do, namely that it means to “incorporate analysis of Latina lives
within feminist theory” instead of what it should do, namely, “empower
Latinas as theorists themselves.”212 Still less does Irigaray’s work empower or
nourish the agency of Mariana Ortega’s question, “Where do we find Latina
desire, lust, and love?”213
But what Irigaray is arguing is particularly compatible with the second
aspect of Alcoff ’s philosophy of identity, the claim that identity categories are material practices that “confer status differences on perceptible
differences.”214 Alcoff writes, “By saying that identities are material, the point
is not that their meaning or correlate status is entirely determined by their
materiality, but to counsel against the idea that identities are illusions or mere
figments of our ideologically befuddled imagination.”215 Alcoff ’s account of
identity is not biocentric in the specific respect in which Irigaray’s is also not
biocentric: in neither case is the claim that predetermined bodily ranking
makes unnecessary the study of form. The point is that this is currently how
senses of self are mandated by the political, by the polis. Identities are political in the Aristotelian sense: “having to do with the realm of human affairs,”
which he defines as the realm of the one complete human form.216 If the polis
212 Linda Martín Alcoff, “Decolonizing Feminist Theory,” in Theories of the Flesh: Latinx and Latin
American Feminisms, Transformation, and Resistance, ed. Andrea J. Pitts, Mariana Ortega, and José
Medina (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020), 21.
213 Mariana Ortega, “Cámara Queer,” in Pitts, Ortega, and Medina, Theories of the Flesh, 278.
214 Alcoff, The Future of Whiteness, 49.
215 Alcoff, The Future of Whiteness, 49.
216 Arendt, The Human Condition, 13. Arendt writes that bios politkos for Aristotle meant “the
realm of human affairs.” That’s the sense of the bios of biocentrism. Arendt argued for a reinstatement
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of Aristotle could afford never to consider what Alcoff calls identity, this was
because it was something that had absolutely to be shared. Citizens of the
polis were in fact talking about identity all the time, a shared identity.
Alcoff ’s philosophy of identity is a helpful articulation both of the
problems with the hierarchical impositions of identity and with the cortico-​
visceral217 need of a person to articulate their own sense of self in a given
context. For Alcoff, to ignore identity is to ignore what it is like to be human.
I seek to add to this that it is the tradition of the polis that bolsters “popular
accounts of identity formation that view it as necessarily involving either authoritarianism from above, or irrationality from below.”218
Key to Alcoff ’s account is a balance of attention to the fact that (1) a centralized conferring of status according to bodily features characteristically
takes precedence over a dispersed process of elaborations of identities and
yet that (2) attention to this process of elaborations of identities is a source of
power, a source of located agency. Is it paradoxical that modern laws are universal, and yet humans are supposed to come in nameable, studiable groups?
While laws are meant to be either identity-​less or identity-​transcending, for
Alcoff the articulation and the critique of identities are necessary for learning
to understand the shapings of people.219
In 1977 the Combahee River Collective published “A Black Feminist
Statement,” a document that coined the phrase “identity politics”220 and
in doing so went sharply against the current of generic modern politics, a
politics that distinguishes bodies of science from the one, the body of the
polis. The Combahee River Collective understood identity politics as an engagement in political struggle in keeping with “a healthy love for ourselves,
our sisters, and our community which allows us to continue our struggle
and work.”221 They insisted that in order to be political, they needed to
understand identity practices. They created what many regard as an oxymoron: identity politics. They write that engaging in politics on behalf of a
of this polis, which is difficult to imagine without its distinction from oikos. What is the polis if not an
outgrowth of the oikos and a guiding element of bios? As Katherine Sophia Belle (formerly Katherine
T. Gines) argues, Arendt’s own sense of the political, like that of Aristotle, “seems to place more emphasis on what is to be excluded from the political realm rather than providing a positive account of
what belongs to the political realm.” See Katherine T. Gines, Hannah Arendt and the Negro Question
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014), 52.
217
218
219
220
221
Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 216 n. 35.
Alcoff, “Decolonizing Feminist Theory,” 20.
On this point, see also Rasheed, “Islam, Sexuality.”
Combahee River Collective, “A Black Feminist Statement,” 19.
Combahee River Collective, “A Black Feminist Statement,” 18.
A Revised Irigarayan Study of the Hierarchy
99
love for themselves is a necessity because “Black women’s extremely negative
relationship to the American political system (a system of white male rule)
has always been determined by our membership in two oppressed racial and
sexual castes.”222 In other words their oppression as a group is a confluence
of the oppressions felt by and addressed by political movements and organizations that are able to isolate and focus on just one part or another—​just
the subordinations of a race, or just the subordinations of a sexuality, or just
the subordinations of a gender, or just the subordinations of a class. They famously write that they “reject pedestals, queen hood, and walking ten paces
behind. To be recognized as human, levelly human, is enough.”223 In a century of modernism and ecofascism (more on this in Chapter 3), they reject
“biological determinism [as] a particularly dangerous and reactionary basis
upon which to build a politic.”224 Here again there is a critique of biocentrism, a critique of the polis.
What the Combahee River Collective suggests is that to assert an identity or identities is to struggle in the polis. I mean “struggle” in two senses.
First, one will have to engage in conflict in order to make it clear how much
it matters that one is appreciated not just for who but for what one is, including the life course that one wants. The who and the what are the political
and the ecological by which the polis knows itself. To put these together is to
struggle against the polis.225 And, second, to dare to speak about identity is to
get involved. To nourish one’s own identity is to take a shape that could be in
conflict with that of the polis. We can say that the singularities among us are
superficial. But I argue that the polis is premised on their denial.
The Combahee River Collective didn’t invent identity politics. They insist on this themselves.226 They were just the first to name it. What I seek
to point out is that they had to do so precisely because politics still means
polis. Politics has so far been understood as a realm of defensively consistent
and therefore absent morphology. It is a realm that pretends to be the site of
agency. A background of enforced shared identity was what made possible
all confrontation and fixed boundaries of the polis. As a result of the modern
polis’s polarization of homogeneous polis and heterogeneous ecology, to reveal that identity is relevant to one’s position and power in and as the polis is
222
223
224
225
226
Combahee River Collective, “A Black Feminist Statement,”16.
Combahee River Collective, “A Black Feminist Statement,” 19.
Combahee River Collective, “A Black Feminist Statement,” 21.
Compare Arendt, The Human Condition, 181.
Combahee River Collective, “A Black Feminist Statement,” 16.
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A Philosophy of Elemental Difference
a revolutionary claim. The Combahee River Collective doesn’t just make this
claim; they name their own efforts identity politics. This statement affirms
that the polis is not only constituted by the one, the body that relates via and
as the Same. In truth it never was. The polis requires other bodies in order to
outline itself. The political thrives on nothing other than identities (“a system
of white male rule,”227 as they put it, admittedly in two-​sex-​model, sex-​
gender-​distinction terms). And thus mingling of intervention in the polis
with identity reflection, talking about identities as the polis, as the political itself, is a conversation that politics in the usual generic sense makes necessary.
But then it also becomes easy to see why so many people consider “identity politics” to be a threat to (the unity of) the polis. Identity politics, in the
Combahee River Collective’s sense of this phrase, is an explication of the
contours of the polis. What the Combahee River Collective suggests is that
the beginning of a new way of relating is not in continuing in the way of the
polis, the way of aspiring to a homogeneity of life course, of experience, of
event, but of appreciating that identity is and has always been part of what it
is like to become human. Only then can the disparities that the polis creates
be addressed.
Recognition is an attempt to extend the universal body gesture beyond
the one, the body of the polis. Recognition as a concept must seek political
acknowledgment for what Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw calls “one dimensional” difference. And this is precisely that on which the gesture of identity
politics in the Combahee River Collective’s “Black Feminist Statement” was
meant to intervene. Recognition of elemental difference is not possible because it is for the vast majority of people in any genre not a one-​dimensional
pattern of oppression. Not only that, but as Susan Stryker puts it, “Of course
it’s possible to have many different, overlapping, or even contradictory personal identities and for people who are significantly different from one
another in some ways to be included in the same category.”228 The significance of elemental difference for what it is like to be-​become human is that
for the vast numbers of people identity is not going to be a matter of one-​
dimensional articulation that precisely fits a large number of others. This
doesn’t make identity insignificant. It makes it personal. And the personal is
the polis. The personal is both presupposed in and denied by the polis. Each
human engages in a process of coming to understand their own who-​what,
227
228
Combahee River Collective, “A Black Feminist Statement,” 16.
Stryker, Transgender History, 27.
A Revised Irigarayan Study of the Hierarchy
101
these aspects that the polis means to splinter. That this is necessary to what it
is like to be-​become human can be denied, or it can be taken up as an affirmation of elementality.
Instead of recognition, what is needed is analysis of the functioning of the
polis itself, its very bodily disembodied shape: a mode of relation through homogeneity that is synonymous with a supposed surpassing of oikos, the use
of other bodies as one’s environment or envelope. Appreciating the shaping
of morphology, the shape of the polis is a way out of the polis, just as those
everyday authoritarians who insist on the homogeneity of what it means to
be the one, the body, the human have feared.
Sylvia Wynter writes that “we humans auto-​institute ourselves as the
uniquely hybrid mode of living being that we are.”229 I want to agree with
this but also add, inspired by Irigaray, that the very fact that there is no homogeneous human, that humanity is inevitably multimorphic, each of us
elaborating a sense of self that it always in process, is a participation in the
relational belonging that exceeds any one of us. No human is responsible for
this aspect of ourselves. And so ultimately I will question Wynter’s explicit
gesture to hybridity. Yes, we create identities. Following Irigaray, I will use the
term “morphology” for this need. Yes, we create morphologies.
No human created or creates the fact that we create morphologies in the
plural. That is owed to what we might with Jane Bennett call our own “thing-​
power,” agency for which the polis by definition does not have adequate
concepts. And in most cases, to be a thing is to be vilified by the polis. This
denial has significances that cross the ecological and political divide, significance that challenges that very hierarchy. For Irigaray there is no such thing
as a justly homogeneous, undifferentiated sense of self. Such a self must make
use of another as one’s envelope, environment, thing. And yet this is precisely
what characterizes the polis and its recent modern political-​ecological hierarchy. In the next chapter I read expositions of that hierarchy in contemporary texts.
229
Wynter, “The Ceremony Found,” 226.
2
Performativity and Political Ecology,
Matter’s Politics
In the previous chapter I sought to rewrite a gesture of elemental difference
that is in between the lines of Luce Irigaray’s philosophy of sexual difference.
The gesture of the body and its forced homogeneity of morphology figures
the denial of matter of the polis. I want now to take that philosophy of elemental difference and consider its implications for a political-​ecological hierarchy that mutually defines these terms. In this chapter I try to illustrate that
split—​between political and ecological—​in contemporary texts. It appears in
two traditions in tandem. In the next chapter I’ll try to put these parts back
together with the help of Bruno Latour and Frantz Fanon.
In this chapter I offer a reading of Karen Barad, placing her account of the
need for a concept of agential realism beside the performative 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 text1 and a powerful
illustration of the limits of performativity. I argue that this crucial text nevertheless neglects the philosophical question of political difference—​the
question of it—​precisely because of the need to direct attention away from
politics in the usual anthropocentric sense and to think from a very specific
sense of “nonhuman.” When differences among humans do come up, specifically differences in ability, Barad takes the performative approach that
gives all credit and blame for non-​universal experiences among humans
to humans themselves. For Barad, the key articulation of performativity is
that of Judith Butler, whose own concept of performativity does not take
into account the agencies of material technologies. Barad then articulates
1 Barad does not name agential realism in this way, though she does ascribe to the political ecological project (see Meeting the Universe Halfway, 59). Meeting the Universe Halfway is helpfully very
critical of Bruno Latour in precisely that passage. Barad rightly worries about the lack of a theory of
power in Latour. Still Barad does appear to ascribe to political ecology’s interest in (1) the climatic
powers of human-​nonhuman assemblages, (2) the critique of anthropocentrism, and (3) the rejection of environmentalism. Because of these key features, I take Meeting the Universe to be a crucial
political ecology text.
Elemental Difference and the Climate of the Body. Emily Anne Parker, Oxford University Press.
© Oxford University Press 2021. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780197575079.003.0003
Performativity and Political Ecology
103
the project of Meeting the Universe Halfway as a broadening of Butlerian
performativity. Saidiya Hartman expresses an entirely separate drawback of
performativity: its considerable powers cannot explain the “sheer force of the
utterance ‘black,’ ” the intensity of the animosity toward racialized bodies.
Thus Hartman articulates a need to think from a very specific sense of “nonhuman,” its performative creation by white people seeking to maintain unilateral political authority.
Chapter 1 shows that there are not one but two concerns with
performativity that demonstrate a political ecological split: (1) a political
ecologist concern about the lack of attention to “nonhuman” agency in the
sense of electricity and technology in the work of Barad and (2) a distinct
concern about the unjust political creation of people as “nonhumans.” Both
concerns cannot be stated at one time without one project or the other losing
its crucial outline.
This chapter illustrates the overwhelming influence of the performative
philosophy of political difference. There seems to be no room for an account
of political difference that affirms elemental singularities, as obvious as they
are conceptually elusive. The sort of difference that I am trying to locate is not
biocentric difference, but that is what gets named difference in the present.
In eighteenth-​and nineteenth-​century biological discourse the name of difference was that which has been “observed” by someone else, the scientist,
the doctor, the zoologist. Difference is in this sense “human made.” However
differences among humans are obviously not entirely human-​made. And yet
this claim currently can only be understood in a biocentric way. There is a
need for an alternative philosophy of political differences among humans,
differences of the polis that the polis ultimately denies. There is a need for an
understanding of such differences that doesn’t attribute all agency to humans
and—​here’s where I part ways with political ecology—​that does not reverse
the significant achievements of performativity and social constructionism
more generally. In seeking a new account of political differences, I am inspired by performativity as well as by political ecology.
I consider first of all the very notion of social construction. I locate my primary sense of it in the realist account of Linda Martín Alcoff and the performative one of Judith Butler. I will focus for the rest of the chapter on Butler’s
performativity because it unites two texts that I take to be as significant as
they are mutually resistant, the work of natural scientist Karen Barad and
humanist Saidiya Hartman. I discuss the significance of the fact that in an
important work of political ecology Karen Barad subscribes to a key element
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A Philosophy of Elemental Difference
of performativity, namely its philosophy of political difference, even though
she is also articulating one of the most important critiques of performativity.
My interest is in the fact that Barad’s sensitivity to what she names “agential
realism” requires setting aside the question of the origin of discontinuity of
humans among humans due to the crucial need for directing attention away
from anthropocentric politics.
For Barad, the key account of performativity is that of Judith Butler, whose
concept of performativity does not take into account the agencies of material technologies. Barad articulates her project as a broadening of Butlerian
performativity.2 In Barad it is possible to understand the limits of the human
from an ecological perspective, but in this work a political “nonhuman” is
hidden.
After this reading of Barad I turn to the work of Saidiya Hartman. Like
Barad, Hartman develops Butlerian performativity while also registering a concern with it. Hartman’s primary concern is the performativity
of “white ideality” and its corollary blackness. But Hartman also expresses
a lesser-​
noticed frustration with this articulation of political difference: performativity’s considerable powers cannot speak to the “sheer
force of the utterance ‘black,’ ” its force as an utterance. The depth of the
thingification, “the inescapable prison house of the flesh,”3 that which is created, “exceeds”4 the performative account of racial difference, the force of the
“strategies through which it is made to appear as if it has always existed.”5 To
say that racial difference is created does not yet speak of its seemingly timeless force and why it is created with such hostility over and over again. There
is in this way a subtle suggestion in Hartman that the needs of the politics that
are white, the polis that is white, are underestimated by a performativity that
sticks so closely to the notion that white and black are projections. Hartman,
like Barad, does not break with performativity in Scenes of Subjection. She
expands performativity. Barad and Hartman thus both raise concerns with
performativity as two of its elaborators.
2
3
4
5
Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, 191–​195.
Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 57.
Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 58.
Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 57.
Performativity and Political Ecology
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2.1. What Is Social Construction?
What is social construction? Performativity is a philosophy of social construction, though performativity is on my reading the most consistent
articulation of social construction. It has to be understood that social construction is a vast and valuable alteration in modern human self-​perception.
As Sylvia Wynter has explained, differences “among humans” in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were not in fact understood by Europeans
to be differences among humans at all. They were peculiarities observed and
cataloged by, as Wynter puts it, biocentric Man who was and is the definition
of the one of the body, the complete human form. It is not until the middle
to late twentieth century that a full rejection of this account of difference—​
difference as the catalog of the others of biocentric Man—​is articulable because of much engagement in the polis, against the difference-​denying
sculpture of that polis. And yet the rejection of difference as a catalog of the
others of biocentric Man, what today can be understood as the political philosophy of difference or social construction, is not currently understood to
be a rejection of anything so much as an explanation of how the others of
Man come to be considered other. It is sometimes articulated as an account
of how differences are made, not found.
In the work of philosophers such as Linda Martín Alcoff and Judith Butler
social construction is a way of understanding how differences come to be
not only created but constitutive of the politics of humans, among humans.
This is not the way that eighteenth-​and nineteenth-​century scholars of racial anatomy, indigence, incommensurable sexual difference, and ability understood their subject matter, their subject/​matter. Social construction is a
present-​day way of speaking about the fact that such political difference is
understood precisely to be made and unnatural in that sense. Social construction represents a philosophical watershed that is in danger of being set
aside by those who advocate a full turn to political ecology.6
For that reason I don’t mean to displace social construction so much as
to converse with it, to develop a position that can collaborate with it. It is
time to revisit the question of political difference, with the help of social
construction, especially the philosophy of performativity. Is there such a
thing as a non-​universal bodily event? If so, to what is this owed? If a non-​
universal bodily event is owed to injustice, strictly to differential treatment,
6
An important exception to this is Braidotti, Posthuman Knowledge.
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A Philosophy of Elemental Difference
then it should be eliminated. In that moment it is necessary to double down
on universal political definition in the context of the modern polis. But if
non-​universal bodily events are somehow part of what it means to become
human, then much current political functioning is based on a deep misunderstanding of what it is like to be-​become human.
What is social construction, that with which I want to converse?
To begin with I can put it simply: social construction takes the origin of political differences to be politics itself. Social construction rightly understands
plural identities as central to human relationality. It seeks an explanation of
the generation of such identities in human relationality.
Beyond that initial definition, social construction is extremely difficult to
define because its proponents are so many and so various. I will narrow my
interest to two philosophies of social construction, a realist version in the
work of Linda Martín Alcoff and a performative one in the work of Judith
Butler. I discuss Alcoff in part because I take her work to be informative for
my own, as discussed in Chapter 1, but especially because putting Alcoff and
Butler side by side gives at least part of the respect owed to the range of possible philosophies of social construction. The distance between Alcoff and
Butler is just the beginning of the wide range of philosophies that count as
social construction. The performative version of social construction is the
one that Karen Barad and Saidiya Hartman will seek to expand. In their
expansions, both articulate reservations, reservations that are an indication of the limits of performativity and, arguably, social construction more
generally.7
Linda Martín Alcoff ’s The Future of Whiteness is a work that, though it
is not directly engaged in the political ecology-​performativity conversation
at which I aim, is nevertheless a helpful place to start for an understanding
of social construction. Alcoff articulates her notion of social construction as
“realist.” In her earlier work Visible Identities, Alcoff argues that social identities are real in the sense that they are “relational, contextual, and fundamental to the self.”8 The more recent book The Future of Whiteness begins
with an even more explicitly philosophical realist account of “social identity
7 I cannot consider all possible philosophies of social construction. But performativity in my view
is the most consistent social constructionist account. Alcoff ’s, as I explain in a subsequent note, tends
in the direction of an account of elemental difference on my reading.
8 Linda Martín Alcoff, Visible Identities: Race, Gender, and the Self (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2006), 90. See also Linda Martín Alcoff, “Who’s Afraid of Identity Politics?,” in Realist Theory
and the Predicament of Postmodernism, ed. Paula M. L. Moya and Michael R. Hames-​García
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 312–​341.
Performativity and Political Ecology
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categories in general” before going on to offer a philosophy of whiteness in
particular.9 Alcoff describes social identity categories as build-​ings, things
built. As such, an identity is not a “natural, found object,”10 but neither is the
role of identities deniable historically or in the present. Social construction,
Alcoff explains, is a term for the ongoing building of identities. Their having
been built is the way in which they are real. That identities are built does not
at all suggest that they are false or should be denied. This is the meaning of
“realism.” Alcoff names her approach a realist one insofar as social identities
are not “ideological obfuscation”11 that could or should be avoided in public
or academic conversation.
Alcoff outlines four aspects of this realist account of social identity. First,
social identities explain. For example, they explain the reactions that a
person might encounter, coming from people around them. Social identities
“help us to make sense of what we experience as well as to comprehend larger
historical events.”12 Second, social identities are material practices in the
sense that they produce “a kind of visual registry organizing the interactions
in social spaces,” which makes the material world, including all bodies composing the human, whether positively (white, tight, symmetrical, incapable
of pregnancy, autonomous) or negatively (black, dark, large, asymmetrical,
pregnable, and dependent as well as parenting of bodies in this domain).
With respect to the human, identities assimilate all that is available to the
senses13 and confer “status differences on perceptible differences. The point of
saying that identities are material is not that their meaning or correlate status
is entirely determined by their materiality, but to counsel against the idea
that identities are illusions or mere figments of our ideologically befuddled
imagination.”14 This second part of Alcoff ’s account of social identities
9
Alcoff, The Future of Whiteness, 39.
Alcoff, The Future of Whiteness, 39.
Alcoff, The Future of Whiteness, 46.
12 Alcoff, The Future of Whiteness, 47.
13 Alcoff, The Future of Whiteness, 49.
14 Alcoff, The Future of Whiteness, 49. Here is the aspect of Alcoff ’s work that possibly gestures in
the direction of a dispute with the philosophy of social construction of Judith Butler insofar as Alcoff
underscores a distinction between status as opposed to perception. Anticipating the suggestion that
that which is perceived is reducible to a higher or lower status that should simply be eliminated,
Alcoff writes, “It is undoubtedly true that in a European-​dominated aesthetic field we are trained to
perceive and overemphasize small differences or physical aspects that should be trivial, but what we
are perceiving is not an illusion in and of itself ” (The Future of Whiteness, 50). She adds, invoking the
work of Patricia Williams, “Even if we take as a goal diminishing the meaningfulness of racialized
physical attributes, it is simply untrue that attempting to ignore such attributes today will realize
the dream. In fact, spreading the lie that it is possible to ignore entirely such radicalized differences
helps to conceal racism” (51). See also Patricia J. Williams, Seeing a Color-​Blind Future: The Paradox
of Race (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997). It is this moment of Alcoff ’s work that I take to
10
11
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A Philosophy of Elemental Difference
understands them as “a meaningful (or meaning-​laden) organization of
the phenomenologically accessible material world. A simpler way of saying
this is that identities are not mere talk but an aspect of our material environment.”15 What emerges as political difference for Alcoff is a function of
“early training to pick out and focus on specific kinds of attributes.”16 The
perceptual practices that constitute difference are owed to corporeal habits of
sensing and thus participate in the creation of built environments.
The third and fourth aspects of Alcoff ’s realist account of social identity
give depth to these first two features. The third aspect of identities is that they
are patterns of shared perceptual attunement of groups. The fourth is that
they are the product of what has happened before, history, and thus they are
a “historical residue” that is sustained unless it is acknowledged.17 Whether
they are acknowledged or not, identities are practices of placing oneself specifically and not generically in relation to a past that therefore “isn’t even
past.”18 With respect to whiteness Christina Sharpe writes, “The disaster of
Black subjection was and is planned; terror . . . is deeply atemporal.”19 The
polis is maintained in spite of historical alterations of the details of the polis.
Identities are another way of speaking of habits—​of perceptual attunement,
of narratives—​that are rooted precisely in the fact that they are established
as real over time, but also in a repetitive manner that defies the teleological
sense of history as developmental.
Alcoff ’s philosophy of social construction is in this way an insistence on
the political salience of identity, the role of identity in the making of the polis.
Alongside this development of a realist account of identities in the work of
Alcoff, Judith Butler elaborates an alternative account of their social construction, a notion of performativity. Butler’s account seeks to understand
the very word “real” and its corollary “ideal” in their alternate guise of matter
and its corollary form. Butler’s critique and rearticulation of the gesture of
social construction understands identities as crucial in precisely the way
that Alcoff does, but Butler seeks to understand how these very concepts—​of
be sympathetic with my own account and that makes Alcoff ’s work, however realist, also in a complicated relationship to the notion of performativity.
15
Alcoff, The Future of Whiteness, 49.
Alcoff, The Future of Whiteness, 49.
Alcoff, The Future of Whiteness, 56.
18 William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun (New York: Random House, 1951), 81. Cited in Sullivan,
The Physiology of Sexist and Racist Oppression (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 122.
19 Sharpe, In the Wake, 5, see also 9.
16
17
Performativity and Political Ecology
109
real and material—​are themselves politically produced. For this reason
Butler articulates identities as ongoingly elaborated and “permanently
problematic.”20 What Alcoff articulates as solid and functioning, Butler
renders disputable and alterable. While Alcoff ’s account, as I have explained
in Chapter 1, is compatible with a philosophy of elemental difference and
departs from social construction at least insofar as that is the case, Butler’s
provides a more faithfully social constructionist philosophy of political difference, insofar as for Butler political difference is consistently “enabled, if
not produced, by such norms.”21 Identities constitute bodily selves in Butler
no less than in Alcoff, but for Butler it is crucial to understand the very politics orchestrated by relegation of some bodies to the role of matter as opposed
to that which is real. Butler’s sense of performativity is, following Irigaray, a
critique of the subordination of matter according to which some bodies are
made to play the role of matter in the polis. First in Gender Trouble and then
in Bodies That Matter Butler articulates a notion of performativity that makes
explicit use of the philosophy of social construction and then alters the sense
of that term in subsequent works.
In Gender Trouble, Butler first articulates at length the concept of
performativity. She writes, “Gendered bodies are so many ‘styles of the
flesh.’ . . . A corporeal style, an ‘act,’ as it were, which is both intentional and
performative, where ‘performative’ suggests a dramatic and contingent construction of meaning.”22 The corporeal style of “discrete genders” is composed of “various acts of gender [that] create the idea of gender, and without
those acts, there would be no gender at all. Gender is, thus, a construction
that regularly conceals its genesis; the tacit collective agreement to perform, produce, and sustain discrete and polar genders as cultural fictions is
obscured by the credibility of those productions—​and the punishments that
attending not agreeing to believe in them; the construction ‘compels’ our belief in its necessity and naturalness.”23 The empirical practices of naming and
surgically forcing two “discrete and polar” sexes result from the presupposition of two “discrete and polar” genders, Butler famously argues. That there
20 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London: Routledge,
1999), 163. I trace the distance between Alcoff and Butler to their respective placements of emphasis.
Both take identities to be necessary to what it is like to be human, and both take identities to be constantly enforced and subtly altered. Alcoff places emphasis on the former, while Butler is interested in
the latter. Ultimately neither of them, on my reading, questions the necessity for taking seriously the
role of identity in and as politics.
21 Butler, Bodies That Matter, 15.
22 Butler, Gender Trouble, 177.
23 Butler, Gender Trouble, 178.
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A Philosophy of Elemental Difference
are two discrete and polar genders is “a performative accomplishment” based
on the idea of gender itself, not an expression of an inward natural sex, in
other words, a pre-​political nature.
Butler’s critique of gender as nature debunks the supposed two discrete
and polar genders as expressive of natural sex, as fixed and prior to human
events. In making this argument, Butler does not discredit gender identification per se. Performativity denies the notion of natural sex, precisely
insofar as this is one of the places where the supposed inertness of matter
shows up in politics. That the very idea of natural sex is the target of Butler’s
account is not so easy to see in part because drag infamously serves as an
exemplary site of gender performativity in Butler’s account. Drag is not
necessarily an activity that troubles the philosophy of sex of the two-​sex
model. Nevertheless Butler writes that “in imitating gender, drag implicitly
reveals the imitative structure of gender itself—​as well as its contingency.”24
While this does not necessarily lead to a questioning of dimorphic apolitical sex, drag “avows” the distinctness of sex and gender that allows gendered
practices to indicate the changeability and artistic nature of the entire edifice. Butler’s point I think is to dramatize an instance of a celebrated discrepancy between sex and gender, a moment in which one can see the artifice
inherent in both. Drag demonstrates that it is necessary to give up the polarization according to which sex is something inert and automatic and gender
is something enacted. Butler makes the same observation about all “performative accomplishments,” including the two discrete and oppositionally defined sexes.
The distance opened up here between sex and gender in Gender Trouble, as
well as the affirmation of discontinuity and “cross”-​identification that such a
distance makes possible, is only part of the argument. The most crucial pages
of the book are dedicated to the claim that the “sedimentation of gender
norms produces the peculiar phenomenon of a ‘natural sex’ or a ‘real woman’
or any number of prevalent and compelling social fictions.”25 The primary
concern of Gender Trouble is not the performativity of gender, and it is not
making the distinction between sex and gender. After all both of these were
already well understood by the time of the writing of Gender Trouble.26 The
primary concern of Gender Trouble is the performativity of sex. Sex is not a
24
Butler, Gender Trouble, 187.
Butler, Gender Trouble, 178.
26 To the point that Moira Gatens argues that the distinction has become a simplistic polarization.
See Gatens, Imaginary Bodies, 6.
25
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natural phenomenon that can be contrasted with gender. It is a gesture that
bodies are mutually exclusively, oppositionally, and hierarchically two, and
in this way is a “sedimentation” of the social enforcement of two discrete and
polar genders that prescribes these to all physicalities that would be human.
Butler explains that the only reason why anyone in the polis feels that there
are ultimately two genders is because these are supposed to be the expression
of two sexes; however, for Butler the source of the notion of sex is in fact the
practice of dualistic gender. The two gestures are indistinguishable. Butler is
not only arguing here that one only ever learns how to become human, but
also arguing that one does not necessarily have to be pressed by social coercion into this. Social construction can and does frequently fail.
Gender Trouble ends with an affirmation of performativities of gender. The
point is that Butler believes such performatives ought to be automatically
taken as credible, as human, as gender per se, instead of defining gender in
terms of coercive social roles: “Genders can be neither true nor false, neither
real nor apparent, neither original nor derived. As credible bearers of those
attributes, however, genders can also be rendered thoroughly and radically
incredible,” as in unbelievable.27 For Butler the performativity of a body, of a
gender, makes it automatically credible, so the question is how such a body
can possibly be taken by others to be “unreal,” a real man, a real woman, etc.
The task of Gender Trouble was thus to argue that “discrete and polar” sexes
are, even when they seem most natural, in fact always the result of practices
of normalization that constitute realness or unrealness. This is, again, why
drag is in that book a (problematic) demonstration of the performativity
of sex. The project is to debunk the very gesture of natural sex. Sex in the
context of drag according to Butler is superfluous, not necessary. It doesn’t
matter how one has been designated with respect to the two-​sex model, according to Butler. Drag is about something else, the playfulness, the exaggeration, the exploration. Drag dramatizes the lack of relevance of the gesture
of “real” when it comes to sex. The lack of a basis for its truth or falsity is on
display.28 This I would argue is the project of Gender Trouble, to insist on the
performativity of sex, not (only) gender.
In making this argument, that the very idea of discrete and polar sexes,
in other words sexual difference, is performative, Butler suggests that
where there is variety—​heteronormative or not—​among humanity and
27
28
Butler, Gender Trouble, 180.
Butler, Gender Trouble, 174.
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constituting its dynamics, it is a presupposition. If sex and gender are performative, Butler asks, and thus if “to become a lesbian is an act, a leave-​taking
of heterosexuality, a self-​naming that contests the compulsory meanings of
heterosexuality’s women and men, what is to keep the name of lesbian from
becoming an equally compulsory category? What qualifies as a lesbian? Does
anyone know? If a lesbian refutes the radical disjunction between heterosexual and homosexual economies that Wittig promotes, is that lesbian no
longer a lesbian? . . . Can one understand lesbian sexuality not only as a contestation of ‘sex,’ of ‘women,’ of ‘natural bodies,’ but also of ‘lesbian’?” The notion of lesbian is constituted by presuppositions, a house of cards.
Butler in this way anticipates the explicit rise of trans-​exclusionary radical
feminism, which ironically doubles down on the two-​sex model, the discrete
and polar notion of sex as nature. For now I want to point to Butler’s still-​
timely response to a largely reactionary insistence on sex as nature, a reactionary insistence that is only possible because of the polarization of natural
sex-​unnatural gender.
Butler’s response to sex as inert matter, unchanging matter, demonstrates
the account of difference that she takes performativity to entail: “What a
tragic mistake, then, to construct gay-​lesbian identity through the same exclusionary means, as if the excluded were not precisely through its exclusion,
always presupposed, and indeed, required for that construction of that identity.
Such exclusion paradoxically institutes precisely the relation of radical dependency it seeks to overcome: Lesbianism would then require heterosexuality.”29 The dichotomy lesbian-​heterosexuality relies on mutually projected
presuppositions. What it is to be lesbian requires something that it is to be
heterosexual, and what it is to be heterosexual requires something that it is to
be lesbian. In either direction, an identity presupposes its own definition in
opposition to a rejected other. For Butler, the more “insidious and effective
strategy” is performativity itself: “not merely to contest ‘sex,’ but to articulate
the convergence of multiple sexual discourses at the site of ‘identity’ in order
to render that category, in whatever form, permanently problematic.”30
If Gender Trouble argued that sex is performative, not only gender, but
especially what is meant by sex is performative, Bodies That Matter argued
that the concept of matter is too. In response to Gender Trouble, Butler
explains, she witnessed many circular rejections of performativity, rejections
29
30
Butler, Gender Trouble, 163; my emphasis.
Butler, Gender Trouble, 163.
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that presuppose a distinction between “bodies” and “power.” Rejectors of
performativity ask, if power constructs sexes, then what about powers of “the
body”?31 Butler takes such objections to be rooted in an interest in preserving
some basic, comforting bodily facts, the responsibility for which humans are
entirely absolved. What had been left unexplained in Gender Trouble, Butler
writes in the introduction to Bodies That Matter, is that matter, including
matter’s subjectivities, the matter that we ourselves are, is also a performative
event, an ongoing elaboration.
Butler argues instead that matter should be understood as a process.
Matter is “materialization.” Power is a power of bodies, a power of bodies to
coerce each other’s shapes. Butler then sets out in Bodies That Matter to debunk the very gesture of matter, not just sex, because the concept of matter is
the root of the very notion of sex and sexual difference as well as the “others”32
of sexual difference, racial difference and sexuality difference being the ones
Butler explores in Bodies That Matter. We could call these discontinuities of
human relation that for Butler are produced by the patterns of relationality
themselves.
In making this revision of the account of performativity in Gender
Trouble, Butler rejects what she calls the “radical linguistic constructivism”
as well as the “radical constructivist position,” of which she had been accused in response to Gender Trouble. But it’s also clear that Butler does
not mean to reject construction so much as give it a different philosophical terminology. In response to this, Butler moves in Bodies That Matter
“from construction to materialization,”33 another way of thinking about
the constructedness of nature and the very idea of inert matter. The radical
constructivist position that she rejects comes in a variety of forms,34 but
all presuppose a distinction between nature and culture and between “the
body” (a term that Butler regularly questions)35 as matter and the subject as
agential, distinctions that Butler says are inherently political. This would be
the difference between social construction and performativity on Butler’s
account: social construction tends to presuppose a distinction between
nature and culture and to assign to culture the capacity for constructing.
31
32
33
34
35
Butler, Bodies That Matter, 6.
Butler, Bodies That Matter, 49.
Butler, Bodies That Matter, 4–​12.
Butler, Bodies That Matter, 6.
See, for example, Butler, Gender Trouble, 164.
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Performativity is an attempt to reject this distinction, but to keep the idea
that political hierarchies are not automatic.
Interestingly, at roughly the same time as Bruno Latour is writing in
We Have Never Been Modern that nature is a result of the modern distinction between “culture” and its leftovers, a lifeless nature, Butler is writing
a similar claim, that matter as inert nature is a hurtful fiction in a political sense.36 Butler comes to a conclusion strikingly consistent with that of
Latour. She is interested in the very concept of matter that she takes to be
a function of a politics of nature, one that projects nature onto some politicized bodies and not others, and though Butler does not use this phrase
the “politics of nature” or the “politics of matter,” this is exactly her point.
Matter and nature are political fictions that need to be given a different
philosophical approach, she suggests. These fictions are responsible in the
realm of politics for the very notion of sex that Gender Trouble had sought
to undermine. In Bodies That Matter, Butler moves her argument from sex
to the more basic concern with matter, “the body,” the “passive surface”
that something else constructs.37 And Butler again like Latour argues that
bodies are not something other than “agency.” Agency is the definition
of “the human” that Butler rejects. Following Irigaray’s critique of matter
while distancing herself from Irigaray’s politics, Butler argues that humans
as materialities are “agential,”38 and these negotiations of bodies are what
is responsible for the performative production of differences among them.
Nevertheless Butler’s attention is on the ways in which differences among
bodies are the activity of coercion of bodies among themselves. A subject
who is formed in a social context of spoken and unspoken expectations “is
enabled, if not produced, by such norms.”39 Agency is the capacity to act by
this subject “as a reiterative or rearticulatory practice, immanent to power,
and not a relation of external opposition to power.”40 Reiterative practices
produce “a domain of abjected bodies,”41 and this process is materialization. What needs to be understood in Bodies That Matter is not so much that
sex is constructed, because that was the project of Gender Trouble, but that
36 Compare Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, 100, and Butler, Bodies That Matter,
48–​49, 257 n. 44. Both were published in 1993. Both cite Donna Haraway. Latour cites Haraway,
Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1989), and
Butler quotes Haraway in private correspondence.
37 Butler, Bodies That Matter, 4.
38 Butler, Bodies That Matter, 36–​49.
39 Butler, Bodies That Matter, 15.
40 Butler, Bodies That Matter, 15.
41 Butler, Bodies That Matter, 16, 22.
Performativity and Political Ecology
115
matter as a naturalizing or freezing gesture of exclusion gets produced and
projected onto some bodies that are thought to be “unnatural” and abjected.
The discourse of nature is inherently political in this way. Performativity
becomes then a process of mattering—​making some out to be the matter and
not others—​that characterizes the ideal human, the “body that is reason.”42
Materialization is the processes of bodies making themselves in asymmetrical power relations. Bodies That Matter offers an alternative to the distinction between constructed inert matter and constructing power that both the
“radical constructive position” and those who reject it presuppose.
This account of performativity becomes in Butler’s later work the framework for understanding the collective and transnational process of precarity,
“that politically induced condition in which certain populations suffer from
failing social and economic networks of support more than others, and become differentially exposed to injury, violence, and death.”43
Saidiya Hartman makes use of this notion of performativity to understand
the way that citizenship is figured as abstract and disembodied and blackness is figured as the matter. Hartman’s account is an explicitly performative one. But even Karen Barad, whose work is famously critical of Butler’s
performativity, subscribes to performativity’s account of political difference.
I now turn to the way in which Butlerian performativity is taken up by
Karen Barad.
2.2. The First Problem with Performativity: Karen Barad’s
Critique (the Political Ecology Critique)
Though performativity has been criticized widely, in my view there has yet to
be sufficient account of it. What is needed is both an acknowledgement of its
influence and a sufficient account of its primary problem. Its influence is so
wide that even those who discredit it subscribe to its philosophy of political
difference. At the same time the primary problem with performativity is that
as a philosophy of political difference it ascribes all power to the polis.
Performativity looms so large that its influence cannot be fully understood. It seems always too close and too indispensable to be criticized properly. Many, following a political ecological critique begun in Bruno Latour’s
42
43
Butler, Bodies That Matter, 49.
Butler, Notes, 33.
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Politics of Nature,44 take the problem with performativity to be encapsulated
in Karen Barad’s critique of Judith Butler’s work on performativity. They understand Butler’s philosophy of matter to be set aside in this critique. But
Barad’s critique of Butlerian performativity, one I’m calling the political
ecology critique, is not only important as a sign of the limits of performativity.
Few appreciate the degree to which Barad’s own account is itself a fundamentally performative one with respect to the polis. Thus Barad’s work is, just
as much as Hartman’s, also a place in which it’s possible to get a sense for
just how pervasive the reach of performativity has been. Even in a work that
rightly criticizes performativity, certain aspects of it remain untouched.
Barad’s Meeting the Universe Halfway offers a critique of performativity
on the way to an expansion of it. Barad is, like Butler, interested in the ethics
and politics of the production of differences. However, while Butler herself is
clear in Bodies That Matter that performativity is not an intentional agency
that it makes no distinction between nature and culture and refers to bodily
habits of ubiquitous social attunement and coercion, it is nevertheless the
case that according to Barad performativity in Butler so far does not extend
past events of human relation. It does not include what Jane Bennett calls “a
subsistent world of nonhuman vitality.”45 In an extremely helpful passage for
our purposes, Bennett writes,
This impulse toward cultural, linguistic, or historical constructivism, which
interprets any expression of thing-​power as an effect of culture and the play
of human powers, politicizes moralistic and oppressive appeals to “nature.”
And that is a good thing. But the constructivist response to the world also
tends to obscure from view whatever thing-​power there may be. There is
thus something to be said for moments of methodological naiveté, for the
postponement of a genealogical critique of objects. This delay might render
manifest a subsistent world of nonhuman vitality. To “render manifest” is
both to receive and to participate in the shape given to that which is received. What is manifest arrives through humans but not entirely because
of them.46
Barad finds that Butler’s Bodies That Matter demonstrates precisely this
politicizing of moralistic and oppressive appeals to nature, but also that the
44
45
46
Latour, Politics of Nature, 51, 54, 80–​81.
Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 17.
Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 17.
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117
book ignores the “subsistent world of nonhuman vitality.” It is in reaction in
part to Butler that Barad argues for a “new materialism,” in which “we are
part of that nature that we seek to understand.”47 Barad is not at all arguing
for a return to what Butler and Latour call nature, but beginning a new paradigm in which humans are phenomena in a temporal process of materiality
composed of differential phenomena. Barad agrees with Butler that tracing
the play of human powers among humans is a crucial project, but Barad
anticipates Bennett’s argument that this project runs the risk of obscuring
the power of things, which is typically assigned an inertness that common
sense equates with objects.48 The problem with performativity, as an account
of historical, linguistic, social construction, on Barad’s account, is that it
explores only the powers of humans and denies the powers of “nonhumans”
(much more on this term later) in apparatuses.
Barad’s critique of Butler is in this way a political ecological critique. What
do I mean by political ecology? I understand political ecology to include three
ingredients. First, there is in political ecology a commitment to observing the
implications of microscopic-​to climate-​scale human-​thing apparatuses in a
Baradian sense. Second, there is a critique of anthropocentrism. And third,
this critique of anthropocentrism is also a rejection of environmentalism
or a naive backgroundism that has dominated even anti-​androcentric philosophies. Political ecology seeks to demote humans but also to foreground
what has been the background, leading to accounts that, for example, might
blend the powers of lead with racialization and class-​making to understand
the ongoing water crisis in Flint, Michigan, and in other cities in the United
States, which, as Frantz Fanon argued, is the exacerbation of the dynamics of
European morphology. Political ecologists helpfully urge me to move beyond
environmentalism into a way of thinking about the agencies that act upon
me, by means of which any agency that I can claim to have is manifest. With
the combined powers of electricity, computer, soft jeans, hoodie, journal,
pencil lead, dog-​eared copy of Meeting the Universe Halfway, eyeglasses,
IUD, walls of this building, space heater, desk, chair, coffee, water, chocolate chip cookies, air, oatmeal eaten earlier, hair stick, and other powers I am
surely overlooking, I write. I am “vital materiality,” and I am surrounded by
it.49 These things direct me, even as I direct them. Parts of nearly all of these
47
48
49
Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, 26, 67. See also 383.
Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 5.
Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 14.
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will outlive me. “I” am a word for some part of this momentary configuration
to which “I” contribute some action. The things that I amass, as well as that
which I could never have amassed, shape what I do. As Bennett suggests, because humans are themselves composed of vital materials, not only the lead
or the caffeine or the water itself, but whatever is meant by human is always
an instance of what she names “thing-​power,” a “positive, productive power”
that goes beyond the associations humans assign them.50
In Barad a political ecology critique of Butler’s Bodies That Matter is
couched in the context of a revised performative account,51 “a posthumanist
performative”52 and “agential realist” one that seeks to reread the work
of physicist Niels Bohr as “proto-​
performative.”53 Barad writes that
performativity has been misunderstood as idealistic, linguistically monist,
denying of “real flesh-​and-​blood bodies.”54 She distances herself unequivocally from this sort of “gross misunderstanding”: “On the contrary Butler
does provide us with an insightful and powerful analysis of some discursive dimensions of the materialization of real flesh-​and-​blood bodies. My
point is that the analysis of materialization that Butler offers leaves out
critical components.”55 Barad thus begins her critique with a correction of
the usual way in which Butler is read. Butler “develops a notion of gender
performativity that links subject formation to the production of the body’s
materiality” and in doing so understands “matter, not as a site or a surface,
but as a process.”56 Barad affirms the importance of Butler’s “reconsideration
of what it could mean to claim that bodies are ‘socially constructed.’ ”57
50
Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 11.
Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, 133.
52 Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, 135.
53 Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, 195.
54 Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, 192.
55 Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, 192. Barad also writes that Butler has “analyzed
only . . . how discourse comes to matter. Butler’s account fails to analyze how matter comes to matter.”
But as I have discussed, Bodies That Matter is following Irigaray’s critique of the concept of matter
and its distinction from form. I agree with Barad that Bodies That Matter excludes consideration
of thing-​power, but this way of putting it is misses a crucial claim in Butler, that the distinction between agency and “matter” is itself a discursive one. Barad comes close to making this point herself (Meeting the Universe Halfway, 216). For Butler, gestures to thing-​power are, precisely as Jane
Bennett worries, “methodologically naive” (Vibrant Matter, 17). Barad and Bennett, following
Latour, are willing to make the gesture, while Butler for good reason is not. It’s not that Butler is not
concerned with “ecology.” It’s that she has a different way of getting there. My concern with Butlerian
performativity—​and this becomes a concern with Barad’s elaboration of performativity as well—​is
with its attribution of political difference strictly to human invention.
56 Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, 191.
57 Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, 191.
51
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119
But for Barad, Butler’s own undermining of the dualisms of “passive-​
active, nature-​culture that her displacement of construction is in part meant
to counter” is not going to be successful without attention to how “nonhuman” things materialize, not just humans. When Butler rejects the very
concept of matter, she throws out the possibility of thinking about bodies
other than human bodies. As Barad puts it, Butler’s account does not consider “how matter comes to matter.”58 The critical component that Barad
seeks is what Jane Bennett will in a few years name “thing-​power,” the role
of a thing as actant, intervener, operator that “makes the difference, makes
things happen, becomes the decisive force catalyzing an event.”59 Humans,
when they are actants and operators, Bennett writes, have been thought primarily as “agents” engaged in enactments driven by volition. This agency
not only entails a naive self-​transparent knowledge to humans, it also covers
over the powers of things all around and within and in fact constituting our
own powers. The thing-​power to which Barad points in her critique of Bodies
That Matter is the piezoelectric crystal.60 Without attention to the power of
the piezocrystal in ultrasound technology, Butler “does not give any insights
into how to take account of material constraints, the material dimensions of
agency, and the material dimensions of regulatory practices that make the
gender interpellation of the fetus through ultrasound technology different
from a situation in which ‘girling’ begins at birth,”61 as opposed to gestation,
when so much about a fetus’s life is already been built.
For Barad, Butler does not address how “matter comes to matter.” For example, when Butler describes the “medical interpellation” of sex, she speaks
only of the naming on the part of medical professionals that “girl” a baby, that
brings the child “into the domain of language and kinship through the interpellation of gender.”62 Butler notes the “emergence of the sonogram,”63 but
the development of this technology makes no difference for her account. The
piezoelectric crystal that makes it possible to view a fetus prior to the event of
birth has no power in the process as Butler describes it. For Barad this nonhuman, the piezoelectric crystal, requires a broadened performative account.
For example, Barad argues that knowledge of a fetus is a “phenomenon,” a
happening that is constituted through a performative apparatus: uterus,
58
59
60
61
62
63
Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, 192.
Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 9. See also Latour, Politics of Nature, 73–​75.
Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, 189ff.
Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, 194.
Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, 193; Butler, Bodies That Matter, 7–​8.
Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, 193; Butler, Bodies That Matter, 7.
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placenta, amniotic fluid, nutrients, piezoelectric crystal. When ultrasound
technology is part of this assemblage of actants, in Barad’s terms “a cut” is
enacted. A difference is made by the tool itself. And this enables a “racialized
and classed construction of an ‘epidemic of infertility’ among ‘white, affluent,
highly educated women.’ ”64 Barad’s point is that while in fact the birth rates
among white people are higher than for “nonwhite and poorly educated”
people, the attention enabled by ultrasound technology, not just the intended
attention but the subtle knowledge of fetal development that goes beyond
human intentions, makes it possible for white people to miss entirely the
political ecology that is responsible for the more crucial “epidemic of infertility” in “nonwhite” communities.65 The piezoelectric crystal is an irreducible power in this racializing assemblage, this creation of racial difference.
This nonhuman agency, in Barad’s language, is a racializing performativity
for which Butler’s work cannot account, but which Barad seeks to alter in
order to speak of the performative construction in which things such as the
piezoelectric crystal take part.
It is clear that Barad’s concern is to work across a human-​nonhuman distinction that she ultimately replaces with a concept of agential matter. In
doing so, Barad does not set aside differences among humans, but she does
affirm Butlerian insights about performativity. In this account differences
among humans are differences in outcome. They are performatively built.
Barad writes, “Different agential cuts produce different phenomena.”66
The “nonhuman” that Barad introduces here is one that Butler indeed does
not address, but Butler has her own reasons for this that are not acknowledged in Barad. What Barad rightly seeks to articulate are the powers of what
we could call an ecological nonhuman. As we have seen, Butler argues that
the concept of matter is an irreducibly political one, one that forms in the
context of a political relationality, to produce not only the mutually oppositional concept of natural sex, which makes for the very idea of unnatural
sexes, a difference that is therefore performatively instantiated, but also racial
difference and sexuality difference in Butler’s work in Bodies That Matter. In
other words, Butler is very concerned about the political production of a certain nonhuman that is incompatible with Barad’s use of this word. Also for
Butler all oppositions, like matter-​culture, are mutual oppositions that are
political, the projections of discursive elaborations authored by materiality
64
65
66
Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, 217.
Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, 217.
Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, 175.
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that seeks to explain itself to itself. The inherently negative gesture of the
“nonhuman,” appearing in Barad, as well as Bennett, a legacy I want to trace
from the work of Bruno Latour, is thus for Butler a political partition. And
matter itself, Butler suggests, is a function of the human/​nonhuman opposition: matter “designates the constitutive outside of the Platonic economy; it is
what must be excluded for that economy to posture as internally coherent.”67
Those excluded as matter for Butler in this passage are would-​be humans,
nonhuman humans, and here is precisely where Butler and Barad part ways.
Butler’s reasons for not addressing how “matter comes to matter” are thus
more complicated than Barad, I think, can allow if what Barad seeks to do
(rightly) is speak in an “ecological” mode. Barad writes that the problem in
Butler is that materialization “displaces matter . . . analyzed only in terms of
how discourse comes to matter. Butler’s account fails to analyze how matter
comes to matter.”68 But what Barad does not discuss is the fact that Butler
refuses to promote this distinction that Barad is making, discourse versus
matter, and the cost of this in Butler is that there can be no apolitical sense of
matter.
Whereas this aspect of Butler’s work, the inherently political sense of
matter, is left out of the Baradian account, it is at the center of the work of
another scholar who is rarely read together with Barad, but who should
be: Saidiya Hartman. As Hartman explains, in a way that continues a dropped
thread in the work of Butler, and as I will discuss in the next section of this
chapter, the “nonhuman” is a crucial role among humans, within the polis.
It is of course not only a way of speaking about a lacuna created by exclusive
attention to linguistic or historical constructivism. The “nonhuman” is a lacuna within the political. One doesn’t have to turn to things to encounter the
nonhuman. The nonhuman is already a dynamic of the political.69
The nonhuman in Barad, however, has this other meaning, that which
is technological. Dehumanized humanity does not make an appearance in
Barad. The nonhuman in Barad’s sense is ecological. In this respect Barad
sets aside the question of materiality of humans among humans, the question
of how nonhuman humanity in the polis is possible. In Barad, I would argue,
67
Butler, Bodies That Matter, 38.
Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, 192.
69 See Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks; Fanon, Wretched of the Earth; Warren, Ontological Terror;
Sharpe, In the Wake; Browne, Dark Matters; Fred Moten, “The Case of Blackness,” Criticism 50.2
(2008): 177–​218; Hartman, Scenes of Subjection; Hartman, Lose Your Mother; Hartman, Wayward
Lives, Beautiful Experiments; Tyrone S. Palmer, “‘What Feels More Than Feeling?’: Theorizing the
Unthinkability of Black Affect,” Critical Ethnic Studies 3.2 (Fall 2017): 31–​56.
68
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the human inadvertently turns out to be a basically homogeneous category.
But this is for very good reason. To admit its heterogeneity would require letting go of the word “matter,” and the distinction between human and matter.
This falling back on the Butlerian performative when it comes only to the political is not because Barad doesn’t discuss politics. It’s just that Barad sticks
strictly to appreciating the political differences of humans among humans,
not humans in an “ecological” or bodily sense.
Meeting the Universe Halfway is anything but an apolitical book. Barad
discusses throughout the book the production of racialization, class,70
racialized gender,71 and ability. But in every case Barad understands such political differences to be performative in Butler’s sense. With respect to the
polis, Barad is an orthodox Butlerian, even as with respect to the oikos, Barad
is Butler’s most widely cited critic. In a passage specifically on the phenomena
of able bodies that builds on the work of Nancy Mairs in Waist-​High in the
World: A Life among the Nondisabled,72 Barad writes that in order to understand what and when ability is the case, ability needs what it constructs as
disability, a contrasting bodily situation of not being in the “luxury of taking
for granted the nature of the body as it negotiates a world constructed specifically with an image of ‘normal’ embodiment in mind” that is “enabled by
the privileges of ableism.”73 In this sense, “Focusing on the nature of the materiality of able bodies as phenomena, not individual objects/​subjects, makes
it clear what it means to be able-​bodied: that the very nature of being able-​
bodied is to live with/​in and as part of the phenomenon that includes the
cut and what it excludes, and therefore, that what is excluded is never really
other, not in an absolute sense, and that in an important sense, then, being
able-​bodied means being in a prosthetic relationship with the ‘disabled.’ ”74
That normate bodies require disabled bodies in order to be normate
recalls Butler’s own critique of making others into matter in Bodies That
Matter. Butler writes, “Xenophobic exclusion operates through the production of racialized Others, and those whose ‘natures’ are considered less
rational by virtue of their appointed task in the process of laboring to reproduce the conditions of private life. This domain of the less than rational
human bounds the figure of human reason, producing that ‘man’ as one who
70
Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, 236ff.
Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, 159.
Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, 157; Nancy Mairs, Waist-​High in the World: A Life among
the Nondisabled (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996).
73 Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, 159.
74 Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, 158.
71
72
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is without childhood; is not a primate and so is relieved of the necessity of
eating, defecating, living and dying; one is not a slave, but always a property
holder; one whose language remains originally and untranslatable. This
is a figure of disembodiment, but one which is nevertheless a figure of the
body.”75 Barad is thus extending Butler’s own account of bodies serving as the
support for a supposed disembodiment of (paradoxically) a body that serves
in a role of priority, the figure of realness among bodies.
Barad does not use the language of “nonhuman” for the dehumanization
of disability in this example because Barad’s account is one in which there is a
relationship of humanity even when one human denies the humanity of another. To be able requires something that it is to be un-​able, dis-​able. When
there is this undeniable human relationality that defines a body against another body, Barad writes, “What is excluded is never really other, not in an
absolute sense.”76 Here Barad is extending not only performativity, but also
its way of understanding the origin of political difference. There is ultimately
no “nonhuman” with respect to the political in Meeting the Universe.
My own interest appears here: in order to introduce the ecological mode
into performativity, Barad has to reintroduce the gesture of matter that Butler
was right to criticize. But Barad’s project is at the same time extremely important. In introducing the turn to ecological agency, Barad must set aside the
question of the performativity constituting “the human,” the possibility of
the politically lesser human and nonhuman, the one in which Butler is arguably exclusively interested. Barad is right to insist on the ecological turn, but
Butler’s concerns are just as compelling.
Butler has shown in recent years that she is not so much opposed to such a
turn, as trying to understand the political causes of ecological events. Butler’s
key question is going to be who among humans is made to be the matter, and
how does this create the very notions of precarity and austerity that make
for ecological events? Such questions are as crucial as Barad’s project, and
somehow they relate to each other. There are many crucial questions, not just
one. As I will explore later, Butler’s question is asked—​this specific political
“nonhuman” is traced—​in the performative account of Saidiya Hartman. In
Scenes of Subjection, Hartman asks who among humans is made to be the
matter. I think a more basic question that needs asking, one that can only
be asked by putting Barad-​Latour-​Bennett together with Butler-​Hartman, is
75
76
Butler, Bodies That Matter, 48.
Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, 158.
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why in English and in French, which together represent a third of the official languages of the United Nations,77 a political assemblage in which a
crisis of climate could be addressed, there are no positive ways of gesturing
to the nonhumans of these projects. What concept or concepts are responsible for the weight of attention of human and the linguistic absence of its
partner word, “nonhuman”? Bennett crucially gives a name to the specific
nonhuman in which she is interested, a thing-​power that needs naming in
order to even begin to appreciate climate crisis. Barad offers the notion of
agential realism, the distributed power of assemblages in which humans
take part. But in Hartman no positive naming for what is nonhuman, what
is not “the human,” can be uttered at the risk of reifying and forcing the non-​
universality that is part of what it is like to be-​become human.
As humans I think we need attention to what Sylvia Wynter calls genre in
order to begin to name problems and alter practices. This is a process that
Vibrant Matter and Meeting the Universe Halfway begin. But this gesture
of the nonhuman in political ecology currently displaces the political nonhuman, those who disqualify for the one and the two of the body, the complete human form, which is the content of the gesture of “the human” and
the abstract political citizen debunked by Hartman in bodily terms. Barad
and Bennett will agree with Hartman that tracing the play of human powers
among humans is a crucial project, but together they also worry that this
project obscures the power of things. But the reverse is true, too: thinking
the power of things hides the question of political difference just as much
as thinking exclusively in terms of politics hides the power of things. The
question that I want to ask, building on the work of political ecologists and
performativists together, is why attention to politics and attention to ecology
are mutually obscuring.
2.3. The Second Problem with Performativity: Saidiya
Hartman’s Critique (the Performativity Critique)
Barad’s critique of performativity is nevertheless only part of its recorded
drawbacks. Roughly a decade prior to Barad’s critique of Bodies That Matter,
Saidiya Hartman suggests that performativity misses, as she puts it, the
77 Here I’m attempting a politicization and concretization of languages in the context of the climate
crisis. “Official Languages,” About the UN, United Nations, https://​www.un.org/​en/​sections/​about-​
un/​official-​languages/​.
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“sheer force of the utterance ‘black.’ ”78 The “sheer weight of a history of
terror”79 seems outside what it is possible to understand through a performative frame. Hartman, like Barad, does not reject performativity. Hartman’s
work as a performative account demonstrates the necessity for sticking with
performativity in the present. Hartman nevertheless registers a reservation
with it that I seek to underline and interpret.
For Hartman of Scenes of Subjection, blackness is a “phobogenic object”80 constructed through coerced mundane practices that “can hardly be
discerned—​slaves dancing in the quarters, the outrageous darky antics of the
minstrel stages, the constitution of humanity in slave law” prior to emancipation and “the fashioning of the self-​possessed individual” that constitutes an
emancipation that has not been emancipatory.81 Hartman also discusses the
“pageantry of the coffle” as a “coerced performance” that creates “assurances
about black pleasure” for people constituted as white though this performance.82 Through such everyday performances whiteness and blackness are
made, and Hartman’s writings make it necessary to discern such practices
in the present. Hartman asks, “How is race transformed and refigured in
practice?”83
This account is therefore an explicitly performative one. Nevertheless,
Hartman expresses a subtle doubt in performativity. She writes,
Despite the effort to contextualize and engage blackness as a production
and performance, the sheer force of the utterance “black” seems to assert
a primacy, quiddity, or materiality that exceeds the frame of this approach.
The mention of this “force” is not an initial step in the construction of a
metaphysics of blackness or an effort to locate an “essence” within these
performances but merely an acknowledgement of the sheer weight of a history of terror that is palpable in the very utterance “black” and inseparable
from the tortured body of the enslaved.84
78
Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 58.
Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 58.
80 Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 57. Hartman cites both Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks and
Butler’s Gender Trouble here.
81 Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 4. See especially 117, 122.
82 Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 36.
83 Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 58.
84 Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 58.
79
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A Philosophy of Elemental Difference
What exceeds the frame of performativity? Hartman is very clear that this
“primacy, quiddity, or materiality” ultimately only seems to exceed the frame
of performativity. She writes that “what is particular to the discursive constitution of blackness is the inescapable prison house of the flesh or the indelible
drop of blood—​that is the purportedly intractable and obdurate materiality
of physiological difference.”85 This “intractable and obdurate materiality of
physiological difference” is, in keeping with the performative account, “purported.” Hartman is also very clear that she is not seeking to offer a “metaphysics of blackness,” an “essence” prior to or within the performance.
As Frank Wilderson argues, “Hartman has no direct, Black critique or
rejection of [Butlerian] feminism’s de-​re-​styling performance. . . . But her
text maintains an unpersuaded and underwhelmed stance toward the explanatory, much less liberatory, power of the performative when asserted
in conjunction with the Black.”86 Hartman’s account remains performative
on my reading and yet she does register a reservation that makes a difference in performativity. Hartman’s is a performative reservation concerning
performativity. What is the reservation?
A few years later Butler herself writes in a preface to a new edition of Gender
Trouble published two years after the publication of Scenes of Subjection,
“I would . . . suggest that the question to ask is not whether the theory of
performativity is transposable onto race, but what happens to the theory
when it tries to come to grips with race.”87 Is Butler asking what happens to
performativity when it tries to come to grips with racial difference in the confrontation that Hartman accomplishes in her book?88 Is Butler offering an affirmation of the reservation articulated in Scenes of Subjection, an affirmation
that is articulated even in the midst of an elaboration of the performativity of
race? What is performativity after Scenes of Subjection?
In order to appreciate Scenes of Subjection as a performative critique
of performativity, it is necessary to think about the work on the whole.
Throughout Scenes of Subjection, Hartman is reflecting on the impossibility
of bodily universality and on the aspiration to a bodily yet disembodied status
in which mastery and white power consist. Not just any body is disembodied.
85
Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 57–​58.
Wilderson, Red, White, and Black, 312–​313. Wilderson is referring to a different passage in
Scenes than the one I am discussing here.
87 Butler, Gender Trouble, xvi.
88 In a note, Butler cites Saidiya Hartman, as well as Lisa Lowe and Dorinne Kondo as “scholars
whose work has influenced my own,” and Hartman has reciprocally cited Butler in Scenes of
Subjection. See Gender Trouble, 192 n. 11.
86
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This is a status, but it is inextricable from the bodily hierarchies it assumes.
This is a possibility in Butler, and yet Butler doesn’t linger long over the
fact that this figure of disembodiment is a body: white-​masculinity-​adult-​
reason-​freedman-​idealized-​speaker is “a figure of disembodiment, but one
which is nevertheless a figure of a body, a bodying forth of a masculinized
rationality, the figure of a . . . body that is not a body.”89 However, in contrast
to Butler whose interest is not so much in bodies as in the ways in which they
are seen, and not so much the differences as the ways in which they are created and figured, in Hartman bodily universality is the oxymoron that it is for
Luce Irigaray whose gesture of elemental difference I discussed in Chapter 1.
Hartman’s critique of bodily universality shares with Irigaray an emphasis on
the oxymoron itself. For Hartman, plantation culture reaches far beyond the
structures of plantations themselves, to an entire legal terrain of disembodied
equality and bodily universality that projects a thwarted bodily status. I want
to suggest that for Hartman “the production of universality” is a use of bodies
and an abuse of “nature’s whimsical apportionments.”90 The lie of the universal body requires bodies as well as “brute force.”91
The “disembodied and self-​possessed individual”92 is in Hartman both
(1) a created and therefore somewhat arbitrary projection that is the invention of negrophobia and (2) an affirmation that is simultaneously the
targeting of certain bodily features, certain bodily features against which
whiteness defines itself. Performativity in Butler is arguably already the first
of these. But I want to suggest that performativity in Butler is not the second.
Hartmanian performativity, however, is both. In the first instance, the political difference is created and inherently lamentable. This political difference
should end. In the second, some feature at odds with white disembodied citizenship is not just excluded but targeted. In the second gesture there is a
need to admit that what whiteness perceives is those bodies that threaten its
ethereal pretensions. These are not the same gesture, but they aren’t mutually
exclusive either. Hartman combines them.
The significance of the fact that these are two distinct gestures is that here
is where I read Hartman as demonstrating a problem with performativity
“when it tries to come to grips with race.”93 Her first gesture, according to
89
90
91
92
93
Butler, Bodies That Matter, 48–​49.
Hartman, Scenes of Subjection,122.
Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 58.
Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 123.
Butler, Gender Trouble, xvi.
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which political difference is created and brutal, is in keeping with Butler’s
own rejections of the concepts of matter and nature. For Butler, the classification of natural sex is a manifestation of the political enforcement of a belief
in the difference between form and matter. Hartman takes this account of
performativity as the practices of rejection of who is taken to be the matter
and articulates with it an account of white animosity and the invention of racial difference. In this sense, Hartman’s Scenes of Subjection takes up Butlerian
performativity’s implications for a political nonhuman, a nonhuman who is
nevertheless forced to live in and as the polis.
But in the second gesture, Hartman suggests that some bodies can be made
use of in order to create whiteness and “the tortured body of the enslaved,”
the “sheer weight of a history of terror.”94 This is a way of articulating the intensity of white animosity and its “brutal corporealization of the body and
the fixation of its constituent parts as indexes of truth and racial meaning.”95
Prior to emancipation non-​ethereal bodies were by definition the necessary
outside of the polis, but post-​emancipation such bodies continue to constitute a boundary, of a homogenous body that is still a requirement for citizenship.96 This second gesture is an indication of the limits of performativity in
its Butlerian articulation. That there is some feature against which political
space is defined—​this is what Butlerian performativity emphasizes as wholly
projected. It attributes this adversity exclusively to political dynamics, dynamics of the polis. Hartman is at least very close to suggesting that the polis
requires something for its shaping.
Under formal slavery, Hartman writes, “The dispossessed body of the
enslaved is the surrogate for the master’s body since it guarantees his disembodied universality and acts as the sign of his power and dominion. Thus,
while the beaten and mutilated body presumably establishes the brute materiality of existence, the materiality of suffering regularly eludes (re)cognition by virtue of the body’s being replaced by other signs of value, as well
as other bodies.”97 The creation and concentration of negrophobia as the
location of abjection and the “fascination” with the intense pleasure and
bodily self-​enjoyment of the enslaved were synonymous in this era.98 Post-​
emancipation, in the Thirteenth Amendment, the Civil Rights Act of 1866,
94
95
96
97
98
Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 58.
Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 57.
Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 123.
Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 21.
Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 22.
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129
and the Fourteenth Amendment, citizenship maintains this abstraction, this
time altering the sense of equality: a “nefariously ‘egalitarian’ mode” emerges
post-​emancipation in order to respond to a shift in who is now technically
part of the polis. Prior to emancipation, there was a political equality within
the carefully circumscribed political sphere because a certain body was required for political agency. Post-​emancipation, “Black equality did not imply
‘equality in all things . . . simply before the laws, nothing else.’ ”99 Hartman
writes that, post-​emancipation, equality becomes a tool of exclusion. A new
equality is needed that can be as effective as the old. In contrast to the disqualification of nonhumans for political standing prior to emancipation, just
as surely after what is called emancipation
liberalism, in general, and rights discourse, in particular, assure entitlements and privileges as they enable and efface elemental forms of domination primarily because of the atomistic portrayal of social relations, the
inability to address collective interests and needs, and the sanctioning of
subordination and the free right of prejudice in the construction of the
social or the private. Moreover, the universality or unencumbered individuality of liberalism relies on tacit exclusions and norms that preclude
substantive equality; all do not equally partake of the resplendent, plenipotent, indivisible, and steely singularity that it proffers. Abstract universality
presumes particular forms of embodiment and excludes or marginalizes
others. Rather, the excluded, marginalized, and devalued subjects that
it engenders, variously contained, trapped, and imprisoned by nature’s
whimsical apportionments, in fact, enable the production of universality,
for the denigrated and deprecated, those castigated and saddled by varied
corporeal maledictions, are the fleshy substance that enable the universal to
achieve its ethereal splendor.100
Hartman is saying so much here that is essential to political ecology, the
disembodiment of the morphology in question, and yet to jump straight
to political ecology would totally miss the area of her argumentation.
“Liberalism . . . and rights discourse” participate in a notion of political
equality that can only be possible because they are enabled by those humans
excluded from them, those required to be nonhumans by the polis. Thus a
99
100
Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 175.
Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 122.
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A Philosophy of Elemental Difference
crucial feature of the political, the universality of its membership, is exemplified by bodies, but not bodies in Barad’s sense discussed earlier. Hartman
is articulating that in which whiteness consists, such that certain groups not
previously included in the US context can later become part of its universal
splendor precisely by entering into practices deemed to be without comparison and also being compared at the same time. Whiteness is an independence and incomparability that needs its comparisons to other bodies,
specifically those problematically included in the polis. To skip over the nature of the problems is to miss so much. White men are independence and
incomparability. They are the complete human form that can only be this
through a denied contrast, a contrast that must be repeatedly recast.
In this passage Hartman’s reservations regarding performativity as Butler
articulates it emerge: an abstract universality requires those it “contains,”
“traps,” “imprisons.” Universality and its legal concept of equality are the
sorting of bodies. The “whimsy” of nature is put in service of an abstract
equality and universality that are deliberately impossible. There is an etherealness being celebrated, being enjoyed precisely insofar as it demonstrates
a distance between “abstract and disembodied persons” and those whose
bodies are “the fleshy substance of the embodied and the encumbered—​that
is the castigated particularity of the universal.”101
Hartman is consistently performative in her articulation of racial difference, but at the same time, the opposite of whiteness is not so much its
phobogenic object. The opposition in which Hartman is interested is that
of white men to “fleshy substance” or matter that constitutes blackness.
Hartman suggests that the opposite of white is matter.
Arguably Butler herself makes precisely this argument in Bodies That
Matter, but it is more difficult to pick up on. She explores there sexual difference but also political difference displaced by sexual difference: racial difference, ability difference, linguistic difference, all of which can be displaced
by exclusive attention to the performative enactments of sexual difference.
These are, as performativity would have it, not inherent, empirical physiological events. Butler writes,
This figuration of masculine reason as disembodied body is one whose
imaginary morphology is crafted through the exclusion of other possible
bodies. This is a materialization of reason which operates through the
101
Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 123.
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dematerialization of other bodies, for the feminine, strictly speaking, has
no contour, for it is that which contributes to the contouring and enveloping
of man, but is itself undifferentiated, without boundary. The body that is
reason dematerializes the bodies that may not properly stand for reason or
its replicas, and yet this is a figure in crisis, for this body of reason is itself
the phantasmic dematerialization of masculinity, one which requires that
women and slaves, children and animals be the body, perform the bodily
functions, that it will not perform.102
In this way Bodies That Matter accounts for the fact that some bodies create
a disembodied status built upon the exclusion of “embodied . . . encumbered . . . castigated”103 features.
Butler makes this claim in a critical reading of Luce Irigaray. But this is
what she is suggesting: “the body that is reason” has, ironically, no physicality. The body that is reason for Butler is the only contour; it provides the
only salient shape, so that there is no other competing physicality with its
own positive presence. This is how certain bodies become “unnatural” and
“unreal.” A certain body can define all value, but it is the values themselves
in which Butler is interested: their invention, projection, stifling presence.
Such values do things to the world, to other bodies in Bodies That Matter but
also to earth in Notes toward a Performative Theory of Assembly. Interestingly
Butler never uses this term, “matter,” unless she aims to politicize it. This is a
theme begun in Butler’s reading of Irigaray in Bodies That Matter: The body
that is reason becomes both bodily and disembodied and triumphantly natural precisely insofar as it serves as the site of prevailing value, as that which
must be defended. Bodies in an alienating, empirical, medical contrast with
the body of reason ultimately are somehow not there at all. In fact, that
they are not there is the crucial point. They are lack, a deficit of the positive
values, the only values: masculinity, but for Butler also whiteness, freedom,
monolingual-​ness,104 undetectably located linguistic-​ness, independently
adult.105 Butler puts space between performativity and the notion of sexual
difference here when she writes that “Irigaray does not always help matters
here, for she fails to follow through the metonymic link between women
and these other Others, idealizing and appropriating the ‘elsewhere’ as the
102
103
104
105
Butler, Bodies That Matter, 49.
Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 122.
Judith Butler, “Gender in Translation: Beyond Monolingualism,” philoSOPHIA 9.1 (2019): 1–​25.
Butler, Bodies That Matter, 48.
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feminine. But what is the ‘elsewhere’ of Irigaray’s ‘elsewhere’?”106 Butler will
then go on in Bodies That Matter to articulate a critique of precisely the politics of matter that she finds in a critical reading of Irigaray, and that Barad has
rightly argued does not extend to things.
What Hartman does with her own performative critique of matter’s politics is to suggest, contra Butler, that universality and its legal manifestation
as equality require flesh that provides the frame to that universality. The very
notion of “ethereal splendor” requires that which would locate it.107 In Scenes
she highlights Frantz Fanon’s insistence that whiteness consists in a “fixation of . . . parts as indexes” that it takes to be “corporeal malediction.”108 She
gestures to a feature of Fanon’s writings that is not strictly political, if politics
is at odds with matter. This is a whiteness that feels itself to be other than materiality and that makes what it takes to be other not only be the matter from
which it distances itself but needs to sabotage as matter. Whiteness, Hartman
argues, needs matter in order to establish the ethereal status that whiteness
is: “The fungibility of the commodity makes the captive body an abstract and
empty vessel vulnerable to the projection of others’ feelings, ideas, desires,
and values; and, as property, the dispossessed body of the enslaved is the surrogate for the master’s body since it guarantees his disembodied universality
and acts as the sign of his power and dominion.”109 The captive body serves as
the matter of the enslaver.
I do not think that Butler’s account is incompatible with Hartman’s.
Contrasting them is challenging because they are so consistent. But insofar
as Hartman’s interest is in the assigning of disembodiment to bodies, as
well as “the indelible drop of blood”110 and the legal structures this builds,
Hartman’s work demonstrates on the whole a slightly different performativity
that subtly transforms it. It is consistent with Butler’s philosophy of political
difference, but has a different emphasis.
What is the critique of performativity that Hartman is offering? The political concept of a disembodiment both before and after emancipation,
Hartman suggests, is an attack on something it finds, and finds in a specific
manner, not strictly something that it projects. Particularly the political concept of equality post-​emancipation is a construction, a making of political
106
107
108
109
110
Butler, Bodies That Matter, 49.
Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 122.
Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 57, 59.
Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 21.
Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 57–​58.
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configurations, yes, but it is also a targeting of someone, some feature of a
life that white power and white citizen find and are threatened by precisely because it is somehow implicated in this feature and must eliminate
it. Is it possible for something to be both created and at the very same time
attacked? If so, that’s the performative account of political difference. What is
performatively made is then targeted for destruction. But I think Hartman is
arguing for the priority of the attack itself. She is suggesting that at its foundation the validation of white citizenship does not only create nonhumans,
deauthorized agents; it targets those who would be political actors.
This is the function of the designation “matter,” the designation “thing” as
inert insofar as this matter can be used, but also there is animosity there insofar as this matter must be “handled like a slave, like a wench, like a b*tch,
like a wh*re, like a n*gger.”111 It is in passages like this one that Hartman
articulates the stakes of the envelope-​thing role that Irigaray has argued is
a function of the form-​matter definition of agency constitutive of the one
of the body, the complete human that is the ruler of the polis. But Hartman
offers precisely that reading of the oikos that is missing in Irigaray: the slave,
the barbarian, those that constitute the terrain of the Aristotelian polis that
become reinvented in the modern polis of which the one of the body, the finished human form is still the ruler.
The interest in matter emerges in a number of places in Hartman’s work,
enough so that her work is gesturing in the direction of political ecology, an
account of the modern cities, or poleis, with their ecological implications. In
her most recent book Hartman writes of the “wayward lives” and the “beautiful experiments” of those who resisted efforts to recreate “the plantation
in the city”112 in the context of false emancipation. In the final pages of the
book she writes of the “chorus” of the work, whom she defines in the front
pages as “all the unnamed young women of the city trying to find a way to
live and in search of beauty”:113 “Who else would dare believe another world
was possible, spend the good days readying for it, and the bad days shedding tears that it has not yet arrived? Who else would be reckless enough
to dream a colored girl’s or a black woman’s future? Devote even an afternoon musing about the history of the universe seen from nowhere? Or be
convinced that nothing could be said about the Negro problem, modernity,
111
112
113
Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, 78; my asterisks.
Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, 174.
Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, xvii.
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global capitalism, police brutality, state killings, and the Anthropocene if it
did not take her into account? Did not reckon with the disavowed geography
of the world: the barracoon, the hold, the plantation, the camp, the reservation, the garret, the colony, the attic studio, the bedroom, the urban archipelagoes, the ghetto, and the prison?”114 The Anthropocene, Hartman suggests,
is all of these, disavowed.
What keeps this from being a political ecology is that there is no mention
here of what Barad calls agential realism, no mention of what Bennett calls
“thing-​power,” the powers of charged particles, mineral powers, vegetable
powers, Preciado’s powers of caffeine or Prozac or Valium or Prilosec.
To begin to speak in terms of thing-​power would in the context of
Hartman’s work be totally wrong precisely because of the political meaning
of thing. It would detract from the crucial problem of the way in which “the
agency of the performative” is at odds with the very idea of “the black performative . . . inextricably linked with the specter of contented subjection, the
torturous display of the captive body, and the ravishing of the body that is the
condition of the other’s pleasure?”115 The impossibility of the very gesture of
“slave agency when the very expression seems little more than an oxymoron
that restates the paradox of the object status and pained subject constitution of the enslaved”116 for Hartman is overdetermined by the way in which
agency is thought.
A brief section of Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments is entitled
“Manual for General Housework.”117 This piece extends the ecological
themes of Hartman’s work and demonstrates why Hartman cannot speak
of thing-​power in the way that a political ecologist does, even though there
are gestures in her work to geography and to the Anthropocene, as we have
seen. The piece is a compendium, or a speculum in the sixteenth-​century
European sense of a presentation of condensed encyclopedic knowledge of
what it means to be “manual,” to be handled. Hartman writes,
Manual: As of pertaining to the hand or hands. . . . Hands, no longer
yours, contracted, owned, and directed by another like a tool or object. . . . manual: the concrete, the physical, the embodied as opposed to
abstract knowledge and the formulation of it. As opposed to reason.
114
115
116
117
Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, 347.
Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 52.
Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 52. See also Wilderson, Red, White, and Black, 311–​312.
Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, 77–​79.
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manual: . . . As related to handle, to be handled, as to be handled with no
regard, as to be handled as a tool or instrument; as to be handled like a slave,
like a wench, like a b*tch, like a wh*re, like a n*gger. Handled as pertaining
to that part of the thing which is to be grasped by the hand in using it or
moving it.118
Hartman makes the significance of the politics of things and thing-​power
even more explicit a few lines down: “As pertaining to: Hands up, don’t
shoot. To manage, conduct, direct, control. To be handled by men, to be
manhandled, to be seized by men, to be used by men, to be used up by men.
Handled, as related to use of the thing, to do something with the tool, as opposed to directed by will and desire as opposed to consent, as opposed to
leave me the fuck alone.”119 Here it is humans who become things, humans
demoted to things that have no power, manuals, manuals meant for “general housework” and other modes of debasement in a society that debases
that which is “manual” or body, the opposite of abstract. All power is that of
white, of men, of security, and this entails the politics of “the thing.” With
Hartman it becomes possible to appreciate the degree to which the naming of
“the thing” is agency. One cannot be agency and thing at the same time.
In Lose Your Mother Hartman had already written of the barracoon and
matter’s politics of the thing. She writes in a difficult passage of what it means
to be identified with matter in response to her visit to Cape Coast Castle that
was built by the British to “warehouse slaves.”120 Hartman writes,
Human waste covered the floor of the dungeon. To the naked eye it looked
like soot. After the last group of captives had been deported, the holding
cells were closed but never cleaned out. For a century and a half after the abolition of the slave trade, the waste remained. To control the stench and the
pestilence, the floor had been covered with sand and lime. In 1972, a team
of archaeologists excavated the dungeon and cleared away eighteen inches
of dirt and waste. They identified the topmost layer of the floor as the compressed remains of captives—​feces, blood, and exfoliated skin.121
118
Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, 78.
Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, 79. Compare this to Aimé Césaire: “My Turn
to State an Equation: Colonization = ‘Thingification.’” Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, trans.
Joan Pinkham (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000), 42.
120 Hartman, Lose Your Mother, 110.
121 Hartman, Lose Your Mother, 115.
119
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A Philosophy of Elemental Difference
Hartman’s response: “I refused this knowledge. I blocked it out and proceeded
across the dungeon as if the floor was just that and not the remnants of slaves
pressed further into oblivion by the soles of my shoes. I came to this fort
searching for ancestors, but in truth only base matter awaited me.”122
There is thus no “agential realism,” no “thing-​power” in Hartman. There
really cannot be if her crucial project is going to retain its shape. Things are
the “base matter” of white power and white citizen, a power that does not
distinguish between black and thing and which regards Black humanity as
an oxymoron, even as it forces Black people into the sphere of politics in
which they are made to live as its very negation.123 This is an incisive, undeniable critique, which political ecology obscures, and I fear trivializes, with
its straightforward gestures to the “nonhuman.” Hartman is articulating a
“nonhuman” produced by a politics that defines itself in contrast to things, to
matter, and thus a nonhuman that is not considered in the terms of political
ecology.
Performativity in Scenes of Subjection takes on a new sense, one that
occurs in tandem with the new sense of performativity that emerges in Karen
Barad’s work.
The flip side of Hartman’s critique of the politics of the thing is Barad’s
insistence precisely on the power of nonhuman things, things that are not
human in any sense of this word but which are powers. By nonhuman Barad
of course means the piezoelectric crystal, the brittlestar,124 atomic energy.125
Surely these powers are also crucial. Barad is also, in a different mode, articulating a “nonhuman” produced by a politics that defines itself in contrast to
things, to matter.
How best to bring these two together?
The very shape of the human as a homogeneous figure is in political
ecology a function of the distinction between human and nonhuman, and in
performativity a function of the distinction between human and nonhuman
as well. However, each identifies an entirely distinct “nonhuman.” Gestures
to “the human” are gestures to a distinction that both Barad and Hartman
articulate, though they are exploring distinct implications of this definition
of human.
122
Hartman, Lose Your Mother, 115.
Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World
(New York: New York University Press, 2020).
124 Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, 375.
125 Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, introduction.
123
Performativity and Political Ecology
137
Getting in the way of putting these together is a double bind. Reading
Barad and Hartman side by side makes it possible to see that in their work
political ecology and performativity do gesture to each other. I want to suggest that these are expressions of the polis I spoke of in the introduction and
Chapter 1: the one of the body is not a body, insofar as what distinguishes this
body is a capacity for uncaused thought. Because of the tradition of the polis,
clearly an ecological turn is necessary to counter the splitting of the properly
political from all that it considers to be ecological. But to reunite these means
instigating a confrontation between two “nonhumans,” the very suggestion
of which would be for some bodies a repetition of brutality. To speak of political ecology without skepticism toward its suggestion of an ultimate homogeneity of “the human” means leaving untouched the dynamics by which
bodies play the role of matter. In this way political ecological thinking can be
a continuation of the polis. Without a direct confrontation of the polis, its dynamics continue. But to avoid that ecological turn and remain in exclusively
political terms means of course ignoring all of that which the polis considers
outside of itself.
It is necessary to think ecologically, but this is politically naive. It is necessary to think politically, but this is ecologically naive.
What is available currently are these distinguishable projects: performativity
with its critique of political power in the context of an environment, and political ecology with its crucial attention to thing-​power and its incompatibility with, sometimes, an explicit rejection of social construction.126
Political ecology must suspend the question of the political nonhuman
in order for thing-​power as a project to come into focus, but in doing so it
sidelines the question of what it is like to become human. This is done in
order to turn attention to the powers of things that act on humans whether
they appreciate this or not, which is surely in some ways a crucial gesture
for appreciating what it is like to become human, but political ecologists
largely turn to performativity to understand the origin of political difference.
Performativity in turn neglects the question of the ecological nonhuman
because to do otherwise, to speak of the power of earth-​water-​fire-​air itself,
is by definition to return to the very gesture of matter, with its suggestion
126 For example, Latour, Politics of Nature, 50–​
54. See also the exposition of “universalizing
gestures” in Karera, “Blackness,” 37.
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A Philosophy of Elemental Difference
of a natural realm. Performativists rightly reject giving up tracing the ways
in which humans do make themselves, stack their hierarchies, build their
environments.
What is it about these gestures that makes them distinct? How to put them
together?
3
Latour’s Modern Is Fanon’s Manichaean
In the previous chapter I placed side by side the work of political ecologist Karen Barad1 and performativist Saidiya Hartman. These are my own
designations. My hope is to demonstrate a pattern of thinking that I witness
in which these two strands cannot come together without dehumanizing
some persons (an inherent potential of political ecology when it is taken to
be incompatible with performativity or social construction more generally)
or pretending that with respect to political difference the only powers that be
are those of politics (a potential of performativity even when it is made compatible with political ecology, as seen in the previous chapter).
That pattern of thinking, I argue, is owed to the contours of the polis,
which considers all agency to be that of the one of the body, and distinguishes
between that proper rule of the one of the body and the subordination of all
other parts of the polis and its beyond. A certain body, premised upon the
notion that there is such a thing as the one of the body or the two of the body,
figures the denial of matter of the polis. The work of Frantz Fanon is a significant influence on this exposition of the polis. In this chapter I argue that
Fanon anticipates the concerns of political ecology and performativity, but
he does so in the context of a philosophy of elemental difference. This philosophy of elemental difference in Fanon seamlessly combines the concerns of
political ecology and performativity. His work offers a conceptual space prior
to the splitting of these into two distinguishable projects. In the final section of the chapter I read Fanon’s philosophy of elemental difference together
with that of Luce Irigaray.
Political ecologists generally must presume what is meant by “human”
and therefore by “nonhuman,” because political ecology entails at least the
1 Barad does not name agential realism in this way, and as I have mentioned previously, it is important to note that Barad rightly worries about the lack of a theory of power in the work of Bruno
Latour. Nevertheless she does ascribe to the political ecological project; see especially Meeting the
Universe Halfway, 59. Barad ascribes to political ecology’s interest in (1) the climatic powers of
human-​nonhuman associations, (2) the critique of anthropocentrism, and (3) the rejection of environmentalism. Because of these key features, I take Barad’s Meeting the Universe to be a crucial political ecology text.
Elemental Difference and the Climate of the Body. Emily Anne Parker, Oxford University Press.
© Oxford University Press 2021. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780197575079.003.0004
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A Philosophy of Elemental Difference
potential for dehumanization of those who are not the one, the body, the
complete human form that is still implicit in the polis. This potential is a key
theme of the present chapter. The flattening gesture of political ecology—​to
consider all things human and nonhuman as “actants,” who act and perform,2 is its crucial contribution, something from which I want to learn, not
reject. The problem is that when political ecologists do turn to the question
of the human, they ascribe to performativity’s account of political difference,
which takes differences among humans to be owed to human projections
alone. This seems both to reinstate the privileging of the human that political ecology was supposed to end, and to reinstate the one, the body, the
complete human form that corresponds to that privileging of the human.
Political ecology, we could say, needs its own philosophy of political difference. It needs its own philosophy of power. And yet even if one were to offer
a political-​ecological philosophy of political difference, this would just be to
continue to perpetuate the very idea that political and ecological are two distinct concepts, realms, gestures. They are the same gesture, the polis.
Performativity is currently the sole philosophy of political difference. It
focuses attention on the creations of political differences among humans, the
injustices of this, as well as the overdeterminations of discontinuity of what it
is like to become human. I want to learn from this, too, not reject it, because
of the dangers of Man-​ism. And yet performativity alone does not hold the
key to all problems. The problem with performativity, as political ecologists
have at least partly articulated and as I have already discussed, is that it gives
exclusive attention to the agency of those considered to instantiate the polis.
But the political ecologists, I think, do not appreciate the degree to which
they are dependent upon the performative philosophy of political difference.
Both of the projects that I have discussed in Chapter 2 rely on the account
of political difference offered by performativity while simultaneously articulating important reservations with it. Each of these—​political ecology and
performativity—​is a necessary project that obscures the other. How to bring
these two necessary projects together? My interest is not in performativity
and political ecology as two finished projects that can create a third finished
project. My interest is to understand the workings of the polis.
Bruno Latour and Frantz Fanon offer ways of bridging the concerns of
Barad and Hartman. Social construction and political ecology represent
a divergence identified by Latour (who is a primary source for political
2
Latour, Politics of Nature, 237.
Latour’s Modern Is Fanon’s Manichaean
141
ecologists, most notably Jane Bennett)3 and Fanon (who is a primary source
for performativists, most notably Sylvia Wynter, to be discussed in
Chapter 4). Latour and Fanon both acknowledge that a certain human body
defines political agency. In Latour we can appreciate that political agency is
a tautological phrase, while material agency is the oxymoronic one. Matter
is the very denial of agency. For Latour, the modern practice of Science was
absolutely and by definition distinguished from politics.4 Modern has a
technical sense for Latour: it means the desire to purge the politics of the
science, the science of the politics. Scientists and politicians distinguished
between nature and politics, even as they made a certain body a requirement for political participation within European societies. A certain body
simply was politics. If this is no longer the case, politics is still defined by
a certain presupposition of universality that allows for questions of ecology
and bodies to be absent in the polis. This is what makes one “a modern” in
the present, a modern effort to distinguish politics from anything having to
do with ecology, and its proponents attempt to retain that modern formation to this day. Latour articulates this as a matter of two great divides, between “humans and nonhumans” and among humans (“Us” and “Them”),
the former of which is primary. These polarizations ultimately for Latour
reduce to the first one, the one between “humans and nonhumans,” where
the meaning of “humans” is, I argue, taken for granted. Latour argues that at
present there are two viable choices: modernity or ecology. To modernize or
ecologize?5 I argue that the problem is that to eliminate the nature-​culture
divide, as Latour recommends, does not to eliminate the polis, the one, the
body, the complete human form, an indistinguishably political-​ecological
concept that is responsible for the distinction itself.
I compare Latour’s philosophy of political ecology with the philosophy of
elemental difference of Frantz Fanon. For Fanon, modern as a gesture is indeed a polarization. But for him modern is constituted by an attribution of
“the biological” emblematic of an inherently threatening nature and a generic
body who transcends and controls that nature.6 Fanon suggests that matter is
3 It is important to note, however, that Bennett disagrees with Latour’s wholesale rejection of nature. She recalls the Spinozistic distinction between natura naturata and natura naturans as a way
forward. Natura naturans “ceaselessly generates new forms” (Vibrant Matter, 117, 121). Compare
Politics of Nature 25ff., and, more recently, Latour’s critique of nature in Down to Earth, especially
70–​77. See also Hassana Sharp, Spinoza and the Politics of Renaturalization (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2011).
4 Latour, We Have Never Been Modern.
5 Latour, Politics of Nature, especially 247; and Down to Earth.
6 Fanon, Wretched of the Earth.
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A Philosophy of Elemental Difference
never inert according to this polarization. The hallmark of colonial power for
Fanon is the universal, the generic, the bizarre disembodied-​bodily. Because
Fanon does not himself make any sort of historical claims about the emergence of this distinction, I think it is fair to say that his work is open to the
possibility that the modern is part of a longer pattern in which a unilateral
power thinks it is outside of the chain of relationalities. In Fanon we can appreciate, as Latour does, that political agency is a tautological phrase, while
material agency is an oxymoronic one. But for Fanon this is not because the
biological is the denial of agency, as Latour has it; instead, material agency is
oxymoronic because the agency of the biological must be denied. “Colonist”
is another word for a sanctioned agency that opposes itself to what it takes
to be hostile. This is the “delirious Manichaeanism”7 that Fanon rejects, and
I argue that it articulates a philosophy of elemental difference consistent with
that of Luce Irigaray. As I will argue in Chapter 5, Fanon and Irigaray indicate
different dynamics of the polis.
Crucially Fanon’s account combines some of the interests of political
ecology—​especially its rejection of environmentalism—​with an interest in
social construction. And for precisely that reason, Fanon’s oeuvre is ultimately neither. His work is a genre of its own. Fanon suggests that humanity
is still a deeply puzzling question. Scientists cannot answer the question of
what it is like to be-​become human or how to relate in and as earth of which
I am a part but not the whole. Latour, to give you a sense of the contrast I’m
after, writes that dynamics among humans are an “importation” of a certain
relationality between (modern) human and nonhuman. For Latour, the hierarchy among humans (presupposing who counts as human) is an instance
of a deeper hierarchy moderns impose on nonhumans. My interest is that
7 Fanon borrows this phrase from Maurice Dide and Paul Guiraud, coauthors of Psychiatrie
du médecin praticien, refondue en psychiatrie clinique (Masson, 1922), cited by Fanon, Black Skin,
White Masks, 139 n. 25, 160. Paul Guiraud republished this text in 1956, and that is the edition that
I have been able to consult. See Paul Guiraud, Psychiatrie clinique (Paris: Librairie Le François, 1956).
Guiraud and Dide write of “Manichéisme délirant,” a formal pathological, clinical symptom of being
given to extremes of desire and aversion (Guiraud, 424–​425). I have written on what I read as Fanon’s
own approach to the gesture of pathology in a more recent article, “Zoonosis and the Polis: COVID-​
19 and Frantz Fanon’s Critique of the Modern Colony,” which is forthcoming in a special issue of the
International Journal of Critical Diversity Studies. In an earlier essay I mistakenly wrote that Fanon
borrows this phrase from the unorthodox gnostic Christian religion Manichaeanism, begun by
Mani and thought to originate in third century of the common era in Babylonia. There I referenced
William L. Reese, Dictionary of Philosophy and Religion: Eastern and Western Thought, expanded ed.
(Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 1999), 445. See Emily Anne Parker, “On ‘the Body’ and the Human-​
Ecology Distinction: Reading Frantz Fanon after Bruno Latour,” philoSOPHIA 8.2 (2018): 59–​84. For
a critique of what the authors take to be Fanon’s conflation of mental illness and racism, see Sander L.
Gilman and James M. Thomas, Are Racists Crazy? How Prejudice, Racism and Antisemitism Became
Markers of Insanity (New York: New York University Press, 2016), 190–​196.
Latour’s Modern Is Fanon’s Manichaean
143
Fanon suggests that these are not two distinguishable dynamics, with one
counting as the more basic. For Fanon, the “delirious Manichaeanism” of the
colonist and the “dichotomy it [the “colonial context”] inflicts on the world”
are the point.8
What Latour and Fanon seem to agree on is that modern politics is a hostile
relationship to bodies. The political body is the agency that directs, studies,
dissects what it casts as nonhuman (Latour) and the biological (Fanon). In
both accounts a certain body simultaneously defines political agency and
negates material agency. What I argue is that this oxymoronic status of material agency presupposes a generic or abodily body as the political concept,
the very conception that institutes the polis and its conceptual distinction
from all the rest to varying degrees and to varying effects. This leads me to
favor Fanon’s account. Fanon offers the best way at present to put together the
concerns of Barad and Hartman.
3.1. Bruno Latour, “The Modern Critical Stance,” and
the Two Great Divides
In We Have Never Been Modern, Bruno Latour initiates a gesture of political ecology by redefining the “modern”9 and recommending instead a
Parliament of Things.10 When one uses the word “modern” to describe a
modern person or a modern appliance or modern technology, what does the
term mean? What does it mean to say that something or someone is modern?
Latour argues that modern can, to begin with, be understood as meaning two
things: “a break in the regular passage of time, . . . [and] a combat in which
there are victors and vanquished.”11 Modernity designates simultaneously
both a rupture with what is thought to be the past and a victory over those
who lived and live in that past. But according to Latour moderns do inherit
a past and are historically situated. This decade’s modern is next decade’s
passé. And it is obvious that what comes later is not guaranteed to be better.
Latour argues that even moderns themselves “can no longer point to time’s
irreversible arrow, nor can we award a prize to the winners.”12 The meaning
8
9
10
11
12
Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 10.
Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, 10.
Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, 142ff.
Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, 10.
Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, 10.
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of modern feels obvious, but upon examination, Latour suggests, the term is
in fact quite empty.
Instead of thinking of this term as a historical or sociological one, Latour
very helpfully explores it in a philosophical mode. He asks what the gesture of
modern entails. What does its concept include? In its various uses, what does
it enact? How should we understand this term, and does it indicate a worthy
goal? Just as in the Daodejing basic words are troubled with basic questions
and in the early Platonic dialogues Socrates asks his interlocutors to think
again about “piety,” Latour asks his readers to wonder about “modern.” He
asks moderns themselves to wonder at this term. What does it mean? Latour
leaves one wondering how such a shaky term can manage to be so influential.
Latour suggests that parsing the definitions of modern does poke holes
in its pompousness, and yet as a set of practices the modern is relentlessly
palpable. Ultimately “ ‘modern’ designates two sets of entirely different
practices.”13 When those two sets of practices are both acknowledged, one
can cease to be modern. The first set of practices is the “translating” or
“mixing” of “hybrids of nature and culture.”14 Moderns feel themselves to
be unique in having the power to create hybrids of nature with culture. To
be modern is to distinguish nature from culture and thus to feel as if it is
one’s own task to put them together in optimal ways. This aspect of modern
practice, according to Latour, is obvious even to moderns. But the specific
aspects of the hybridity modernity creates are a result of the modern attempt
at partitioning nature from culture. The “paradox of the moderns” is that the
more sharply one tries to separate nature from culture, the more alarming
the hybrids become. Hybridity of some sort is inevitable, but the character of
the hybridities moderns make is owed to their attempts to divide nature from
culture.
Latour wrote We Have Never Been Modern prior to the existence of the term
“Anthropocene.” But his more recent work suggests that the Anthropocene is
a hybrid, a nature-​culture, that results from moderns’ attempts to distinguish
themselves from nature, to not appreciate their own ecological aspects. They
don’t understand not only that they are things, but that even things aren’t
“things,”15 in the sense of being only acted upon and not themselves acting.
Modern hybridities, nature-​cultures, Latour argues, have become more and
more distressing, since “the end of limitless Nature” in the “glorious year
13
14
15
Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, 10.
Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, 10–​11.
Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, 138.
Latour’s Modern Is Fanon’s Manichaean
145
1989 [that] witnesses the first conferences on the global state of the planet.”16
In the very same year the Berlin “wall of shame” fell.17 Along with it the sense
of an outside of European capitalism disappears. Those in “rich Western
democracies” fail to notice the “perfect symmetry” and the combined devastation of this pair of events in “1989: The Year of Miracles.”18
Latour does not dispute the conceptual structure nature-​culture, or as he
later puts it in Politics of Nature, the political-​ecological divide. He only argues
that this divide is not unique to moderns; all human societies exhibit hybrids,
mixings of some sort of what is ecological with what is political. What
moderns do not appreciate is that they are also hybridly political-​ecological.
They have an ecological part. So there will always be the need to appreciate
that one is making mixtures, with or without the desire to be modern. It is
appreciating a second of the two practices that Latour argues holds the key to
letting go of the modern as a desire. This second practice is that of “purifying”
what is “human” from that which is understood to be “nonhuman,” by which
Latour means asbestos,19 a snail,20 a forest.21 “Nonhuman” is not a political
term for Latour, as it is not for Karen Barad in Meeting the Universe. Modern
is a (failing) effort to distinguish properly political actants from nonhumans
who are not actants, but only are acted upon. Thus, while even those committed to modernity understand the need for translation or mixing of the
natural with the cultural, what they do not understand is that their hybrid
practices of translating or mixing take the shapes that they do because of a
more subtle second practice of attempting to purify politics and attempting
to purify ecology, to divide these into separate realms.
Latour argues that the partition between the zones of politics and of science
is the definitive modern partition.22 This I think is the key to understanding
modern in Latour’s critical sense: modern politics entails a capacity for absolute self-​causation. The modern as a way of life is instituted wherever this
distinction between politics and science is made between a self-​causation of
the actors of politics and a ceaseless relationality characteristic of the subjects
of scientific study. Of course the partitioning can never ultimately succeed.
16
Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, 8.
Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, 9.
18 Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, 9.
19 Latour, Politics of Nature, 23.
20 Latour, Politics of Nature, 25.
21 Latour, Facing Gaia, 263.
22 He cites Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-​Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the
Experimental Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011).
17
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A Philosophy of Elemental Difference
Latour’s point is that the harder moderns try to isolate the human from that
which is not human, the more obvious and elaborate the translating must become. In turn, the interventions must be more elaborate, too. And yet all the
while the modern as a gesture returns one in the midst of the interventions
to an isolated zone of the political in which humans as self-​causing deliberate
and celebrate their self-​causation.
It is this second practice in particular that Latour names “the modern
critical stance.”23 The modern critical stance distinguishes “humans” from
“nonhumans.” It is a definition of “human” as not a thing among other relational things, although that is precisely what a human is. For Latour all things
act, humans too, and so human action is a component of collective action.
Proponents of the modern critical stance make use of a universal practice of
mixing nature-​culture, but they do so in a unique way—​in order to adapt and
readapt and retrofit a Terrestrial24 that thwarts them—​precisely because they
think that they are distinguishable from nonhumans (again, nonhuman here
means literally not human: asbestos, a snail, a forest). When someone refers
to the modern, what they mean is that this person, thing, or practice properly
distinguishes culture from nature, and elevates the political over the ecological. To be modern is to presuppose and to attempt to enact these gestures.
Latour coins the term “actants”25—​“acting agents, interveners”—​as a way
of bridging human and nonhuman powers. The hope of coming “down to
earth,”26 as Latour puts it in a more recent book, is in understanding the inherent connections of these two sets of practices. If moderns could appreciate the fact that it is only because they oppose human to nonhuman that
they need to translate in the ways that they do, and that they will need to
do so more and more elaborately, then they can “immediately stop being
wholly modern.”27 In appreciating these two practices simultaneously, understanding how they relate, the “future begins to change.”28 Moderns have
never ultimately been successful at being modern because “modern” is an
impossible desire, a futile gesture, and yet for Latour there are moderns in the
sense that there are those whose intuitions are shaped more or less decisively
by habits of distinguishing a politics focused on “matters of concern” from
23
24
25
26
27
28
Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, 11.
Latour, Down to Earth, 40.
Latour, Politics of Nature, 75.
Latour, Down to Earth.
Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, 11.
Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, 11.
Latour’s Modern Is Fanon’s Manichaean
147
science that purported to study bare “matters of fact” that are ahistorical and
independent of human influence.
In order to cease to desire to be modern, Latour argues, it is necessary
to end “the modernist parenthesis” and begin political ecology.29 Political
ecology will be the outcome of rejecting the gesture of nature. It will be the
outcome of appreciating culture as the collaborations among actants. First
in We Have Never Been Modern and continuing in Politics of Nature Latour
proposes a “Parliament of Things,” an elaborate ecological-​
economic-​
political structure that will facilitate the proposal, discussion, and revision
of human and nonhuman associations, such as the piezocrystal-​human association discussed in Chapter 1 in the work of Karen Barad. This is the labor
of Latourian democratic politics: discernment of the shapes and qualities of
associations. Latour’s claim is that humans have an irreducible role in the
engendering their own networks, as actants among actants, and so they have
no choice but to create new modes of governance that reflect this.30 Actants
are already shaping the associations of which humans are a part. A Parliament
of Things needs to replace modern parliaments in which human powers are
thought to be unilaterally powerful and distinguishable from the questions
and problems of Science, but are in practice increasingly in desperate need
of the counsel of scientists who study nonhuman actants. Scientists, Latour
suggests, are parts of associations that are already Parliaments of Things of
a different sort: “Half of public life is found in laboratories; that is where we
have to look for it.”31 For Latour, the wisdom attainable through the sciences
(not “Science”) needs to become part of the practices of democracy.
What Latour means by “nonhuman” here is what Karen Barad means by
it. He does not mean disenfranchised peoples. This makes for jarring reading
if one is skeptical of the justices offered so far by modern representative
democracies, the production of nonhumans within modern democracies,
not to mention the longer-​lived structure of the polis itself. Consider the following sentence in Politics of Nature: “Democracy can only be conceived if
it can freely traverse the now-​dismantled border between science and politics, in order to add a series of new voices to the discussion, voices that have
been inaudible up to now, although their clamor pretended to override all
29
Latour, Politics of Nature, 130.
I set aside for now the two-​house collective model that Latour has proposed starting in We Have
Never Been Modern and continuing in Politics of Nature. My argument is that without a critique of the
polis, no democracy will do.
31 Latour, Politics of Nature, 69.
30
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debate: the voices of nonhumans.”32 Latour means rivers, soil, telescopes,
carrots, soy. He does not mean “slaves, poor people, . . . women”; these are,
in Latour’s estimation, already formally included in the democracies that call
themselves modern.33
For political ecologists, the “nonhuman” is in this way what we might call
an ecological nonhuman, that which is in an ecological sense not human.
Even as Jane Bennett argues that humans themselves are vital materiality
and that “human power is itself a kind of thing-​power,”34 there is a need
to think about all of the other actants that constitute, exceed, and influence. Latour writes that when he reads the news, “The same article mixes
together chemical reactions and political reactions.”35 For example, “On
page twelve, the Pope, French bishops, Monsanto, the Fallopian tubes, and
Texas fundamentalists gather in a strange cohort around a single contraceptive.”36 News sources divide these stories into threads that mimic the modern
scheme: “Headings like Economy, Politics, Science, Books, Culture, Religion,
and Local Events remain in place as if there were nothing odd going on.”37
Modern common sense sorts out the parts: “On the left, they have put knowledge of things; on the right, power and human politics.”38
The problem for Latour is the posturing of things as mutually exclusive
of power and politics. Things act, things such as tissue cultures and DNA,
and political structures currently pretend as if they don’t. He thus proposes
to include “nonhumans” such as these—​mountain ranges, inert gases, the
Antarctic, tissue cultures, DNA—​in a political process that has been defined
against them, and not defined against “slaves, poor people, . . . women.”39
Political ecologists who take Latour’s proposals in a wide variety of
directions adopt his ecological gesture of the nonhuman, and, along with it,
a lack of reflection on the question of the possibility of political nonhumans.
This is not because political ecology as a literature denies political injustices,
but because it is the general view of the political ecologist that political
32
Latour, Politics of Nature, 69.
Latour, Politics of Nature, 69.
34 Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 10.
35 Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, 2.
36 Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, 2.
37 Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, 2.
38 Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, 3.
39 Latour, Politics of Nature, 69. One of my concerns in this book is to articulate how the polis
differentiates among these. To put it frankly, the polis seeks to swallow women who are neither slave
nor poor, and seeks to destroy women who are slave and poor. These terms for me gesture to the
shape of the polis.
33
Latour’s Modern Is Fanon’s Manichaean
149
injustice is shaped by bodies in denial of the actantcy of nonhumans, agential
realism, and thing-​power. As Jane Bennett puts the point, many “humans are
now, in a world where Kantian morality is the standard, routinely made to
suffer because they do not conform to a particular (Euro-​American, bourgeois, theocentric, or other) model of personhood,”40 in which agency is
uncaused. On this model of personhood, human agency is alone in the world.
This unilaterally agential definition of humanity is responsible for casting
many humans as nonhumans, according to political ecology. Humans may
deny humans among themselves, and this discussion, this social constructionist discussion, is among political ecologists sometimes explicitly noted
to be crucial.41 But what has yet to be understood, according to political
ecologists, is how this definition of humanity has made itself not primarily
against other humans, but against things. It has conceived of itself as a supposed power over things. And this is not so much a separate question, political ecologists argue, but one that is distinguishable from the question of how
humans subordinate other humans. There is a literature for the latter conversation, they argue, that is, performativity and social construction more generally. Meanwhile there has not yet been a literature specifically addressing
the way in which humans relate to earth. It is crucial to keep in mind here
that political ecology is a repudiation of “environmentalism” in the sense that
there is no background of what is human for political ecologists. Things act
on things, and what it is to be human has to start from ceasing to consider
human to convey a unilateral power. But the concern of political ecologists
is to create a missing attention, an attention to the ecologically nonhuman.
My concern is that political ecologists tend to presume that who is human
and who is not are ultimately solved questions. In this respect performativity
is on a different page. The performativist knows that this question is alive
and well. Social construction, and as its most sophisticated articulation,
performativity, has as its primary question, what makes someone human?
How is dehumanization accomplished? What is dehumanization? What
practices distinguish the human? And its general method is to study the ways
in which this is made, built, composed by and among humans.
For Latour, by contrast, this set of concerns is an enclosure that does not
appreciate the role of other actants in its own formations. I don’t mean to
suggest that Latour the political ecologist totally neglects the question of
40
41
Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 13.
See, for example, Braidotti, Posthuman Knowledge, especially Chapter 2, “Posthuman Subjects.”
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humanity. He explicitly considers the question of what humanity means to
be crucial. In this way his writings do offer one way of bridging the projects
of Barad and Hartman that we encountered in the previous chapter. Latour
doesn’t always, perfectly consistently, take for granted what humanity means.
Latour attends to the question of humanity in at least two ways. The first
is in his critique of the two great divides, and the second is Latour’s suggestion that anthropos should be defined as “a weaver of morphisms.”42 Though
Latour does address the question of what it means to be human, there is from
the beginning a schism in his work: the Aristotelian political-​ecological distinction that makes it difficult to appreciate the disturbing variety of that
which and those who are taken in a modern context to be “nonhuman.”
An alternative philosophical orientation is needed that can discern the dynamics of these entangled gestures of a political nonhuman and an ecological
nonhuman. It is this that Frantz Fanon provides, and which Sylvia Wynter
extends, as I will discuss in Chapter 4.
The first place where Latour raises the question of what it is like to be human
is in We Have Never Been Modern. The arch-​political ecologist is in this passage something of a social constructionist. He argues that “Westerners,” the
name that moderns most readily use for themselves, “do not claim merely
that they differ from others as the Sioux differ from the Algonquins, or the
Baoules from the Lapps, but that they differ radically, absolutely, to the extent that Westerners can be lined up on one side and all the cultures on the
other.”43 Why do westerners position themselves like this? Westerners arrange themselves this way, bringing “history along with them in the hulls
of their caravels and their gunboats, in the cylinders of their telescopes and
the pistons of their immunizing syringes,” because of the modern critical
stance, the distinction between humanity and things, between politics and
science, between humans and ecological nonhumans. This is the great divide
to which the majority of the book has so far been dedicated. “If Westerners
had been content with trading and conquering, looting and dominating,
they would not distinguish themselves radically from other tradespeople
and conquerors. But no, they invented science, an activity totally distinct
from conquest and trade, politics and morality.”44 This pride in Science, in
a realm distinguished from democratic roles and legislatures, is at the heart,
Latour argues, of the modern. The notion of Science is synonymous with the
42
43
44
Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, 37.
Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, 97.
Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, 97.
Latour’s Modern Is Fanon’s Manichaean
151
modern distinction between it, a by-​definition apolitical realm, and politics,
a realm in which bodiment plays no role. And so “the first [Great Divide,
between Us and Them] is the exportation of the second [Great Divide, between humans and nonhumans].”45 Latour gestures in this passage to that
“other Great Divide between humans and nonhumans that I defined above,”
in which it is very clear that what he means by nonhumans is ecological.
This passage regarding the two great divides is one that is trying to understand the reasons for “the conquering, looting and dominating,” but it
finds the source of these in a more basic distinction, that between humans
as an undifferentiated block and the entire rest of the planet. Explicitly,
Latour is saying that the divide for moderns between themselves and the
rest of humanity is at root the divide for moderns between themselves and
“nonhumans” in an exclusively ecological sense. They are not relational
powers, themselves subject to the powers of things, and therefore they are
“not merely a culture” among other cultures.46 They are Culture itself, with
nothing natural mitigating it.
But if this is really the case something that Latour writes next is puzzling.
He rewrites the point I’ve just discussed, arguing that the “internal” divide
of moderns between society and nature accounts for an “external” one, that
between moderns and other peoples.47 “For Them, Nature and Society, signs
and things, are virtually coextensive. For Us they should never be.” Here’s
the puzzling part: “Even though we [moderns] might still recognize in our
own societies some fuzzy areas in madness, children, animals, popular culture and women’s bodies (Haraway 1989), we believe our duty is to extirpate
ourselves from those horrible mixtures as forcibly as possible by no longer
confusing what pertains to mere social preoccupations and what pertains
to the real nature of things.”48 Here it turns out that the external divide is
much closer to being the inside of modern politics. A seemingly external
divide among humans is “in our own societies”—​madness, childhood, animality, poverty, castration, pregnancy. Each of these is a “horrible mixture”
of social and thing that must be barred from the political in order for the
45 Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, 97. What is designated “first” and “second” on this page
seems to differ from what is first and second in a diagram that appears on the next few pages. If I’ve
understood correctly, the first great divide is ultimately the human-​nonhuman one, and the second
great divide is the derivative one between moderns and all other societies who are, according to
moderns, not distinguishable from networks of things.
46 Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, 97.
47 Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, 99.
48 Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, 100.
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political to be what it is. It seems that here Latour is suggesting that there is
a desire among moderns to isolate “fuzzy areas” (fuzzy in their proximity
to those who are the political) from the political. Clearly Latour does not
himself deny the humanity of these features. His point is that there is a need
to distinguish not only the human from an ecological nonhuman, but from
a political nonhuman, a nonhuman that emerges in contrast to a modern
definition of human as what could be called Man. Moderns in fact made a
certain bodiment a requirement for political participation. And this is a dynamic that occurs, Latour partially suggests, internally within modern societies. Where are negrophobia and disability phobia and transphobia in this
account? The Us-​Them great divide is Latour’s philosophy of racial difference, and it does speak to racial difference as an internal European divide.
The point I want to make here is that implicitly (though not explicitly) in this
passage it is no longer clear which great divide is the more basic or primary
one, the one between humans and things or the one between humans and
“fuzzy areas” understood to be mixtures of social and thing.
Explicitly for Latour the more basic divide is the human-​nonhuman one.
It comes first. As Gyan Prakash has argued, Latour “assumes that it [modernity] had forged its characteristic commitment to modernity before
overseas domination. Thus he suggests that imperialisms’ great divide between ‘us’ and ‘them’ was the exportation of the division between humans
and nonhumans that Europe instituted within its borders. But is it possible
to deny the simultaneity of the formation of Western scientific disciplines
and modern imperialism?”49 The way that moderns regard other peoples for
Latour is caused by how they regard nonhuman things. The subordination
of nonhuman things comes first. Nonhuman agency is denied by moderns,
and this dynamic is both distinguishable and prior to the colonial practices
of modern imperialisms. For Latour the most basic alienation, the one most
at fault for the new climate regime, is that of moderns from ecology, and
this is an alienation that, to borrow Prakash’s phrase, was “instituted within”
Europe. My concern is that in the passage I’ve just discussed about the “fuzzy
areas,” Latour is beginning to suggest that within Europe there must have already been some dynamic that has to do with humans among humans. How
can these relationalities be distinguished, then? The human-​nonhuman or
the human-​subordinated-​denied human one? I agree with Prakash; these
49 Gyan Prakash, Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of Modern India (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1999), 12.
Latour’s Modern Is Fanon’s Manichaean
153
cannot be distinguished. It is true that Latour doesn’t consider racial difference among the “fuzzy areas.” And while he is making the point that in
making a certain body necessary for political agency, the modern assesses
bodies, nevertheless Latour’s explicit claim is that the human-​nonhuman alienation is the primary one. This is ultimately not only a maintenance of the
two divides as two divides but more importantly a maintenance of precisely
the intuition that there is a wide and clear chasm between that which is factually, obviously human and that which has no part in what is human. There is a
presupposition that the question of human is a subsidiary one.
If the human-​nonhuman divide is more basic, then that would mean that
unmaking it would unmake the Us-​Them divide, too. This is Latour’s wager,
and I think it is ultimately the wager of political ecology generally. However,
Jane Bennett doubts whether this is really true: “Such a newfound attentiveness to matter and its powers will not solve the problem of human exploitation or oppression, but it can inspire a greater sense of the extent to which all
bodies are kin in the sense of inextricably enmeshed in a dense network of relations. And in a knotted world of vibrant matter, to harm one section of the
web may very well be to harm oneself.”50 Why doesn’t the political ecology
affirmation of the power of things solve the problem of human exploitation
or oppression? It is because “to harm one section of the web may very well be
to harm oneself,” and a person would need to adopt this “expanded notion
of self-​interest,” an expanded terrain of identification, even as thing-​power
moves and pulls in various directions, in order for the attentiveness to alter
the qualities of human relationality. The patterns of identification across what
is perceived as matter seem to remain outside of the question of whether or
not I am matter. To insist that I am matter is not necessarily to identify with
other matter.
A second passage in which Latour considers the question of the human
even more directly than the first appears near the end of We Have Never Been
Modern. In order to begin the project of incorporating things into politics,
“We first have to relocate the human, to which humanism does not render
sufficient justice.”51 Modern figures of humanism—​“the free agent, the citizen
builder of the Leviathan, the distressing visage of the human person, the other
of a relationship, consciousness, the cogito, the hermeneut, the inner self,
the thee and thou of dialogue, presence to oneself, intersubjectivity”52—​are
50
51
52
Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 13.
Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, 136.
Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, 136.
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“asymmetrical” insofar as they are contrasted with objects of Science. “Where
are the Mouniers of machines, the Lévinases of animals,53 the Ricoeurs of
facts? Yet the human, as we now understand, cannot be grasped and saved unless that other part of itself, the share of things, is restored to it.”54 For Latour,
to restore the share of things to the human is to end humanism as it has previously been practiced, but it is not to “announce the death of man.”55 The
“human does not possess a stable form, [but] it is not formless for all that.”
Humans are not distinguishable from things because humans live so intimately with things, and also because “things are not things either.”56 Humans
like many other actants build things and bend things for their own uses. They
elaborate themselves with things and put themselves into things. They make
their own bodies with things. Latour proposes that anthropos be thought of
as an orchestrator of many morphisms, “technomorphisms, zoomorphisms,
phusimorphisms, ideomorphisms, theomorphisms, sociomorphisms,
psychomorphisms.” Anthropos is a “weaver of morphisms—​isn’t that enough
of a definition?”57
This is an intriguing way of redefining the human, a maker of shapes. It
could be a different way of understanding the significance of social construction. What social construction constructs is morphisms; it is a way of
speaking of the many makings in which humans are engaged. What is human
according to Latour? Is there anything distinct about being or becoming
human?58 I’m interested neither in distinguishing humanity from so-​called
animality (a term of which Fanon has taught me to be suspicious) nor in
conflating these terms, but in understanding what it is like to be human. It
becomes clear in later works that indeed for Latour there is no such definition of humanity specifically.
In Facing Gaia, Latour writes of the world as a “metamorphic zone” in
which this time all actants engage in “morphisms.”59 As in earlier works
he advocates here a political ecology in which the powers of human and
53 More recently, such a project does exist. See Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am,
ed. Marie-​Louise Mallet and trans. David Wills (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008); and
Cynthia Willett, Interspecies Ethics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014).
54 Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, 136.
55 Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, 137.
56 Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, 138.
57 Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, 137.
58 Cynthia Willett argues that Plato has it all wrong. For Willett, the “ ‘rational’ self is in fact
driven by those horses, not the other way around.” The beginning of understanding humanity is
reversing that millennia-​old priority of rationality that is the basis of human exceptionalism. Willett,
Interspecies Ethics, 20–​21.
59 Latour, Facing Gaia, 57–​58.
Latour’s Modern Is Fanon’s Manichaean
155
nonhuman actants are all represented in an integrated way in a Parliament
of Things that would include delegations such as Land, Oceans, Atmosphere,
Endangered Species.60 This would “repoliticize the negotiation” among
powers that are in fact already at the heart of politics, whether moderns appreciate this or not. Latour gives what he admits is an absurd fictional example of
what he has in mind. Imagine a delegation representing an ocean declaring
“unacceptable for our sovereignty” the actions of delegations representing
Australia or the United States. Latour writes, “It is not hard to understand
the surprise of a sovereign peacefully surveying his domain who suddenly
hears the virulent response of territories that start to shout: ‘This isn’t yours
any longer!’ The direction of land grabbing is immediately reversed and, with
this, the very definition of what it means, for any power whatsoever, to possess land.”61
In Politics of Nature, Latour sketches a new collective with a new constitution that sets out processes for determining who are the delegations and
what their concerns are. For those who wonder whether a forest can be properly represented by humans, who are surprised to think that “forest” can be
given a political “voice,” Latour responds that “you have to be just as surprised that a president speaks as the representative of ‘France.’ ”62 He continues: “Each corporate body has a good deal to say, and each can express
itself only through a dizzying series of indispensable intermediaries. It took
many decades to agree that the definition of democracy as the will of a sovereign people corresponds, even vaguely, to a reality, and it was necessary to
start with fiction.”63 This is a revolutionary proposal that Latour is making, an
ecological politics that considers scandalously incomplete any politics that is
confined to the needs of humans conceived as if they are alone on the planet.
It is revolutionary in the sense that it is a “turn around,” a turn in a new direction in which the many powers to which humans are subject are institutionally appreciated. Humans are subject to what we can call political power,
and they are also composed of the powers of oceans, forests, atmospheric
events. These powers, if they were to be folded together into a revolutionary
way, could no longer really be named, strictly speaking, a democracy, rule
by the people, though Latour insists that what he is proposing is that we acknowledge powers that are already constitutive of every democracy, already
60
61
62
63
See Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, 262, including n. 11.
Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, 263.
Latour, Facing Gaia, 263.
Latour, Facing Gaia, 263.
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being debated even if only between the lines in every political body. They are
already part of the processes of collective human discernment, but they are
barred from having their own direct concerns voiced.
It is in this context that Latour argues that we should no longer be thinking
in terms of a nature to which we belong, nature being a term synonymous
for him with environmentalism, but a political ecology that we already
are. Each of us is not so much a body as a shifting association of influences
and exertions. Humans are like all other nexuses part of a “metamorphic zone, borrowing a metaphor from geology, to capture in a single word
all the ‘morphisms’ that we are going to have to register in order to follow
these transactions.”64 Morphism here is not a distinctive way of speaking of
anthropos any more. Morphisms now refer to all powers, and Latour explicitly argues that the human-​nonhuman distinction has no more meaning that
the nature-​culture one. And yet human clearly means something to Latour.
It’s not a meaningless word for him. But what is its meaning? What is the content of the word?
The elimination of any content for this term is complete in Latour’s more
recent book Down to Earth. Here humans finally disappear. And yet the
human-​nonhuman distinction remains. Latour argues the new climate regime is marked by a situation in which those with the most political power do
not “know on what we depend for subsistence.”65 Humans are not the center;
“the center is everywhere and the circumference nowhere.”66 Latour continues, “It is perhaps time, in order to stress this point, to stop speaking about
humans and to refer instead to terrestrials (the Earthbound), thus insisting on
humus and, yes, the compost included in the etymology of the word ‘human.’
(‘Terrestrial’ has the advantage of not specifying the species.)”67
And yet the human-​nonhuman split is prevalent in Down to Earth. In an
intriguing passage with which I nevertheless cannot agree, Latour writes,
“The nineteenth century was the age of the social question; the twenty-​
first is the age of the new geo-​social question.”68 Latour’s point is that leftist
movements of the nineteenth century fought in order to expand the political
realm to include excluded humans; this fight defined and continues to define
“the left.” In the present new climate regime leftists must “reopen the social
64
65
66
67
68
Latour, Facing Gaia, 58.
Latour, Down to Earth, 86.
This is a quotation from Pascal. Latour, Down to Earth, 86.
Latour, Down to Earth, 86.
Latour, Down to Earth, 63.
Latour’s Modern Is Fanon’s Manichaean
157
question while intensifying it through the new geopolitics.”69 The movements
of miners that involved organization and protest on site has largely been
replaced by oil workers “controlled by a few expatriate engineers in distant
countries led by tiny and easily corruptible elites.”70 Such political-​ecological
transformation demonstrates a new geo-​logic or geo-​social formation.
I would like to ask how much has changed in this picture? Is the nineteenth century mine geo-​social formation really so different from that of the
oil field? Is there not ultimately one common hegemon in both? An “owner”
who pretends to be a master of both humans and nonhumans, who rules
both? And here’s the very split that I would argue is at issue again: geo-​social.
“The nineteenth century,” to quote Latour again, “was the age of the social
question,” and “the twenty-​first is the age of the new geo-​social question.” Isn’t
Latour ultimately arguing that both centuries ought to have been understood
as one age of this common hegemon, a modern who believes, without being
able to articulate the belief, in the two great divides? And hasn’t Latour himself suggested that this modern made a certain body a requirement for political agency? The mine laborers are the “popular culture” irritants of the
moderns, that which must be “extirpated” as a “horrible mixture” in order to
protect the coherence of politics as a modern project.71 Keeping this conceptual divide throughout Latour’s work means that the question of the human,
the question of humanity, of what it is like to be-​become human, remains. At
the same time Latour takes political ecology to its logical conclusion when
he argues that we need to stop speaking of humanity in a way that makes
species-​specific claims.
This combination—​insisting on eliminating any content for the word
“human” and yet referring over and over again to a distinction between
polis and oikos, geo and social, nature-​culture, leaves one dangerously close
to what we could call ecofascism, ecological fascism or fascism that appeals
to ecology. I am not suggesting that Latour’s work amounts to ecofascism.
But I want to consider them together for a moment. Latour’s critique of the
modern great divides leaves one with no way of supplanting the homogeneity and desire for “ethereal splendor”72 (to invoke Hartman) of ecofascism,
precisely because a gap is maintained between a homogenous, presupposed
human and ecology.
69
70
71
72
Latour, Down to Earth, 62.
Latour, Down to Earth, 62.
Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, 100.
Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 122.
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Let me say this once more, just to be clear: I do not argue that Latour’s work
is ecofascism. What troubles me is that his work has no way of responding to
ecofascism.
The trouble with Latour’s account of humanity is that it so easily dissolves
away not merely any way of understanding what humanity is like, but also
all dynamics among those organized according to the generic identification of Man as “the human.” Latour’s critique of the nature and culture divide, naming this the most basic great divide, leads him to reject explicitly
the tradition of social construction insofar as it is, in the modern context, by
definition devoid of actantcy. Where moderns divide the world into nature
and culture, and they think of themselves as Culture itself, at a remove from
ecology, they also divide the world into subjects (with no bodies) and objects
(with no agency). For Latour social construction is by definition an account
of subjectivity distinguished from objecthood, even our own objecthood as
organisms.73 Social construction on this understanding is a disembodied
concept that is a result not of the nature-​culture distinction, but of the inability to embrace political ecology as a philosophical pursuit, to appreciate
the powers of things, including the things that humans are. While I appreciate Latour’s critique of social construction and its denial of the object-​
status of humans, his articulation of political ecology overlaps with the polis
of the moderns that he explicitly rejects as well as the polis of the ecofascists
that he does not address.
Nothing in Latour’s work can replace the crucial work done by
performativity, and specifically by Butlerian and Hartmanian performativity,
to account for the specific dangers of thinghood for humans. The work done
by performativity is that of articulating the injustice of, or even that there
are, non-​universal, relationally instituted human events. When differences
among humans do appear in Latour, they are a byproduct of the injustice
of modern partitioning between human and ecological nonhuman. But also
the extent of political difference, the possibility of dehumanization, of having
one’s humanity denied, doesn’t seem to appear in Latour or in the literature
of political ecology.74
In fact the very content of the “actant” I cannot help finding troubling.
This concept, actant, upon which Karen Barad and Jane Bennett extrapolate to develop the crucial gestures of “agential realism” and “thing-​power”
73
74
Latour, Politics of Nature, 54, 80–​81.
See also Karera, “Blackness,” 38.
Latour’s Modern Is Fanon’s Manichaean
159
discussed in Chapter 2, extends Latour’s critique of the modern toward new
gestures that redefine agency. For Barad and for Bennett, for political ecology
as a method, there is a continuity of agencies: caffeine impedes the absorption of calcium into human blood. Wind moves the blade of a windmill.
Cannabis blocks dopamine receptors. The agency or actantcy of a human has
been understood as the definition of agency itself, and on this basis none of
these actors are thought to be actors at all in the polis. It is only in the realm
of Science, Latour points out, that they are thought to be actors. In politics
their agency is negated. Political ecology is a crucial rejection of environmentalism and an embrace of relationality, offering an orientation for living
as earth-​air-​fire-​water. Political ecology is not quite an ethics; it doesn’t dictate an ethical account. But it offers an indispensable vocabulary in that effort
to affirm relationality, to put myself back into the flows of acting earth.
Any benefit of thinking in terms of this flat concept of actant, however, is called into question by Saidiya Hartman in “Manual for General
Housework,” as discussed in Chapter 2. There Hartman’s picture of modern
cities, or poleis, and their ecological implications offers an implicit indictment of political ecology: Hartman is writing about the vitriol toward those
who “dance within an enclosure,”75 and I would argue that this vitriol is an
indication of the polis. The contours of the polis remain. The notions of not
only equality and freedom and human, but also matter, have been worked
out by a human and nonhuman divide that is also internal to politics and yet
denying of agency precisely to that which is by its own bodily definition nonhuman. And this holds not only for climate deniers, if there really are any, but
also for those Janet Biehl and Peter Staudenmaier call “ecofascists,” ecological fascists, those who apply biological categories (selectively) to the social
realm.76 For Hartman, the gesture of actancy alone offers no defense against
this plainspoken terror of ecofascism, let alone the entrapping features of the
bodily-​disembodied political.
This analysis by Hartman is evidence that modernity and ecofascism share
a common distinction between polis and oikos, one that remains even after
nature is rejected and in this way the nature-​culture distinction is debunked.
Political ecology can be a maintaining of the body of the polis. Body politics is surely a tautological phrase. The distinction between polis and oikos is
75
Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, 347.
Janet Biehl and Peter Staudenmaier, Ecofascism Revisited: Lessons from the German Experience
(Porsgrunn, Norway: New Compass Press, 2011), 19.
76
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one traceable to the ancient Greek city-​states. Though there was much disagreement among Greek philosophers regarding the relationship between
these terms, the polis popularly seems to have meant “representative government of the sort with which we are familiar from modern European history: elite representative institutions.”77 For Latour in We Have Never Been
Modern what modern means is the desire not only to distinguish these two
conceptually, but to purge the politics of all signs of a nature from which it
distinguishes itself. From where does this desire come? Ecofascism seeks to
institute the same divide as does modernism generally, the split that Latour
laments, but ecofascism at the very same time wishes to unite with a nature
of its own design and to purge itself of that which it takes to be in conflict
with this.
Indeed a certain love for nature accompanies love of the polis. Consider,
for example, Janet Biehl and Peter Staudenmaier’s point that “Hitler and
Himmler were both strict vegetarians and animal lovers, attracted to nature
mysticism and homeopathic cures, and staunchly opposed to vivisection and
cruelty to animals. Himmler even established experimental organic farms
to grow herbs for SS medicinal purposes. And Hitler, at times, could sound
like a veritable Green utopian, discussing authoritatively and in detail various renewable energy sources . . . as alternatives to coal, and declaring ‘water,
winds and tides’ the energy path of the future.”78 As Staudenmaier illustrates,
this was not a superficial misrepresentation of deeper-​seated ecologically
destructive goals.79 The National Socialists established “the first nature
preserves in Europe.”80 National Socialists, the substantial “green wing”81
within the leadership, are just one example of ecofascism, and I don’t want
to repeat the mistake of focusing on the violences within Europe as a polis
while ignoring the centuries of violence that precede them.82 Nevertheless,
Staudenmaier and Biehl helpfully suggest that National Socialism serves
as a good example of the consistency of nature-​loving and fascism. This is
not so surprising if one considers that National Socialists were concerned
77 Patricia Springborg, “The Primacy of the Political: Rahe and the Myth of the Polis,” Political
Studies 38 (1990): 84.
78 Biehl and Staudenmaier, Ecofascism Revisited, 29. Peter Staudenmaier further argues that for the
National Socialists—​who were of course not only antisemitic but also negrophobic, misogynistic, in a
way that calls for an analysis that puts all of this phobifying together—​“ecological ideals . . . were . . . an
essential element of racial rejuvenation” (29).
79 See Biehl and Staudenmaier, Ecofascism Revisited, 30–​42.
80 See Biehl and Staudenmaier, Ecofascism Revisited, 38.
81 See Biehl and Staudenmaier, Ecofascism Revisited, 39.
82 Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism.
Latour’s Modern Is Fanon’s Manichaean
161
about the alienation of a homogeneous and generic human from an organic
unity, and they considered humans that differed from themselves and that
they defined as different from themselves to be at odds with their own natural flourishing. Interestingly they didn’t have the same animosity toward
animals. Himmler and Hitler were vegetarians. They considered, and today
proponents of ecofascism, consider certain of their own species in particular to be a threat to the resplendent outdoorsman’s effort,83 a nature of their
own definition and precisely the sort against which Judith Butler and Bruno
Latour are writing from distinct but related angles. The polis with which
ecofascists identify is the one, the body, the natural, including even animals
to which they relate, the nature-​body of immateriality, and this is why at the
same time they can consider nature to be entirely theirs. This nature includes
“animals,” those above whom they nevertheless place the triumphant polis.
Rudolph Kjellén was the first to employ the term “biopolitics,” in The
State as Form of Life in 1916.84 Biopolitics is like political ecology in that it
introduces ecology into the polis. But true to the political dynamics discussed
in the first two chapters regarding the gesture of matter, in both cases there
is a subtle conceptual distinction maintained in between polis and what is
meant by bios and especially oikos. What is beyond these is that which is in
modern terms named zoological.85 But the philosophical framework according to which there can be such a category beyond that which is oikos is
consistent with the very notion of polis itself. The part that pertains to matter
in its various guises remains outside of the political.
My source for understanding this term “biopolitics” is the work of
Roberto Esposito, but Esposito himself contrasts modernity with biopolitics.
Because for Kjellén “the political is nothing else but the continuation of nature at another level and therefore destined to incorporate and reproduce
83 I argue that this why, even as Black people are, as Fanon argues, indicative of “the biological”
with respect to the polis, in the twentieth century, Black farmers “endured numerous economic and
racialized obstacles including untimely delivery of operating loans, insufficient information about
program availability, and racist treatment in many county USDA offices, [and] their number has
declined at a rate nearly three times that of White farmers.” Anti-​blackness entails the claim that
Black people cannot hold the position of control over the farm that the body of the polis can. See
Gary R. Grant, Spencer D. Wood, and Willie J. Wright, “Black Farmers United: The Struggle against
Power and Principalities,” Journal of Pan African Studies 5.1 (2012): 3. See also Willie Jamaal Wright,
“As above, So below: Anti-​Black Violence as Environmental Racism,” Antipode (2018): 1–​19.
84 Roberto Esposito, Bíos: Biopolitics and Philosophy, trans. Timothy Campbell (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 16.
85 As Londa Schiebinger explains, Carl Linnaeus’s tenth edition of Systema Naturae and Carl
Clerck’s Aranei Svencici “together form the starting point of modern zoological nomenclature”
(Nature’s Body, 222 n. 1).
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nature’s original characteristics,”86 Esposito argues that “biopolitics” can be
contrasted with the “modern conception derived from Hobbes that one can
preserve life only by instituting an artificial barrier with regard to nature.”87
Hobbes’s formulation is what Latour laments as modern, placing a barrier
between politics and nature. Whereas the modern conception relegates
nature to the outside of politics, biopolitics conflates them, according to
Esposito. The “political as nothing else but the continuation of nature” means
for Kjellén, Esposito points out, that the state should be approached like any
other natural organism, one that can be diagnosed with a “degenerative syndrome” and subjected to a “consequent regenerative program”88 of the sort
that the National Socialists would envision on the basis of the gesture of
biopolitics worked out in Kjellén as well as Jacob von Uexküll’s Staatsbiologie
in 1920.
Pace Esposito, I think the detachable character of the polis is a point of
continuity between the modern and the very gesture of biopolitics that is the
hallmark of ecofascism. Hobbes is one half of precisely the contrast case that
Latour uses to define the modern, Hobbesian politics and Boylean Science,
the Leviathan and the air pump,89 and so this partition is the modern that
Latour undermines. Biopolitics shares this structure. Biopolitics does desire to eliminate the partition by reuniting the polis as an organism with the
eco(logical). But what is meant by polis and defended as polis that can be
properly natural is still nevertheless there in the biopolitical concept, as that
which must be defended. In other words, in biopolitics the polis remains;
it is what needs defending against the dangerous forces of organic decay.
What the earnest biopolitical enforcer means by “political” is the polis, the
same homogeneous core that moderns likewise see as failing in one way or in
many to be the one, the body, the complete human form.
This partition of the polis from that which is cast uniquely as ecological in the polis shared by the modern and the biopolitical accounts for the
wisdom of Aimé Césaire’s claim, “At the end of the blind alley that is Europe,
I mean the Europe of Adenauer, Schuman, Bidault [whom I would argue are
moderns in Latour’s sense] and a few others, there is Hitler. At the end of capitalism, which is eager to outlive its day, there is Hitler. At the end of formal
humanism and philosophic renunciation, there is Hitler.”90 The modern,
86
87
88
89
90
Kjellén, quoted in Esposito, Bíos, 17.
Esposito, Bíos, 17.
Esposito, Bíos, 17.
Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, 15–​20.
Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, 37.
Latour’s Modern Is Fanon’s Manichaean
163
Césaire suggests, is disgusted by fascisms precisely because such authoritarianism reveals the capacity for brutality of a culture that is supposed to be
the model for how the rest of the world should live and should always have
lived. He writes of the modern (in Latour’s sense, again which Latour entirely laments), “What he cannot forgive Hitler for is not the crime in itself,
the crime against man, it is not the humiliation of man as such, it is the crime
against the white man, the humiliation of the white man, and the fact that he
applied to Europe colonialist procedures which until then had been reserved
exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the ‘c*olies’ of India, and the ‘n*ggers’ of
Africa. And that is the great thing I hold against pseudo-​humanism: that for
too long it has diminished the rights of man.”91 Césaire makes plain the continuity of liberal political philosophies and the fascisms that embarrass them.
But this distinction of bios and oikos from polis, such that they can all be
distinguished according to moderns and reunited according to ecofascists,
is troublingly also maintained in Latour’s remedy for modernity, namely
political-​ecology.
Clearly ecofascist ecology differs from political ecology as Latour
articulates it. They couldn’t be farther apart in one sense. It is modernity, not
Latour’s critique of it, that is consistent with ecofascism’s implicit schism between the human as a homogeneous, ethereal ideal and an equally idealized
Nature. Latour would argue, I suspect, that ecofascists are environmentalists,
not thinkers of political ecology at all. But this is precisely the point. While
Latour’s oeuvre as a rejection of modernity contains countless rejections of
such a mobilization, from We Have Never Been Human to Down to Earth,
including the denunciation of nature across many works but most pronouncedly in Politics of Nature, there is nothing in Latour to address fascist
defensiveness of ecology. There is nothing to directly confront ecofascism.
Latour would argue that ecofascists are at best environmentalists, insofar as
they preserve an implicitly undifferentiated humanity whose background
is of value and can be preserved through pristine conservationist measures
somehow distinguishable from the supposed decay of urban life in the present. But insofar as Latour himself maintains a homogeneous polis, there can
be no confrontation with this dynamic as it appears in ecofascism, the desire
for a politically purified polis.
Pace Latour, political ecology replicates the separation between ecology
and polis that one sees in the modern and in the originally conservative
91
Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, 36; my asterisks.
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versions of the biopolitical. Latour’s critique of the modern retains the separation between ecology and politics at least so long as the question of what
is meant by the polis and by its human is not asked. I am not saying that
Latour’s work amounts either to the modern that he has so thoroughly criticized or to the ecofascism with which his work is incompatible.92 In response
to the folly of modernism, Latour does not make the move made by Kjellén
of conflating the political with nature, which is an abrupt return to Aristotle’s
biocentric Man. Latour’s work engages in a consistent refutation of the very
gesture of Nature. There is no Nature any more than there is Science, or the
state for that matter,93 in Latour. And yet there is still a problem. I belabor
the point because there is something about Kjellén’s invocation of biopolitics,
Nature or no nature, as well as the silence of the modern regarding what it
is like to be-​become human that reappears in a certain silence in Latour regarding the human. Who, and also what, is the humanity?
Thus there is a worrisome silence in Latour regarding the ongoing, frequent assignment of nonhuman status to political actors, a political nonhuman status. For too many, the denial of humanity, the withholding of
something, is part of what it is like to be-​become human. And the denial of
this denial—​being oblivious to it—​is also part of what it is like to be-​become
human, at least in the present. That some humans can be oblivious to the
experience of dehumanization that others spend their entire lives trying to
figure out, that is the sense of humanity that I seek to understand. What is
this humanity? As we saw earlier, when Latour does explicitly pursue an account of humanity, in both cases there is a flat reduction to what we could
call the ecological alone or to a gesture toward a polis that is not explicit regarding its manner of distinguishing humans from other sorts of terrestrials.
Either way, a political-​ecological divide emerges, even in Latour, who is
92 Not only does Latour thoroughly refute the notion of “nature,” he suggests that the tradition
of vitalism that overlaps with ecofascism is the opposite of his own view, of which he takes James
Lovelock to be a precursor. Lovelock “refuses to de-​animate the planet by removing most of the actors
that intervene a causal chain.” Latour takes vitalism to identify, as does Aristotle, agency with “immateriality.” See Down to Earth, 76.
93 The Parliament of Things is, like the Deleuzian-​Guattarian war machine, a rejection of politics as
a collaboration exclusively of humans. So I don’t see that the state can really survive Latour’s proposal.
Consider also that Deleuze-​Guattarian “nomad science” is comparable to Latourian sciences, little
“s.” However, Latour retains a hope for democracy, as the subtitle of Politics of Science has it, “bringing
the sciences into democracy,” while Deleuze and Guattari speak intriguingly little about it. Compare
“Treatise on Nomadology: The War Machine” in A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia,
trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987) with Latour’s Politics of
Science and Down to Earth, especially 90. But like Latour’s, Deleuze and Guattari’s work ultimately
neglects to expose the polis as well. This is why elemental difference is sometimes parsed as political
for them, and sometimes as empirical or pre-​political.
Latour’s Modern Is Fanon’s Manichaean
165
trying to put them together, insofar as what is left over are all of the pressing
questions about the origins, qualities, and resilience of a distinctly political
difference. For Latour, political differences, differences within the polis, are
all byproducts of a human-​nonhuman great divide, a divide that is not itself political. If that more basic divide were addressed, the relations among
humans would be, too. Or that is Latour’s claim.
I worry that without a sustained inquiry—​of the sort apparently offered
only by performativity—​into the gesture of humanity, political ecology
cannot ultimately be distinguished from what is problematic about both modernity and ecofascism, in spite of the general spirit of Latour’s work, because
of the silence regarding the possibility of understanding humanity anew.
Thus while Latourian political ecology offers a welcome reorientation that
appreciates the powers of earth-​air-​fire-​water in and as human actancy, a way
of thinking that I do wish to follow, I would argue that Latour’s work offers
no response to the dangers of flattening inherent in the gesture of actancy, a
flattening that can result in a vicious adherence to the one, the body, the complete human form. The crucial danger is that in Latourian political ecology
there seems to be no way yet of preserving the insights of performativity, and
definitely not social construction, and the very possibility that there discontinuities, unshared events, in what it is like to be human.
3.2. Frantz Fanon: The Modern Is Manichaean
In the first half of this chapter I have been discussing how Latour’s political
ecology offers a way of thinking across the work of political ecology and
performativity. There is some exploration of what it is like to become human
in Latour, this crucial political-​ecological thinker. And yet political ecology
as a literature has a tendency to set aside the question of what it is like specifically to be human. Latour’s understanding of what it is like to be human by
his own description reduces to what it is like to be anything else. For Latour,
one great divide—​between Us and Them, as Latour puts it—​results from a
more basic great divide, that between nature and culture. On Latour’s account, this is the great divide that must be unwound in order to redress political difference.
Latourian political ecology seeks to put these together by denouncing the
gesture of apolitical nature. But to denounce the gesture of distinguishing
nature from culture is not yet to examine the dynamics of the polis. Quite
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literally, political ecology maintains the concept of the polis. I will explore
this further in later chapters. My conjecture is that the concept of the polis
holds the possibility of asking about humans, including the qualities of relations among those humans. Because such relations are owed, according to
Latour, to a more basic relationality—​between moderns and an acting terrestrial, he suggests that if moderns were to understand themselves as terrestrial, this would eliminate the power dynamics of the polis. But how can it do
so if the very notion of the polis is still what human means—​the gesture of
the one, the body, the finished human form that can be universally extended?
I turn now to the work of Frantz Fanon, who offers an alternative model
for bridging political ecology and performativity as crucial literatures.
Conundrums that emerge when reading Latour disappear when one turns
to The Wretched of the Earth. This is not a reason not to read Latour; indeed
his work crystalizes the legacy of the polis and its recent breaking off of itself
from oikos. My argument is instead that Latourian political ecology needs a
way of getting reacquainted with and transforming the wisdom of social construction, particularly the performative philosophy of social construction,
in spite of the fact that Latour himself has argued that social construction is
incompatible with political ecology.94 Fanon’s philosophy offers a way to do
this, hidden though Fanon’s interest in ecology has apparently been. Fanon
is neither a political ecologist nor a social constructionist, on my reading.
Sometimes he moves back and forth between them. But on the whole his philosophy is located prior to the departures each of these makes from the other.
What Latour names modern, Fanon names Manichaean. As an indictment
of the polis, Fanon’s work is not only historically significant but also contemporarily incisive. Latour argues that one great divide (a divide between Us
Western Europeans and all other societies, or Them) should be understood as
caused by a more basic one (the nature-​culture95 or ecology-​politics96 distinction). Part of this view is the claim that the agency of the nonhuman needs to be
appreciated and that this will eliminate political hierarchies.97 Fanon suggests
instead that this line between politics and ecology is drawn by means of elemental difference, vilifying all who are placed on the wrong side of the line. For
Fanon that which is not human is never understood as simply lacking agency.
What we could call extra-​polis agency, any agencies unauthorized by the polis,
94
95
96
97
This argument is maintained throughout Latour, Politics of Nature, but see especially 54, 81.
See Latour, We Have Never Been Modern.
See Latour, Politics of Nature.
Latour, Politics of Nature, 76.
Latour’s Modern Is Fanon’s Manichaean
167
Fanon suggests, are conceived as a threat to the polis. The agency of that which
is not European Man, Manichaean Man—​for Fanon this is everything other
than the authorized agency of white justice that presupposes the unique value
of a specific body—​is a threatening agency, not a lack of all agency.
Latour laments that there is an Us and Them distinction caused by the nature-​
culture distinction. I would argue that writing Them does not capture the vitriol of the dynamic. “Them” suggests contenders, who are fellow (albeit lesser)
humans. “Them” is a term for humans that one excludes, but nevertheless
regards as human. What’s missing is precisely the process of dehumanization
according to which there is no Them at all. Now, Latour does not take lightly the
implications of the division Us-​Them or the ongoing animosity of humans that
define the political realm. Certainly there is an alienation there, a polarization,
an othering that his work seeks to understand. The Us-​Them dynamic serves as
a foundational motivation of We Have Never Been Modern and features prominently in Down to Earth. My worry is that the process of dehumanization is not
there in his account. Reading Fanon suggests, helpfully, that the crucial polarization of Latour’s modern is not human-​nonhuman—​in an apolitical sense that
precedes politics. The problem of the Manichaean for Fanon is precisely that it is
not at all clear who is human because of the fact that the one, the body, the complete human, is defined against his own body. The process of dehumanization is
an indistinguishably political-​ecological event. In short, Fanon articulates the
missing dehumanization. He offers a philosophy of dehumanization. The one,
the body is meant to be his own fate; there is no other measure in the world
than the one of which he is inherent lack. There is not a sufficient understanding
in Latour of what humanity even means to protect against this homogeneous
and bodily yet disembodied account of humanity. The central dichotomy that
Latour considers synonymous with modern is better understood in Fanon as
the one, the body of the human who is established through a contrast, not so
much with an inert nature, but with a nature that this body perceives as hostile to itself. The human, Fanon laments, is defined as the culmination of and
proper ruler of all nature. The political, the bodies constituting the polis, are a
conquering nature, and they must defend themselves as such.
What makes Fanon’s work so important in the present is a larger picture
of a world divided between humans and a hostile nature. Fanon denounces
“the Manichaean,” “a world compartmentalized, Manichaean and petrified, a world of statues.”98 Apartheid, Fanon writes, is “but one method of
98 Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 15. This argument begins in Black Skin, White Masks, as I will
explain.
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compartmentalizing the colonial world,”99 one method of compartmentalizing the social world. But the compartmentalization of colonialism is owed
to a simultaneous assessment of nature on the part of the colonizer. The colonizer opposes himself to a “hostile, ungovernable, and fundamentally rebellious nature” of which the colonized are one especially representative part.100
Fanon writes, “Colonization has succeeded once this untamed nature has
been brought under control. Cutting railroads through the bush, draining
swamps, and ignoring the political and economic existence of the native
population are in fact one and the same thing.”101
Because of this approach to the question of what it means to become
human, Fanon does not distinguish between ecological devastation and political devastation. He doesn’t consider one to be more basic than the other.
There isn’t a more basic problem to attend to, one problem that would unwind the other. Fanon’s work folds in the concerns of both the political ecologist102 and the social constructionist, including performativists such as
Hartman and Wynter.103 His work encompasses both of these strands. The
performative part is taken up by Saidiya Hartman in Scenes of Subjection and
by Sylvia Wynter across many works. Indeed this aspect of Fanon has been
widely influential entirely on its own. About the relevance of Fanon’s work
99
Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 15.
Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 182. Translation altered.
Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 182.
102 While there is a growing literature on Fanon as an environmental thinker, I am suggesting
that he anticipates political ecology, while also articulating a comprehensive critique of its defining
distinction. Fanon is not an environmentalist; he is closer to being a vital materialist. On Fanon’s
environmentalism and for a well-​researched archive of it, see Romy Opperman, “A Permanent
Struggle against an Omnipresent Death: Revisiting Environmental Racism with Frantz Fanon,”
Critical Philosophy of Race 7.1 (2019): 57–​80; and Jennifer Wenzel, “Reading Fanon Reading Nature,”
in What Postcolonial Theory Doesn’t Say, ed. Anna Bernard, Ziad Elmarsafy, and Stuart Murray
(New York: Routledge, 2016), 185–​201. For implicitly vital materialist-​friendly readings of Fanon,
see Anna M. Agathangelou, “Bodies to the Slaughter: Global Racial Reconstructions, Fanon’s
Combat Breath, and Wrestling for Life,” Somatechnics 1.1 (2011): 209–​248; and Achille Mbembe,
“Frantz Fanon and the Politics of Viscerality,” paper presented at the workshop “Frantz Fanon, Louis
Mars, and New Directions in Comparative Psychiatry,” Duke Franklin Humanities Institute, Duke
University, Durham, North Carolina, April 26–​27, 2016, https://​www.youtube.com/​watch?v=lg_​
BEodNaEA. For an explicit reading of Fanon as “new materialist,” see also Stephanie Clare,
“Geopower: The Politics of Life and Land in Frantz Fanon’s Writing,” diacritics 41.4 (2013): 60–​80,
but see also Esposito, Bíos, 16, on the origin of the gesture of “geopower.”
103 Though they are far from in agreement in their readings of Fanon’s oeuvre, my reading
of Fanon owes a great deal to the following, in addition to the work of Sylvia Wynter and Saidiya
Hartman: Browne, Dark Matters; Gines, Hannah Arendt and the Negro Question; Lewis Gordon, What
Fanon Said: A Philosophical Introduction to His Life and Thought (New York: Fordham University
Press, 2015); David Marriott, Whither Fanon? Studies in the Blackness of Being (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 2018); Mbembe, Critique of Black Reason; Mbembe, Necropolitics; Achille Mbembe,
On the Postcolony (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001); Moten, “The Case of Blackness.”
100
101
Latour’s Modern Is Fanon’s Manichaean
169
for thinking political ecology comparatively little has been written.104 I want
to suggest that both of these themes of Fanon’s work must be appreciated together in order to appreciate their full significance. Because both are there,
and especially because Fanon allows one to appreciate how political and ecological are distinguishable at all, Fanon’s work is not reducible to either political ecology or social constructivist literatures. This is the gesture that allows
for an adequate understanding of climate disruption, as I will discuss more
directly in Part II.
Fanon’s is the thinking that I want to follow. I read this together with
Irigaray’s critique of the one, the body, and the critique of the form-​matter
hierarchy. Irigaray cannot appreciate the extent to which matter, or, as
Fanon puts it, “the biological,” is conceived as threatening, not merely inert;
Fanon’s work complements that of Irigaray. Both are interested in a denial
of elemental difference, relational differentiations that earth-​wind-​fire-​air
is and thus in which we ourselves participate. This denial is accomplished,
both Irigaray and Fanon suggest, in the attempt to protect the notion of there
being one complete (human) form. This form is biocentric Man. All bodies
contrasting with this are not the ruler of the polis. This denial of elemental
difference structures the polis in presupposing a generic human distinguishable from earth. But it is only because of elemental difference that there can
be any gesture of the generic human. The polis is a gesture of the one, the
body, and this is a polis that, Fanon laments, anticipates danger in all that
exceeds it.
Fanon writes in The Wretched of the Earth, “The colonial world is a
Manichaean world. The colonist is not content with physically limiting the
space of the colonized, i.e., with the help of his agents of law and order. As
if to illustrate the totalitarian nature of colonial exploitation, the colonist
turns the colonized into a kind of quintessence of evil.”105 In a footnote to
this passage, he gestures to Black Skin, White Masks, where he has “demonstrated . . . the mechanism of this Manichaean world.”106 Fanon is pointing
to his claim in Black Skin, White Masks that the mechanism of colonization
and racialization is an animosity toward the biological, that which is figured
as the biological itself, and the genital, that which is figured as genital, both of
104 Mel Chen’s political ecological book Animacies includes a reading of Fanon, and yet I would
argue that the reading is ultimately a social constructionist one. See Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial
Mattering, and Queer Affect (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012), especially 31–​35 and 49–​50.
105 Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 6.
106 Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 6 n. 1.
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which are invented as le nègre: “Le nègre symbolise le biologique.”107 The negro
symbolizes the biological. At the time of writing, le nègre would have been
translated as “Negro.” Fanon distinguishes this in Black Skin, White Masks,
from le Noir, “Black man.”108 In Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon writes, “To
have a phobia about le nègre is to be afraid of the biological, for the black
man is nothing but biological. Black men are animals. They live naked. And
God only knows what else.”109 In this quotation Fanon understands the tight
associations for Europeans of matter, sexuality, race, animality, legacies of
the disembodied yet bodily polis. A certain body defines a polis with which
le nègre is in conflict. Each term augments the rest. Le nègre is an exploitation of the departures of his body from the one, the body, the lone complete
human form. In the passage Fanon is commenting on the work of psychiatrist O. Mannoni, who had published a book in 1950110 entitled Prospero and
Caliban, in which he argued that the “colonial situation” in Madagascar was a
case of “the meeting of two entirely different types of personality and their relations to each other, in consequence of which, the native becomes ‘colonized’
and the European becomes a colonial.”111 Mannoni argued that a reciprocal
set of types of personality explained the stability of colonial hierarchy.
Mannoni, Fanon suggests, is like an anatomist whose “research always
focuses on others and never on himself.”112 Mannoni, the scientist, the third
party to a dispute between two preexisting “entirely different types of personality,” characterizes the colonized as playing a reciprocal part, and he
insists that that is what entraps the colonized. Mannoni holds that there is a
reciprocal rationality, and that is bad enough. But Fanon argues that the real
problem with Mannoni’s account is that he does not ask about “the mechanism” that makes two groups emerge in the first place.113 It seems that
Mannoni reifies and denies the mechanism at issue for Fanon. Racialization,
Fanon explains, in the form of le nègre is an animosity toward an external
107 Frantz Fanon, Peau noire, masques blancs, in Frantz Fanon: Oeuvres (Paris: La Découverte,
2011), 198; Black Skin, White Masks, 144.
108 Compare, for example, Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, xii; Fanon, Peau noire, masques blancs,
64, with Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 139; Fanon, Peau noire, masques blancs, 193.
109 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 143.
110 This would have been the time of the Malagasy Uprising, a rebellion against French colonial
rule. The peoples of what is now Madagascar would not be free of colonial rule until 1960, only
after the French colonial military engaged in brutal efforts ,including torture, mass execution, state-​
sponsored sexual assault, to suppress the revolutionary effort. See Fanon Black Skin, White Masks, 84.
111 O. Mannoni, Prospero and Caliban: The Psychology of Colonization (New York: Frederick
A. Praeger, 1964), 17.
112 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 145.
113 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 146.
Latour’s Modern Is Fanon’s Manichaean
171
biological. This is “the mechanism”: the invention of le nègre /​the biological. Mannoni’s analysis doesn’t appreciate negrophobia, fear of the threat
that le nègre is to the closed circle of the morphology of the one, the body. As
Fanon puts it, “Black/​negro [le nègre] through his body hinders the closure of
the White’s [du Blanc] postural schema.”114 For Fanon an animosity toward
bodiment of the biocentric or bios-​centric tradition is not aimed at “embodiment” generally; it is not an animosity toward bodies in a universal sense. It
is not aimed at bodies generally. It is aimed at what is extraneous to itself. For
Fanon there is not an ultimately disembodied ideal behind this, more basic
than it, but instead the one, the body is itself a vilification of the biological.
The desire for disembodiment is the desire for a specific body. A desire to
escape earth-​water-​fire-​air, to be disembodied, is a bodily desire, and so it is
figured as a body. Generic body is an oxymoron, but it is at the same time not
oxymoronic because the desire for a very specific body is the way in which
the animosity of the biological appears. Fanon suggests that the idealization
of a certain one, the body is a bodily way of managing hatred of bodies in the
relational and in the plural to which the one, the body, the complete human
form, wishes it didn’t relate.115
A crucial point here is that for Fanon it is not merely the attachment to an
idea that is whiteness itself that makes a white man white. Even if the idea of
whiteness is rejected, somehow there are still “all those white men, fingering
their guns, [who] can’t be wrong.”116 As Frank Wilderson has underlined,
Fanon wrote, “I am a slave not to the ‘idea’ that others have of me, but to
my appearance.”117 In other words the political itself has been instituted not
out of an investment in a pure idea of whiteness, but in the validated agency
of certain bodies with certain features that are rendered synonymous with
a certain collective attachment to the one, the body, the lone human form.
We could say that whiteness is superficial, except that the very notion of the
polis is built on it, allegiance to a certain form-​matter. One might say that
what is white or what is black or what is brown or what is yellow or what is
red is a superficiality—​but only if we consider these terms to be ideas. They
are not ideas, if what is meant by an idea is something distinguishable from
the necessity of shape, an idea in the Platonic sense of eidos. They are appearance in Fanon’s sense, the way that a body is made to appear communally,
114
115
116
117
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 138; Fanon, Peau noire, masques blancs, 193.
Jackson, Becoming Human.
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 118.
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 95; Wilderson, Black, White, and Red, 37.
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A Philosophy of Elemental Difference
to be sensed. Irigaray’s term is “morphology”: the study of the senses and
shapes of bodies that are the elaborations of bodies themselves. Elaborations,
adornments, shapes of body. Wherever there is white morphology, an establishment of the one, the body, a preeminent body implicitly and explicitly
enforced, there is a polis made up of exclusion of that which cannot be white.
It is in this sense that le nègre is the biological and the genital for Fanon.
The presupposed primacy of the one, the body, the one body, the complete
human, overdetermines the meaning of all who asymmetrically relate to the
animosity of the one, the body toward the biological, the genital, and, Fanon
will add more explicitly in The Wretched of the Earth, earth.
In the final pages of Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon criticizes what he calls
a white justice. Reading these pages together with The Wretched of the Earth,
this is a legality that not only does harm in fetishizing him as a departure
from the one, the body, but at the very same time does not acknowledge the
role of his body, perceived as le nègre in propping the political up out of the
castigated ecological. White justice fetishizes a generic equality of treatment,
a denial of a political difference and dehumanization that it created and
renews. In other words, not only does the one, the body of the polis, fetishize
certain bodies that protrude against an implicit morphology of the one, the
body, the human, it pretends to accommodate them so long as they do not
reveal themselves as departing from it.118
The Wretched of the Earth picks up on precisely this theme: colonial justice is the result of a Manichaean splintering of the political from all that is
associated with the needs of the bodily, the political from the ecological, the
cortical from the visceral. This is why sociotherapy is absolutely necessary as
a decolonial practice.119 The Manichaean is a way of naming the fundamentally bizarre and uncanny damages of white/​disembodied justice that is both
figured by certain bodies and is a hatred of bodies.
For Fanon, this is also why lynching is white justice. I think today he would
additionally point to record-​setting hurricanes in the Caribbean, the finance-​
capital attempts at takeover in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria, practices
of spatial confinement, and in the United States the death penalty. These
are not separate phenomena; they are part of the same disembodied bodily
structure of the generic body that white justice is, the explicit celebration of
the one, the body that is in fact a celebration of an immaterial agency that the
118
Sara Ahmed, “A Phenomenology of Whiteness,” Feminist Theory 8.2 (2007): 149–​168.
As David Marriott has articulated. Whither Fanon?, 41–​190. See also Chapter 4, “Frantz Fanon’s
War,” in David Marriott, On Black Men (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000).
119
Latour’s Modern Is Fanon’s Manichaean
173
one, the body can encase but also is identified with. Fanon would, in contrast
to Latour, in the present point to the perfect consistency of both ecofascism
and ecoapartheid: some of the best ecologists and environmentalists are
committed to the one of polis, to a very specific human and family as nature.
Fanon would not be shocked by this. These are the one, the body, the finished
human seeking to safeguard the polis in the Anthropocene. Ecological fascism and ecological apartheid of course have the same dualistic conceptual
structure as political ecology and biopolitical do, as well as, unsettlingly, the
human-​nonhuman of the political ecologist. These terms are not all equatable, and yet in all three a common problem appears, a sort of oil-​and-​water
inability of these concepts ecological and political to be honest about their
relationship. There is a refusal being conveyed in the dualism. There is an inability to appreciate the basic allegiance of ecology as a concept to apartheid
as a concept. The common point for both is a valuation of the one, the body,
the very idea that there is one complete human form, thought to be simply
the completion of the human. Fanon’s philosophical writings, like Irigaray’s,
press me to the philosophical exploration of how this gestural split manifests
over and over again, and how the split is made out of the elevation of the ideal
human form. It is for Fanon a manifestation of the mechanism articulated
in Black Skin, White Masks of the denial of that which is the biological and le
nègre as a sign of that denial.120
According to this account of the mechanism—​the refusal of the biological
/​ le nègre—​a “cycle of the biological”121 begins with negrophobia, the genesis
of negrophobia due to a white postural schema that wants to, but cannot,
close. In this sense the entire process of racialization, the source of the gesture
of white, begins with an overdetermination of le nègre as “the phobic object,”
the thing, a threat to white-​man as the one, the body, the lone perfect human,
as the enclosed schema and the one needing and worthy of defending. Black
simply is the outside of a bodily-​disembodied white, white as a uniquely
suited place for that which is disembodied to emerge. And as Sylvia Wynter
will explain, though for generations so many white bodies remained unfinished versions of biocentric Man, some would become the two of the body,
the definitive partner in bodily-​disembodied humanity of the one, the body,
the fullness of the human.
120
121
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 143; Fanon, Peau noire, masques blancs, 197.
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 139.
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A Philosophy of Elemental Difference
Fanon presupposes that the reader has already understood this mechanism in Black Skin, White Masks before she turns to read The Wretched of
the Earth.122 The critique of the biological /​le nègre as a threat to the morphological closure of the complete human form in Black Skin, White Masks
becomes in The Wretched of the Earth a framework for exposition of the
“world divided in two”123 that is the colony. What Latour names modern,
Fanon names Manichaean. Colonialism opposes the human to agential
things. Fanon writes, “The ‘thing’ colonized becomes a man through the very
process of liberation,”124 by a restoration of “unity”125 to each person, but he
is no less interested in things of the so-​called ecological sort. (More on the
meaning of “man” in Fanon, as I read him, subsequently.)
There are four specific claims in Fanon that amount to a rejection of this
Manichaean and the “abstract universal values of the colonizer.”126 First,
there is the characterization of the colonial world and its Manichaeanism,
specifically the French National Assembly, as needing to be protected against
the “defilement” threatened by those who require colonization. This theme
is introduced early in the book and, I want to suggest, structures it. Second,
there is the characterization of the insecticide DDT as a colonial power.
Third there is the demand that one of the first things that is required for
halting colonization is “testing the soil and subsoil” and rivers. These powers
will also need attention in order to recover from colonial assaults. And finally there is Fanon’s attention to the “cortico-​visceral” implications of both
Manichaeanism and the wars of resistance necessary to end colonization.
Fanon’s work is a concerted effort to undermine the polarization of what
the polis divides as mind-​body and more recently brain-​body. Fanon rejects
them both.
Fanon’s initial description of Manichaeanism in The Wretched of the
Earth characterizes the colonial world and its Manichaeanism as set against
“the customs of the colonized, their traditions, their myths, especially their
myths.”127 He cites a specific claim by Monsieur Meyer during a session of
the French National Assembly that “we should not let the Republic be defiled
by the penetration of the Algerian people.”128 Fanon writes, “Colonization
122
123
124
125
126
127
128
Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 6 n. 1; Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 140–​146.
Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 5.
Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 2.
Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 238.
Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 9.
Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 6–​7.
Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 6.
Latour’s Modern Is Fanon’s Manichaean
175
has succeeded once this untamed nature has been brought under control.
Cutting railroads through the bush, draining swamps, and ignoring the political and economic existence of the native population are in fact one and
the same thing.”129 These are all one and the same thing according to the
Manichaeanism of the political.130 For Fanon this is the colonial world: a
zone of humans is established that must fight to subdue myriad powers. Such
powers are equated in being set against the colonial project. Preemptive
weapons against defilement include Christianity, according to which “many
are called but few are chosen,”131 and the insecticide DDT, on which I will say
more later.
Fanon pens a few of these lines in order to turn to what he terms “mental
disorders,” though he promptly conceptually reorients this phrase. Fanon
says that in order to fully address the character of colonial war, it is necessary
to “deal here with the problem of mental disorders born out of the national
war of liberation waged by the Algerian people.”132 And to do this it is necessary to recall that colonization is an effort to protect against incursions of
“a hostile, ungovernable, and fundamentally rebellious nature” that is “synonymous in the colonies with the bush, the mosquitoes, the natives, and
disease.”133 This is the full scale of colonial war. This is the very gesture of
the native, someone who is earth, the biological of Black Skin, White Masks.
Wherever the native appears, the one who must be subdued as earth, this
is earth appearing as something inherently “fundamentally rebellious.” In
other words, Fanon’s approach to clinical psychiatry is directly engaged in an
articulation of the implications of the colonist’s assault on nature. The colonial system, especially when people are not able to fight it,134 produces psychiatric events that cannot in fact be categorized as either bodily or mental,
and this is part of what makes the colonial vocabulary so set against the humanization of the colonized. Fanon argues that the unilateral control sought
by the colonist, the unilaterally sanctioned agency of the colonialist, and the
threat of the powers of everything else are features of a dichotomized gesturing of the colonist, for whom “the Algerians, the women dressed in haiks,
129
Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 182.
Compare this to Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 53, 57.
Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 7.
132 Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 181. I have written on what I read as Fanon’s philosophy of disability in a more recent article, “Zoonosis and the Polis: COVID-​19 and Frantz Fanon’s Critique of
the Modern Colony,” which is forthcoming in a special issue of the International Journal of Critical
Diversity Studies.
133 Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 182.
134 Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 182.
130
131
176
A Philosophy of Elemental Difference
the palm groves, and the camels form landscape, the natural backdrop for the
French presence.”135
A second indication that Latour’s modern is better understood through
Fanon’s Manichaean is Fanon’s understating of the significance of the use of
the insecticide DDT. Colonialism inflicts dichotomy on those against whom
it defines itself. This dichotomizing or polarizing is Manichaean in that it
divides earth into good-​lightness and evil-​darkness, the latter of which must
be brought under control of a good-​lightness with which European power
is synonymous: “The ‘native’ is declared impervious to ethics, representing
not only the absence of values but also the negation of values. He is, dare we
say it, the enemy of values. In other words, absolute evil.”136 Manichaeanism
reaches its “logical conclusion” as zoological discourse, but never for
Europeans who were developing a notion of their own relation to climate at
the time.137 The zoological terms are instead strictly for those who must be
colonized.138 As Achille Mbembe puts it in a reading of Fanon on this point,
“The noun ‘Black’ . . . designated not human beings like all others but rather
a distinct humanity—​one whose very humanity was (and still is) in question. It designated a particular kind of human: those who, because of their
physical appearance, their habits and customs, and their ways of being in
the world, seemed to represent difference in its raw manifestation—​somatic,
affective, aesthetic, imaginary.”139 A distinct enclosure of the one the body,
the lone human completion thus develops against what it understands as the
“raw manifestation” of difference. Manichaeanism needs a concept of race in
order to defend itself against “multiplicity,” and it takes this “appearance . . . as
the true reality of things.”140 Such dichotomously human values, identified
with an all-​powerful body amid rebellious nature, are “irreversibly poisoned
and infected as soon as they come into contact with the colonized.”141 This
human has the power to design the earth—​colonies, farms, and economies.
The customs, traditions, and myths of the colonized are sensed only as evil
that must be eradicated. Fanon writes:
135
Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 182.
Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 6.
137 See Fabien Locher and Jean-​Baptiste Fressoz, “Modernity’s Frail Climate: A Climate History of
Environmental Reflexivity,” Critical Inquiry 38.3 (2012): 579–​598.
138 Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 7.
139 Mbembe, Critique of Black Reason, 46. See also Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, especially 6,
164–​183; and Jackson, Becoming Human.
140 Mbembe, Critique of Black Reason, 112.
141 Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 7.
136
Latour’s Modern Is Fanon’s Manichaean
177
The customs of the colonized, their traditions, their myths, especially their
myths, are the very mark of this indigence and innate depravity. This is why
we should place DDT, which destroys parasites, carriers of disease, on the
same level as Christianity, which roots out heresy, natural impulses, and
evil. The decline of yellow fever and the advances made by evangelizing
form part of the same balance sheet.142
My interest here is in the fact that for Fanon the insecticide DDT and
Christianity—​nature-​cultures in Latour’s language—​are “part of the same
balance sheet.”143 Though Fanon does not articulate further worries about
DDT, he clearly takes this technology to be part of a Manichaean desire that
kills indiscriminately. The point for Fanon is that colonization understands
its own technologies or religions as exemplifying an unquestionable good-​
lightness that assumes it must defend itself. Meanwhile the powers of DDT
and the powers of Christianity mingle, registering as part of the same balance sheet.
The third indication that what Latour names modern, Fanon names
Manichaean, is the power that Fanon attributes to, for example, soil. As Jason
W. Moore has argued, Karl Marx understood that soil was an agency that capitalism, as (an inherently failing) world ecology denies.144 Fanon was clearly
a careful reader of Marx. But as David Marriott has argued, “Fanon stands
up to the orthodox Marxian reductionism of race to class by the various
European communist parties of his time, with his emphasis throughout on
the racial hegemony that pertains to all aspects of life in the colony.”145 Fanon
rejects both capitalism and socialism, insofar as they are European projects
“defined by men from different continents and different periods of time.”146
He writes, “The underdeveloped countries, which made use of the savage
competition between the two systems in order to win their national liberation, must, however, refuse to get involved in such rivalry.”147 What’s more,
they are not equally problematic; capitalism is without question the “enemy
of the underdeveloped countries,” defining them as underdeveloped from
the start. However, he does not ascribe to socialism “such as [it has] . . . been
142
Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 7.
See also Opperman, “Permanent Struggle,” 68ff.
144 Jason W. Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital
(London: Verso, 2015), 3, 107.
145 Marriott, Whither Fanon?, 147.
146 Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 55.
147 Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 55.
143
178
A Philosophy of Elemental Difference
defined by men from different continents and different periods of time.”148
In order for socialism “to function feasibly and for us to constantly abide by
the principles which have been our inspiration, we need something other
than human investment.”149 While affirming that “man is the most precious
asset” does make socialism at least marginally preferable to capitalism, beyond this “everything has to be started over from scratch.150” “Everything
must be rethought,” Fanon writes. “The spirit of self-​sacrifice” on the part of
people, Fanon argues, has been essential to mending the damages of colonial
racism and, as David Marriott puts it, its “system based on indebting.”151 But
this is not enough. His justification of needs beyond “human investment” are
the following:
The colonial system, in fact, was only interested in certain riches, certain
natural resources, to be exact those that fueled its industries. Up till now no
reliable survey has been made of the soil or subsoil. As a result the young
independent national is obliged to keep the economic channels established
by the colonial regime. . . . Perhaps everything needs to be started over
again: The type of exports needs to be changed, not just their destination;
the soil needs researching as well as the subsoil, the rivers and why not the
sun. In order to do this, however, something other than human investment
is needed. It requires capital, technicians, engineers and mechanics, etc.152
What Fanon proposes here is not only that the racial oppressions of the
colony go beyond what socialism so far has addressed. He is also proposing something of the Parliament of Things to be recommended a couple
of decades later by Latour. Fanon anticipates Latour’s call for integrating
assessments of the powers of things into human relationality: technicians,
engineers, mechanics need to contribute knowledge beyond the approach
of “new management” that is more or less a continuation of colonial hierarchies.153 This is a crucial corrective to the Manichaeanism of colonization.
It is only a small distance from this to hold explicitly the notion that rivers
and soil need to be considered players in governance. This really seems to
be ultimately what Fanon is arguing, for thinking in terms of milieu (d’une
148
149
150
151
152
153
Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 55.
Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 56.
Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 56.
Marriott, Whither Fanon?, 151.
Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 56–​57.
Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 56–​57.
Latour’s Modern Is Fanon’s Manichaean
179
part du milieu) and not “environment.”154 Starting over for Fanon, a starting
over that ends the naive juxtapositions of the colonial vocabulary, “the split
[le clivage] imposed by the Europeans,”155 is a starting over also with respect
to how people regard these powers of soil and rivers and sun. They cannot
be fought with; they must be openly collaborated with. Presumably the aim
would be to understand the qualities of soil, rivers, the powers of the sun
that have been assaulted according to the denied nature-​culture practices of
Manichaeanism. Racial hegemony has been integral to these practices, inextricable from the European priorities with respect to rivers and subsoil.
Fanon rejects charity or unilateral aid: “European opulence is literally a
scandal for it was built on the backs of slaves, it fed on the blood of slaves,
and owes its very existence to the soil and the subsoil of the underdeveloped
world.”156 “Europe is literally the creation of the Third World,” the people
of what Europeans designate the Third World but also the “shipments of
diamonds, oil, silk and cotton, timber and exotic produce.”157 Europe “is the
creation of ” an array of discredited powers that colonial agency has considered threatening when any of these are at odds with their own aims. It is in
these terms that it would be appropriate to think of what is owed, not only
what is needed, but what is owed to formerly colonial and now neocolonial
societies.
As I have suggested, these lines are all subsidiary to Fanon’s departure
from the socialisms of Europe, the way that socialism has been practiced in
Europe. After making clear that socialism is preferable to the “cartels and
monopolies” of capitalism, Fanon writes, “In order for this regime to function feasibly and for us to constantly abide by the principles which have been
our inspiration, we need something other than human investment. . . . everything has to be started over from scratch.”158 For example, “The colonial
system . . . was only interested in certain riches, certain natural resources,
to be exact those that fueled its industries. Up till now no reliable survey has
been made of the soil or subsoil. . . . Perhaps everything needs to be starred
over again: The type of exports needs to be changed, not just their destination; the soil needs researching as well as the subsoil, the rivers and why not
154 This phrase “d’une part du milieu” is unfortunately translated into English as “environment” in
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 62, twice on that page alone. Compare Fanon, Peau noires, masques
blancs, 125.
155 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 63.
156 Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 53.
157 Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 53, 56–​58.
158 Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 56.
180
A Philosophy of Elemental Difference
the sun.”159 Something other than human investment—​capital, technicians,
engineers, mechanics—​will be needed in order to start over again.
This means that Fanon departs from Marxism as a materialism in
broadly the same spirit as the “new materialisms,” for example, the work of
Karen Barad, whom I discussed in Chapter 2, which take off in part from
the very gesture of political ecology in Bruno Latour. Fanon’s critique of
modern Manichaeanism, like political ecology and more broadly the “new
materialisms,” is not dialectical materialism;160 neither is it the materialism
or environmentalism of the anthropocentrist. It is a thinking that rejects
the very concept of the one, the body, the very gesture of a complete human
form, as well as the threatening notion of the biological or matter that reciprocally structures the shape of the polis and what-​who is human.
It is in these terms that I read certain passages in Fanon that might lend
themselves to an anthropocentric reading, if the reader does not keep in
mind the larger exposition of Manichaeanism that Fanon is articulating.
Consider the following: “If working conditions are not modified [in order
to enable the necessary human labors] it will take centuries to humanize this
world which the imperialist forces have reduced to the animal level.”161 How
does Fanon himself understand the meaning of the verb “to humanize”? And
what is “the animal level”? There is a danger here of the familiarity of dichotomizing Manichaean concepts getting in the way of the appreciation of a
novel gesture on Fanon’s part. By “humanize,” I would argue, Fanon means
“non-​dichotomize.” This would mean addressing “the pathological dismembering of his [the colonized human’s] functions and the erosion of his unity,
and in the context of the community, the fracture, the stratification.”162 He
means understanding what it is like to be human as part of a larger web of
agencies, such as the sun. By the “animal level,” I would argue, Fanon means
the “imperialist’s forces” definition of the zoological, from zoē. A skepticism
toward the zoological in Fanon’s writings is identical in shape to the biological that he has articulated as a mechanism of racialization in Black Skin,
White Masks. There is no difference between these for the colonizer. The biological and the zoological are that which the white and the modern colonizer
are not.
159
160
161
162
Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 56–​57.
On Fanon’s departures from Marx and Marxism see also Marriott, Whither Fanon?, 147.
Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 57.
Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 238.
Latour’s Modern Is Fanon’s Manichaean
181
Neither the biological nor the zoological, as Fanon reads them, in the “colonial vocabulary” is a dispassionate study. Here is zoology, from one of the
first few pages of The Wretched of the Earth:
When the colonist speaks of the colonized he uses zoological terms.
Allusion is made to the slithery movements of the yellow race, the odors
from the “native” quarters, to the hordes, the stink, the swarming, the
seething, and the gesticulations. In his endeavors at description and finding
the right word, the colonist refers constantly to the bestiary. . . . the colonized, who immediately grasp the intention of the colonist and the exact
case being made against them, know instantly what he is thinking. This explosive population growth, those hysterical masses, those blank faces, those
shapeless, obese bodies, this headless, tailless cohort, these children who
seem not to belong to anyone, this indolence sprawling under the sun, this
vegetating existence, all this is part of the colonial vocabulary.163
When Fanon writes that the colonized “roar with laughter” because “they
know they are not animals,” this is what he means: they know they are not the
animal of the colonist. The colonized know they are not the animals that they
are in the eyes of Europeans, who define themselves as above the animals.
The zoological for Fanon is an application of Manichaeanism, an inherently
disgusted gaze, to all that it distinguishes from proper humans, from politics,
from authorized speech and action.
Fanon himself, I will admit, does not have very much to say about “animals.”164 When Fanon writes that “man is above all the vertebrate governed
by the cortex,”165 there doesn’t appear to be celebration in the claim, though
admittedly this is difficult not to read as a claim to human exceptionalism.
Fanon writes this line in the context of the suffering that can only be understood in terms of a revised anatomical sense, one that is not Manichaean
and does not distinguish “the brain” from body. Whereas Manichaeanism
divides humans from the biological, for Fanon humanity is entirely relational: body to body, cortico-​visceral, subsoil-​soil-​water-​sun. This is a way
163
Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 7.
It is possible that Fanon might share the view of Laurie Shannon, who argues that the distinction between human and “animal,” according to which human is not animal, is a modern concept. Compare Aristotle, for whom man is bios politikos, the political animal. Laurie Shannon, The
Accommodated Animal: Cosmopolity in Shakespearean Locales (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2013).
165 Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 225.
164
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of understanding the specificity of what it is like to be human and to suffer as
humanity, not in terms of a Manichaean effort to divorce brains from sociality, brains from guts, guts from sociality. It is also a terminology that cannot
be distinguished from “animal,” which is interesting precisely because
he is so critical of this term. Note that Fanon counts “man” to be a certain
“vertebrate.” It is true that Fanon does not write about the worries of other
vertebrates at all, not to mention “in-​vertebrates.” With Latour I wonder why
there cannot be “Lévinases of animals,”166 and why Fanon doesn’t say more
about that. But I have the same question for Césaire, for Beauvoir, for any
number of Fanon’s conversation partners who were engaged in an attempt to
understand humanity in simultaneously earth-​air-​fire-​water terms. What is
crucial here is that, as in the case of the concept of the biological of Black Skin,
White Masks, animosity is synonymous with the gesture of zoology, “the bestiary.”167 Overall the effect of reading Fanon is to understand that to see an
“animal” is to place oneself above the thing in question, and this is a result of
a Manichaean postural schema.
The crucial point in Fanon that makes his work a philosophy of elemental difference—​speaking to the concerns of both political ecology and
performativity—​is his novel approach to the meaning of the verb “to humanize.” What would it mean to humanize the world, as Fanon puts it,
invoking the words of his teacher Césaire? For Fanon I think this amounts to
asking what it would mean to be concerned about the political uses of the teleological gesture of nature, the nature that defines the polis, but at the same
time not to want either to depart from or to fetishize elementality. What does
Fanon really mean by arguing that, “for Europe, for ourselves and for humanity, comrades, we must make a new start, develop a new way of thinking,
and endeavor to create a new man”168? My concern with the polis and interest in transfeminism169, I will admit, make me skeptical of the gesture of
the “new man.” And many readings of Fanon reinstantiate a tendency in his
work toward non-​intersectionality.170
166 Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, 136. See also Derrida, Animal; and Willett, Interspecies
Ethics.
167 Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 7.
168 Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 239.
169 See Preciado, Countersexual Manifesto; and Emi Koyama, “The Transfeminist Manifesto,” in
Catching a Wave: Reclaiming Feminism for the 21st Century, ed. Rory Dicker and Alison Piepmeier
(Lebanon: Northeastern University Press, 2003), 244–​259.
170 See T. Denean Sharpley-​
Whiting, Frantz Fanon: Conflicts and Feminisms (Lanham,
MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1998); Traci C. West, “Extending Black Feminist Sisterhood in the Face
of Violence: Fanon, White Women, and Veiled Muslim Women,” in Convergences: Black Feminism
Latour’s Modern Is Fanon’s Manichaean
183
But I want to stress that Fanon’s writings offer a framework for a philosophical approach that can respond to the one, the body, the lone complete
human form as a desire not to be a body at all. Fanon is writing constantly
about the ways in which he himself is barred from being affirmed either as a
man or as a human, the problems that Manichaean biocentric Man poses for
him, as well as the ways in which other men in colonial relation to Europe,
especially France, are barred from being affirmed as men, one of few senses
of self available to them. This doesn’t speak to all of the people—​even those
who are not man in any sense at all—​of whom Fanon himself does appear
to try to speak, for example in his writing about the ways in which women
who veil and participate in revolution are racialized by white French colonial
settlers,171 for example about “the schizophrenic or . . . sexually impotent”172
whose bodily events he does not share. Fanon’s writings hold this other possibility of a multimorphism, a philosophy of elemental difference that neither reifies nor denies bodily discontinuity, precisely because Fanon himself
doesn’t confine his reflections to events he shares.
Crucially, what Fanon contributes and Irigaray mostly misses is the
threateningness of the biological and zoological, what bears the weight of
matter for the Manichaean one, the body, the complete human form. As
I have argued, Fanon suggests that crucial morphological terms—​the body,
the biological, the zoological—​take decisive shape in the threat, the very
agential threat, of what exceeds the polis and prevents its clean closure. To
humanize for Fanon entails addressing the nervous integrity of the polis and
the role that threateningly differential and relational elementality plays in
constituting that polis.
So who and what is this “new man,” which for Fanon requires thinking
soil, rivers, and sun and “putting the brain back in its place”?173 This is not
posthumanism, because I think Fanon appreciates, in a way on which Sylvia
Wynter elaborates, that there has been no philosophy of humanity yet in the
tradition he is and isn’t a part of. You cannot be post-​something that has not
yet happened. But then again “new man” seems to indicate something like a
post-​Man-​ism. And in fact this language suites today as well as it suited the
and Continental Philosophy, ed. Maria del Guadalupe Davidson, Kathryn T. Gines, and Donna-​Dale
L. Marcano (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2010), 157–​181.
171 Fanon, “Algeria Unveiled,” in A Dying Colonialism, trans. Haakon Chevalier (New York: Grove
Press, 1965), 35–​67. See also Al-​Saji, “Racialization of Muslim Veils.”
172 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, xvi.
173 Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 216 n. 35.
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1960s, insofar as biocentric Man is still what is meant by human. Fanon rejects
biocentric Man in mid-​twentieth-​century colonial language. The question of
what Fanon means by “a new man” and what I can make of his writing leads
me to a fourth aspect of Fanon’s resistance to Manichaeanism, which I have
really been discussing for pages already: his attention to relational cortico-​
viscerality that is necessary to understand what it is like to become human
in contexts of colonial thwarting of precisely the possible pleasures of that
relationality. This fourth aspect of Fanon’s work advocates rethinking what
it is like to be human rather than rejecting the question. He advocates asking
the question anew instead of rejecting the question of humanity.
What Fanon does reject is the European penchant for Manichaeanism. His
interest in starting over, breaking entirely with the ways of life of Europe,
and thus an entirely new understanding of what it is like to be human, is in
fact a rejection of what is called the mind-​body split, a Manichaeanism par
excellence. The mind-​body split presupposes a universal body, the one, the
body, but also this universal body is historically an encasement for mind.
For Fanon, one cannot question the mind-​body split properly without interrogating the affective Manichaean celebrations and vilifications of “white,”
“the biological,” “the zoological,” “le nègre.” In the chapter “Colonial War and
Mental Disorders,” Fanon denounces the blame for symptoms placed on the
colonized by colonial psychiatrists. He cites research that supports the gesture of “psychosomatic pathology,” “the general body of organic disorders
developed in response to a situation of conflict. Psychosomatic, because its
determinism is psychic in origin. This pathology is considered a way the organism can respond, in other words how it adapts to the conflict, the disorder being both a symptom and a cure. More exactly it is generally agreed
that the organism (here again it is the former psychosomatic, cortico-​visceral
body) outwits the conflict using the wrong, but nevertheless economic,
channels. The organism chooses the lesser evil in order to avoid a complete
breakdown.”174 Additionally and crucially, in a brief footnote to this passage
Fanon writes that the “psycho-​somatic” is both current research and also
an “idealist notion [that] is being used less and less.”175 He clearly prefers
“cortico-​visceral” as a way of thinking the implications of psychosomatic
research, but lodges a subtle critique of that as well. I conjecture that he is
concerned about the Manichaeanism even of “cortico-​visceral” as a concept,
174
175
Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 216–​217.
Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 216 n. 35.
Latour’s Modern Is Fanon’s Manichaean
185
and yet he is interested in the relationality of dehumanization and health,
in the relationality of the way, for example, a person’s blood pressure might
rise when she is spoken to. And he’s interested in how a “body . . . outwits
the conflict.” A body fights back, though this isn’t meant to suggest always
happy outcomes. He writes: “The cortico-​visceral terminology, in fact a
legacy of Soviet research—​especially Pavlov—​has at least the advantage of
putting the brain back in its place, i.e., of considering it [the brain] the matrix where precisely the psyche is elaborated.”176 This passage and footnote as
well as the list of symptoms that follow are an exploration of the responsiveness, in a word the agency, of stomachs, kidneys, hair, hearts, other muscles
to colonial accusations and punishments of criminality, even for engaging
in revolutionary behaviors that would have been lauded by the French at the
barricades in their own revolution. Revolution only on the part of the colonized is criminalized. These powers of tissue are understood by Fanon to
be not only symptoms of war, both in the sense of colonial power as war on
Algerian people and in the sense of the effort to create resistance to colonial
power, but also enactments of survival on the part of the colonized. This is
what it means to take colonial war seriously: doubting the Manichaeanism of
body-​mind and the “abstract universality” of the colonizer.
Fanon does explicitly cite the definition that the symptoms he’s studying
are of the “psyche” in origin, and he titles a crucial chapter in The Wretched
of the Earth “Colonial War and Mental Disorders” (my emphasis). These
terms—​psychic, mental—​are on my reading one half of a hybrid understanding of humans as mind-​bodies that replicates the polis-​oikos and form-​
matter pattern. However, I think it is important to note the way in which
Fanon uses words like “psyche” and “mental.” Fanon’s interest is in the full
body fighting back. He writes of stomach ulcers, vomiting, loss of weight,
renal colic, hypersomnia, premature whitening of hair, paroxysmal tachycardia, panic attacks, heavy sweating as “a way the organism can respond”177
to colonial power when revolution is thwarted. These are powers fighting
back, keeping the person alive if not whole and thriving. Fanon thus ultimately refuses the Manichaeanism of the gesture of the “psyche.” It is “the
organism” that “outwits the conflict.” He is attempting to understand the
implications of colonization in a mode incompatible with zoology and with
176
177
Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 216 n. 35.
Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 217.
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biology. He articulates the way in which human cortico-​viscerality itself
disproves the aims of Manichaean, compartmentalizing control.178
Fanon similarly articulates the “psycho-​affective” dangers of continuing
to try to be a “colonized intellectual.”179 Colonized intellectuals will become
“individuals without an anchorage, without border, colorless, stateless, rootless, a body of angels”180 insofar as someone attempts to live “in a thoroughly
‘universal perspective.’ ”181 Fanon continues, “The intellectual who has
slipped into Western civilization through a cultural back door, who has managed to embody, or rather change bodies with, European civilization, will
realize that the cultural model he would like to integrate for authenticity’s
sake offers little in the way of figureheads capable of standing up to comparison with the many illustrious names in the civilization of the occupier.”182
In other words, to become an intellectual of “Western civilization” is to take
on a morphology and an interpretation of one’s body and history that fit
inside that universal morphology. It is to share a certain sense of self that
values features of bodiment, not only cultures, but bodies and their ascribed
meanings. And for Fanon this all points to the “rootless body of angels” that
is white identity, white sense of self as a disembodied-​bodily unilateral agent
that considers elemental difference to be a sign of the biological, a threat, an
unauthorized agency.
Fanon in this way manages to articulate what is sought by political
ecology—​a rejection of environmentalism and an attention to agencies of
cortico-​viscerality, soil, sun, river, DDT—​and what is sought by social construction, the “socio-​genesis”183 of what it means to be humanity, of what it is
like to be human, of his own definition. His work I would argue is not anthropocentric insofar as he appreciates the necessary role of the myriad denial of
178 Fanon’s work in this way anticipates the “gut feminism” of Elizabeth Wilson in the context of a
critique of the modern political-​ecological dichotomy. In Gut Feminism, a work explicitly indebted
to Karen Barad, “new materialist” Elizabeth Wilson recovers the “biological unconscious” in the
work of Sándor Ferenczi and argues that “the gut is an organ of the mind: it ruminates, deliberates,
comprehends.” For Wilson this is a middle way between the anti-​biologism of (largely European-​
oriented) feminist theories and the central nervous system-​centrism of a “new breed of neurologically informed critics,” for example, Catherine Malabou. Fanon seeks a similar “middle way,” though
for Fanon that European theorists espouse an enthusiastic apolitical biologism would be a direct
result of the Manichaean legacy. I worry that Wilson’s own gestures to “the mind” as well as “the gut”
and “the body” are part of this legacy, too. Reading Fanon and Wilson together would be an interesting future project. See Wilson, Gut Feminism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015), 5, 13.
179 Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 155.
180 Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 155.
181 Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 156.
182 Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 156–​157.
183 Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, xv.
Latour’s Modern Is Fanon’s Manichaean
187
powers considered a threat to Manichaean colonial European powers that
figure themselves as disembodied-​bodied. He is opposed to racial categories, but he argues that the way to oppose racial categories is not to deny that
bodies differ. What is needed is repairing colonial legacies of denying bodily
autonomy and located belonging. In addition, identifying with bodies in the
abstract and collapsing a distinction between human and “nonhuman” does
not necessarily mean opposing racial categories, precisely because the lie of
the “colorless, stateless, rootless, body of angels”184 opposes them to the threat
of “the biological.” In other words Manichaeanism does already identify with
a certain body. It’s not just disembodied; it’s also a valuing of a certain body
as the disembodied one. It’s a valuing of disembodiment by valuing a certain
body and vice versa. Elemental difference—​the agency of relationality that
we ourselves are—​emerges in this way of both opposing the sciences of racial anatomy and appreciating the human capacity for multimorphology. We
are not the same body or the same as bodies, and the human according to
colonization proceeds precisely as if we are because it paradoxically resents
relationality. This is why a “new man” is necessary (with the caveats I have
discussed), a starting over in how everything is arranged.
And so Fanon’s psychoanalytic critique of the “mind-​body split” is a critique of the very gesture of the one, the body, since this gesture is based on the
idea that either human bodies are subject to thoughts and values or the mind
is an insignificant immaterial entity to which health is immune. “The brain”
is an iteration of “the mind” and is sometimes in this climate thought of as
something other than body. But if brain isn’t body, what is it? Body carries
the connotations of both inertness and threat that accompany the notions of
the biological, zoological, matter. Putting the brain back into the dynamics of
influences that shape it is a way of contesting the notion that bodies are inert,
but also that thought and body are two distinguishable parts.
I offer a final note in favor of my claim that the problems that Latour
locates in the modern might be better studied in the terms offered by Fanon’s
Manichaean. The title of the book I have been almost exclusively discussing
is Les damnés de la terre, the damned of the earth, The Wretched of the Earth.
It appears that a certain commitment to thinking in earth-​air-​fire-​water
terms is there in the very title of the work. That title has been there all along.
Sylvia Wynter will take the socio-​genesis or social construction theme
of Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks and read this together with the account
184
Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 155.
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A Philosophy of Elemental Difference
of performativity of Judith Butler to create a way of thinking about what is
called the Anthropocene. I will argue that Fanon’s delineation of the extensive dangers of human-​nature Manichaeanism, a manifestation of the polis-​
oikos distinction, needs to be remembered. This will render a reorientation
of Wynter’s crucial critique of the climate of biocentric Man. It is a climate of
the one of the body, a climate of suppression of elemental difference.
3.3. Undoing the Polis, Affirming Elemental Difference
I now want to rearticulate the critique of the form-​matter hierarchy in
Irigaray, this time with an appreciation of Fanon’s exposition of the biological /​ le nègre as external to the polis. The biological as an affront to the one of
the body, the lone complete human form, is not only inert, in contrast to the
primarily inert matter in Irigaray’s philosophy of elemental difference, but
also a threat posed by that which is cast in the role of matter with respect to
form. Irigaray’s and Fanon’s attentions are directed at the same identification
of the polis with one disembodied body. But they are articulating its various
relationalities that are created through a denial of elemental difference—​
including the elementality of human bodies. What Fanon contributes is that
to be the biological with respect to the one, the body, the perfect human form,
is to be taken to be problematically agential—​sometimes lacking agency but
primarily being dangerous agency. Matter is in this way not only figured as
dead mechanism.
Matter is lacking in agency when it is thought in the guise of the second of
the two of the body. After all, while the polis does not sanction rule by this
second, a body whose what is fit for this function, it is nevertheless required
for the generation and reproduction of the polis, and the fitness of a body for
that generation and reproduction is key. The polis requires the mother, according to nature, as Irigaray puts it, “consuming it, introjecting it into itself,
to the point where the other disappears.”185 But even the most exalted cases
of the two of the body can be cast as those “symbolically associated with unruly nature,”186 nature that exceeds a proper place, as I will discuss in the next
chapter.
185
Irigaray, Elemental Passions, 27.
Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution
(New York: Harper and Row, 1980), 132.
186
Latour’s Modern Is Fanon’s Manichaean
189
At any rate there is this other evidence of the shape of the polis that emerges
because of Fanon’s study of the specter of le nègre, in which the biological or
matter reveals itself to be a most intense danger for the very notion of a unilateral influence of form, the disembodied-​body of biocentric Man. Matter
is in the case of le nègre not figured as inert but instead that which must be
subordinated to the agency that is form, and ultimately the one of the body as
a celebration of immaterial form becomes itself by means of the valuing of a
certain body with which polis is identified.
Recall from Chapter 1 that Irigaray writes, “What we call democracy, in
fact, was born in ancient Greece and had as its more or less explicit stakes
the differentiation of the masculine body from nature and the mother, who
was assimilated to the natural world. It was a matter of favoring the emergence of man as such, especially of his sexuate body, thanks notably to the
constitution of language, of a logic, and of a society formed only by men
and between men. . . . man asserted his own forms—​including art—​but
the difference between one man and another man was not really taken into
account.”187 This is both a critique of the “modern” split in Bruno Latour’s
sense and already a critique of the Aristotelian polis. In other words it is
already there in the philosophy of the ancient polis, especially in the study
of nature of Aristotle, according to which what is masculinity grows out of
and is the completion of a larger society. Polis in this sense is the guide of an
oikos; polis is a word for this whole that includes oikoi. And this originary
crack is capable of being exploited further in the modern distinction
denounced by Latour.
The polis of the one-​sex model is ultimately what Irigaray is concerned to
understand. According to the one-​sex model, there was literally one sex by
nature, Man. All other bodies were incomplete versions of this body. Irigaray
criticizes this ancient polis from the point of view of someone living the
modern one. For her, what is called woman is actually the mirror image of
this Man. On my reading she explores the figuring of only free, nonnative,
white, normate, non-​intersex women, who are also now the second of the
two-​sex model, an image that displaces so many bodies and that institutes the
very idea that female means women and that a certain body is necessary for
moral completion, as Talia Mae Bettcher has shown. Irigaray thus unfortunately reintroduces in her philosophy of elemental difference a gesture to idealization and genericness, a generic two-​sex model. Nevertheless, Irigaray’s
187
Irigaray, “There Can Be No Democracy,” 194.
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critique goes some way toward questioning a polis that emerges only as the
apex of a larger natural world of which it is the proper disembodied wisdom.
A certain body is this polis. The polis on this model was hierarchically differentiable from the rest of the world in being its guiding agent.
In this sense the ancient polis is already modern in Latour’s sense. The
ancient polis-​oikos terminology is a sort of prequel that Latour doesn’t appreciate. Latour’s attentions are on the modern chapter of the story. What
is crucial in Irigaray’s critique of the very concept of the polis, in spite of the
problems with her account, is the way that form relates to matter and the
polis relates to oikos. Irigaray writes that this notion of the polis can be altered only if “legislation today . . . start[s]‌again from the person’s right to
exist in his or her difference, and from the duties toward himself or herself
as a person toward other persons respected in their difference, that is to say
from duties regarding coexistence.”188 This is a way forward so long as one
focuses on the interest in elemental difference and its denial on the part of
the polis, not on the philosophy of sexual difference that presupposes the
two-​sex model, but that focuses on Irigaray’s subtle philosophy of elemental
difference and critique of the polis as reliant on a specific body to figure its
unilateral power over matter.
Frantz Fanon, a couple of decades earlier, had also pondered this fundamental splitting of the polis, but he suggests that the problem is that the very
idea of the one, the body, the complete human form, is Manichaean. The gesture of the native, the one that is nature, is more than an attribution of oikos;
it is an oikos figured as threat to the polis. This is the absolute split of which
Latour has so helpfully written, and yet for Latour this is not only an entirely
recent event. It is also an event whose political dynamics are no longer problematic. Political hierarchy is thought to be one thing, according to Latour,
and the ecological, or that which is oikos-​related, is entirely another. What
is interesting is that these are already opposed to each other in the very way
that they are articulated in the ancient polis-​oikos distinction, though it is
not until later that the oppositional shape of the polis-​oikos configuration
appears when the polis seeks to take in but remain opposed to those Aristotle
argues are naturally slaves and barbarians. Thus Aristotle’s writings already
define, in the notion of the barbarian and the placing of the slave as below
and not overlapping with women in Aristotle’s Politics, the polis.189 In the
188
Irigaray, “There Can Be No Democracy,” 197.
Aristotle, Politics 1.2.1252a35–​1252b5, 1.131259b25–​30. See also Benjamin Isaac, The Invention
of Racism in Classical Antiquity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 177.
189
Latour’s Modern Is Fanon’s Manichaean
191
period Latour discusses, slave and citizen remain as absolutely distinguishable, as they already are in Aristotle, and the slave is conflated with an oikos
that now is figured as oppositional to the polis. What Fanon suggests is that
the polis is perceived as having to be defended against a native/​nature that
threatens to overwhelm the polis. The polis as the realm of the one of the
body, the complete human form, must maintain integrity through homogeneity, and it is constituted by an inability to do so.
A philosophy of elemental difference attempts to affirm the particularities of location, movement, living, aging, dying, valuing, among humans
that are arguably singularities as well: differences that are currently taken to
be differences from the one, the body, the supposedly sole complete human
form of Aristotelian Man. To deny all of this is an attempt to deny elemental
agency. Humanity is always in some relationship to itself as bodily. A philosophy of elemental difference isn’t a philosophy of bodily difference. It is
an exposition of biocentric Man’s reliance on bodies for its own definition
as supra-​bodily, capable of uncaused, unlocated thinking. This is the source
of the prevailing sense of “nature”—​hierarchy according to a pinnacle
of disembodied-​bodily Man. Hierarchizing bodily difference is a way of
denying elemental difference, using the variations among human bodies to
establish one body, the one, the body, as the human alone. A philosophy of
elemental difference must take all of this into consideration.
Thus I would rewrite some of what Irigaray has written: what we call the
polis was born in ancient Greece and had as its more or less explicit stakes
the differentiation of the one, the body, from the waywardness of all else that
is cast as matter apart from the one body, the body. The polis was and is a
favoring of the emergence of the one of the body as such, thanks notably to
the constitution of language, of a logic, and of a society formed only by the
one, the body, and between those who could identify themselves with that
body. The one of the body asserts its own forms in the present, but the singularities within what it is like to be human as well as the agencies that conflict
with the efforts of this one of the body get denied in order to favor the agency
of form, an agency with disembodying aspirations that it locates in the one,
the body. Such disembodying aspirations are uncannily articulated precisely
by means of bodily hierarchies. A body is needed to signify abodily aspiration. The very notion of the hierarch, as I have argued, is a valuing of an ultimately matter-​transcending ruler, a ruler whose body is its authorization.
In and as the polis, the one, the body, a generic notion, comes to be constituted by this long-​standing biocentric Man but also by the two-​sex model
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on the whole, as I will discuss further in the rest of the book. Because the
generic human—​whose body in fact has a specific sex-​gender, racial, ability,
and class morphology—​is not a barbarian or a slave, the two-​sex model is
a sharing in the morphology of biocentric Man. This may be an impossible
situation for the “sex which is not one,” but it is also a position of race, ability,
class, religion, geography, ethnicity privilege in the polis. In other words, the
two-​sex model is now positioned as the generic, only owing to a lack of barbarian and slave qualities, owing to ability qualities, and the two of the body
still practices the morphology of biocentric Man.
Undoing this polis will require affirming elemental difference. Certainly
there can be no democracy without an affirmation of elemental difference,
but the question will be whether democracy as a tradition isn’t premised
upon the denial of elemental difference. How closely tied is democracy to the
tradition of the polis? Is it possible to distinguish them? Taking full measure
of polis pitfalls and potential promise of democracy will have to wait for a
future book. For now I am insisting that “human,” this originally Latin term,
has always indicated a plurality, but it has also been a hierarchization of that
plurality and ultimately a despairing denunciation of all that is body. Man
names the hierarchy in the tradition of the polis.
Elemental difference is a gesture that comes out of my reading of the work
of Luce Irigaray, from whom I borrow this language, and of Frantz Fanon,
whose reading of the deep polarization of the polis, including the polarization one finds in the work of Irigaray, offers an exposition of the centrality
of the race of the one of the body in the polis-​oikos structure. It is Fanon
who most directly responds to the Aristotelian equation of the polis with
a certain body. Race, sex, gender, class, religion, language, disability: these
are the body’s ways of parsing elementality and delineating the polis from
the rest. The hierarchizing of bodily difference is a way of denying elemental
difference.
A few points can now be made. First, matter has never been figured entirely as inert. The definition of matter is therefore not lack of agency or inertness, though this is sometimes very appropriate. The definition of matter
is better understood to be agency unauthorized by the one of the body. Form,
paradoxically immaterial and yet also figured by a specific body, is agency,
and it is the one, the body, the lone complete human form. The very idea of an
ultimately disembodied form of Man is an attempt to deny what form cannot
possibly have invented. Why is it that “disembodied” and “immaterial” can
only be stated in negative terms? Form is, when understood in accordance
Latour’s Modern Is Fanon’s Manichaean
193
with the polis, by definition a rejection of matter. Materiality is posited and
denied in one decisive, cruel move that then is projected onto all bodies who
are not biocentric Man. The significance of this projecting is not of course the
same for all bodies. But what is crucial is that agency as the positive figuration is figured by a specific body, and this is what makes him the one perfect
(as in whole and complete) human.
Second of all, matter is an inherently differentiated concept. Whereas the
polis of biocentric Man is homogeneous, matter is inherently heterogeneous.
It contains many folds of variously problematic elements, problematic according to the gesture of form as biocentric Man. The era of the invention
of Man in the work of Michel Foucault and Sylvia Wynter is a making explicit of the study of these differences from biocentric Man, not differences
among humans strictly speaking. This differentiation only reinvents and further authorizes a long-​standing gesture of an undifferentiable polis defined
by “beautiful dialogue among equals, sharing rule by turns, and bound by
affectivities of friendship.”190
The differentiations are attributed to nature, which was for Aristotle
“what each thing is when fully developed.”191 The nature of Man is not only
a capacity for disembodied thought, but a certain body that indicates this
to him. Aristotelian nature was a teleological account that in fact weighs
and measures according to a presupposition that the one of the body is the
teleological end of all nature. This nature is in this way by definition the
denial of elemental difference. While elemental difference is a necessary
component of any genre of humanity, it is according to Man understood
only in relation to this one body, and the rest is more or less given the status
name “matter.”
Affirming elemental difference would mean insisting that humanity, too,
is elemental difference, that there is no generic one, the body, the lone perfect human form. This is still a largely threatening claim insofar as the polis
is set against such an idea. To admit that humanity, like the rest of earth, is
elemental difference, threatens an obliteration of all reflection on what it is
like to be human. It is such a troubling thought because so much of our lives
is organized according to this denial of all bodies—​political and ecological—​
except the one of the body. A new philosophy of humanity is needed. And yet
the polis has given a definition of humanity that actually prevents exploration
190
191
Bianchi, The Feminine Symptom, 225.
Aristotle, Politics 1.2,1252b32–​33.
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A Philosophy of Elemental Difference
of what it is like to be human: biocentric Man. In the second half of the book
I propose that Sylvia Wynter, especially in her reading of Frantz Fanon, offers
a philosophy of humanity that can undermine the political-​ecological distinction that is figured by a specific body. I am speaking of Wynter’s philosophy of genre.
4
Sylvia Wynter and the Climate
of Biocentric Man
The final two chapters of this book seek to articulate the implications of
the preceding critique of the body and the philosophy of elemental difference of the first three chapters. As I argued in Chapter 1, the very idea of the
body is an artifact of biocentrism (Wynter) and the “use of biology as ideology” (Oyěwùmí) integral to the polis of Western philosophy. The gesture
of the body—​the one of the body and more recently the two of the body—​
figures the attempt of the polis to overwrite the agency of what the polis itself
defines as matter. Humanity is always in some way an engagement in the
elaborations of identities among an “us,” but there is no part of earth-​air-​fire-​
water where what it is like to be-​become a body is homogeneous. In this part
of the book I argue that in response to the body of the polis it is important to
develop an appreciation of the identities, or rather morphologies, that allow
for senses of self within and constitutive of what is meant by community.
These layers upon layers must develop from below, from the respect for the
elementality of each. These layers upon layers can only develop in appreciation of the fact that humanity is not one body, one falsely generic “the body.”
Neither are we naturally, empirically differing bodies in a way that can be
externally read. This gesture—​in which nature can be exhaustively externally
read—​is the gesture of the one, the body in a negation that is characteristically hierarchical. To read externally is to read from above. The body and the
human as non-​differing and empirically different have been the measuring
stick that defines differences as differences from the body, which is the selfsame non-​body-​that-​is-​figured-​as-​a-​specific-​body of thinking. The wisdom
of elemental difference in which humanity participates has been difficult to
locate in a tradition that so fundamentally distinguishes polis from oikos in
its practices of biocentrism. Biocentrism is how that split is made, according
to a homogeneous humanity that has no sense of bodily self or need to reflect
on or develop one.
Elemental Difference and the Climate of the Body. Emily Anne Parker, Oxford University Press.
© Oxford University Press 2021. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780197575079.003.0005
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The Climate of the Body
The present climate of the one, the body denies elemental difference, non-​
polis agency, agencies of whatever is excluded from authority in and as polis
by means of body-​ranking. Following Wynter and Irigaray, I mean climate
literally. Climate in this context is another word for “ecological.” All that is
considered not to be the polis is its outside, neglected, but still there, and
having an agency that cannot ultimately be ignored. Is it ironic that a tradition that is biocentric, so focused on bodily status, has also been the one to
develop technologies and economies at odds with earth-​wind-​fire-​water? Is
it a coincidence that the polis tradition is the one responsible for the invention of capitalism, an economic system that opposes itself to earth-​air-​fire-​
water?1 In this second half of the book, I answer no, largely following the
work of Sylvia Wynter. The climate or the ecological of the one, the body, the
only perfect human form, is a way to think about the indistinguishably political and ecological overdetermination of political defensiveness in the midst
of “ecological breakdown.”
The political-​ecological split is responsible both for certain events cast as
political and ecological in the present and for the inability to connect them.
The critique of the notion of the modern in Bruno Latour is primarily a critique of the split between nature and culture, and more recently political and
ecological. I have suggested this split is already witnessable in the Aristotelian
split between those wielding authority in the polis and all the rest who are
parts of the polis but sidelined as oikos. This is the part of the polis in Aristotle
that is composed of bodies figured as uniquely plural. The leadership of the
polis is one; the oikos is many bodies that exceed those whose teleological
end is biocentric Man. Latour appreciates the problems of the bifurcation,
but doesn’t appreciate either the history of this distinction or the degree to
which the polis remains in his own account. Latour locates the nature-​culture
distinction, but not the polis-​oikos one. Irigaray suggests that the concept of
the ancient polis is no less modern than the modern one is, in its isolation of
“the masculine” (Irigaray’s term, not mine): the ancient polis was a “favoring
[of] the emergence of man as such, especially of his sexuate body, thanks
notably to the constitution of language, of a logic, and of a society formed
only by men and between men . . . the difference between one man and another man was not really taken into account.”2 For Irigaray this elevation of
one body as the apex of the polis and the polis as a zone without difference is
1
2
Moore, Capitalism.
Irigaray, “There Can Be No Democracy,” 194.
Sylvia Wynter and the Climate of Biocentric Man
199
simultaneously an attempt to distinguish between an agency and matter. The
very gesture of matter, Irigaray thus suggests (and Butler and Hartman crucially on my reading elaborate), is an attempt to distinguish that which is the
one, the body from everything else. While Irigaray’s account only addresses
the two-​sex model in order to denounce the one-​sex model, Judith Butler
has helpfully opened the way to a questioning of that aspect of Irigaray, her
centering of sex and her lack of appreciation for the privileges of a certain
positioning with respect to the body. But Butler’s performativity sets aside
the question of the ecological implications of Irigaray’s work. Butler finds the
gesture of matter so problematic that she does away with reflection on it beyond the political. In Irigaray there is an interest in retaining some gesture
to matter in multiple modes—​in order to say that matter is not inert. This is
a gesture that shows up in Latour, too. But it is Frantz Fanon’s critique of le
nègre as the biological and zoological that allows me to bring the ecological
side of Irigaray into an understanding of the present moment.
What needs to be appreciated is the degree to which that which is not
polis, that which is not biocentric Man and outside of the two-​sex model, is
considered to be threatening to it. Clearly the polis does not equate all that
is distinguishable from its rulers. So attention must be given to that. But the
crucial point so far is that Fanon’s philosophy of elemental difference is also
an implicit critique of the Aristotelian polis, a gesture with simultaneously
political and ecological repercussions. The biological is another term for
matter, depoliticized elementality. The biological is not only a concept for
an inert and therefore apolitical presence (that’s Irigaray’s primary concern),
but also understood as an attacking, devouring agency according to the one,
the body. What makes biocentric Man is a gesture of immateriality—​nous—​
identified with a certain body. In other words, at the bottom of a supposed
biocentrism is in fact the desire to escape from earth-​water-​air-​fire. This desire for escape is figured as a certain body. (Because what else would it be figured as?) Due to this threat of the biological to which Fanon gives attention,
one can feel that that which is the biological and matter does have agency
according to the one, the body. It’s felt as a criminal agency, an untrustworthy, risky agency. A competing agency. A dangerous ability to act that
must be controlled by biocentric Man, a certain body, who is this “immaterial agency.”3 (In quotation marks because how can something be an agent
3 Isn’t this an oxymoron? How is it even possible to move anything if one is not part of the world? If
I’m not a domino, how do I touch the other dominoes?
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The Climate of the Body
without being elemental, relational? There is no agency without that which
has been scorned as matter.) When the biological and matter are perceived
as passive, this is an important but partial account of the story. This is the
Irigarayan story. However, the biological and matter and the zoological are
very often also concepts for an agency that threatens the polis. The ecological
of the one, the body is going to correspond to this vilified, neglected, abused
biological and matter and zoological, setting up a problematic situation in
which the political is going to feel like it must defend itself against an ever
more hostile ecological.
And so quite a lot is stacked against an affirmation of elemental
difference—​agency that does undermine the polis and oikos divide.
In this chapter I turn to what I take to be the most crucial body of work
for understanding the disastrous relationality of the political and ecological in the present: I am speaking of the work of Sylvia Wynter, whose notion of biocentrism and biocentric Man I have discussed in Part I. Wynter’s
work in Caribbean studies, literary studies, cultural studies is philosophical
in that she participates in “dialogue 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.”4
Wynter offers a comprehensive articulation of how a way of life absolutely
obsessed with physicality and health and studies of “the natural world,” the
way of life that invented Science, is one that is also responsible for developing
and globalizing practices that are currently causing ecological breakdown.
Even a cursory survey of the “environment” section of various newspapers
will turn up alarming events: “Ocean oxygen levels drop, endangering marine life”;5 “doctors . . . concerned about the effect of heat stress and extreme
weather events”;6 “a group walk out of a panel at the UN Climate Summit
in order to protest the influence of Shell, BP, and Chevron”7 in even what
can be talked about at the summit; “sea level rise, flash flooding, and other
climate change-​related threats pose a risk of spreading contamination from
4
Van Norden, Taking Back Philosophy, 151.
“Ocean oxygen levels drop endangering marine life: Report,” Al Jazeera, December 7, 2019,
https://​www.aljazeera.com/​news/​2019/​12/​ocean-​oxygen-​levels-​drop-​endangering-​marine-​life-​
report-​191207155827092.html.
6 “Torres Strait Doctors Issue Call to Arms over Climate Change Impact on Indigenous Health,”
The Guardian, December 7, 2019, https://​www.theguardian.com/​australia-​news/​2019/​dec/​08/​
torres-​strait-​doctors-​issue-​call-​to-​arms-​over-​climate-​change-​impact-​on-​indigenous-​health.
7 “Why Are Some of Spain’s Biggest Polluters Sponsoring the U.N. Climate Summit?,” Democracy
Now!, December 6, 2019, https://​www.democracynow.org/​2019/​12/​6/​big_​polluters_​sponsoring_​
cop25_​climate_​summit.
5
Sylvia Wynter and the Climate of Biocentric Man
201
four EPA-​designated superfund sites.”8 Wynter’s philosophy of genre offers
a philosophy of humanity fit for the present. Wynter argues that biocentric
Man is an overdetermination of these events in their political and ecological
aspects, and thus allows for these aspects to be put back together. She offers a
cohesive philosophy of the political-​ecological of biocentric Man.
Wynter’s work is going to allow me to make the ultimate argument of the
book, that it is not so much biocentric Man but the very idea of the one, the
body, the lone complete human form, that is to blame for ecological breakdown. What is called ecological breakdown, what is happening as I write,
is the playing out of the very idea of a nonbodily body, an immaterial universality that is in fact figured with a certain body, that defines the polis and
denies relationality. I wish to argue that the problem is not Man; the problem
is the body.
Wynter provides a philosophy of genre and a critique of biocentric Man.
What I want to respond to Wynter’s account, primarily in the final chapter of
the book, is that the one, the body, powers vested in a specific body, is a denial
of elemental difference, and not the invention of a political difference. The
problematic dynamics of the one, the body cannot be parsed as either political or ecological. These dynamics are the outcome of the attempt to make
the split itself through a denial of elemental difference. Biocentrism isn’t a
valuing of that which has been castigated as matter. It is a valuing of an impossible nonbodily. Biocentrism is a denial of elemental difference.
Wynter, like Irigaray and Fanon, maintains a focus on the hegemony of
Man, which is not totally wrong if “natural” Man,9 in the Aristotelian sense,
is what this term means. It’s just that underneath the gesture of Man there is
a deeper dynamic, the one, the body, that is in fact an aspiration to being no
body at all. It is this deeper dynamic that allows the one, the body, to become
newly redefined by the two-​sex model, which is meant to capture all of humanity in the figures of two bodies. The problem is that this notion of two
incommensurable sexes is actually itself an ideal—​a set of whole, finished
bodies, both of which can be made to identify with the one, the body that
I have discussed throughout the book. The two, the body is still a naturalizing
8 “Climate Change Threatens Four Polluted ‘Superfund’ Sites in Baltimore Region, GAO Report
Says,” Baltimore Sun, November 25, 2019, https://​www.baltimoresun.com/​news/​environment/​bs-​
md-​superfund-​sites-​20191123-​toh43qbqyraullqrpkffxfn6lu-​story.html.
9 This is a very tricky point: “nature,” I argue, means an effort to suppress that which is “matter.”
Environment as a concept, nature as a concept—​these both reinstitute the form-​matter hierarchy.
Form is nature. Form for Aristotle is nature. From Aristotle’s Physics 2.193b6–​7: “The form is the nature, more than the matter is.”
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The Climate of the Body
or anti-​materializing articulation of what it means to be the entirety of
humanity.
Wynter argues that so far in the Western philosophical tradition there
has been no articulation yet of humanity apart from the biocentric one. All
attempts have in fact been articulations of Man as Christian or Man as divine lawgiver, both of which culminate on her account in the present biocentric Man as natural organism. Each of these at different historical moments
defines Man who is thought to be the whole of humanity, and whoever differs
from this is thought to be less than fully human or not human at all. Wynter
further argues that the present pursuit of climate disruption is a project of the
most recent philosophy of Man, as biocentric and a natural organism who
thinks that he is the lone agency of earth-​air-​fire-​water and therefore cannot
possibly conflict with it. This fantasy of biocentric Man grows out of studies
of race, sex, ability, poverty, and sexuality in the seventeenth to nineteenth
centuries in Western Europe. Such studies were initiated by the science of
racial anatomy and the desire to make a solid distinction between black and
human. Wynter points out that Man was not originally a sex, a sexuality, an
abnormality, indigent, or mad or ill. Man was the word for the absence of
these isolatable qualities. Man studied these. A fear of black and dark as the
very signs of material fluidity and contagion then inspires all of the other
efforts, efforts to chart precisely scientific subjects who are the subject matter
studied by Man who is the human. In other words all other modes of biologically defined difference from biocentric Man follow from the invention of
a pre-​political racial difference. This sociogeny, or performative enactment
of Man, is for Wynter simultaneously the sociogeny of climate emergency, a
climate that she understands to be the acting out of the values of the genre of
biocentric Man as well as biocentric Man’s inability to appreciate the peculiarity of itself as a genre. A constitutive feature of biocentric Man is the lack of
appreciation that this is a genre at all.
Wynter’s critique of biocentric Man is a performative account of climate disruption that builds on the work of Judith Butler, whose philosophy
of performativity I have discussed, especially in Chapters 1 and 2. Wynter
relies, just as I have suggested both Karen Barad and Saidiya Hartman do
(with some qualification in the case of Hartman, as I discuss in Chapter 2),
on performativity in Butler for articulating an account of the genre of biocentric Man. Here again we can see the overwhelming influence and necessity
of the philosophy of performativity as well as its philosophy of political difference: biocentric Man invents differences from himself. This is not exactly
Sylvia Wynter and the Climate of Biocentric Man
203
false, because biocentric Man is at core quite a lot of invention. However there
is a grain of truth to Man’s hostility: humanity is elemental difference, just
like the rest of earth. Biocentric Man, however, denies elemental difference.
As I have argued in Part I, I do not wish to reject performativity so much as to
give it a conversation partner. I object not so much to performativity as to its
philosophy of political difference. How should we understand the generation
of political difference? The question for me is not whether political difference and climate disruption, genocide and ecocide, as Wynter puts it,10 are
creations. The question is why certain creations get created at all. I argue that
they get created because of biocentric Man’s efforts to deny elemental difference and install one body as the one, the body.
These two efforts are not capable of being distinguished, on my account.
The denial of earth and the fetishization of a certain body that means the
vilification of other features of body—​these are the same effort, constantly
reinforcing the other one. For this reason I do not argue that either ecological
breakdown or political hierarchy is more basic. These are mutually reinforcing dynamics.
In the final section of this chapter I argue that hybridity, a concept I first
discussed in Latour, shows up also in Wynter. And this term means largely
the same thing in both oeuvres. The gesture of hybridity, I argue, is a reflection of the political-​ecological distinction. What I want to do in this chapter
is locate the Wynterian philosophy of genre so that I can reread it in the final
chapter of the book, offering a non-​hybrid response to the very hybrid political ecology-​performativity split of the present.
4.1. Biocentric Man as Agency, Biocentric
Man’s Classifications: The Performative Account
of Climate Disruption
Sylvia Wynter argues that the very notion of Man as a natural organism,
Homo economicus, is a recent invention. And this notion was the working
out of a prior understanding biocentric Man as an ultimate religious and
then legal kind. Man in these earlier versions was already an incipient account of itself as a superior race, a group established by observation of
common features. Contemporary commercial discourses of the polis often
10
Wynter, “1492,” 7.
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The Climate of the Body
suggest that humanity is a diversity of agents of a universally shared polis.
In the decades in which the Anthropocene takes decisive shape, the gesture
of diversity-​of-​universality is ubiquitous. But from where did this gesture of
diversity come? And what accounts for the ease with which gestures of diversity give way to the idea that deep down what it is to be human is a universal
experience? Where does the diversity stop and the universal begin?
It is true that who is at least technically part of the ruling of the polis has
changed dramatically since the nineteenth century. The polis was as recently
as the mid-​nineteenth century literally a zone for which a certain bodiment
was required. Biocentric Man was that body which one had to be in order to
be the polis. If this has changed—​that one can at least formally take part in
the polis regardless of body, I argue that it is not the case that the concept of
the polis has changed. It is still a space organized according to a split between
the one, the body and the heterogeneous ecological. It is this split that accounts for the diversity-​universality conundrum: what we humans share is
the polis insofar as we are bodily; however, when our needs or claims conflict
with those of the biocentric Man according to which the polis was elaborated, these needs and claims are considered to be external to the polis. We
share the polis; we differ in the ecological, the outside of the polis.
Sylvia Wynter argues that it is crucial to recall that the very gesture of difference and diversity are entirely consistent with the gesture of biocentric
Man. Difference as a political concept was born in the context of a polis that
was absolutely uniform and a scientific discourse in which heterogeneity was
studied by Man. Difference among humans was not at all what modern science sought to understand. Differences were what Man studied, discovered,
cataloged.11 Difference as a political concept traveled conceptually from this
zone of studies done by a unilateral Man who did not identify with them.
Man originally was not a race or a sex or a diagnosis or indigent or queer or
trans or intersex. Man was the unidentified agent who studied these and in
that way developed a (falsely generic) sense of self in the negative, based on
these studiable things that Man wasn’t.12
The important point for my own interest is that Wynter argues that Man
as a natural organism develops as a sense of self through the study of others
who are not Man and are therefore either blatantly not human or having a
complex relation to the concept of humanity identified strictly with Man and
11
12
Wynter, “1492,” 42.
Wynter, “1492,” 42–​43.
Sylvia Wynter and the Climate of Biocentric Man
205
bodily events proper to Man. By this means it became possible for one to be
Man—​by being a kind of empty and therefore open and free exercise, untarnished and untouched by matter, that which is externally studiable. This is
the source of the very idea of a generic body of biocentric Man, which is in
fact an oxymoron. This develops precisely in the archive of a study of bodies
in the plural. According to this morphology of biocentric Man, bodies in the
plural is a zone of nonpolitical relationality.
Wynter builds on the work of so many scholars that only at risk of being
misleading can one focus on a small set of those whose work her writings
synthesize. Judith Butler and Frantz Fanon are among those Wynter’s work
folds in. A crucial influence on Wynter’s articulation of the historical and geographical development of Man as a natural organism is the work of Michel
Foucault, who argues that “the figure of Man only emerged as a recent invention ‘of European culture since the sixteenth century.’ Specifically he notes
that our contemporary variant of this ‘figure of Man’ only appeared ‘a century
and a half ago,’ as an effect of a change in the ‘fundamental arrangements of
knowledge.’ ”13 Wynter takes up a claim from the final chapters of Foucault’s
The Order of Things, especially the chapter “Man and His Doubles,” that the
transition from medieval soul to modern biocentric Man was a transition
from an arrangement of knowledge organized around the agency of a “supernatural realm” to one that can “no longer be guaranteed by the supernatural realm.”14 In this transition, biocentric Man takes the metaphysical role
that supernatural agency once played in the Western philosophical tradition.
No longer soul or disembodied reason, biocentric Man is now conceived in
terms that don’t need the guarantee of a supernatural realm in order to make
sense, but that still do not have any more definitive content than divinity ever
did. (Even prior to biocentric Man, a certain body was required to figure divinity.) Foucault puts the point this way: “For Classical15 thought, man does
not occupy a place in nature through the intermediary of the regional, limited, specific ‘nature’ that is granted to him, as to all other beings, as a birthright. If human nature is interwoven with nature, it is by the mechanisms of
13
Wynter, “1492,” 42.
Wynter, “1492,” 42.
15 The classical episteme, a sort of first transitional phase of Man as a presupposed vantage point,
Foucault takes to have lasted from the mid-​seventeenth century to the beginning of the nineteenth.
From the early nineteenth century to the years that Foucault was able to study, he names the “modern
age.” Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage
Books, 1994), xxii. In “The Ceremony Found,” Wynter names the classical episteme Man 1 and the
modern age Man 2. See “The Ceremony Found,” 216.
14
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The Climate of the Body
knowledge and by their functioning; or rather in the general arrangement of
the Classical episteme, nature, human nature, and their relations, are definite
and predictable functional moments. And man, as a primary reality with his
own density, as the difficult object and sovereign subject of all possible knowledge, has no place in it.”16 In other words, nature and human-​as-​nature were
mutually distinguishable concepts. So-​called human nature, i.e. biocentric
Man, is presumed not to be part of nature at all. Man is a vantage point on nature and not part of it. Foucault does point out that “there is no doubt that the
natural sciences dealt with man as with a species or a genus: the controversy
about the problem of races in the eighteenth century testifies to that. Again,
general grammar and economics made use of such notions as need and desire, or memory and imagination. But there was no epistemological consciousness of man as such.”17 This is because “Man as such” was the vantage point.
Man as such was not something Man could be possibly be conscious of. Man
was consciousness itself. Man as a (white, Christian, sex, gender, ability,
European, wealth) cultural triumph was that vantage point, a bodily agency
without quite being a body conceptually speaking, that certain bodies by no
coincidence exemplify, but at the same time “Man as such,” this vantage point
itself, is not there in that of which Man is conscious and studies.
Crucial to this account for both Wynter and Foucault is the claim that contemporary Man, what Wynter names Man 2 and Foucault names the Man of
the “modern age,” is a secondary development that grows from this classical
situation, or Man 1, as Wynter puts it. The contemporary notion of human,
because it is identified with nature in the race concept, retains this earlier
separation from the rest of nature proper.
But even before Man 1, there was the Christian and the explicitly immaterial soul constituting an agency. This Christian as a sense of self was not
yet Man 1 or 2 for Wynter or man for Foucault. This is technically a time in
which there is no Man yet. There is soul, embodied, but there is not yet Man
as a “by-​Evolution different . . . form of co-​human negation,”18 as Wynter
puts it. That comes later. It is not until the shape emerges of Homo politicus,19
or Man 1,20 that there is the first emergence of Man as an entirely natural organism, with zero supernatural reference. Homo politicus is thought to be a
16
17
18
19
20
Foucault, The Order of Things, 310.
Foucault, The Order of Things, 309; my emphasis.
Wynter, “The Ceremony Found,” 187.
Wynter, “Towards the Sociogenic Principle,” 43.
Wynter, “The Ceremony Found,” 187.
Sylvia Wynter and the Climate of Biocentric Man
207
newly fully bodily capacity for reason and legislation, but Wynter’s interest is
that Homo politicus is a newly earnest interpretation of bodiment. Only certain bodies were Homo politicus, or Man 1, but they could only be this body
by a comparison that negates that which exceeds Man. Homo politicus on
Wynter’s reading retains the sparks of an ethereal splendor21 of the Christian
and passes this along to a future iteration of Man 1: “Elaborated by humanists
as well as by monarchical jurists and theologians, this revolution [of Man 1]
opened the way toward [Man 2, which was] an increasingly secularized, that
is, degodded, mode of ‘subjective understanding.’ ”22 Man as Homo politicus
was a “hybridly religio-​juridical term.”23
The Christian as a sense of self remains in Man 1 insofar as Man 1 has
a tripartite structure of dehumanization, in fact multiple irreducible
dehumanizations. The others of the Christian were conceived of as “infidel,” such as Muslim and Jewish, who are “unfaithful,” and “idolator, those
pagan polytheistic peoples who had either ignored or had not as yet been
preached the Word.”24 This tripartite division of Christian, infidel, and idolator becomes in the Homo politicus sense of self the following: the childlike Indios, a criminal child who might if properly policed (“under wardship
and tutelage of the Spaniards”)25 grow into the fullness and completion of
Man, and the blatantly nonhuman “natural slave” who will not ever be the
completion of Man. This “natural slave,” a concept borrowed from Aristotle’s
Politics, was “generated from a new and powerful construct that would come
to take the place, in the now-​secularizing Judaeo-​Christian cultural system,
that religion and the sanction of the supernatural had earlier taken for the
role-​allocating structures of the feudal-​Christian order, one that had been
based on the principles of caste. The new symbolic construct was that of
‘race.’ ”26 I understand Wynter to be arguing that the notion of the “idolator”
becomes “slave” thanks to the very idea that the science of racial anatomy
occurs without Man’s intervention. Race is the gesture that the empirical
facts of bodies are discovered by the pre-​political scientist. The slave is of
nature, in keeping with Aristotle’s teleological definition of Man as the complete human. Some of those who are partial versions of Man are by definition incapable of growing to complete form. All of these terms—​Man, Indios,
21
22
23
24
25
26
To borrow an apt phrase from Saidiya Hartman discussed in Chapter 2.
Wynter, “1492,” 13, 25.
Wynter, “1492,” 30.
Wynter, “1492,” 29.
Wynter, “1492,” 35.
Wynter, “1492,” 34.
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The Climate of the Body
slave—​are interpretations of cultures and bodiments, in comparison to each
other, in “oppositional meaningfulness”27 that elevates Man while ultimately
(most explicitly in Man 2) understanding Man to be an exemplary outgrowth
of a nature for which Man is not responsible.
This philosophy of racial difference that Wynter explains and laments is
the result of a transition from the sense of self Homo politicus to a sense of
self that is even more fetishistically attached to the “oppositional meaningfulness” of bodies conceived characteristically as “plural” by nature. The claim is
that the very notion of political difference is racial difference from biocentric
Man and that racial difference is natural and something for which Man is not
at all responsible. This sense of self that Wynter criticizes is articulated as an
entirely naturalistic one, the “man of the modern age” in Foucault, and Man
2 in Wynter, Homo economicus. It is biocentric Man as Homo economicus
who is the first to be conceived of as pure body, because this Man is capable
of mastering materiality under conditions of scarcity and competition, and
hierarchical racial differentiations are a sign of the one’s proximity or distance from mastery. Man is the hierarch (a crucial term I’ve discussed in
Chapter 1), but not responsible for the hierarchy itself.
This figure of Homo economicus has been discussed at length, though in
different terms, in the landmark political-​ecological work Death of Nature by
Carolyn Merchant. Though Merchant does not use this phrase, what Wynter
means by Homo economicus is the sociohistorical development of which
Merchant’s work offers a crucial yet, I argue, partial account: Man as an agent
who controls mechanistic nature, “a source of secrets to be enacted for economic advance.”28 Homo economicus pursues the secrets as well as the lucrative “rearrangement of parts”29 precisely because this mechanical wonder has
no agency of its own by which Man can be chastened. Man becomes a denial
of the agency of this mathematical apparatus, and profits from the conquest
of knowledge of it in ways that were forbidden when earth was an organic
nature and mother that one dare not cross. In the mid-​seventeenth century,
Merchant writes, a new “mechanical philosophy . . . achieved a reunification
of the cosmos, society, and the self in terms of a new metaphor—​the machine. Developed by the French thinkers Mersenne, Gassendi, and Descartes
in the 1620s and 1630s and elaborated by a group of English emigrés to
Paris in the 1640s and 1650s, the new mechanical theories emphasized and
27
28
29
Wynter, “1492,” 28.
Merchant, The Death of Nature, 165.
Merchant, The Death of Nature, 290.
Sylvia Wynter and the Climate of Biocentric Man
209
reinforced elements in human experience developing slowly since the late
Middle Ages, but accelerating in the sixteenth century.”30 This new mechanical view of an external world is synonymous with “the death of nature,” “the
removal of animistic, organic assumptions about the cosmos.”31 The witch-​
hunts that occur in the midst of the transition from organic mother earth to
inert mechanistic matter are the political attempt to disenfranchise representatives and associates of organic agency, those “symbolically associated
with unruly nature.”32
The literatures of political ecology and new materialisms (discussed in
Part I) I would argue extend this Merchantian reading of Enlightenment
according to which nature is replaced with a mechanism incapable of its
own behaviors and Man is understood as Homo economicus, capable of
extracting from a mechanical model. There is no doubt that to some extent
this is a persuasive account. But two points need making. First, Merchant’s
account gives no attention to the significance of colonization and the transatlantic slave trade for the transition from nature to mechanism. Second, as
Merchant herself acknowledges, the mathematical aspects of the mechanistic
model are present from the time of Plato. Though the mathematical figuring
of the cosmos takes precedence after the persuasive work of mechanists
Newton, Boyle, and Gassendi, there are many historical precursors to this
way of figuring earth-​air-​fire-​water. In this respect there is arguably a certain
consistency over the Platonic philosophical tradition of a tension between
a Platonic, mathematical cosmos and an Aristotelian, organic, holistic one.
For this reason I am skeptical about whether, historically speaking, there really has been a transition from one model to another. Merchant writes that
the transition from one model to the other has not been complete, and so it
seems that the tension between nature and mechanism as ways of figuring
the cosmos continues.
As my reading of Frantz Fanon in the previous chapter demonstrates, there
is seemingly another dynamic in play aside from the tension between the organic animal mother earth and the mathematical mechanic earth, and this
other dynamic is even given attention by Merchant herself. Accompanying
studies of Man as himself a natural entity, there is a sense that earth is not mechanical, but also there is a sense that nature is to be feared insofar as nature
30
31
32
Merchant, The Death of Nature, 192.
Merchant, The Death of Nature, 193.
Merchant, The Death of Nature, 132.
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The Climate of the Body
is capable of activity. In fact, the very lack of mechanical predictability and
docility is precisely what characterizes nature as the supposed threat to that
which is properly political in Fanon’s account. Nature is also very much alive
and threateningly so for the wielder of colonial power, Fanon suggests. And
this aliveness and threateningness Fanon suggests is felt most deeply by the
one, the body, the one complete human form, in the context of the racially organized colony. Merchant is no doubt offering a helpful figuring of the threat
of the angry mother that nature carries, but with her naturalization of the
two-​sex model, and no consideration of the significance of racialized slavery
and colonizations (more on this later), Merchant’s work makes it difficult to
think about the legacies of the threat felt by the one, the body in the mechanistic model. Where is the threateningness of mechanism? Fanon’s work
makes palpable the broad influence of a white justice that considers nature
not just to be inert but to be a dangerous agent.
This narrative has not yet been given sufficient attention: Man studies a nature of which he must be wary. The mechanistic era of naturalists and modern
philosophers is also the era of the invention of the sciences of race-​sex-​
indigence-​sexuality-​madness-​disease. Wynter’s work draws out this theme
in Fanon, but I will argue that ultimately what is needed is more attention
to the exposition of the Manichaean, the polarization that is responsible for
the biological, the zoological as a theme in Fanon’s work. For Fanon, the hybridity for which Wynter hopes would be a manifestation of Manichaeanism.
Where Wynter’s philosophy enters the conversation is in the suggestion that the very idea of biocentric Man was inspired by a desire for
dehumanizations: Indios and natural slave are desires of a morphology
seeking to blame and shame nature for its own morphology. The very gesture
of biocentric Man as the conquering agent with respect to a deviant planet is
made possible by the invention of the science of racial anatomy, which was
the gesture of “human hereditary variations.”33 And this is accompanied by
a biocentric Man as conquering agent who must conquer also the dangerous
agent that is the native. These themes work together, Wynter explains. She
suggests that the history articulated in Merchant’s Death of Nature, as well
as more recent articulations, such as those of Bruno Latour, who argue that
what it is to be nonhuman is to be politically inert, should be situated within
a larger history that includes the justifications of genocide and enslavement-​
as-​genocide through insistences of “an ostensibly genetically non-​selected,
33
Wynter, “1492,” 39.
Sylvia Wynter and the Climate of Biocentric Man
211
because non-​involved mode of biologized being.”34 This “non-​selected” evolutionary agency enables the development of the very gesture of a selected
evolutionary agency. In other words, Wynter suggests that the centuries-​
long development of the notion of “biological difference” made it possible
for there to be a concept of (white, Christian, European, able, sane, two-​sex
model, two-​gender model, and on and on) Man that is an agent with respect
to nature who defines what is a bad agent. A crucial part of this story is the
supposed threat of nature, the one that Frantz Fanon understood, that was
synonymous with interchangeable justifications for colonization and ecological devastations, or “genocide and ecocide,” as Wynter puts it.35
There are I think only three other articulations that can be compared
to Wynter’s philosophy of racial difference in which Homo economicus
develops not only in concert with a lifeless mechanistic matter, but also in
response to a very much alive, threatening, agential matter. The three are
Dialectic of Enlightenment by Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno,
Ecofeminism by Maria Mies and Vandana Shiva, and Caliban and the Witch
by Sylvia Federici. Each of these in some way grasps the threatening character
of a materiality that (1) others take strictly to be mechanistic and therefore
characterized by a lack of agency and (2) hovers over the polis/​oikos split and
is precisely in that respect a threat to the polis and not of the polis, emerging
within its own morphology. Let me say a bit about these three works before
articulating what I take to be Wynter’s intervention, one that I want to put together with certain aspects of Fanon (namely his critique of Manichaeanism)
that I argue are underappreciated by Wynter.
Writing in the late 1940s and in response to the “disaster triumphant” of
the totalitarianism of a culture that democratically elected the Nazis, Max
Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, anticipating in some ways Carolyn
Merchant’s Death of Nature, write that the European Enlightenment, the
same period of which Merchant is speaking, meant “the disenchantment
of the world . . . the extirpation of animism.”36 And yet unlike Merchant,
Horkheimer and Adorno were interested in the degree to which the Man of
34
Wynter, “1492,” 42.
This pairing comes from Wynter’s citation of Susan Shown Harjo, “My Turn: I Won’t Be
Celebrating Columbus Day,” Newsweek Fall/​Winter, 32. See Wynter, “1492,” 6–​7.
36 Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming
(New York: Continuum, 1944), 5. See Zakiyyah Iman Jackson’s concern with the fact that animism “haunts” posthumanist literatures in Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, “Animal: New Directions in
the Theorization of Race and Posthumanism,” Feminist Studies 39.3 (2013): 673. See also Michael
Sullivan and John T. Lysaker, “Between Impotence and Illusion: Adorno’s Art of Theory and Practice,”
New German Critique 57 (1992): 87–​122.
35
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The Climate of the Body
science was in fact afraid of that which exceeded his power and knowledge.
They write, “For the Enlightenment, whatever does not conform to the rule
of computation and utility is suspect,” suggesting that “spiritual resistance” is
met with the totalitarianism of Enlightenment.37 Equivalence and equality
have “become a fetish” in the political that matches the Enlightenment desire to know in the scientific realm. Whatever resists being “decided from
the start” and resists being “comprehended mathematically; even what
cannot be made to agree, indissolubility and irrationality” is a threat to
Enlightenment. Judaism is precisely that which Man takes to be mathematically incomprehensible. However Horkheimer and Adorno’s understanding
of Enlightenment as a denial of animism pertains primarily to the divergence
of human practices and nature in tandem. Perhaps for this reason they do not
say much at all regarding the threat that non-​universal bodily events beyond
the religious pose to European agency. Their critique is crucial, and yet it
is focused on the question of totalitarianism of Europeans toward the supposed incomprehensibility and foreignness of religion. Their interest is in
the Enlightenment’s validation of a right to harm those whose religions and
practices threaten the uniformity of European rational identity: “The organization of the Hitler youth is not a return to barbarism but the triumph of
repressive equality, the disclosure through peers of the parity of the right to
injustice.”38
This is an uncannily contemporary indictment. But the place of European
and US colonization, imperialism, misogynoir39 in this analysis is unclear.40
Certainly Horkheimer and Adorno are not writing about the medicalizations
of sex and sexuality of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the transition from the one-​sex to the two-​sex model, though these aspects of even
their very own societies would have been a place to appreciate the degree
to which Man hates and fears, not only studies and controls, what is not rational Man.
A second pair of writers who think along Wynterian lines about the degree
to which nature in white European culture is not only mechanistic but also
a very much alive and bad biological agent that must be attacked in kind is
Maria Mies and Vandana Shiva, whose important volume Ecofeminism has
37
Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 6.
Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 13.
Bailey and Trudy, “On Misogynoir.”
40 On the absence of imperialism and colonization in Adorno’s work, see Bruce Baum,
“Decolonizing Critical Theory,” Constellations 22.3 (2015): 420–​
434; and Said, Culture and
Imperialism, 278.
38
39
Sylvia Wynter and the Climate of Biocentric Man
213
inspired an entire literature. While Carolyn Merchant’s anticipation of ecofeminism sought to understand how “the female earth was central to the
organic cosmology that was undermined by the Scientific Revolution and
the rise of the market-​oriented culture in early modern European,”41 Mies
and Shiva seek a global account of ecofeminism. Mies and Shiva argue that
“capitalist patriarchy or ‘modern’ civilization is based on a cosmology and
anthropology that structurally dichotomized reality, and hierarchically
opposes the two parts to each other: the one always considered superior, always thriving, and progressing at the expense of the other. Thus, nature is
subordinated to man; woman to man; consumption to production; and the
local to the global, and so on. Feminists have long criticized this dichotomy,
particularly the structural division of man and nature, which is seen as analogous to that of man and woman.”42 Mies and Shiva argue, in a sense reminiscent of Fanon, that this dichotomizing is “basically antagonistic.”43 Explicitly
the hierarchy suggests that “capitalist patriarchy or ‘modern’ civilization” is
the powerful part of a dichotomous picture, but implicitly there is always the
suggestion that the underside is in fact a formidable “enemy,”44 not only a
passive non-​agent. This acknowledgment is enormously significant. I will say
more about why in a moment. But for now I only want to add that ecofeminism in Mies and Shiva’s articulation, as I understand it, argues that there
is an analogy to be made between nature and those global many who are
subordinated insofar as they are considered the enemy of Man. As Mies and
Shiva put it, “As well as women, these include nature and other peoples—​the
colonized and ‘naturized’ —​‘opened up’ for free exploitation and subordination, transformed into ‘others,’ the ‘objects, in the process of European (male)
‘subject’s’ emancipation form the ‘realm of necessity.’ ”45 Mies and Shiva thus
widen what ecofeminism means.
So much has been written about ecofeminism that I cannot possibly make
generalizations about it, but here I want to point out that, even in the more
helpful articulation of ecofeminism that one finds in the work of Mies and
Shiva, there is the familiar partitioning that marks the term itself: eco and
feminism. This distinction is an indication of the problem of the polis, that
a distinction is made between that which is body and that which is politics.
41
42
43
44
45
Merchant, The Death of Nature.
Maria Mies and Vandana Shiva, Ecofeminism (New York: Palgrave, 1993), 5.
Mies and Shiva, Ecofeminism, 5.
Mies and Shiva, Ecofeminism, 5.
Mies and Shiva, Ecofeminism, 7.
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This is a repetition of the polis-​oikos split that does not account for the split
itself. Because of this conceptual demarcation, there is in this literature a
suggestion that certain humans are subordinated as nature is subordinated,
analogously, instead of the claim that is suggested in both Irigaray and Fanon
that biocentric Man is a project that is precisely the inability to appreciate
who is “human” and who is “thing” to begin with.
As Irigaray puts it, the casting of certain bodies as envelope-​thing accompanies the Aristotelian teleology of the gesture of the one, the body, the complete human form that is a denial of bodies that exceed this. On this account
it’s not that nature and certain bodies are subordinated in a distinguishable
way. It’s that the elevation of the one of biocentric Man must deny the plurality of humanity as part of its denial of the suspicious agency of earth-​air-​
fire-​water. Ecofeminists as well as political ecologists and new materialists
argue that what needs to be appreciated is the agency of matter. And even
Irigaray generally takes Man to be an agent who renders material agency an
oxymoron. But as we saw in Fanon, biocentric Man—​a very specific body—​
seems rather to be Man’s philosophy of agency. With respect to this body, the
one, the body, all other agency is problematic.
The suggestion of an elemental difference approach is to try to take note
of the way that relationalities among human bodies are denied and used
to form alliances, debasements, elevations. A certain body figures divine
agency, political authority, economic authority, military superiority. All of
this is possible not because of empirical bodily difference, but because of the
desire to thwart the agency of what one fears-​hates-​contests that undermines
the political-​ecological distinction. Such strategies of alliance and triangulation are attempts to thwart an agency of earth-​air-​fire-​water. The denial is a
desire to suppress. The one, the body is a specific reaction to elemental difference and an attempt to end the encroachments of what the one, the body
understands as matter, most especially when matter shows up to threaten the
polis. The polis is free of what it scorns as matter. To keep up this lie, it must
deny that which is therefore matter.
An elemental difference approach, as opposed to the ecofeminist one (as
I understand it), would not insist that matter is agential, since that is already
the case, but that whatever is the one, the body is an attempt to install itself as
agency per se.46 The one, the body is an effort to be a unilateral agent in the
face of an earth of agents that the one, the body, the lone human form—​this
46
Chen, Animacies.
Sylvia Wynter and the Climate of Biocentric Man
215
false generic—​considers to be threatening. The one of the body is a fear of and
anger at that which is not polis. So the project of re-​enlivening matter only
makes this hypocritical non-​relationality more agitated—​as if the one, the
body is the one who is trapped. Ecofascisms, militarized border proponents,
but also equality proponents are all variants of this fear.
Add to this again (as is the case in Horkheimer and Adorno, not to mention
Merchant) that in Mies and Shiva there is a naturalization of sex and thus a
generalizing of the two-​sex model that needs to be discussed. There is no discussion of the transition of the one-​sex to the two-​sex model, the history and
location of this transition, and no discussion of its medical-​marginalization
of sex and sexuality. The two-​sex model is a generic ideal, relatively new in its
biomedical backing, and this is still largely unquestioned or even acknowledged in ecofeminism. But the crucial point is that the elemental difference
approach would be to understand how discontinuities and singularities per
se are suppressed or vilified and how this is a vilification of what we could call
with Jane Bennett “thing-​power.” Nevertheless it is the case that though there
is no critique of the polis in ecofeminism, there is nevertheless something
of a claim that Fanon and Wynter make more clear: the one, the body is not
only the denial of agencies of air-​fire-​earth-​water, but primarily an attempt to
fight with and take down the agency of an inherently threatening matter with
respect to the polis.
A third argument that is comparable to the Wynterian account in which
matter is not only mechanistic but also a bad biological agent in contrast to
biocentric Man is that of Silvia Federici. Federici’s Caliban and the Witch
contains a very helpful response to the work of Carolyn Merchant previously discussed. Federici writes that while Merchant’s account convincingly
eliminates the presumption that Enlightenment scientific reason was an improvement on the past, it is an argument for the witch-​hunt as a byproduct
of the transition from an organic to a mechanistic metaphor for nature.47 As
Federici points out, if the target of the witch-​hunts were organic nature, you
would think that slavery and the hunting of heretics (men) would be part of
the story insofar as both of these groups would seem to be implicated in the
dangerous magic of nature that must be killed. Witches alone on Merchant’s
account were the organic nature that needed to be killed in order for a new
order to emerge.
47 Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation
(Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 2004), 202–​203.
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The Climate of the Body
Federici argues that instead of the transition from an organic to a mechanistic metaphor for nature, the witch-​hunts were an effort to establish the
capitalist hierarchy of Homo economicus. Federici’s account of the genocide
of those deemed witches within and outside of Europe conveys the threat
level that is economic Man, in an account that is roughly coterminous with
Wynter’s historical account. But here again there are limits to Federici’s account, essential reading though it is. First, this is again not offering an account of why the one-​sex model would remain largely unchanged for
millennia, only to change suddenly in just the last couple of centuries to a
two-​sex model with which it is consistent but to which it is not fully reducible. Federici, like Merchant, takes the two-​sex model for granted. For both
the problem is “sexism,” discrimination on the basis of an unquestioned
apolitical natural formation that is the two-​sex model. So long as sex is understood to be a pre-​political concept, and humans are identified by this pre-​
political concept, there is a mode of feminism that supports the one of the
body. A second concern that I encounter in reading Federici is that she takes
others to have already told the primitive accumulation story of colonization,
and so she articulates her own account as supplementing that one. And thus
her account does not offer its own narrative of racialization (for example,
experiences of racialization of racialized people who are not all the same as
groups and also who are not homogeneous with respect to the impositions
of binary sex-​gender imperatives). Many witches were no doubt racialized,
even on Federici’s own account, but Federici conceives of the war on witches
strictly as misogynistic. Because the two-​sex model is naturalized in this
account, transmisogyny, hatred of transmen specifically (shouldn’t there
be a word for this?), fears of nonbinariness, and fears of intersex, are rendered antithetical. All of this is impossible to address if one takes the two-​sex
model for granted, not to mention the way in which the idealized second sex
is meant in body to mirror the first. Moreover, Federici argues that race is
a condition of subordination that happens because of capitalism’s desire to
prevent a “fatal alliance among the oppressed.”48 Federici, citing the work of
Yann Moulier Boutang, holds that the lines of racial difference were drawn by
those seeking power as capitalists—​not as white people—​in order to demarcate slave status, outlawing “white slavery” and normalizing a tautological
“black slavery” as simply slavery as a method of primitive accumulation.49
48
Federici, Caliban and the Witch, 106.
Federici, Caliban and the Witch, 117 n. 5. See also Yann Moulier Boutang, D’esclavage au salaried: Economic historique du salariat bridé (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1998).
49
Sylvia Wynter and the Climate of Biocentric Man
217
Especially if Aristotle’s work is understood as “proto-​racist,”50 containing already the biocentrism that will make the science of racial anatomy conceivable, then the very idea of a person who is Black is not derivable strictly from
the desire to enslave as a means of primitive accumulation.
Federici’s work is enormously significant for my own, but I seek an acknowledgment of the multidimensional anticipation of threat that defines
biocentric Man. This feature accompanies all distinction-​making between
the one, the body of the polis and the oikos that has defined biocentric Man
since long before Man developed capitalism as a strategy for hierarchization.
Before capitalism, biocentric Man, or rather on my account the one, the body,
espouses Christianity as a sense of self. Both of these as modes of the one, the
body coexist side by side in the present. Pope Francis’s Laudato si, celebrated
by Bruno Latour as a political-​ecological achievement in recognizing the responsive cry of mother-​sister earth,51 is an attempt at a reassertion of power
on behalf of a longer-​lived biocentric Man, the one, the body of the polis
who seeks to care for “our Sister, Mother Earth, who sustains and governs us,
and who produces various fruit with coloured flowers and herbs.”52 Latour
suggests that what the pope means by sister-​mother-​earth is Gaia, and this
illustrates the identification with polis and the one, the body that Latour and
Pope Francis share.
In each of these accounts—​Adorno and Horkheimer, Mies and Shiva,
Federici—​the acknowledgment of the threat that biocentric Man perceives
is in some way articulated, and in that respect is comparable to Fanon’s account, augmented by Wynter, in which biocentric Man takes pains to
distinguish Man from earth. Development of this account is enormously significant for what one takes to be the right response to ecological breakdown.
If one understands the problem to be a lack of appreciation for the agency
of matter, then this is the missing wisdom: matter is not inert. One will, like
Latour, advocate an appreciation of the actancy of things. However, if one,
like Fanon and Wynter but also to some extent Adorno and Horkheimer,
Mies and Shiva, and Federici, appreciates the degree to which biocentric
Man is a morphology seeking to install itself as agency per se, a sense of self
50
See Isaac, Invention of Racism, 175–​181.
Bruno Latour, “The Immense Cry Channeled by Pope Francis,” Environmental Humanities
8.2 (November 2016): 251–​255. See also William E. Connolly, Facing the Planetary: Entangled
Humanism and the Politics of Swarming (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017), 141–​142.
52 Pope Francis, Laudato si’: On Care for Our Common Home. Vatican City: Vatican Press, May
24, 2015, w2.vatican.va/​content/​dam/​francesco/​pdf/​encyclicals/​documents/​papa-​ francesco_​
20150524_​enciclica-​laudato-​si_​en.pdf.
51
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The Climate of the Body
that anticipates threat and perceives as a criminal agency whatever biocentric Man does not identify with, then the response has got to be different. It’s
not that the agency of things needs acknowledging. Biocentric Man, but also
in more intense ways the ecofascist, knows that things are agential. That is
what they fear and loathe, especially when things threaten incursion on the
polis. Nonhumans come in a variety of forms for biocentric Man as well as
the ecofascist, any of which can inspire strategies of containment. If moderns
are not ecofascists, they still do not have the right understanding to respond
to such dynamics of the polis, in which some can more easily identify with an
abstract earth than with other genres of humanity. In both cases also a certain ecological care so often means a doubling-​down on the two-​sex model
and a coercive definition of gender in keeping with the two-​sex model.
Certain bodies are pushed away; other bodies get swallowed and yet are still
not part of the ruling authority of the polis. Latour’s own lack of response
to ecofascism, which I have argued ultimately shares the polis-​oikos conceptual differentiation, encourages in more dangerous ways the ecofascisms that
want to defend the homogeneity of the polis in the midst of ecological crises.
What needs acknowledging is the danger of the absolute authorization of
biocentric Man, who is thought to be incomparable. What needs acknowledging and debunking is the very idea of the lone unilateral bodily agent,
who-​what gets its definition from contrasting itself with features of other
bodies. The bodily homogeneity of this unilateral agent is its crucial feature
as well as an indication of its ethereal aspirations. In a world of thing-​power
there is no unilateral agent, and yet the gesture of the one, the body, the
human as both homogeneous and unilaterally agential in the philosophies of
the West has so far been synonymous with the idea that biocentric Man is a
unilateral agent.
This alternative response becomes apparent upon reading Wynter’s account of the conceptual development of biocentric Man, Man as a natural
organism. Racial otherness, Wynter argues, is the substrate of the historical
emergence of Man as a purely natural organism, as opposed to an immaterial
agency: Christian (who is openly immaterial), then Homo politicus (who
is transitionally “hybrid”), and then Homo economicus (who is “evolutionarily selected”).53 As discussed earlier, the Christian was neither an “infidel,”
such as Muslim and Jewish infidelity demonstrates, nor was the Christian an
“idolator, those pagan polytheistic peoples who had either ignored or had
53
Wynter, “1492,” 33–​44.
Sylvia Wynter and the Climate of Biocentric Man
219
not as yet been preached the Word.”54 The tripartite division of Christian,
infidel, and idolator becomes the later division of Homo politicus, Indios,
natural slave. And this tripartite structure is what becomes the purely natural white humanity, brown ambivalence, black nonhumanity. The present
biocentric version of Man on Wynter’s account, Man as a natural organism, is
the source of the very gesture of teleological evolution.
Wynter extends Frantz Fanon’s notion of sociogeny into a performative
account of what Wynter names genre. Biocentric Man is an idealization
that is the gender concept but also an idealization that is the race concept,
the class concept, the sexuality concept, all of this at once. This is not to say
that these dimensions of Man as a concept are equally threatening to that
figure or to those who would defend it. But a crucial intervention by Wynter
is in pluralizing the directions in which one can take Butler’s philosophy of
performativity and Fanon’s distinctive approach to that which performativity
understands as political difference. As Alexander G. Weheliye has argued,
Wynter’s writings have sought to understand how it has come about that
when so many people say “human,” what they are really talking about is biocentric Man. In Wynter’s account the development of an intersectionally idealized Man as a natural organism develops without the morphē of Aristotle or
the God and soul of Augustine. Weheliye writes,
According to this scheme [i.e., man] in western modernity the religious
conception of the self gave way to two modes of secularized being: first
the Cartesian “Rational Man,” or homo politicus, and then beginning at
the end of the eighteenth century, Man as a selected being and natural organism . . . as the universal human, “man as man.” . . . one genre of the
human (Judeo-​Christian, religious) yields to another, just as provincial,
version of the human, and although both claim universality, neither genre
fully represents the multiplicity of human life forms. In the context of the
secular human, black subjects, along with indigenous populations, the colonized, the insane, the poor, the disabled, and so on serve as limit cases by
which Man can demarcate himself as the universal human.55
54
Wynter, “1492,” 29.
Alexander G. Weheliye, Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist
Theories of the Human (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), 24, citing Sylvia Wynter, “Beyond
the Word of Man: Glissant and the New Discourse of the Antilles,” World Literature Today 63.4
(1989): 637–​648.
55
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The Climate of the Body
Weheliye points out that for Wynter the period of development of wholly
scientific terms has been a re-​articulation of a hypocritically universal Man.
In this account gender (and we could elaborate: the two-​sex model that concept of gender tends to presuppose) is not an independent category, but an
integral part of a larger account of what it is like to be-​become human as
(paradoxically) “beyond the reach of human intervention.”56 Weheliye cites
Wynter’s claim that “it is this issue of the ‘genre’ of ‘Man’ that causes all the ‘-​
isms.’ . . . Now when I speak at a feminist gathering and I come up with ‘genre’
and say ‘gender’ is a function of ‘genre,’ they don’t want to hear that.”57 As
Wynter puts it, the political difference of gender is the establishment of “the
normal sex, the male,”58 according to the need for the political establishment
of normality as an outgrowth of the concept of the science of racial anatomy.
These two ideas are the same idea for Wynter: the invention of racial difference and the establishment of an apolitical definition of that which is the one,
the human, established by nature.
Wynter thus suggests that the two-​sex model that now defines the body
of the polis is an elaboration of the logic of racial difference according
to which biocentric Man can read the differences of bodies externally.
Whereas for most of Western philosophical history prevails what Thomas
Laqueur names the one-​sex model, in which there is one sex, Man, from
which all other bodies in various ways depart, a two-​sex model has taken its
place. As Luce Irigaray has argued, and as Wynter herself agrees, the two-​
sex model is the one-​sex model in disguise. The “sex that is not one” is only
nominally a departure from the one, the body of the complete human form.
However, the two-​sex model, as Paul Preciado has argued, makes it possible
for there to be such a thing as an ideal feminine body, not only a masculine one. These are distinguishable racial, ability, class, sex, gender, sexuality
completions, which are both taken to be generic bodily forms. Both of these
bodies together constitute the two, the body, the perfect human form, by
which I mean that both now share a generic morphology of the body that is
biocentric Man. This puts certain women in an unstable position: sharing
in the defensive privileges of the body of the polis, and yet at the same time
encountering events cast out of the polis.
Wynter’s approach offers the beginnings of an intersectional philosophy
of elemental difference, even though Wynter herself explicitly adheres to
56
Weheliye, Habeas Viscus, 25.
Weheliye, Habeas Viscus, 23 and Greg Thomas, “Proud Flesh Inter/​Views: Sylvia Wynter,” Proud
Flesh 4 (2006): 24.
58 Wynter, “1492,” 42.
57
Sylvia Wynter and the Climate of Biocentric Man
221
Judith Butler’s philosophy of performativity and the performative philosophy of political difference. In the preceding quotation Wynter speaks of
“-​isms” and thereby invokes the legal gesture of treating people as if they
were different though they are not. To discriminate between people, to
treat someone differently from someone else, is the very definition of injustice in the modern polis-​oikos distinction precisely because what it is to
be part of the polis is to be the same. This is what Fanon called white justice,
as discussed in Chapter 3. But Wynter’s point, I take it, is that biocentric
Man is a multidimensional ideal, and this means that as an ideal biocentric Man is synonymous with many overlapping and mutually exceeding
phobias of a variety of intensities. As the Combahee River Collective made
clear and as I discussed in Chapter 1, isolating individual gestures of biocentric Man one by one leaves out the vast majority of people. Those bodies
that share biocentric Man’s needs are few. Wynter’s work gathers everyone
up, all of Man’s various phobias and hatreds of bodiment. Moreover this
approach does not preclude thinking of other dimensions of Man as the
one, the body that Wynter doesn’t herself articulate. She provides a way
of thinking about what it is like to be human to which one can easily add
other attachments: the normate in Rosemarie Garland-​Thomson’s sense,
the size concept (equating thin with a natural health), the cis concept
(equating male with man, female with woman), the binary concept (everyone is either a man or woman), and others I may or may not be perceiving. Surely there will be more dimensions to understand, dimensions
of the biocentrism of a tradition that denies that that is precisely how it
doles out roles and authority, entrapment and criminality. The point is that
biocentric Man, this idealization of a very narrow set of bodily events, is
the source of as many flip-​side entrapments as there are features of biocentric Man. And whatever isn’t biocentric Man is considered to be a mystery,
a research project, or a problem.
Wynter argues, in a melding of the philosophy of sociogenesis of Fanon
and a philosophy of performativity of Judith Butler, that the powers of biocentric Man are sociogenically constituted. For Wynter they can only be
sociogenically constituted because there isn’t just one universal experience
that is the whole of humanity. Biocentric Man is substituted for the question
of what it is like to be human.59 This is characteristic of the genre biocentric
Man that ranks bodies in relation to itself, but understands such rankings to
59 Wynter, “Towards the Sociogenic Principle.” The phrase is a reading of Thomas Nagel’s “What Is
It Like to Be a Bat,” in Moral Questions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 165–​180.
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The Climate of the Body
be the work of a nature with which Man identifies. Nature is the privileging
of biocentric Man, the teleological end of all would-​be humanity. Wynter’s
philosophy of genre is in this way a truly intersectional philosophy, endlessly
open to the addition of further research regarding the dimensions of biocentrism and the ties between biocentrism and ecological breakdown. Is it ironic
that a biocentric genre invents ubiquitous body catastrophe: ongoing “racial
capitalism,”60 ongoing “primitive accumulation,”61 ongoing climate disaster /​
“world ecology”62? Wynter’s answer: of course not.
Wynter takes up the theme of sociogeny from a reading of a line near the
beginning of Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks. Fanon writes, “We shall see
that the alienation of the black man [du Noir] is not an individual question.
Alongside phylogeny and ontogeny, there is also sociogeny.”63 Wynter argues
that what Fanon means by this is that how humans understand each other’s
cultures and bodies is constitutive of what it is like to be human. This is humanity, for Wynter. Humanity is not an empirical or scientific definition. It is
not biocentric Man, in relation to whom all other bodies are approximations.
Humanity is a capacity for developing stories and histories that she names
genre. Biocentric Man is a genre that understands itself to be the teleological
end of nature.
Wynter elides this gesture of sociogeny with the gesture of performativity
as it is articulated in Butler, which I discussed at length in Chapter 2. Wynter
helpfully multiplies both, arguing not that race or gender is biocentric Man’s
meaning, but that practices institute an exalted body of bourgeois-​secular-​
white-​Man-​heterosexuality as an apex. Wynter argues that Man is by definition a fully biological agent. And Wynter argues that this genre can be
addressed if it is appreciated as hybrid: biocentric Man is biological but also
is not biological. Biocentric Man is an exploitation of a certain “physiognomy,” but it is primarily a result of myth-​making about that physiognomy.64
Performativity articulates the narratological aspect of what it is like to be
human for Wynter; a narratological aspect distinguishes humanity from the
rest of life.
60 Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 2.
61 Federici, Caliban and the Witch, 62–​63.
62 Moore, Capitalism.
63 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, xv.
64 Wynter, “1492,” 42.
Sylvia Wynter and the Climate of Biocentric Man
223
This reliance on the notion of performativity leads Wynter to articulate
ecological breakdown as a “non-​natural process”65 that results from the nonbiological aspects of what it is like to be human. My concern with this is that
this way of thinking about that which is ecological replicates the unilateral
agency attributed to biocentric Man, in spite of the attention that Wynter
gives to the political and to the ecological. As in Latour, there is an interest
in the political and the ecological that somehow doesn’t address these two
terms simultaneously. The terms resist each other, and the resistance itself
is not queried. I agree completely with Wynter’s argument that biocentric
Man—​not humanity in a universal way—​is responsible for ecological breakdown. What I do not agree with in Wynter has to do with concerns already
raised with performativity regarding the question of the origin of political difference. Is biocentric Man a set of pure projections onto others, the
haughty author of everything that biocentric Man senses? Or is the one of the
body—​as well as the two of the body—​a response to that which does exceed
the pretension to a falsely abodily and generic morphology? A clear answer
to this question requires an exposition of the political-​ecological distinction
and the polis.
Wynter criticizes the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change66 as
well as the scientific journalist and best-​selling author of The Sixth Extinction
Elizabeth Kolbert67 for understanding global heating as “anthropogenic
change,” a claim that plainly restates the false universality of Man in the generic term anthropos, a descendent of the ancient Greek term anthrōpos for
Man. The IPCC’s 2007 Fourth Assessment Report as well as its 2014 Fifth
Assessment Report fail68 to identify “the fundamental principle of causality that underlies this intractable crisis—​not to mention the system of
underside cases to which it is interconnected,” the “bio-​humanist, homo
oeconomicus.”69 The notion that Man is the epitome of biological agency has
hidden “two phenomena,” about which Wynter has been writing since at
least the early 1990s: “the physical and that of the global socio-​human environments . . . hidden costs which necessarily remain invisible.”70 In “1492,”
65
66
67
68
69
70
See, for example, Wynter, “The Ceremony Found,” 240 n. 58.
Wynter, “The Ceremony Found,” 233–​235.
Wynter, “The Ceremony Found,” 240 n. 58.
Wynter, “The Ceremony Found,” 236–​237.
Wynter, “The Ceremony Found,” 237.
Wynter, “No Humans Involved,” 60.
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Wynter renames the two phenomena genocide and ecocide.71 It is not humanity or even certain practices by some humans, but the absolute trust in
Europe’s invention of biological Man as a conquering natural organism that
“threaten[s]‌the livability of our species’ planetary habitat.”72
Wynter argues that what is needed to get out of this biocentrism, the gesture in which Man is a unilaterally powerful biological agent by definition, is
attention to the performativity of genre. The Western European biocentric
definition of human is, inevitably, one way of life among many. It is a genre
that doesn’t understand that it is a genre at all. Wynter argues that to appreciate the plurality of performative genres is to answer the question of what it
is like to be human as opposed to Man. Man is a denial that located practices
characterize humanity, or “co-​humanity,” as Wynter sometimes puts it. For
Wynter, climate disruption is a result of a distinct and dangerous genre that
doesn’t appreciate that it is a genre, and this genre was inspired by a distinction between humanity and the evolutionarily maladapted slave.73 This science of racial anatomy was the start of the science of anatomies. That is the
problem that is biocentric Man, for Wynter: Man is “a purely biological definition of what it is to be, and therefore what it is like to be, human.”74 And yet
at the same time, Man also retains traces of a divinity; Man 2 is still a development of the Christian, a sacredness of the one, the body that figures divine
rule, whose agency is the definition of agency. And meanwhile Man by definition has no appreciation of genre at all as a feature of humanity, and thus
can have no appreciation of the provinciality of itself as a genre. Racialization
and climate disruption, genocide and ecocide, are simultaneous enactments
of this hostility.
Wynter argues Biocentric Man is at root a hostility toward that which is
not-​yet-​human and which cannot be human because what it means to be
human is biocentric Man. This hostility is not toward “embodiment” generally because the hostility itself is not about being bodily. The hostility of biocentric Man is a hostility toward certain features of body that are taken to be
Man’s approximations or the total lack of Man. This explains why Man’s hostility is not universally directed toward generic bodies, bodies in the abstract.
The validation of biocentric Man as agency is for Wynter a celebration of a
certain physicality, and genocide-​ecocide is the enactment of this validation.
71
72
73
74
Wynter, “1492,” 7.
Wynter, “The Ceremony Found,” 245.
Wynter, “1492,” 35–​37.
Wynter, “Towards the Sociogenic Principle,” 31.
Sylvia Wynter and the Climate of Biocentric Man
225
4.2. Wynter’s What It Is Like to Be Human:
The Performativity of Genre
Wynterian genre is, as Wynter explains in an interview with Katherine
McKittrick, a simultaneous reading of Fanonian sociogeny and Butlerian
performativity. Wynter’s philosophy of genre is not reducible to either of
these. Wynter combines these two concepts. Genre indicates that Wynter
regards nature and culture as mutually influential.75 This philosophy of genre
is a philosophy of humanity that questions the natural definition of biocentric Man as the human. Wynter argues that it is biocentric Man as a genre that
is responsible for genocide and ecocide.
From Fanon, Wynter adopts the notion of sociogeny, and from Butler,
Wynter adopts the “redefinition of gender as a praxis rather than a noun.”76
As Wynter puts it,
Fanon put forward the idea of our skin/​masks, thereby of the hybridity
of our being human, in 1952. Crick and Watson cracked the genetic
code in 1953. Now, I argue that Fanon’s masks enact a “second set of
instructions.” . . . the ism of gender is itself —​while only one member class—​
a founding member class. Gender is a founding member because in order to
auto-​institute ourselves as subject of a genre-​specific referent-​we, we must,
first, co-​relatedly and performatively enact each such code’s “second set of
instructions” at the familial level, in terms of our gender roles. We know of
this brilliant concept of the performative enactment of gender from Judith
Butler. I am suggesting that the enactments of such gender roles are always
a function of the enacting of a specific genre of being hybridly human.”77
In this way Wynter elides the sense of sociogeny, emphasizing its hybridity, its genetic plus relational inputs, in her own multiplying reading of
performativity.
Wynter argues that sociogeny in Fanon is hybrid. That is what makes
Fanon’s philosophy of humanity compatible with Butlerian performativity.
But Fanon himself was very worried about dualism, of which the
75
Wynter, “Towards the Sociogenic Principle,” 59. See also Wynter, “1492,” 43.
Sylvia Wynter and Katherine McKittrick, “Unparalleled Catastrophe for Our Species? or, To
Give Humanness a Different Future: Conversations,” in Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis,
ed. Katherine McKittrick (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015), 33.
77 Wynter and McKittrick, “Unparalleled Catastrophe,” 33.
76
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gesture of hybrid is a version. I have provided a reading of Fanon’s critique
of Manichaeanism in Chapter 3, but let me repeat a bit of this reading now.
In Black Skin, White Masks he laments, as David Marriott puts it, that “civil
society and the state both reflect a world in which blackness is singularly
lacking,”78 introduced by the European vocabularies, which Fanon calls “the
split [le clivage] imposed by the Europeans.”79 The split to which he refers
is the hierarchical split between the “white man” and color that is “felt as a
stain,”80 a split that produces dehumanization by means of the definition
of humanity with a specific one of the body. And in the following chapters
Fanon argues that this feeling of his color “as a stain” is the result of a “mechanism,” in which le nègre is forced to bear the negativity of the biological of
European “delirious Manichaeanism.”81 In Wretched of the Earth, Fanon
argues that European colonists “inflicted” this distinction between humanity
and that which is biological and zoological on the colonized, and this is what
produces the very gesture of the native on the part of the colonist. Fanon
writes, “The colonial context, as we have said, is characterized by the dichotomy it inflicts on the world.”82 All of this on my reading would serve to
question whether a gesture of hybridity can be at all consistent with Fanon’s
oeuvre.
But in reading Fanon together with Butler, Wynter attributes a hybridity
to his work. Sociogeny, taken alone, does suggest a certain affinity with
performativity, and the very next chapter in Black Skin, White Masks after
this term appears is about the way in which language becomes a site of production of racial difference. But I would argue that the gesture of sociogeny
needs to be read as part of a larger project, one of “genuine disalienation”
that “will have been achieved only when things, in the most materialist
sense, have resumed their rightful place.”83 By the end of the book, Fanon has
argued that a deep alienation of Europeans’ thinking—​from that which they
take to be biological and erotic and in general of bodies, a way of thinking
that equates the biological with “sin”—​is responsible for his experience of
78
Marriott, Whither Fanon?, 151.
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 63.
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 63.
81 As I have explained in a note to Chapter 3, Fanon borrows this phrase from Maurice Dide and
Paul Guiraud, cited by Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 139 n. 25, 160. See Paul Guiraud, Psychiatrie
clinique (Paris: Librairie Le François, 1956). Guiraud and Dide write of “Manichéisme délirant,” a
formal pathological, clinical symptom of being given to extremes of desire and aversion (Guiraud,
424–​425).
82 Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 10.
83 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, xv.
79
80
Sylvia Wynter and the Climate of Biocentric Man
227
feeling the weight of his body as if it were “stained”: “In Europe, evil is symbolized by the black man [le Noir]. We have to move slowly—​that we know—​but
it’s not easy. The perpetrator is the black man [l’homme noir]; Satan is black
[noir]; one talks of darkness; when you are filthy [sale] you are dirty [noir]—​
and this goes for physical dirt as well as moral dirt. If you took the trouble to
note them, you would be surprised at the number of expressions that equate
the black man [du Noir] with sin.” This effort of “going down,”84 into the terrifying associations and metaphors of Europeans, is for Fanon a source of
release, not from the relationality of the Europeans, not from colonization,
but a release from his own belief in their associations and metaphors. Fanon
lauds the work of Carl Jung, who teaches people to “become a child again
to understand certain psychic realities.”85 Unfortunately, Jung “makes a big
mistake: he reaches out only to the childhood of Europe.”86 Fanon seems
to make this his method: to refuse such a narrow sense of childhood. This
leads to a questioning of the impulse to divide the world—​by means of a fault
line structuring human relationality—​into evil (bodies) and transcending
(bodies). Such a division is clearly not attributable to Wynter’s philosophy
of hybridity. However, my argument is that the gesture of partitioning is ultimately at odds with Fanon’s skepticism, which seeks a whole-​ism that is nevertheless not “abstract.”87
In spite of these concerns with hybridity, about which I will say more in the
final section of this chapter, performativity in Wynter becomes a welcome intersectional philosophy. Fanon’s work is so focused at times on le Noir in the
abstract that, though as I have argued in Chapter 3 it lends itself to a more general philosophy of elemental difference, it is not easy to appreciate his work
as itself inherently intersectional. Reading Fanon together with Butlerian
performativity allows Wynter to focus on her interest in biocentric Man, and
not just one of his corollaries at a time.
Butler herself has resisted the exploration of performativity as a multidimensional political philosophy in this way. As I discussed in Chapter 2,
Butler herself was not so sure in the 1999 preface to Gender Trouble whether
performativity could easily become a philosophy of race, much less a new
political philosophy, a new full-​blown wisdom of humanity that is not hierarchical. She writes,
84
85
86
87
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 172.
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 166.
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 166.
Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 9.
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The question of whether or not the theory of performativity can be transposed onto matters of race has been explored by several scholars.88 I would
note here only that racial presumptions invariably underwrite the discourse
on gender in ways that need to be made explicit, but that race and gender
ought not to be treated as simple analogies. I would therefore suggest that
the question to ask is not whether the theory of performativity is transposable onto race, but what happens to the theory when it tries to come to grips
with race. Many of these debates have centered on the status of “construction,” whether race is constructed in the same way as gender. My view is
that no single account of construction will do.89
Butler is rightly concerned to distinguish the ways in which race and gender
are distinctly built. She is rightly worried about “simple analogies.” And in
arguing against the notion that race and gender are analogous, Butler also
argues, just a few lines down, that “these categories always work as background for one another, and they often find their most powerful articulating
through one another.”90 Race is always in the background of gender, and
gender in the background of race, and for this reason gender cannot serve as
an “exclusive category of analysis.”91 Somehow the end result of this passage
is a refutation of the notion that performativity can be that “single account
of construction” that will allow a scholar to avoid making either gender or
race the exclusive category of analysis. This refutation comes from the very
philosopher who first articulates performativity as a way of thinking not just
about utterances but about political philosophy itself. And that makes it very
unlikely that anyone would try to think of not only gender, but also the performative enactments of class, race, ability, health, religion together, as a cohesive political philosophy.
Whereas Butler has resisted the exploration of performativity as a political philosophy, Sylvia Wynter has repeatedly articulated performativity
in exactly this way, frequently pairing Butler and Fanon. Wynter writes
that Butler is important for her own “Fanonian answer to the question of
who-​we-​are as humans”: “Butler’s illuminating insight with respect to the
‘fictive construction’ and ‘performative enactment’ (pre-​Fifties/​Sixties) of
88 Butler adds a note here: “Saidiya Hartman, Lisa Lowe, Dorinne Kondo are scholars whose work
has influenced my own” (Gender Trouble, 206 n. 11).
89 Butler, Gender Trouble, xvi.
90 Butler, Gender Trouble, xvi.
91 Butler, Gender Trouble, xvi.
Sylvia Wynter and the Climate of Biocentric Man
229
gender substance is also true with respect to the range of the other also genre-​
specific, fictively constructed, and performatively enacted roles/​identities of
class substance (including rich/​poor and, at the world-​systematic level, developed/​underdeveloped substance), of sexual orientation substance, and, of
course (and centrally so) of race substance.”92 Wynter continues by saying
that Butler’s notion of performative enactment of these aspects of the genre
Man is “true only because of the larger truth that constitutes all such fictively
constructed and performatively enacted roles/​identities, together with their
respective ‘coherences,’ as mutually reinforcing functions—​the truth, that
is, of our being human as ‘always a doing,’ of our being human as praxis.”93
All of these hierarchical relations together “constitute the set of negative
Ontological Others by means of which the descriptive statement of man-​as-​
a-​natural-​organism, encoded in the figure of man, is stably brought into systemic being.”94 For Wynter, the very gesture of “substance” or nature is what
constitutes Man-​as-​natural-​organism. It is biocentric Man who has responsibility for the hierarchical shape of human relationality. These hierarchies
are a natural order for which Man pretends not to be responsible. “Nature”
is responsible; “substance” or matter is that for which nature is responsible.
In response to this Wynter argues that this is itself a way of thinking, and not
nature per se: “Why not, then, the performative enactment of all our roles, of
all our role allocations as, in our contemporary Western/​Westernized case, in
terms of inter alia, gender, race, class/​underclass, and across them all, sexual
orientation? All as praxes, therefore, rather than nouns. So here you have the
idea that with being human everything is praxis. For we are not purely biological beings! As far as the eusocial insects like bees are concerned, their roles
are genetically preprescribed for them. Ours are not.”95
In an earlier essay Wynter explains what she means by suggesting that race
as a performative enactment has a central role in the very gesture of substance (which I take to be another way of gesturing to the notion of matter).
She argues that the need for a concept of absolute racial difference inspires
a more general praxis of biocentric Man, according to which humanity is
not a praxis at all, but instead a fixed hierarchical structure. Wynter argues
that the praxis of biocentric Man develops out of the Christian as a genre,
which as I have discussed, was according to Wynter a geographical concept.
92
93
94
95
Wynter, “The Ceremony Found,” 195. More on the centrality of race subsequently.
Wynter, “The Ceremony Found,” 195–​196.
Wynter, “On Disenchanting Discourse,” 235.
Wynter and McKittrick, “Unparalleled Catastrophe,” 34.
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Christians understood “an ostensibly unbridgeable separation between the
habitable areas of the globe (which were within the redemptive grace of the
Scholastics’ God and His only ‘partial providence for mankind’), and the
uninhabitable areas (which were outside His grace).”96 The uninhabitable
zones that lay “beyond the bulge of Cape Bojador” were prior to the sinister
ambitions of Christopher Columbus, who described them as “torrid” or arid,
too dry or barren to live on.97 The concept of the “discovery of land” that was
of course already lived on by non-​Christians was an effort to extend the habitable zones, to envelope them into a way of life that contrasted itself in these
religious-​geographical terms. However, as the world becomes more and more
habitable, Wynter argues, the boundary lines of the Christian morphology
of Western European political agents transfers from the meanings of map
locations to the meanings of bodies once associated with the map locations.98
The more the land becomes “habitable” and known and mappable, in keeping
with the Christian concept of “discovery” of uninhabitable land as well as
the earth-​air-​fire-​water—​gobbling desires of Christopher Columbus and his
supporters who consider this all to be an extension of themselves—​the more
the bodies themselves come to play the role of partitioning that the land once
played. The less salient “habitable-​uninhabitable” becomes as a concept, precisely because the entire earth-​air-​fire-​water comes to be recognized as habitable, and assimilable, the more a new concept of irrationality and then the
biological concept of race are needed to replace “habitable-​uninhabitable” as
a closed body schema.
This is the centrality of the need for the invention of the science of racial
anatomy, according to Wynter; it is the gesture that allows for a representation of the falsely universal human as a specific body, one that is a transfer
of a livability-​spatialization to a Human-​bodies spatialization. The bodies
themselves become that which is mapped. And it is representation itself, and
the fighting over authority for representation, that Wynter points to as what
it is like to be human, regardless of whether one is engaged in the Man-​as-​
natural-​organism genre: “The central mechanism at work here, therefore,
was and is that of representation. Its role in the processes of socialization, and
therefore, in the regulation both at the individual and at the collective levels
of the ensemble of behaviors—​affective, action, and perceptual-​cognitive—​
is central. For it is by means of the strategies of representation alone that
96
97
98
Wynter, “1492,” 21.
Wynter, “1492,” 18–​21.
Wynter, “1492,” 25.
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each human order and its culture-​specific mode of empirical reality can be
brought into being.”99 The very fact that it is decided over and over again who
and what is human, becomes in Wynter a definition of what it is like to be
human, of which biocentric Man is but one ecocidal-​genocidal form.
The primarily geographical but already proto-​racial representation constituting the Christian morphology, Wynter argues, alters so as to protect a
concept of aspiring universality. Whereas the globe becomes more and more
habitable, and so “uninhabitable” has less and less meaning at all, the bodies
encountered by Columbus do not for all that become habitable or familiar.
The divisions of the map in this way become the “physiognomic”100 divisions
of the body /​the bodies, and the science of racial anatomy develops as a way
to safeguard the exceptional substance of certain bodies who will come to
call themselves white.
This invention of racial anatomical difference inspires the very gesture of
anatomical differences. Wynter writes that it is
from this ultimate mode of otherness based on “race,” [that] other subtypes
of otherness are then generated—​the lower classes as the lack of the normal
class, that is the middle class; all other cultures as the lack of the normal
culture, that is, Western culture; the non heterosexual as the lack of heterosexuality, repressed as a biologically selected mode of erotic preference,
women as the lack of the normal sex, the male. So, while serving as units
of an overall totemic system, all were themselves generated from the central and primary representation of the black physiognomy as “proof ” of the
represented evolutionarily determined degrees of genetic perfection, on
whose basis the structuring hierarchies of the social order had, ostensibly,
been allocated. Above all, as the proof of a biogenetic nonhomogeneity of
the species whose function is the exact analogue of the function played in
the feudal order by the represented non-​homogeneity of the earth and the
cosmos.101
In other words, the very idea of “biogenetic nonhomogeneity” is a flourishing of the notion of racial anatomy as a way of understanding what it is to
99
100
101
Wynter, “1492,” 45.
Wynter, “1492,” 42.
Wynter, “1492,” 42.
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be biocentric Man in the era Latour has described as modern and Fanon has
described as “Manichaeanism.”
This broader approach that is embraced by Wynter allows for a political
philosophy, a philosophy of the polis, as performative. It is one that is not
limited to the performativity of gender, the relationalities that white people
negotiate with respect to the ideals of man and woman among themselves;
Wynter explains how embedded in a race concept these gender dynamics
are. Race is the founding gesture of biocentric Man insofar as the entire genre
hierarchizes on the basis of externally readable characteristics, but at the
same time all other modes of political difference come to mutually naturalize
racial difference.
Though Wynter takes all of this to be an account of the recent invention
of the science of racial anatomy, I would underline the following in her account: biocentrism and biocentric Man are together the repetition of a
“neo-​Aristotelian concept of a by-​Nature difference of rationality between
its referent ‘Western humanity . . . vis-​à-​vis all other humans now classified and subordinated as the West’s ostensible irrational Human Others.”102
In other words, biocentrism, as Wynter suggests here, is not so new. It is a
way of establishing hierarchy—​of immateriality over materiality precisely
through the placing of some bodies over other bodies—​that is there at least
since Aristotle. Immaterial “rationality” is given the ultimate respect, but this
happens by means of figuring a specific body as rationality.
This approach is capable of being extended indefinitely. Genre is not the
making of biocentric Man. Biocentric Man is an example of the making
of genre through the denial of the relationality of all of these other bodies.
Without the supposed evidence of the “biogenetic nonhomogeneity,” there
would be no genre Man. Paradoxically, biocentric Man as a hypocritical universality is the idea that there are natural political differences among Man’s
proximate peers. To appreciate difference apolitically is in this context to elevate biocentric Man. And that is to prevent the real question of what it is like
to be human from coming to the fore precisely because biocentric Man is not
a genre, not a performativity. Performativity is the argument that genre is a
doing, not a natural being unsusceptible to the practices in which humanity
“represents to itself the life that it lives.”103 The relationality of bodies and corresponding praxes are an integral part not only of what it is like to become
102
103
Wynter, “The Ceremony Found,” 187.
Wynter, “1492,” 8.
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human, but what humans are in some sense like. However, “what humans
are like” on this formulation is an inherent multiplicity. Not only do genres
differ throughout the world, but they are never homogeneous within. They
contain multimorphic roles and relational identities within. What doesn’t
differ across genres is that there is some sort of genre in play, praxes of representation of bodies that might or might not arrange bodies according to
a belief in the one of the body or the two of the body. Biocentrism would
be an example of a political ordering, an ordering in keeping with the polis,
that arranges bodies according to what you can tell about a person “just by
looking at them,”104 as Oyěwùmí argues and as I discussed in Chapter 1. For
Oyěwùmí, Oyo-​Yoruba society, in which the authority of seniority is performative, serves as an example of a relationality that does not arrange bodies in
this way.
What does Wynter mean by humanity and therefore by dehumanization?
What is it to deny the humanity of someone, if one does not take biocentrism to provide a satisfying definition of humanity but instead one (problematic) genre of humanity? If genre is humanity, not a specific body, what
does that mean?
Biocentrism presupposes an answer to the question of dehumanization: someone is by nature a human, apolitically-​ecologically speaking, because of a relationality to biocentric Man, the complete human. A human
is either biocentric Man or approximation of this one body. As I argued in
Chapter 1, the introduction of the two-​sex model is a reconfiguration of
biocentric Man, though no less problematic. According to the one-​sex
model, biocentric Man is the solitary, perfect (as in complete) human, the
end of human life, and this one, the body, is the apex of the ancient polis.
Biocentric Man represents a definition of humanity according to the one-​sex
model, which is simultaneously defined by race, ability, class, sexuality, size.
Biocentric Man was the one, the body of the political in the one-​sex model, a
body that is not in fact universal or disembodied at all. And yet the one, the
body as a gesture pretends to be an externalized shape of the matter proper
to thinking, thought, and the political in which this deliberation mutually
thrives.
This shape of the political is not exactly the same as in the later configuration that Latour names the modern. In the more recent polis the two-​sex
model reintroduces the body, the one generic body as uniquely positioned to
104
Oyěwùmí, The Invention of Women, 14.
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be a secondary and subordinate but nevertheless parallel end. But otherwise
the polis is unchanged. In the modern polis the political becomes sharply elevated and discontinuous with the ecological, but this is a reiteration of the
same distinction in Aristotle. Whereas Latour’s primary interest is the nature-​
culture distinction, the polis-​oikos distinction is in fact what undergirds that
distinction. The ancient polis, I have tried to suggest, was already modern in
Latour’s sense: the polis and the oikos may have been identified in the ancient
context, oikos being subsumed by the polis as one of its lesser parts, but still
these were distinct concepts barring so many bodies from political agency.
The woman, the mad, the ill, the aging, the children of the ancient polis were
incomplete approximations of biocentric Man, but these were still considered to be approximations of biocentric Man. The slave and the barbarian
are set apart. But note that for Aristotle, the woman as a concept of the ancient polis is said to be one half of a whole: He writes that “male and female”
are “a union of those who cannot exist without each other, that the race may
continue (and this is a union which is formed, not of choice, but because in
common with other animals and with plants, mankind have a natural desire
to leave behind them an image of themselves), and of natural ruler and subject, that both may be preserved.”105 This arraying of bodies around the one
of the body in Aristotle demonstrates the swallowing of bodies that “cannot
exist without each other” and dehumanization of “the slave” already in the
ancient polis. So many other bodies are left out: the mad, the ill, the aging, the
child, all whose “natural sex, real sex” is said to be determinable by (the biocentric Man of) Science. The two of the body represents a tweaked definition
of humanity, but it is still the body. Just as the polis-​oikos was a conceptual
distinction in the ancient Greek context, polis-​oikos remains to this day.
And a hallmark of the polis is the notion of ecological difference. It is empirical difference that is on the side only of the ecological, distinguished from
that which is polis. But of course that which is ecological traces the outline of
the political.
All of this leads to the need for a revisiting of the question of humanity in
the present for those who have lived too long in the Aristotelian teleological
definition of human as biocentric Man and the body: the one of the body, or
its variant, the two of the body. Societies organized according to the body
don’t know what humanity is. Neither the one of the body nor the two of the
body answers this question.
105
Aristotle, Politics 1.2.1252a26–​31.
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235
Sylvia Wynter suggests that a distinct approach to the question of humanity
would be to ask not what is a human, but what it is like to be human. To ask
what is a human is a self-​defeating question. If you try to find out whether
someone is human by measuring parts and classifying features, you’ve already answered your question. Instead we could ask what is it like to become
human. And therefore we could ask what is it like to become dehumanized.
Wynter’s answer to the question of what it is like to be human is that it is to
participate in genre, the performativity of relationality. To be dehumanized
in Wynterian terms is to be externalized, to have one’s participation in genre
denied or thwarted or vilified. It is to be forced to identify with the one of the
body that we all are and should want to be, and thus to be forced into identification with the one of the body.
This is precisely the profound contribution, on my reading, of Wynter’s
philosophy of genre. It is a philosophy of humanity and what it is like to be
human that neither presupposes, denies, nor reifies the role of elemental
relationality in genre. To dehumanize is to attribute or assign a way of life
that Frank Wilderson106 and Jared Sexton107 speak of as “social death.” It is to
engage in a praxis whereby a body is excluded from an elevated relationality.
It is not possible to preclude a body from participating in genre, but it is
entirely possible to deny or thwart participation in genre. It is entirely possible to ask a body to look elsewhere for the cortico-​visceral nourishment of
relationality. This approach is in keeping with Wilderson’s interest in the social life of those who live the “object status of the Slave”108 that cannot strictly
speaking be dehumanized insofar as the very gesture of humanity is currently predicated on the disavowal of “physiognomy”109 articulable by white
identities as apolitically black. If one is not human to begin with, one cannot
be dehumanized. Wynter speaks precisely to this conundrum: for Wynter
this “object status of the slave” is precisely, as Wilderson argues, a necessary
substrate in order for “the body”110 (as the definition of “humanity”) to appear. And again Wynter’s critique of biocentric Man is a critique not only of
the depoliticization/​naturalization of racialization, but also the depoliticization/​naturalization of every other feature of biocentric Man. She argues that
the very notion of “physiognomy” is the race concept, the capacity to read the
106
Wilderson, Red, White, and Black, 39.
Sexton, “Social Life of Social Death.”
108 Wilderson, Red, White, and Black, 312.
109 Wynter, “1492,” 46.
110 Wilderson, Red, White, and Black, 312. See also Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe,” especially 206–​208.
107
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life of a body externally, to read the life of another person externally on their
body as you sense that body. This is the race concept. And it is a biocentrism
that constitutes the morphology of biocentric Man at least since Aristotle.
The historical and conceptual specificity of the science of racial anatomy
further stokes biocentric practices of understanding a body by only looking
at that body. Studying a body externally without relating to his or her own
practices of genre amounts to putting into practice a racialization that
withholds co-​humanity from that body. That denies, steals, and thwarts the
creation of genre from that body.
Add to this the compounding complexity of the fact that, as Frank
Wilderson has suggested, “the body” itself is a human concept.111 Human
is body, especially the one, the body. Without body, one is strictly studiable,
negligible flesh, and Wilderson’s work cites Fanon’s critique of the biological,
as discussed in Chapter 3. The minute that you begin to pluralize the one, the
body—​to speak of bodies instead of the body—​you are in the zone of that
which the body studies and reads externally. How easily the one of the body
disappears once comparisons are made! Meanwhile the zone of equality is
synonymous with a forced uniformity of the body. While Wilderson focuses
on the absence that Black is with respect to the political, Wynter and Fanon
are also interested in the conflation of black with respect to the ecological.
Sylvia Wynter’s work has these overlaps with that of Wilderson and also
Jared Sexton because of a shared legacy of the interest in white identities’ fetishization of “the appearance” that Fanon articulates. While Wilderson does
not (to my knowledge) connect the alienation of this appearance from the
political to its equation with the ecological, Wynter opens up this very possibility in her writings on IPCC documents. But she does so without making a
connection to Fanon’s critique of the biological, “the biological” and the zoological as gestures of contempt. That is the connection that I want to make
explicit, in order to appreciate the fact that genocide and ecocide are not two
analogous events overdetermined by the one of the body. They are the same
event: the one, the body as an ironic aspiration to immateriality that is figured by a specific body.
Irigaray’s hidden gesture of elemental difference as a critique of the elevation of the political out of the terrestrial, as I have discussed in Chapter 1,
is a key to appreciating genocide and ecocide as more than analogous. The
philosophy of elemental difference of Irigaray does not explore the subtle
111
Wilderson, Red, White, and Black, 313.
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237
changes that the two-​sex model represents, because she is so focused on the
ways in which the two-​sex model is the one-​sex model in disguise. She is
right about that. And yet the two-​sex model highlights distinct problems
that were ultimately there all along: first of all it is modeled on and mutually supporting of the science of racial anatomy,112 and as such it becomes a
new definition of the body. This dynamic is already present in Aristotle, but
arguably in the two-​sex model version this is even more problematic given
its role in colonization. Second of all, the two-​sex model creates new possibilities of dehumanization of trans, nonbinary, and intersex people, even
as it corresponds to the privileging of all white and able bodies. Myra Hird
argues that there is more fluidity in the one-​sex model,113 owed to the fact
that if one is not the one, the body, then one is included in a catch-​all category of not-​male that “female” means in the one-​sex model. In the two-​sex
model, such fluidity ends. All have to be one or the other, and still there is the
problem of the one of the body. But also the two-​sex model, no less than the
one-​sex model in Aristotle’s oeuvre, defines “the race” of the one, the body.
Insofar as the philosophy of elemental difference in Irigaray does not fully
explore these dynamics of the two-​sex model, it is not helpful, even as her
work articulates the basic and problematic shape of the polis-​oikos distinction that these models bolster.
Why does man enact such specifically targeted genocide and such widespread ecocide, if what this means is that biocentric Man ultimately threatens
Man’s own “planetary habitat,” as Wynter puts it? Wynter’s explicit answer,
the performative answer, is that Man is a practice of being nature, but also
a practice of selective identification within a whole of life of which Man is
the apex. “The interest of our present middle-​class model of being Man in
its own stable replication as such a model logically takes precedence, within
the discursive logic of our present ‘form of life,’ over the interests both of the
flesh-​and-​blood individual subject and of the human species as a whole, together with, increasingly, that of the interests of all other nonhuman forms
of life on this planet.”114 Because biocentric Man is the apex of nature, biocentric Man logically takes precedence. The logic is biocentric Man. And
this Man for Wynter as a certain natural/​apolitical body is performatively
112 See Schiebinger, Mind Has No Sex and Nature’s Body. Samuel Thomas von Sömmerring created
“one of the first distinctly female skeletons” but “was not primarily interested in women’s anatomy but
in the anatomical basis of racial differences” (211).
113 Hird, Sex, Gender, and Science, 143ff.
114 Wynter, “1492,” 47.
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enacted, established in and as praxis. Man creates a certain set of associations
and disavowals. Man is a certain set of associations and disavowals.
The question that remains for me, after reading and agreeing with so much
of Wynter’s account is the following: why is this performative doing done
at all?
Wynter argues that this performative doing is done because biocentric Man is a reductively material genre that has painted itself into a corner.
Biocentric Man is both a genre and an inability to appreciate that. Biocentric
Man misses the myth-​making and the languaging that are what it means to
do humanity as performativity per se: “Hitherto we have had little knowledge with respect to the functioning of these principles and of the rules that
govern them. Thus, the task before us will be to bring into being a new poetics
of the propter nos [for us]. Such a new poetic would, in the wake of Fanon’s
formulation, have to engage both in a redefinition of the relation between
concrete individual men and women and in the socializing processes of the
systems of symbolic representations generated from the codes that govern
all human purposes and behaviors.”115 Biocentric Man thinks that Man is by
nature the one, the body, of which there are countless imitations, but through
this languaging Biocentric Man enacts genocide-​ecocide. Man needs to learn
to live as other than the one of nature, Wynter argues. Biocentric Man is by
definition an exceeding of this: “If, as a species, we are now to govern consciously, and therefore consensually, the narratively instituted purposes that
now govern us, we must set out to open a path . . . directed at the winning of
the autonomy of our cognition with respect to the social reality of which we
are always already socialized subject-​observers.”116
In putting the project this way, a schism between that which is culture and that which is nature emerges.117 For Wynter biocentric Man now
lives as if Man is the purity of nature, when what he needs to do is embrace
Man’s performatively enacted hybridity. This would be the beginning of
not performatively doing Man. Wynter thus describes her project as that of
embracing a cultural component that together with nature defines genre.
Wynter’s invocation of Butler makes all too easy a reading of her work as
a Butlerian performative account of biocentric Man, of genocide-​ecocide,
even though with the gesture to “physiognomy,” Wynterian genre is not
Butlerian. Butler would never gesture to “physiognomy,” because it replicates
115
116
117
Wynter, “1492,” 47.
Wynter, “1492,” 49.
See, for example, Wynter, “1492,” 7.
Sylvia Wynter and the Climate of Biocentric Man
239
the gesture of apolitical matter. Because of the invocations of Butler’s philosophy of performativity, it would seem as if Wynter and Butler do share
the philosophy of political difference embedded in the philosophy of
performativity: differences with respect to the polis can be fully understood
as enactments of biocentric Man, a creation of associations and disavowals
that are owed to biocentric Man’s self-​
definition. As Butler puts it in
Precarious Life, “Lives are supported and maintained differently,”118 and this
is what accounts for political difference.
The articulation of genocide and ecocide in parallel in Wynter further demonstrates an ascription to the philosophy of political difference embedded in the philosophy of performativity. Genocide is, literally,
the killing of a people. The term seems to miss the crucial point: genocide
happens precisely where a geno is thought to be absent. In other words, genocide happens precisely as a case of dehumanization. Genocide happens when
biocentric Man takes for granted what it means to be or rather to become
human, and so biocentric Man denies other genres as genre. Genocide can in
this sense be said to be a practice of ecocide, the killing of that which biocentric Man has designated as vilified oikos. But ecocide is a similarly troubling
term: it is never the devastation of eco alone. It is the elimination of the things
that breathing requires. In other words, conceptually speaking, ecocide is always genocide, the killing of that which is needed for there to be humanities
as genres at all.
What I want to suggest is that speaking of biocentric Man as the application of associations that result in a dualistic result of genocide-​ecocide is
a restatement of the splitting of polis-​oikos without an explanation of the
splitting itself. Biocentric Man is not only a set of creations of associations.
Biocentric Man is also a boundary-​drawing of what is not Man precisely because it represents for Man a hostile world against which Man must therefore defend by means of boundaries of Man’s own design, boundaries drawn
around the one, the body, the one complete human. The two of the body is an
iteration of this, with an oblivion-​hostility toward elemental difference that
produces hierarchies of race-​ability-​nationality-​geography-​class-​sexuality-​
sex-​gender-​religion-​ethnicity-​language. The boundary-​making around the
body is only possible because of elemental singularities, for which biocentric Man cannot possibly take credit, except insofar as Man’s denial of them
causes their current shape.
118
Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (New York: Verso, 2004), 32.
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In fact this is what biocentric Man is in Wynter’s articulation of
performativity, an erasure of the significance of elemental singularities,
discontinuities, asymmetrical bodiments. The problem with this as an account of political difference, for me, is that it obscures the deep character
of biocentric Man: the degree to which biocentrism isn’t biocentric at all. It
is nous-​centric or uncaused-​thinking-​centric. It is aggressive authorization
of the agency of the polis. It is a denial of elemental difference, a vitriol for
materiality, and yet a figuring of this vitriol with in fact a specific body: the
president, the pope, the fossil fuel executive. Genre without that moment
in Wynter in which the political and the natural are distinguished can inform genre in Irigaray, in which it is an art of elemental singularities, art in
Irigaray’s sense, poetry in Césaire’s sense,119 a way of living as elementality.
Biocentric Man on Wynter’s formulation, however, is a building of political differences as if they were natural.120 For Wynter the distinction between
political and natural is ultimately defensible. Her solution to biocentrism is
to point out that it is a genre, an inherently more than natural way of life.
The distinction between what is political and what is natural is my concern. I argue that the political is the natural, the very notion of that which the
polis claims is both apart from it and that which it defines. The very gesture of
the physiognomic, the externally studiable is the pre-​political fact, and part
and parcel of the political, as Wynter herself seems to suggest. The gesture of
the physiognomic as empirically differentiable is a presupposition of the political. The natural is how the polis defines an earth it tries to control through
surveillance.
Wynter’s is arguably121 a universal philosophy of genre that identifies
humanity, due to the fact that for Wynter what it is like to be human is to
be something that is more than only natural. Sometimes it seems that for
Wynter even this universal affirmation is of genre as an inherent appreciation of the plurality of humanities both across and within genres, and those
are the moments by which I am most inspired. However, the universality of
genre is possibly her claim, insofar as humanity is held quite distinctly apart
from what Wynter defines as strictly biological life. Humans are more than
119 Aimé Césaire, “Poetry and Knowledge,” in Refusal of the Shadow: Surrealism and the Caribbean,
ed. Michael Richardson and trans. Krzysztof Fijałkowski and Michael Richardson (New York: Verso,
1996), 134–​146. Césaire describes European scientia, scientific knowing, as “undernourished.”
120 I think the best illustration of this in Wynter might be an essay that I find otherwise completely
convincing, “Genital Mutilation or Symbolic Birth?” There is the sex-​gender distinction, and a conflation of female with woman.
121 I am very grateful for discussion with Michael Monahan on this point.
Sylvia Wynter and the Climate of Biocentric Man
241
biological for her. Still, I understand Wynter to argue that what it is like to
be human is to participate in a genre, not genre per se, as there is no such
thing for Wynter, but genre as a located, specific practice of what I would call
morphology.
What is interesting to me is that Wynter points the way to a realization that
biocentric Man as a concept is itself problematically hybrid. She is hopeful
that this hybridity might be taken up differently. In a moment I will say more
about what sort of hybridity Wynter endorses, a hybridity of bios-​mythos.
But biocentric Man in another sense is hybrid already insofar as biocentric
Man divinizes a body in that body’s presupposed “oppositional meaningfulness”122 from other bodies. Biocentric Man is the best of the “bodies,” because
Man is and isn’t a body. Man is a “de-​godded” genre, according to Wynter,
but she is also suggesting that Man serves in the place of a missing god in
the secular genres of Homo politicus and Homo economicus.123 For Wynter
Man is biocentrism, but what I want to suggest is that this biocentrism is and
isn’t biocentric at all insofar as Man, the best of the bodies, is understood as
transcending every other body in some way that makes biocentric Man the
figuring of immateriality. Biocentrism is bios-​centrism, a system that on the
whole is in praise of immateriality, the negation of the material, the matter,
the biological, the zoological. And yet it is a body that figures this escape
from earth. The elevated one of the body is the one that instantiates a being
positioned above. This elevated body is a maintenance of the Aristotelian
nous,124 which was also a naturalized account. It is also a maintenance of the
Christian sense of self that wasn’t quite biocentric Man yet, on Wynter’s own
understanding. I hold that biocentrism is better thought of as (Aristotelian)
bios-​centrism, an immaterial thinking agency that has the unique capacity to
encapsulate thinking and to rank bodies properly, but who is also in despair
regarding bodiment.
I get this primarily from reading Fanon. In the context of a critique of
European Manichaeanism that despises all that is not polis in the Aristotelian
sense, Fanon argues that the political, a hypocritically generic white justice,
is an agency hostile to that which is the biological and has the capacity both
to kill indiscriminately (with DDT) and to kill in a targeted manner when
nonhumans decisively threaten the hallowed boundaries of the polis.
122
Wynter, “1492,” 28.
Wynter, “1492,” 13, 25.
124 As Emanuela Bianchi points out, for Aristotle nous, or thinking, is the opposite of necessity insofar as nous is a capacity for “apprehension of future possibilities” (The Feminine Symptom, 178).
123
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David Marriott helpfully suggests that Wynter misreads Fanonian
sociogeny, making it into a new science. How can sociogeny be a science if
what Wynter is advocating is an end to the biocentric conception of Man, in
contrast with a narrative-​affirming praxis? Marriott suggests that this is because Wynter has somehow missed Fanon’s critique of science and the myth
of the disembodied observer. Marriott writes, “Whereas Fanon suggests
that sociogeny is to do with the aporias of narcissism, with how difference
is psychically lived, fantasized, contested—​
with an insistence opposed
to those views reducing man to a mere ‘mechanism’125—​Wynter reads his
speculations on racist fantasy in culture as ‘data’ for an ‘objective phenomenology,’ which, for her, calls for ‘another form of scientific knowledge beyond the limits of the natural sciences.’ ”126 “Through this concept of science,”
Marriott continues, “Fanon’s careful questioning of the limits between phylogeny and ontogeny, inside and outside, the psychical and the physical, is,
inversely, read as a call for a new scientific description.”127
Marriott rightly argues that Wynter’s response to biocentric Man revalidates
a scientism consistent with the lie of secular Man. I would only underline
Marriott’s worry that Wynter undermines “Fanon’s careful questioning of
the limits between phylogeny and ontogeny, inside and outside, the psychical
and the physical.”128 Indeed Fanon’s work constantly undermines the very
gesture of hybridity that Wynter argues holds the promise of biocentric Man’s
undoing. Fanon’s term for hybridity is Manichaeanism. Interestingly, as we
had already begun to see in Chapter 3, this figure of hybridity also appears in
Latour as holding promise for the undoing of the modern, in his sense of the
term that regards the polis-​oikos gesture as a historically recent event.
4.3. Hybridity in Sylvia Wynter and Bruno Latour
Wynter’s philosophy of genre is ultimately neither the philosophy of
sociogeny of Fanon nor the philosophy of performativity of Butler. Wynter
multiplies both Butlerian performativity and Fanonian sociogeny, but she
also conflates them in ways that Fanon’s work on my reading resists insofar
125
The citation is to Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 6.
Marriott, Whither Fanon?, 308. The Wynter quotation is from “Towards the Sociogenic
Principle,” 59.
127 Marriott, Whither Fanon?, 308.
128 Marriott, Whither Fanon?, 308.
126
Sylvia Wynter and the Climate of Biocentric Man
243
as he is interested in the inextricability of the invention of racial difference
and the denial of such agencies as subsoil, rivers, sun. Butler’s work, as Karen
Barad has demonstrated and then sought to amend, does not think the
performativity of such “nonhumans.” What is a human is taken for granted
in this gesture, insofar as what is “nonhuman” is obvious. I have argued in
Chapter 2 that this nonhuman is in tension with the nonhuman and the
thing as this figure is explored in the work of Saidiya Hartman. Barad’s work
as political ecology tracks only the production of what I called an ecological nonhuman, and it reproduces the idea of political difference as entirely
human-​made. Barad’s work doesn’t consider the degree to which a Butlerian
philosophy of performativity contains a subtle suggestion that political difference is entirely human-​made, an imposition and projection. Barad’s
work extends at least this problematic aspect of performativity. This aspect
of performativity is problematized by Hartman, whose own philosophy
of performativity suggests that performativity cannot account for the animosity that “white ideality” (Hartman’s helpful phrase) feels for the flesh it
castigates as matter. Wynter doesn’t explicitly dispute this aspect of Butlerian
performativity, though her work, like that of Hartman, does insofar as she
insists that there is a variety to what it is like to become human that in the
genre of biocentric Man is made to serve the identification of humanity with
the one, the body, the lone complete human.
Wynter’s philosophy of genre thus has the potential to undo the polis-​
oikos distinction insofar as she appreciates, like Fanon, that the race concept
emerges in biocentric Man’s effort to distinguish the political from ecology—​
so much is distinguished from the apex of the ancient polis and the zone of
the polis itself in the modern configuration of the one, the body. This is a filling out of the work of Luce Irigaray, who problematizes only the masculinity
that is the polis in Aristotle. Irigaray does not really discuss the slave or the
barbarian at all. But also as I have argued, the two-​sex model (which conveys
ability meanings and ascriptions of value by race, gender, age, size) is not
appreciated as having rearranged the problems of the one-​sex one. Irigaray
and Fanon in different ways appreciate the plurality of bodies that biocentrism denies and subordinates, but they further suggest that biocentrism is
not a validation of earth-​air-​fire-​water relational agency. Biocentrism is not a
sanctioning of what is biological so much as a sanctioning of the agency that
is polis, a polis that is only understood through differentiation from oikos.
Wynter can be read as a proponent of this Irigaray-​Fanon account insofar as
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she redefines the despised plurality as what it is like to become human in her
philosophy of genre.
However, the critique of the notion of biocentrism in Wynter becomes
an all too familiar valorization of what is “immaterial.” Though for Wynter
genre is unthinkable without relationality, Man’s biocentrism, Wynter
laments, identifies with and blames a nature for what biocentric Man does
to others. And yet it seems as if the very gesture of the one, the body, is a
vilification of matter, not a straightforward identification with it. The nous
(thought or thinking) of Aristotle, the Christian soul, the transitional Homo
politicus, even the full-​force naturalized concept of Homo economicus are
all versions of the polis-​oikos split. Now, the one of the body that figures immateriality is indeed a specific body. (After all, what else could it be? How
else could “immaterial” be figured than through some body?) But the point
is that undergirding each of these articulations is a validation of escape from
earth, being one who is without a body, with relationality, beyond terrestrial
influence but at the same time capable of bending what is terrestrial to one’s
own uncaused will.
In spite of the potential in this philosophy of genre for undoing the polis-​
oikos distinction, Wynter recreates it. Interestingly, this recommendation of
hybridity appears in Bruno Latour as well. In this final section of this chapter
I want to demonstrate the content of the gestures to hybridity in Latour and
Wynter. Hybridity and the gesture of welcoming it are recommitments to the
polis-​oikos distinction. What’s more, hybridity in both is recommended as a
response to naturalism. However, what both Latour and Wynter take to be
“naturalism” is in fact idealization, hierarchy that results from the valuing of
bodies capable of housing what is immaterial. The valuing of what is natural,
when this is considered to be apolitical and mutually distinguished from the
agency that is polis, is the valuing of what is immaterial in disguise. It is a
valuing of immateriality, non-​materiality, precisely by valuing the one of the
body. In the final chapter of the book I will attempt to reread this philosophy
of Wynterian genre without the hybridity, without the valuing of what is immaterial by figuring it with a specific one of the body. When elemental difference is affirmed in genre, affirmed as something both beyond the agency
of any one genre and nevertheless shaped in genres, this philosophy of genre
holds much promise.
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245
Aristotle wrote,
Now, that man is more of a political animal than bees or any other gregarious animals is evident. Nature, as we often say, makes nothing in vain, and
man is the only animal who has the gift of speech. And whereas mere voice
is but an indication of pleasure or pain, and is therefore found in other animals129 (for their nature attains to the perception of pleasure and pain and
the intimation of them to one another, and no further), the power of speech
is intended to set forth the expedient and inexpedient, and therefore likewise the just and the unjust. And it is characteristic of man that he alone has
any sense of good and evil, of just and unjust, and the like, and the association of living beings who have this sense makes a family and a state.130
This passage locates the exceptional nature of biocentric Man in a capacity to
speak, and this speech is somehow also an extraordinary capacity for judgment. Speech exceeds the matter that merely conveys it.
It is in passages such as this one that, as Rachel Jones argues, “Aristotle
makes the form/​matter distinction internal to nature. The fact that the specifically material aspect of nature is still deprived of any active powers to articulate forms for itself is thus less obvious”131 than it was in Plato, for whom
form was explicitly without power insofar as it was the transcendence of the
ever-​changing world. But this less than obviousness is actually, Jones argues,
“more insidious” insofar as it now seems as if Aristotle has made everyone
and everything matter. The crucial point is that form remains. And form in
biocentric Man is nous, or thinking. Emaneula Bianchi argues that in Plato
there was no matter as such: “Where he does use the word hulē it is exclusively
in the sense of wood or timber, for example, at Timaeus 69a.”132 Whereas
form in Plato’s work was explicitly and unmistakably other than matter, in
Aristotle form is difficult to distinguish from matter—​in the case of every
matter except the matter of the rulers of the polis. In the polis there is nous,
the capacity for thinking and speaking and transcending that through which
it appears. In the preceding passage from Aristotle, the capacity for thought
129 Here again see Laurie Shannon’s The Accommodated Animal, in which she argues that the distinction between human and “animal,” according to which human is not animal, is a modern concept. For Aristotle, Man is one among animals, but he is distinguished in being the political animal,
bios politikos.
130 Aristotle, Politics 1253a.7–​18.
131 Jones, Irigaray, 96.
132 Bianchi, The Feminine Symptom, 117.
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in biocentric Man (nous) is the capacity to distinguish just from unjust, good
from evil. There is thus a transcending form that is in the midst of matter
without being matter. Aristotle seems to have introduced the very idea of a
naturalized form, but in Aristotle this naturalization is simultaneously also
an identification of biocentric Man with agency as the power for thought.
Let me reiterate before I go on that Wynter’s philosophy genre offers a
sorely needed philosophy of humanity, a philosophy of what it is like to
be human. A generic one of the body of biocentric Man and the two-​sex
model have so far stood in for a philosophy of humanity. Because the one
of the body uses a body to figure that which is human, there doesn’t need
to be any substance given to the term. A body that is capable of mind is all
that is needed. This in turn casts doubt (on the part of those who identify
with biocentric Man) on whether practices of dehumanization are ever so
dangerous or successful. The one-​sex model and its iteration as the two-​sex
model has constituted a generic in the literatures of the polis. The two-​sex
model is arguably, however, a new generic that gives rise to new modes of
dehumanizations. The two-​sex model becomes a new mode of denial of
elemental difference. Wynter’s philosophy of genre helpfully places such
denied practices of withholding of humanity at the heart of what it is like to
become human. Where similarity and equality of a nonpolitical character
have defined biocentric Man, Wynter intervenes to suggest that what it is
like to be human is precisely to participate in the give and take of morphological creations, among others. What it is like to be human requires some
quality of relation with some arrangement of a sense of self. The genre of
biocentric Man is a development of morphology at the expense of others
whose elemental difference is enlisted to elevate some, while allowing for
alliances that exclude others. The point is that what it is like to be human
requires some sort of attitude toward and shaping of elemental difference
among those who participate in and as genre.
All of this is already there in Wynter’s philosophy of genre, but what I need
to point out is that genre in Wynter is in danger of playing exactly the role
that thinking plays in the philosophy of biocentric Man of Aristotle. And in a
couple of places in Wynter’s work, precisely as in Aristotle, the contrast case
of that which is not human is bees. Wynter writes, “I propose, therefore, that
within the terms of the new answer or response that the Ceremony Found
gives to the question of who-​we-​are as that of a hybrid and uniquely auto-​
instituting mode of living being, we humans cannot pre-​exist our cosmogonies or origin mythos/​stories/​narratives any more than a bee, at the purely
Sylvia Wynter and the Climate of Biocentric Man
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biological level of life, can pre-​exist its beehive.”133 This passage is referring to
genre, which Wynter argues is analogous to a beehive. A human lives a genre
as a bee lives its hive. I think that for Wynter the buildings, the highways, the
monuments, the statues, the homes that humans make134 are genre. Humans
live genres; their morphologies are constructions. But Wynter also writes that
what humans construct is more than biological when compared to the bee,
who is “at the purely biological level of life.” What is “more than biological”?
For Aristotle, nothing was more than biological, except, I argue, for nous.
This is an aspect of genre that brings it especially close to Butlerian
performativity. In Notes toward a Performative Theory of Assembly, Butler
writes that “human” and “life” are terms that “repel one another” in the sense
that “human life is never the entirety of life, can never name all the life processes on which it depends, and life can never be the singularly defining
feature of the human—​so whatever we might want to call human life will inevitably consist of a negotiation with this tension.”135 What is it about human
and life that accounts for this tension, if as both Butler and Wynter seem to
otherwise affirm, humanity is fully reliant on a life that in Butler’s terms,
“exceeds us”? It is not so clear in Butler what accounts for the inevitability of
the tension. I will have more to say about this in Chapter 5.
Genres are hybrid, Wynter argues, because they are composed not only
of bios, which is common to all animals, but also mythos136 or logos, which
is specific to humanity. Humans are “uniquely” hybrid.137 Mythos and logos
are discursive formations that are, according to Wynter, neither biological
nor natural.138 She also describes mythos as “meta-​biological,” above or behind the biological, but at any rate distinguishable from it.139 This capacity
133
Wynter, “The Ceremony Found,” 213 and 227.
Recently Candice Elder, founder of the community advocacy organization East Oakland
Collective, has suggested that “homelessness” is a dehumanizing term and a misunderstanding of
a situation in which a person is without shelter. To be without safe shelter doesn’t not necessarily
mean that a person has not created home. To say that a person is “homeless” denies the home that
they might be making. The destruction of encampments, in other words the homes, of people who
are without weather-​proof, fire-​resistant, etc., shelter is currently commonplace in the United States.
“Special Report on California’s Criminalization of Growing Homeless Encampments,” Democracy
Now!, October 25, 2019, https://​www.democracynow.org/​2019/​10/​25/​state_​of_​emergency_​special_​
report_​on.
135 Butler, Notes, 43.
136 Wynter explains that mythos is her more recent term. Wynter and McKittrick, “Unparalleled
Catastrophe,” 16.
137 Wynter, “1492,” 43; and Wynter and McKittrick, “Unparalleled Catastrophe,” 17.
138 Wynter, “Towards the Sociogenic Principle,” 51; and Wynter and McKittrick, “Unparalleled
Catastrophe,” 50.
139 Wynter, “The Ceremony Found,” 209.
134
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for mythos is what enables “a specifically humanized geography.”140 Wynter
argues that a philosophy of genre amounts to a new definition of humanity as
Homo narrans.141
The question that this gesture of hybridity raises is what it means to say
that discursive formations are not biological. Why are mythos, narrativity,
stories, words not bios?
I have more or less the same question for Aristotle, a couple thousand
years too late: why is logos not matter? For Aristotle, logos or formal cause
is what makes a thing what it is, what it is like to be that thing. As Emanuela
Bianchi explains, “For Aristotle the form is primarily the logos or formula of
‘what it is to be’ (to ti ēn einai) of a this, a tode ti, the thing which tells us what
differentiates it from other things, makes it that particular thing and no other
thing.”142 As I have discussed, Rachel Jones has pointed to the difficulty of
distinguishing between form (formal cause) and matter (material cause) for
Aristotle, because he understands them to be indistinguishable. But Aristotle
does give priority to form. In Physics Book 2, 193b6–​7 he writes, “The form is
the nature, more than the matter is.” And form is primarily the logos of “what
it is to be” a this and not a that. The logos of Man for Aristotle, is, I argue, ultimately nous, that which “turns us to the future and thus opens us to the potentially eternal and divine by allowing comparison between contraries, and
which permits us to resist deathly desire.”143 This is the tradition of the polis
in its most consistent articulation. Clearly Wynter does not agree with it. But
she does invoke it.
This gesture of hybridity is responsible for the articulation of the dangers
of biocentric Man in terms of a dualism of atrocities. In 1994, Sylvia Wynter
wrote an open letter to fellow academics, an open letter that could easily have
been written this year with the same devastating implications. Following the
acquittal of the group of police officers in Los Angeles who assaulted Rodney
King, it was discovered that in the offices of these police officers and their
colleagues, it was standard practice simply to ignore any cases pertaining to
those “who belong to the jobless category of the inner city ghettos,” throwing
any paperwork collected for such cases into a dusty file labeled N.H.I., “no
humans involved.”144 In response both to the blatant attack on Rodney King
140
141
142
143
144
Wynter and McKittrick, “Unparalleled Catastrophe,” 17.
Wynter, “The Ceremony Found,” 242.
Bianchi, The Feminine Symptom, 34.
Bianchi, The Feminine Symptom, 173.
Wynter, “No Humans Involved,” 42.
Sylvia Wynter and the Climate of Biocentric Man
249
that was then sanctioned by the US justice system as well as the revelation
of the file label, Wynter penned an open letter to academic colleagues in
California, in which she argues that academics should consider themselves
responsible. Wynter writes,
Yet where did this system of classification come from? One that was held
both by the officers involved in this specific case of the routine “n*gger
breaking” of Black males, as well as by the mainly white, middle class suburban Simi Valley jurors? Most of all, and this is the point of my letter to
you, why should this classifying acronym N.H.I., with its reflex anti-​Black
male behavior-​prescriptions, have been so actively held and deployed by
the judicial officers of Los Angeles, and therefore by “the brightest and the
best” graduates of both the professional and non-​professional schools of
the university system of the United States? By those whom we ourselves
have educated?145
Later in the same essay Wynter discusses the “environmental destruction of
a planet on which we are losing ‘116 square miles of rain forest or an acre a
second,’ and on which at the same time we send up ‘2,700 tons of chlorofluorocarbon into the atmosphere’ ” and argues that such effects are due to
“decisions taken by the ‘best and brightest’ products of our present system of
education.”146 Wynter argues that these “two phenomena, that of the physical
and that of the global socio-​human environments, have been hidden costs”
of an “epistemological order based upon the representation of the human
as if it were a natural organism.”147 This dualism of atrocity appears also in
Wynter’s essay “1492: A New World View,” about which I have written in earlier sections of this chapter.
Wynter’s claim is that Homo economicus is an inherently racial concept
and is the definition of humanity “as if it were a natural organism.” Homo
economicus is the idea that a certain body can and should conquer the
planet. This is why it is so crucial for humanity to appreciate that what it is to
be human is not what it is like to be other organisms, the purely natural ones.
For Wynter to be human is to be more than natural. It is to be myth-​making
as well as natural. And Homo economicus is a myth. Homo economicus is
145
146
147
Wynter, “No Humans Involved,” 43.
Wynter, “No Humans Involved,” 59.
Wynter, “No Humans Involved,” 60.
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thus an example of one genre, a genre that provides hierarchical senses of
self to the humans who live it, and a genre that refuses to understand its own
provinciality and danger. It is also the confused denial of the very capacity for
genre-​making of humanity of which it is itself an example.
The gesture of hybridity interestingly appears also in the work of Bruno
Latour, whom I discussed at length in Chapter 3. For Latour, moderns proliferate disturbing hybrids the more they insist on an absolute dichotomy
of nature and society. The more moderns define themselves as not only a
break with a past but also as a break with nature, the more they blend nature-​
cultures “to the utmost.”148 Latour doesn’t take issue with hybridity itself; it
is the supposed distancing of the parts with which he disagrees. Other societies that understand themselves to live with earth-​air-​fire-​water make for
better hybridities. For Latour the political is not the same as the ecological.
Whether or not one is modern, hybridity is certain for Latour. The question
is how to practice hybridity.
In both Wynter and Latour’s case what we moderns must see is that we are
already hybrid, and the more that we attend to this hybridity, the less problematic will be the actual outcomes. In Wynter’s case the hybridity consists in
the bios and mythos melding of what it is like to be human. In Latour’s case
the hybridity consists in the culture and the ecology, the human and ecological nonhuman of which all societies are together composed. Latour, as
I have discussed in Chapter 3, rejects the concept of nature insofar as nature
is “a particular function of politics reduced to a rump parliament, to a certain
way of constructing the relation between necessity and freedom, multiplicity
and unity, to a hidden procedure for apportioning speech and authority, for
dividing up facts and values.”149 Nature for Latour, like matter for Butler and
Hartman, as I have discussed in Chapter 2, is a way of denying the capacity
for influence to the parties in which each is interested. He prefers ecology as a
way of articulating what is not human.
What Wynter and Latour share is a concept of hybridity. They do not, as in
the case of Aristotle, place value solely on one side of the hybrid landscape.
For Wynter, bios and mythos are equally crucial; for Latour, a continuity is
emphasized in political ecology such that all parts are equally influential.
Nevertheless, there is a retention of hybridity that produces new a dualism,
148
149
Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, 41.
Latour, Politics of Nature, 133.
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251
according to which it becomes necessary to decide whether the polis or the
oikos is the more basic term of alienation.
As I argued in Chapter 3, for Fanon, devastations that are parsed as either
political or ecological according to a political and ecological split and hierarchy proceed together. One doesn’t cause the other. This is for me the reward
of reading Fanon and Irigaray together: appreciation of the simultaneity of
what are generally thought to be multiple events of climate emergency and
the growing fetishization of security. This Irigaray-​Fanon mode of appreciation can be contrasted to other approaches that seek to put the political and
ecological back together, but that wind up favoring one side or the other as
having more explanatory power.
For Latour, as I have indicated in Chapter 3, the denial of powers that are
ecological causes political alienations. Latour does see these as entangled
processes, but, for him, at the most fundamental level ecological alienation
causes the hierarchy within the polis. And recall here that for Latour “nonhuman” is a term of strictly ecological significance. Compare this approach
to that of Ghassan Hage, who comes to exactly the opposite conclusion to
that of Latour. For Hage alienations of the political deepen ecological alienation, driving what he calls the “generalized domesticator” from their own
environmental belonging, because they do not want to identify with what
they deem “animal.” Hage argues that Islamophobia and ecological breakdown are “in effect one and the same crisis, a crisis in the dominant mode of
inhabiting the world that both racial and ecological domination reproduces.
Thus, racism is an environmental threat not just because it has here and there
an impact on the environmental crisis from the outside, which it has, but
because it intensifies it from within.”150 As Hage has it, political and ecological crises share a basic source: the desire of “generalized domestication” of
differences with respect to politics and of extracted resources with respect
to ecology. The rejection of environmentalism characteristic of political
ecology is not there in Hage’s account; his approach forwards the concerns
with abuse of largely passive resources of the environmentalist. However, an
exposition of the one of the body is in between the lines of his account. Even
though Hage does not argue that elemental difference is partitioned in politics and ecology, and thus that the partition is the problem, he comes close to
affirmation of elemental relationality: Hage argues, “We thus need to aim for
150 Hage, Racism an Environmental Threat, 14. This could productively be read side by side with
Sheth, Political Philosophy of Race.
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The Climate of the Body
a recovery of the multiplicities of modes of inhabitance that capitalist modernity has excluded and marginalized.” I want to suggest that what Hage points
to is elemental difference as earth agency, and yet he does so under the auspices of performativity. While he brings to mind affirmation of the profusion
and mutual departures of desires, bodies, languages, accents, dialects, myths,
stories, religions, calendars, and that there are such departures, agency that
no human or humans invented but in which we participate, his interests are in
keeping with a performative approach. Though he does cite Moira Gatens’s151
critique of social construction, his interest is not in the significance of difference, but in the problematic invention of it. The philosophy of political difference in performativity in Hage, as in Butler, is an interest in the invention
of difference. He argues that the generalized domesticator polarizes his own
capacity for humanity from bodies deemed “animal”: “What matters most is
not difference as such but that particular way of experiencing difference as
polarity.”152 The polarization of human-​animal is an aspiration in which the
“humanity of the domesticator, like their sovereignty[,]‌is never complete but
needs to be continuously aspired for.”153 In this respect, in arguing that what
the “generalized domesticator” flees is an threat of animality that the generalized domesticator invents, Hage’s argument divides in two: racism is an environmental threat, and the desire for endless unilateral extraction of value is a
racial threat. There is ultimately a most basic problem, that of the attempt at
what he calls “ ‘generalized domestication’ as a mode of existence.”154
An additional issue arises when I consider Hage’s conclusions: Why can
some identify with earth and yet not with other humans? Why can some
identify with “blood and soil,” ostensibly earth, and yet engage in such intense dehumanization? Indeed why are some (Hitler and Himmler, as
discussed by Janet Biehl and Peter Staudenmaier and explored in Chapter 3)
ethical vegetarians deeply negrophobic and/​or Islamophobic? In short, why
can some humans identify with nature, but not with certain other humans?
The answer, as I will discuss further, is that the one of the body, the body of
nature, is not ultimately an identification with elementality or affirmation of
151
Hage, Racism an Environmental Threat, 97–​98.
Hage, Racism an Environmental Threat, 98.
153 Hage, Racism an Environmental Threat, 101.
154 Hage, Racism an Environmental Threat, 15–​
16. Actually, Hage presents three foundational
structures “behind the generation of the environmental crisis”: first, “forms of othering, domination
and governmentality shared by racism and environmental domination; second, . . . the dynamic of
capitalist exploitation . . . ; and third, . . . the structures of ‘generalized domestication’ as a mode of existence.” The third is the most basic of these three.
152
Sylvia Wynter and the Climate of Biocentric Man
253
elemental difference; the one of the body is an identification with a specific
body, the one that figures escape from bodiment. The one of the body is a surpassing of earth-​air-​fire-​water. There is an identification of oneself with the
whole of the earth, and this can be compatible with the thought that one must
protect oneself—​as well as earth—​against threat.
Wynter’s performative account is, I think, ultimately on Ghassan Hage’s
side, what I am calling the political side, of this discussion. For Wynter, it
is the need to maintain and even increase distance between biocentric Man
and that which is not racially human that produces Man’s distinctive performative enactments. This distancing of Man from an appreciation of Man’s
own hybridity produces not only climate disruption but the pompous lack of
understanding of the ramifications or alternatives to ecological breakdown.
If only Man would appreciate the provinciality of the genre of biocentrism,
Man would appreciate that there are entirely other ways of life, climate disruption would be acknowledged to be the threat that it is, even for those who
think they are going to benefit financially from the ruin.
There is in this way in the literatures of both performativity and political
ecology a tendency for scholars to pick sides. On the political ecology side
are Latour and new materialists who argue that appreciating the agency of
matter will change the polis. And on the performativity side are Wynter and
Hage, who argue that changing the polis will resolve the abuse of a planet
onto which hatreds are projected. Here is the polis-​oikos split once again.
Neither side is wrong exactly. But how can both sides be right?
I want to rethink this notion of genre in Wynter without the gesture of
hybridity that obscures the significance and scale of the damage for which
the one of the body, as a hypocritically generic gesture, is responsible. Why
shouldn’t we think of genre as itself earth-​air-​fire-​water enacting contingent and located morphologies? Explaining itself to itself, as Wynter writes?
Engaging in genre is not meta-​biological at all. It is done best precisely when
loved and affirmed as earth-​fire-​water-​air.
In a final chapter I put together Irigaray’s rejection of the form-​matter
distinction and Frantz Fanon’s denunciation of “the Manichaean.” Together
they suggest that the elevation of form and the one, the body over the biological, the zoological, matter, and bodies is not capable of being broken into
two atrocities that can be analogized. It is not the case that political alienation
is like ecological alienation. It is not the case that ecological alienation is like
political alienation. Neither does one of these make way for the other. Nor are
these events exactly unlike each other: While ecological breakdown is often
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said to be a new and unprecedented event, the truth is that it’s only new for
those who identify with biocentric Man. If we understand political hierarchy
and ecological breakdown to be one and the same gesture, we can appreciate
its long history and act, think, speak about that.
What I want to suggest, bringing together themes in Irigaray and Fanon,
is that elemental difference is the agency of earth-​air-​fire-​water, rejected as
oikos or its beyond and barred from the polis. Humans definitely alter and
shape their own shapes. But that they engage in this, and that such engagement never actually results in any society of totalized homogeneity—​this
effusive shaping is something for which humanity cannot claim credit. No
genre invented Man’s engagement in genre. Biocentric Man is the thwarting
of this elemental difference as earth-​air-​fire-​water, rejected as matter, conflated with other earth-​air-​fire-​water that has its own powers, powers on
which our own powers mutually depend. There is no living-​dying without
relationality. As I have suggested in Chapter 3, Fanon is skeptical toward
“zoological terms” precisely because he regards the word itself to be characteristic of the Manichaean.155 Irigaray likewise understands the denial of
elemental difference as the attempt to replace the energies of earth-​air-​fire-​
water.156 In order to appreciate these pieces of a validation of elemental difference and thus a validation of what it is like to be-​become human as part
of that elemental difference, I need to rephrase the question of what it is like
to be human, now in terrestrial terms. This is a question that not coincidentally both Fanon and Irigaray in different ways insist upon. Following these
themes of two otherwise quite distinct projects, the question of what it is like
to be-​become human is, properly understood, a question of elemental difference and relational belonging.
155
156
Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 7.
Irigaray, Sexes and Genealogies, 3.
5
The Problem Is the One, the Body
In Chapter 5 I articulate an exposition of the ecological of the one, the
body. I seek to develop a way not only of connecting political and ecological devastations of what is euphemistically called climate change but also of
appreciating the problem of the distinction itself. The gesture of the one, the
body, the lone perfect human form, is a sign of this distinction and an indication of the denial of elemental difference that overdetermines an identification of the polis with the one, the body. A certain body figures the denial
of the matter for which the polis has only contempt. This identification can
enable seeming identifications with nature, which is in fact the polis’s definition of matter it seeks to control, and at the same time a desire to dehumanize
those who are not the nature the polis desires.
Pieces of this puzzle have been gathered throughout the book. In Chapter 1
I sought to understand Irigaray’s affirmation of elemental difference, which is
buried in a problematic articulation of sexual difference. Disentangling elemental difference from sexual difference is a delicate effort, but it offers a productive way of appreciating the enormous implications of the planetary and
human conceptual split that shapes the political in the present. In Chapter 2
I attempted to illustrate the problem by articulating the parallel orientation
of the political and ecological, the human and the two connotations of nonhuman in the work of Karen Barad and Saidiya Hartman, two scholars whose
works bend toward each other but cannot quite reach each other. In Chapter 3
I turned to the work of Bruno Latour and Frantz Fanon and articulated the
elements of the political in Latour and of the ecological in Frantz Fanon. That
chapter ends with an appreciation of Fanon’s attention to the animosity toward the biological that he argues le nègre symbolizes. That animosity toward the biological, and in Wretched of the Earth the zoological, is a founding
characteristic of the polis. Fanon suggests that the biological, another word
for matter, that which is cast out of the political, is deemed not just without
agency, as Latour has it, but threateningly agential. This is the dynamic—​the
biological as hostile and not at all lacking in agency—​that makes the most
sense of the contemporary fate of the political and ecological distinction.
Elemental Difference and the Climate of the Body. Emily Anne Parker, Oxford University Press.
© Oxford University Press 2021. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780197575079.003.0006
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The Climate of the Body
This distinction is definitive of the gesture of the political, according to which
the polis is meeting of equals-​as-​same established by a disavowed bodily
relationality figured by none other than a body.
The focus of Chapter 4 was Sylvia Wynter’s critique of the climate of biocentric Man. Wynter carries forward the Fanonian interest in tracing the
roots of the political in that which is deemed ecological and not human,
but Wynter reintroduces hybridity, which is a gesture that approaches the
Manichaeanism that Fanon explicitly rejects. Wynter argues that biocentric
Man is a collection of “non-​natural activities driving global warming and climate change—​as well as the economic policy prescriptions enacting or our
present genre of being hybridly human as that of secular Western Man in its
second reinvented, homo oeconomicus, now (neo)Liberal-​humanist cum
monohumanist form.”1 Wynter argues that when the IPCC, for example,
argues that global heating and related transformations are caused by humanity en masse, it misses the real agent of change. It misses the “threat to
the continued livability of our planetary habitat” that biocentric Man is.2 For
Wynter biocentric Man is given a pass because the IPCC shares biocentric
Man as a genre; it consents to biocentric Man as the lone supposed destiny,
the completion, of all humans. It laments what humanity causes. She argues,
quite rightly, that what the IPCC should be lamenting is biocentric Man.
Because of the dangers of Man as a way of life, Wynter argues that biocentric
Man needs to be “relativized”; practitioners of Man need to be made aware
that Man is “but one . . . human class of classes.”3
In this chapter I want to suggest that the climate that Wynter argues is biocentric Man is ultimately the ecological of the one, the body, a thinly veiled
animosity toward all things bodily. Man is a celebration of one body that is
the perfection of body per se, but ultimately this celebration is of the disembodied agency characteristic of the one complete body. From Wynter
I borrow the claim that biocentric Man, not humanity, is responsible for
planetary changes, but I add that what is problematic about biocentric Man
is the aspiration to disembodiment. In Wynter it is a bit of a puzzle how biocentric Man, a gesture of naturalized humanness, can be committed to planetary damage. If Man is so naturalistic, so identifying with nature, why does
Man destroy nature? It is because the one, the body is actually the search for
escape from earth. It is no coincidence at all that the gesture of the political
1
2
3
Wynter, “The Ceremony Found,” 232.
Wynter, “The Ceremony Found,” 234.
Wynter, “The Ceremony Found,” 241.
The Problem Is the One, the Body
257
identified with the one, the body is in a hostile relationship with earth-​air-​
water-​fire, indeed its very own relationality. And so in this chapter I advocate re-​engagement, following Wynter, with the question of what it is like to
become human and the sub-​question of what dehumanization means, but
this time without the hybridity of Latour and Wynter discussed in the final
section of Chapter 4. The question of what it is like to be-​become human is
an indistinguishably ecological and political question, and it is necessary to
address not the ecological and the political but the distinction itself. The distinction itself hides this question of the one, the body, the very gesture that
pretends that the political is not bodily.
This chapter is composed of three sections. In the first section I point
out that both performativists4 and political ecologists already agree on the
problematic character of biocentric Man, though for different reasons.5 For
performativists (here I focus on Judith Butler), biocentric Man is unjustly a denial of those who are made into others. In this articulation you can see the philosophy of political difference of performativity at work: political difference
is both always from biocentric Man and is the result of Man’s deprecations.
For political ecologists (here I focus on Bruno Latour), posthumanism is
necessary in order to redirect attention to actants. Biocentric Man as the prototypical actant is the denial of a plurality of actants. Latour prefers the term
“actant” to “agency” precisely because of the overly humanistic sense of the
gesture of agency. From this comparison I try to get a sense of a larger pattern. Butlerian performativity suggests that what is necessary to address ecological breakdown is a recommitment to an altered humanistic inquiry that
understands this to be the key to addressing climate emergencies. There can
be only marginal interest in the agency of matter from this angle because
what is crucial is the dangerous morphology of biocentric Man. The problem
of ecological breakdown is a certain limited and controlling gesture of the
human. Then again political ecology suggests that humanistic inquiry is ultimately a distraction in the face of climate disruption because what is needed
4 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 virtually everyone is
a “performativist,” even the political ecologists who are critical of its limits, the word itself has so far
been unnecessary.
5 For an alternative treatment of the “convergence” of critiques of humanism and critiques of anthropocentrism, see Braidotti, Posthuman Knowledge. Braidotti argues that these lines of inquiry are
“discrete and separate events, both in the intellectual genealogies and in their social manifestations”
(2). Instead of understanding these as currently discrete events, I argue that implicitly they share a
common target, the polis, the disembodiment of thinking Man. As I said in the introduction, I read
posthumanism as post-​Man-​ism, following Sylvia Wynter.
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is not yet more attention to humans but attention to agents, or rather actants,
who are not at all human. Human attention needs to make a turn away from
fellow humans who are understood to be obviously already recognized as
such—​toward actants that are nonhuman. (As I suggested in Chapters 2 and
3, what-​who is not human is a more complicated question than this gesture
of political ecology can allow.) In the first part of this chapter I’ll explore both
of these sides. My point will be that the fact that this seems to be a choice at
all—​between performativity and political ecology—​is a reappearance of the
distinction between polis and oikos. What both sides in fact already agree
on is the inappropriateness of equating the one of the body—​in fact a very
specific body—​with agency, a non-​relational disembodied agent figured as a
specific body who is the definition of unilateral power.
In the second and third sections of the chapter I articulate a philosophy of
genre and elemental difference. I borrow the gesture of genre from Wynter,
for whom genre is neither nature nor culture. However, because her philosophy of genre does reintroduce the political-​ecological distinction, I center a
philosophy of genre on the role that the denial of elemental difference plays
in the genre of the one of the body as a disembodied gesture. Wynter argues
that Man as a genre is biocentric, and it is, but biocentrism is actually a cover
for a way of life that perceives the biological in a hostile manner and figures
that hostility in a bodily manner. It is a way of life that values escape from
elemental relationality. As biocentrism of the climate of the one, the body is
a confused celebration of a complete or perfect body that was first defined
by the one-​sex model and more recently the two-​sex model. As I argued in
Chapter 4, biocentrism is naturalistic in an Aristotelian sense: bios-​centrism
is a ranking of bodies according to a philosophy of humanity in which a specific body itself is the site of perfection or completion. Such terms as race-​
sex-​gender-​ability-​class-​sexuality-​size had sought to delineate this perfect
body, and now they are rightly used to marginalize this body. These aspects
of a body, according to bios-​centrism, tell the shape of one’s character,
rightful political status, capacity for thought, for nous, the ability to think
and move oneself free of necessity. Biocentrism has for this reason meant an
elevation of the one of the body. It is thus not ironic that biocentrism is inherently idealistic and seeking an escape from water-​fire-​air-​earth. Plurality is a
hostile agent with respect to the one, the body. I follow Irigaray and Fanon in
appreciating the agencies of elementality and the elementality of language as
a shaping. This account of elemental difference and language will allow for a
return to the question of the “cause” of political-​ecological breakdown—​that
The Problem Is the One, the Body
259
cannot be parsed as either political or ecological. Climate disruption and the
genocides that this entails are a function of the distinction between political and ecological. And while the distinction may be a denial of this, what
it is like to become human is to play a part in the inevitable eruption of elemental difference, neither form nor matter, neither body nor mind, neither
what nor who.
5.1. Performativity and Political Ecology, Polis and Oikos
Performativists and political ecologists, for all their disagreements on which
I have written primarily in the first half of this book, will after all agree on
what Wynter articulates as a problem of biocentric Man being equated with
the human, a falsely generic body. They converge on the problem of the one
of the human, though they don’t share their assessment of the problem. These
two literatures need to be brought together. Each holds the key to what is
crucial in the other one: the fantasy of unilateral agency of the human (political ecology) explains the celebrated elevation of this one of the body
(performativity) that is most elevated. And the celebrated elevation of the
one body (performativity) explains that the site of the unilateral agency that
defines the human is in fact a race-​ethnicity-​class-​language-​sex-​gender-​
nationality-​religion-​defined Man (political ecology). Both sides are critical
of the disembodiment to which the one of the body is an aspiration. As I have
throughout the book, here I will confine my interest in performativity to what
I take to be its most complex and sophisticated articulation, performativity
in the philosophy of Judith Butler. Political ecology is a similarly wide field,
so I will focus on the work of Bruno Latour.
For Judith Butler we could say that the one, the human is an “imaginary
morphology . . . crafted through the exclusion of other possible bodies.”6
Humans do not differ among themselves so much as the human emerges as
the apex among variations that are rendered insubstantial. They are rendered
in such a way as to disappear. The one, the human alone is real, there, substantial. The human is “a figure of disembodiment, but one which is nevertheless
a figure of a body, a bodying forth of a masculinized rationality, the figure of
a . . . body which is not a body, a figure in crisis, a figure that enacts a crisis it
cannot fully control.”7 Though Butler writes “masculinized” in this passage
6
7
Butler, Bodies That Matter, 49.
Butler, Bodies That Matter, 48–​49.
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The Climate of the Body
she understands this to be a racial term, among other elements: “Human
reason . . . [is] ‘man’ as one who is without a childhood; is not a primate and
so is relieved of the necessity of eating, defecating, living and dying; one who
is not a slave, but always a property holder; one whose language remains
originary and untranslatable. This is a figure of disembodiment”8 according
to which anything that detracts from this consistent performance of human
reason, “strictly speaking, has no morphe, no morphology, no contour, for
it is that which contributes to the contouring of things, but it itself undifferentiated, without boundary.”9 The human is a privileging of a specific body
who is relieved of the necessity of speaking, eating, defecating, living, aging,
dying, and who overwrites the existence of any other bodies.
This critique of the human in Butler’s earlier work is a reading of Irigaray
that anticipates the philosophy of precarity that appears in Butler’s work more
recently. Precarity is a “shared condition [that] situates our political lives,”
and its arrangement is not automatic: “We are all unknowing and exposed to
what may happen, and our not knowing is a sign that we do not, cannot, control all the conditions that constitute our lives. However invariable such a general truth may be, it is lived differentially, since exposure to injury at work,
or faltering social services, clearly affects workers and the unemployed much
more than others.”10 The “differentially” here is a production of the dynamics
of the one morphology of the human. Butler seems to have in mind both the
precarity that is created by withdrawal of public institutions as well as the
precarity of “environmental conditions.”11 Exposure to influence would seem
to be another way of speaking of precarity, and this exposure of influence is
precisely what is denied by the human.
Performativity becomes a philosophy of the “differential distribution”
of precarity, which attends life itself, but whose shape is not guaranteed.12
Precarity is a feature of “lives that are clearly not the same as my own”13 and
“cannot be thought without difference,”14 and these differential productions
of precarity are a way of thinking about the ways in which the human
overdetermines a shaping of a political that is lived in common but entails
differential effects. In Notes toward a Performative Theory of Assembly Butler
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
Butler, Bodies That Matter, 48.
Butler, Bodies That Matter, 49.
Butler, Notes, 21.
Butler, Notes, 118.
Butler, Notes, 96.
Butler, Notes, 120.
Butler, Precarious Life, 27.
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261
argues that “acting in concert can be an embodied form of calling into question the inchoate and powerful dimensions of reigning notions of the political.”15 Reigning notions of the political suggest precisely the aspiration to
disembodiment that Butler articulates in Bodies That Matter, and in a context
of “imperiled livelihood, decimated infrastructure, accelerating precarity” it
is crucial to appreciate the degree to which all of these are both features of
the fact that each person’s life is “constituted through perspectives it cannot
inhabit” and that such constitution is performative, not necessary in the way
that it plays out.
Precarity as an “embodied and plural performativity”16 is a shared political
condition that replaces in Butler’s work the absolute sameness that is mandated and denied by the human.17 Precarity is a denunciation of the human
as a disembodied abstraction that renders unreal all bodies who do not perform it. Butler writes that she does not wish to “simply invert the relations
such that we all gather under the banner of the nonhuman or the inhuman.”18
The human, what else it might mean, remains to be thought.
Interestingly Butler argues that thinking “human life” is “inevitably” oxymoronic: the “component parts, ‘human’ and ‘life,’ never fully coincide
with one another. . . . life can never be the singularly defining feature of the
human—​so whatever we might want to call human life will inevitably consist
of a negotiation with this tension.”19 Why are these terms mutually resistant?
What is it about human that makes it somehow inconsistent with life? Butler
further writes, “Perhaps the human is the name we give to this very negotiation [of the tension between ‘human’ and ‘life’] that emerges from being a
living creature among creatures and in the midst of forms of living that exceed us.”20 Why are these terms in tension?
In this way while precarity is a term that places the question of what is
human amid the myriad “forms of living that exceed us,” it is nevertheless an
articulation of a more or less shared condition. I do not totally disagree with
this. But the exclusive attention to the performative differential distribution
15
Butler, Notes, 9.
Butler, Notes, 22.
It is for this reason that I have previously argued that Butler’s precarity is a rewriting of Irigarayan
sexual difference. I now worry that Butler sets aside the aspects of Irigaray’s work that are “ecological,”
but as I have already argued, Butler does this because her work is so committed to a political denunciation of the political role of matter. See Parker, “Precarity and Elemental Difference.”
18 Butler, Notes, 42.
19 Butler, Notes, 43.
20 Butler, Notes, 43.
16
17
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of precarity means that difference is fully the prerogative of the political.
Butler writes,
In my view, a shared condition of precarity situates our political lives, even
as precarity is differentially distributed. And some of us, Ruth Gilmore21
has made very clear, are disproportionately more disposed to injury and
early death than others. Racial difference can be tracked precisely by
looking at statistics on infant mortality, for example. This means, in brief,
that precarity is unequally distributed and that lives are not considered
equally grievable or equally valuable. . . . The body is constituted through
perspectives it cannot inhabit; someone else sees our face in a way that we
cannot and hears our voice in a way that we cannot. We are in this sense—​
bodily—​always over there, yet here, and this dispossession marks the sociality to which we belong. Even as located beings, we are always elsewhere
constituted in a sociality that exceeds us. This establishes our exposure
and our precarity, the ways in which we depend on political and social
institutions to persist.22
Thus precarity is a feature of living-​aging-​dying whose implications are not
determined. But then again, what makes precarity significant as a way of
thinking about the specificities of negotiating the tension between “being a
living creature among creatures” and “life” is the variability of precarity in
spite of the fact that it is a generalized condition. This variability is a function
of how precarity itself is regarded. Is it a common condition of exposure that
is affirmed? Or is it vilified and denied and foisted onto those that are cast in
the role of matter? How the involvement itself is understood will make for
the shape that precarity takes.
Performativity in Butler’s more recent work thus becomes a way of understanding the differential enactments of precarity, as well as a way of rejecting
the very idea of the human. The denial of precarity is the denial of interdependency.23 While there is subtle appreciation in Butler of the agency of
water and soil, the point for Butler is that these are only rendered dangerous
agents by the denial of interdependency.24 Precarity is ultimately the sign
21 Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing
California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007).
22 Butler, Notes, 96.
23 Butler, Notes, 67.
24 Butler, Notes, 44.
The Problem Is the One, the Body
263
of an exposure to political agency that either denies it and exacerbates the
precarity of some or affirms precarity and ensures the necessities of mortality
for all. Butler suggests that ecological precarity, though it is part of bodily life,
is not necessarily problematic, so long as one attends to dynamics of political space. In this sense, though Butler’s work continues in its exposition of
matter begun in Bodies That Matter, Karen Barad’s concerns in Meeting the
Universe Halfway remain relevant: the performative agency in which Butler
is interested is political.
Butler’s concern is exclusively political in the sense that this has had at least
since Aristotle in which what is political is in some way distinguishable from
the capacities of ecological agents, agencies rendered ecological. In fairness
to Butler’s notion of precarity, this is because of the political meant by the gesture of matter, as she herself argues in Bodies That Matter. For this reason it
does seem wrong to suggest that precarity as a devastating exposure is owed
to anything other than political dynamics: of course the agency of a hurricane does not necessarily make for catastrophe if one has the collaborative
support of community. Hurricane Katrina, an event that many in the United
States credit as the first time they began to be aware of ecological breakdown, was a political disaster, and to argue that it wasn’t, that it was a “natural disaster,” is disturbing because of the political neglect of the levees that
erupted after the hurricane.25 Precarity is in keeping with this line of argumentation best thought to be a political phenomenon. Karen Barad’s critique
of performativity has demonstrated that the political as a sphere in Butler
somehow completely overwhelms any attention to agencies one could call
“nonhuman.” Barad readopts the term “matter” in spite of Butler’s critique
of this gesture. How has it come to be that human and life are so intuitively
at odds? Butler poses this question, but also seems to insist on maintaining
the distinction itself in the name of a political resistance, even going so far as
to offer this as a way of thinking about how humanism can coexist with an
affirmation of precarity: “Perhaps the human is the name we give to this very
negotiation that emerges from being a living creature among creatures and
in the midst of forms of living that exceed us.”26 Again humanity is a space
25 Manning Marable, “Katrina’s Unnatural Disaster: A Tragedy of Black Suffering and White
Denial,” in Warfare in the American Homeland: Policing and Prison in a Penal Democracy, ed. Joy
James, 305–​312 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007). See also Shannon Winnubst, Way Too
Cool: Selling Out Race and Ethics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015).
26 Butler, Notes, 43.
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of “embodied and plural performativity”27 that is not reducible to “forms of
living that exceed us.”28
What motivates the human as the denial of interdependency and exacerbation of precarity? What makes for that which is nonhuman, a category so
laughably vast?
Understanding humanity in Butlerian terms is consistent with Sylvia
Wynter’s notion of genre, which is not surprising given that genre is itself partially a reading of Butlerian performativity, as discussed in
Chapter 4. For Wynter, “The non-​natural activities driving global warming
and climate change—​as well as the economic policy prescriptions put forth
as resolutions—​are ones that are reciprocally performatively enacting of
our present genre of being hybridly human as that of secular Western Man
in its second reinvented, homo oeconomicus, now (neo)Liberal-​humanist
cum monohumanist form.” The genre of biocentric Man is performatively
enacted, while maintaining a hostility toward reflection on the ways this
genre is formed. In Notes toward a Performative Theory of Assembly Butler
writes, “Performativity characterizes first and foremost that characteristic
of linguistic utterances that in the moment of making the utterance makes
something happen or brings some phenomenon into being. J. L. Austin is
responsible for the term, but it has gone through many revisions and alterations, especially in the work of Jacques Derrida, Pierre Bourdieu, and Eve
Kosofsky Sedgwick, to name but a few.”29 Performativity in Butler as in
Wynter is the novelty made possible by language and myth or history and
story. The utterance makes something happen, and in this sense for Wynter
and for Butler what happens does not exist prior to the utterance. Biocentric
Man for Wynter and the human that denies precarity for Butler are performative utterances, anchored in the power of institutional accumulations and
repetitions.
The human as a denial of exposure in Butler is capable of being unmade
in the affirmation of precarity and the political engagement necessary to acknowledge and prepare for it. Butler writes, “It is my hypothesis that ways of
avowing and showing certain forms of interdependency stand a chance of
transforming the field of appearance itself. Ethically considered, there has
to be a way to find and forge a set of bonds and alliances, to link interdependency to the principle of equal value, and to do this in a way that opposes
27
28
29
Butler, Notes, 8.
Butler, Notes, 43.
Butler, Notes, 28.
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those powers that differentially allocate recognizability, or that disrupts its
taken-​for-​granted operation. For once life is understood as both equally
valuable and interdependent, certain ethical formulations follow.”30 It is in
this passage Butler that speaks of access to “running water” and the risk of
“toxic soil” that war entails. Such dangers are political possibilities because to
wage war is to be in denial of the claims of interdependency. It is important
to note here the role of equal value as a marker of the political. In my view
this concept maintains the one of the body, the human that constitutes the
polis from which intuitions regarding the political of biocentric Man emerge.
Butler herself is critical of the fantasy of independence, but equality in the
preceding passage presumably does not mean equality of humans with the
rest of life. Human life is not reducible to the rest of life, she argues. I would
argue that here a zone of equal value, a descendent of Aristotle’s “equality for
equals,”31 is reintroduced, in spite of the fact that Butler along with so many
others is no fan of the polis.
Butler’s affirmation of precarity is thus an articulation of the performativity
of the human as a denial of interdependency. The problem with the human is
the fantasy of independence that is integral to it. And yet at the same time a
certain distance between the human and life is explicitly maintained. There is
separation of that which is political from that which is ecological in this critique of the human.
If for Butler the human is problematic insofar as it is a denial of an
embodied performativity, precarity, and interdependency, and this requires
doubling down on humanistic research that pluralizes what humanity
means, for Bruno Latour the human is problematic from another angle. For
Latour the human is a modern concept that is synonymous with agency. He
writes, “Let us begin with the good-​sense evidence from which we are going
to seek to distance ourselves little by little. According to tradition, the social actor endowed with consciousness, speech, will, and intention, on the
one hand, has to be distinguished from the thing that obeys causal determinations, on the other. Although they are often conditioned, even determined, human actors can nevertheless be said to be defined by their freedom,
whereas things obey only chains of causality. A thing cannot be said to be
an actor, in any case not a social actor, since it does not act, in the proper
sense of the verb; it only behaves.”32 Latour laments this attribution of mere
30
31
32
Butler, Notes, 43.
Aristotle, Politics 1280a.12–​14, as discussed in Chapter 1.
Latour, Politics of Nature, 73. See also Bennett, Vibrant Matter.
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behavior to things. Human actors are for him wrongly defined by a freedom
that distinguishes them: what makes a thing a thing is that it is not conscious,
not free, incapable of (effective) speech, lacking in will. Humans are conscious, free, capable of effective speech. For Latour this statement applies
to all humans, not because it did so historically, but because Latour is committed to an understanding of what it is like to be human to all humans. But
where is the philosophy of humanity to support this and to fend off political
identifications with earth that dehumanize, ecological fascism or ecofascism,
as I have discussed in Chapter 3? Latour writes that “it is because he spoke
freely on the agora that man—​at least the male citizen—​had the right of citizenship. Fine; who is saying anything different? Who wants to question this
definition? Who wants to undermine its foundation? I am indeed situating
myself in the concatenation of these principles, in the long and venerable
tradition that has constantly extended what was called humanity, freedom,
and the right of citizenship.”33 The extension here of “humanity, freedom
and the rights of citizenship” is of course to nonhumans. For Latour, unlike
for Wynter, who argues that the name humanity has been and continues to
be understood as an inherent race, gender, class, sexuality, ability concept,
the understanding of the human is not problematic. It is ultimately not in
question in Latour who is human and who is not, and this accounts for the
ease with which Latour and other political ecologists refer unironically to
nonhumans. So Latour sets the question of what it means to become human
or to be dehumanized aside and seeks instead an understanding of action
that is not confined to humans. In the lab there is politics and in the political arena there are “actants, acting agents interveners”34 who are not human.
Whereas “agent” is an anthropomorphic term, Latour suggests that we speak
instead of actants, acting agents, in order to be able to recognize in political
deliberations the powers of hormones, of carrots, of viruses, of hurricanes, of
water, of lead.
The literatures of what is called posthumanism carry forward this intuition. The human has pretended to have a monopoly on actancy, and in
that respect a broader project is necessary that does not necessarily give up
the term or the concept human, but which turns attention to the ways that
humans are acted upon. Indeed the trouble with posthumanism is not that it
sets aside the concept of the human. There are frequent references to humans
33
34
Latour, Politics of Nature, 71.
Latour, Politics of Nature, 75.
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267
in all posthumanist texts, such as one sees here in Latour. The trouble is that
this turn of attention has corresponded to the return of inattention to the
ways in which what human means is hierarchically performative.35
In Chapter 3 I traced the disappearance of the human as a distinct question
in Latour’s work. There I argued not that Latour has anything in common
with ecological fascism or ecofascism, but that Latour’s work offers no response to ecofascism. As a further example of the reintroduction of inattention to what it is like to be human, I would point to Latour’s own interest
in the turn to actancy in the passage in Politics of Nature to which I have
already pointed, the one in which he understands all humans to share unqualifiedly in “consciousness, speech, will, and intention.”36 Notice that that
definition of humanity Latour does not question. The problem that “the
Greeks . . . bequeathed us . . . that no one has yet been able to solve” is not
the question of the barbarian with respect to the polis, but the question of
how to reach past the women, children, slave, barbarian and bring into the
polis those nonhumans that are rivers and hurricanes, vegetables and bacteria. “Far from calling this acquisition into question, I claim on the contrary
to be extending it, naming the extension of speech to nonhumans [such as
rivers] Civilization, and finally solving the problem of representation that
rendered democracy powerless as soon as it was invented, because of the
counterinvention of Science.”37 The problem with modern invention of democratic representation in other words is that rivers were not part of who-​what
was represented. As I said with respect to Butler, I do not exactly disagree
with this. But I can’t agree either.
Latour argues that this tradition of humanism has consistently expanded
its definition of the human. Compare that assessment of the tradition of
modern humanism to those of Sylvia Wynter, Frantz Fanon, and Judith
35 A possible exception to this is the work of Rosi Braidotti, especially Chapter 2, Posthuman
Subjects,” in Posthuman Knowledge. However, Braidotti’s combination of a universal posthuman subjectivity with a double assertion of flat empirical difference and human-​made political difference
(see, for example, 42–​43) puts even this book squarely on the side of political ecology. To be fair,
Braidotti does this in a way that explicitly advocates for more respect for the study of the literature
of the humanities than she rightly argues most political ecologists allow. However, Braidotti on my
reading is squarely on the side of political ecology when she writes, “The point of a posthuman position is that it envisages the subject as transversal, trans-​individual, trans-​species, trans-​sexes. In
short, it is a subject in movement. This kind of subjectivity obviously includes non-​human others, of
both the organic and technical kind” (72). The polarized gesture of gender as political difference and
sex as empirical difference is what I’ve tried to address in Chapter 1. But note Braidotti’s concerns
with Latour on (55–​57) and the “white panic” of Anthropocene literature (82–​83).
36 Latour, Politics of Nature, 73.
37 Latour, Politics of Nature, 71.
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Butler previously discussed. It is far from obvious who and what is human
precisely because a certain body—​the one of the body, the lone complete
human according to the one-​sex and, unstably, the two-​sex model—​and the
presupposition of the suprabodily mind of which that body is capable have
been understood as definitive of the term. For Latour this equation of the
human with a certain body tends not to come up at all. He does acknowledge in We Have Never Been Modern, as I have discussed in Chapter 3, “Even
though we [aspirational moderns, those who divide nature from culture]
might still recognize in our own societies some fuzzy areas in madness, children, animals, popular culture and women’s bodies, we believe our duty is
to extirpate ourselves from those horrible mixtures as forcibly as possible by
no longer confusing what pertains to mere social preoccupations and what
pertains to the real nature of things.”38 Thus in Latour as in Irigaray there is
a lack of acknowledgment of the significance of the two-​sex model, even in
this appreciation of the body of the polis insofar as women’s bodies would
seem to be a generic gesture. Which women’s bodies? Meanwhile among
those attempting to be modern in Latour’s sense, it is agreed which bodies are
properly political and which are “horrible mixtures” of nature-​culture. Those
women’s bodies taken to be proper instantiations of the two-​sex model can
be swallowed by the morphology of the one, the body, the human. While this
wasn’t true in the same way for Aristotle, as I have discussed, it is a feature of
the contemporary polis, lending it a veneer of alteration.
There is something of the performative critique of the one, the body, the
human in this passage from We Have Never Been Modern, a critique that seeks
to understand the production of the nonhuman who is also incompatibly the
matter of the human, an imperfect gesture toward the one, the human, the
body. However, in Latour’s more recent work, as I have argued in Chapter 3,
the question of how to understand the complexity of this space of “negotiation,” as Butler puts it, evaporates in the effort to understand the more basic
great divide, that between “humans and nonhumans.” And again from the
Butler-​Wynter angle, the question of the agency or actancy of hurricanes and
buildings is sidelined precisely because there is so much power on the part
of the political to determine the force and significance of these for any given
precarious life.
In this way Butler and Latour articulate complementary worries about the
human. Whereas Butlerian performativity articulates one angle from which
38
Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, 100.
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269
the human is problematic, insofar as it is a pretension of independence from
other humans, Bruno Latour’s denunciation of the human as unilateral agent
articulates another. Where Butler’s writings reintroduce a sense of humanity
in which this term is subtly incompatible with the “living world” of which it is
one part, in Latour’s philosophy of humanity all of the political subtly found
in Butler, not to mention in Fanon and Wynter, is lost. In Butler, the human is
a political agency that largely supplants the possibility of thinking ecological
agencies (as Karen Barad has argued), and in Latour the human is an ecological agency the thinking of which requires sidelining the thinking of political
hierarchies that obscure the neglect of collective actantcy.
Each of these seems to gesture in the direction of the other. There is an
eerie continuity in these accounts: a certain body, the one of the body, defines
political independence (Butler) and denies ecological agency (Latour).
Political agency is rooted in the arrogant independence of a very specific one,
the body, the human, and ecological agency is rendered oxymoronic by precisely this polis concept that pretends not to need that which is ecological. If
these are read together, the role of the denial of elemental difference emerges.
Without the one of the body of the human, there could be no figuring of the
agency that denies ecological agency.
And so there are performativists and social constructionists more generally who will point to the naivete of gesturing to “nonhumans,” and there are
political ecologists who argue that always returning to the equation of the
political with the human demonstrates an equally problematic naivete.
What I want to point out is this: the fact that these two sides seem to be
distinguishable at all is the polis-​oikos distinction once again, deflecting attention from the distinction itself. You have those performativists who are
concerned with the shape of the political, the brutal hierarchy that constitutes
a polis. And you have those political ecologists who are concerned to extend the boundaries of the modern polis to include those who were its more
bluntly non-​ruling parts, such as beasts that have “no share in action.”39
What these sides add up to is an appreciation that the polis cannot take in the
fact that bodies differ precisely because the polis is constituted by a denial of
elemental difference. Butler does not question the isolation of the polis in a
way that foregrounds the ways in which a certain body is the model of a humanity that is not capable of being acted upon, and Latour does not question
39
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 1139a20.
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the hierarchy endemic to the human and the polis that just as surely justifies
its current shape.
What these literatures share is a common skepticism toward, if not a
common exposition of, the one, the body, the lone human form. What is
needed is an Irigarayan and a Fanonian critique of the one, the body with
which the human is synonymous. The problem is the body as a definition
of both the political and the ecological, as well as a denial of the question of
what it is like to become human. This question, the question of what it is like
to be-​become human, is so much broader than question of the generation
of the polis. It’s just that the polis thwarts even the best attempts to ask it.
Instead of sexual difference, as I argued in Chapter 1, what I want to affirm in
an Irigarayan mode is elemental difference, Irigaray’s subtle philosophy of elemental difference, the fact that what it is like to be human inevitably involves
a shaping of an ever multiple morphology: particularities of location, movement, living, aging, dying, valuing, among humans that are singularities as
well. Elemental differences are currently taken to be encapsulated in empirical bodily difference, differences from the one, the body, the sole complete
human form of Aristotelian Man because the valuing of unilateral agency is
figured as this one, the body. A certain body figures abodiment. Fanon forwards the degree to which what decisively exceeds this false human is understood to be not an inert but a dangerously agential matter. This is the larger
picture of which performativity and political ecology articulate pieces: a certain body defines political agency and vilifies ecological agency. Proximity
to this body in the biocentric genre defines humanity. But this answer to the
question of what it is like to become human is inadequate, as many outside of
biocentric Man have been arguing for centuries. Neither simply affirming the
agency of that which is not the body nor attending to the fact that the body
is performatively enacted will address the more basic problem of the body’s
denial of elemental difference.
5.2. What It Is Like to Be Human: Genre and
Elemental Difference
In Chapter 4 I discussed Sylvia Wynter’s philosophy of genre according
to which “all human Skins can only become human by also performatively
enacting them/​ourselves as human in the always-​already, cosmogonical
chartered terms of their/​our symbolically encoded and fictively constructed
The Problem Is the One, the Body
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genre-​specific Masks, as themselves always-​already programmed by their/​
our respective sociogenic replicator codes of symbolic life/​death. This given
that, unlike the Primate family to which we partly belong, humans are alone
able to transcend the narrow, genetically determined limits of eusocial, inter-​
altruistic, kin-​recognizing behaviors in order to instead attain to higher
levels of cooperation and organization.”40 Genre is neither nature nor culture,
though, as in Latour, this conceptual distinction is ultimately maintained in
the concept of hybridity discussed in Chapter 4. It is explicit in Wynter’s distinction between skins (nature) and masks (culture). While Wynter takes this
distinction from Fanon’s own title, Black Skin, White Masks, I have argued
that the distinction is ultimately a Manichaean gesture rendered questionable by the overall approach of his writings. The distinction is also explicit
in the distance Wynter inserts between humans and “the Primate family,” to
which “we partly belong.” The distinction is so present in Wynter because
genre is a practice of language that is distinguished from that which is bios
or biological. Genre for Wynter is hybrid in the sense that the practices of
“how we represent the life that we live to ourselves”41 is made possible partly
through evolutionary processes and partly as an “epochal rupture” with these
processes in which “humans auto-​institute ourselves” and work upon ourselves with language.42 There are two discernible parts to genre for Wynter: a
biological part and a human auto-​institution part that is not a continuation
but an interruption of that earlier biological process.
My concern with this way of articulating genre—​as auto-​institution—​
follows Fanon’s critique of Manichaeanism. His concern with the
polarizations that characterize Europe does not stop Fanon from trying to
redefine what it means to be human. In fact this becomes a new framework
for understanding humanity. He suggests that the morphology that vilifies
that which is zoological is precisely what prevents an accurate understanding
of the cortico-​visceral relationality that Manichaeanism denies. It is because
humans think they are not part of the relations of earth that they do not take
their own relationality seriously, the relationality that they themselves are.
Then again Wynter’s interest in genre is in other respects very close to Fanon’s
appreciation of the hypocrisy of an abstract universal justice. Following this
Fanonian approach, we could say that Wynter’s philosophy of genre does not
40
41
42
Wynter, “The Ceremony Found,” 198.
Wynter, “1492,” 48.
Wynter, “The Ceremony Found,” 226.
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make explicit the significance of elemental difference in what it is like to be
human. Without affirmation of elemental difference—​ecological agencies
including the discontinuities of humanity that force one to relate to another
instead of to assume what it is like to be him, her, or them—​biocentrism
fetishizes bodily difference. Bodily difference distinguishes bodies from
minds, and it takes humans to be readable and rateable externally. The one
of the body takes away the process of relating to another and puts in its place
the blunt assigning of status to a body. Biocentrism is in this way inherently
dehumanizing, withholding the capacity for genre, for shaping of a body, in,
of, and as itself. It is a denial of morphology as necessary to what it is like to
become human as well as it is a denial of elemental difference as a feature of
human morphology.
Nevertheless there is a risk of reintroducing in the gesture of genre the
political and ecological distinction insofar as genre is taken to be strictly performative, a production of human agency alone, floating free of bodies. Two
oil-​and-​water aspects of Wynter’s work—​the gesture of an empirical discontinuity and the gesture of the performativity of genre—​cannot come together
in part because elemental difference is unstably taken to be either entirely an
apolitical and therefore ecological matter, as Wynter indicates was the case
according to eighteenth-​to twentieth-​century studies of that which was not
Homo politicus, or something invented by humans and thus entirely, purely
owed to political agency. For example, Wynter attributes current practices
of genre entirely to human innovation and human self-​understanding,
in a manner independent of “biology” and absolutely novel with respect
even to other primates. However on Wynter’s own account genre in practice mingles the biological with the narrative in a largely inextricably way,
and genre is an interpretation and not necessarily an exploitation of what
she sometimes names in apolitical terms the “physiognomic features”43 and
the “skins” (invoking Fanon) of humanity. The non-​universality of humanity
flip-​flops in this way from one side of the distinction to the other: sometimes
this non-​universality among humanity is political, sometimes it is ecological.44 With the political-​ecological distinction comes a mutually reinforcing inability to think of elemental difference as a dynamic part of what it
43
Wynter, “1492,” 46.
I have the same concern with Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus. I would argue that the
wasp and the orchid would have suited scientists of the two-​sex model just fine as a way of thinking
about the ecology of mechanistic reproduction (see A Thousand Plateaus, 10). An exposition of the
polis could help to understand why difference is both made (political) and empirical (ecological), according to Deleuze and Guattari.
44
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273
is like to become human, a part that no human invented and for which no
human volunteers. The reason these terms must be expressed in Wynter in
this polarized way—​as purely political sometimes and as purely physiognomic or apolitical at others—​is because of the polis, which is, I am arguing,
the origin of the hybridity concept that appears in Latour and Wynter. It’s
just that Wynter does a better job of holding both sides together than Latour
manages, on my reading. The hybridity concept is a distinction between political and ecological, a repetition of this distinction. Differences among humanity thus come out in Wynter as either ecological or political, but not as
precisely the complex boundary-​defiers that they are in the philosophy of
Frantz Fanon, for whom the biological is castigated and projected onto some
bodies in a manner that makes the status of himself as a body an indistinguishably political-​ecological event.
This philosophy of genre in spite of the hybridity Wynter attributes to it
explicitly offers a much-​needed philosophy of humanity when elemental
difference is brought into the foreground of the gesture. Wynterian genre
takes up some of the features of Butler’s critique of the human insofar as the
human pretends to be independent, and some features of Latour’s critique of
the human insofar as the human pretends to live independently of ecological
events. Wynter’s philosophy of genre holds that the problem of ecological
breakdown is not so much the question of what it is like to become human,
an obsession with humanism, as a hidden allegiance to biocentric Man, a
Man who considers himself alone to be the natural, in the Aristotelian sense
of complete, human. All other humans, so biocentric Man believes, are incomplete versions that point to Man. Wynter’s work rejects the very idea of
posthumanism because there has been no human yet. There has been only
this biocentric Man who considers himself the apex of nature. For her, those
who call themselves posthumanists would be better to call themselves “post-​
Man-​ists.”45 As I have argued in Chapter 4, this is all a cover for a valuing of
escape from earth, a valuing of immateriality figured as a very specific body.
(Because what else would it be figured by?)
Genre is the practice of relationality that is not capable of being studied
generally or universally, globalement, as Fanon puts it.46 It is a weaving of
language as a way of relating, but humanity requires questioning the very
45 However, as Rosi Braidotti argues, some posthumanists are not even post-​
Man-​
ist. See
Posthuman Knowledge, 60.
46 Fanon, Peau noire, masques blancs, 193.
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idea of a generic one body that encounters or is encountered in genre in a
universally applicable way. Wynter writes, “Thus the task before us will be to
bring into being a new poetics of the propter nos [the “for us”]. Such a new
poetics would, in the wake of Fanon’s formulation, have to engage both in
a redefinition of the relation between concrete individual men and women
and in the socializing processes of the systems of symbolic representations
generated from the codes that govern all human purposes and behaviors—​
including those of our present globally hegemonic culture, as at present instituted about [sic] in its model of being ‘Man.’ ”47 Wynter invokes the “concrete
individual” here against the “globally hegemonic culture . . . of being ‘Man,’ ”
and she does so on the same page in contrast to “the bourgeois mode of the
subject and its conception of the individual.”48 The concrete individual is a
way of repositioning biocentric Man among the many humans by virtue of
which his unique completeness can appear. The gesture of the individual here
indicates that biocentric Man is but one “conception of ” individuality that is
in fact a denial of “the interests both of the flesh-​and-​blood individual subject and of the human species as a whole, together with, increasingly, that of
the interests of all other nonhuman forms of life on this planet.”49 In other
words biocentric Man is not only a political but also an ecological project.
This hegemonic individual is a denial of “the process of socialization that
institutes the individual as a human, and therefore, always sociogenetic subject”50 that requires and subordinates “concrete” contrasting bodies in order
to establish certain bodies as the one, the body, the human per se and deny
the interests of “all other nonhuman forms of life on this planet.” Wynter uses
“nonhuman” here in the ecological mode.
Whereas genre is Wynter’s term for the multiple and performative
enactments of what it is like to be human as a multiplication of Butlerian
performativity, I propose that genre be understood as a shaping of elemental
difference. This is to introduce attention to the impossibility of what Fanon
calls a “global” approach to humanity as well as attention to the form-​matter
hierarchy that sets up a distinction between human and the rest of life, as
discussed in Irigaray. As we have also seen in Chapter 3, Fanon’s critique of
the inherently vilifying concept of the biological, the racial fundament of this
concept, that it is a vilification of le nègre, deepens the problematic character
47
48
49
50
Wynter, “1492,” 47.
Wynter, “1492,” 47.
Wynter, “1492,” 47.
Wynter, “1492,” 47.
The Problem Is the One, the Body
275
of the form-​matter hierarchy. Form is good agency; matter is vilified agency.
These warring parts are elements of a divided morphology that characterized
biocentric Man, according to which there is ultimately one, the body, which
is the completed form of all other bios bodies.
Genre is a relationality that must have some attitude toward elemental difference and the requirement for relationality. The attitude of the biocentric
genre toward elemental difference is one of hostility, and this is the reason
for the arraying of all bodies around and pointing to the fullness of the
one finished complete human form that is biocentric Man. This biocentric
Man is figured as natural, but, as I have discussed, this means natural in an
Aristotelian sense of teleological and in celebration of the one, the body that
is capable of a disembodied and unlocated speech.
To affirm elemental difference would mean to affirm both the engagement in elaborations of genre, but also to affirm elemental difference that
humanity did not invent. A philosophy of genre in which elemental difference is affirmed can be found not only by reading between the lines of the
philosophy of genre in Wynter, but also in both Irigaray and Fanon, though
none of them truly appreciates the modern renegotiation of the body in the
form of the two-​sex model, as I have discussed that especially in Chapter 1.
Saidiya Hartman’s philosophy of performativity and Paul Preciado’s invocation of multimorphism are also crucial. But I regard Wynter, Hartman, and
Preciado ultimately as philosophers of performativity insofar as they do not
argue that political difference results from the denial of elemental difference.
They all would seem to hold that political difference is human creative cruelty
and experimental making. The more a philosopher tends towards the latter,
the more there is the beginning of a philosophy of elemental difference. But
a critique of the polis is required to understand why such experimentation is
so vilified only when done by those who are not meant to rule the polis.
It is Irigaray and Fanon who speak most directly to a philosophy of elemental difference that addresses the polis. They articulate most directly a philosophy of political difference, not as the invention of political difference on
the part of the one of the body, but as the denial of elemental difference. And
so, keeping in mind the caveats discussed in Chapter 1 regarding Irigaray, her
work and that of Fanon suggest a largely mutually consistent philosophy of
elemental difference that I now wish to articulate, distinguishing this from
the philosophy of political difference of performativity.
The aim is not to articulate a new universal philosophy of the human.
I mean only to take issue with the denial of elemental difference that
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distinguishes the global terrain of the political from the plurality of the ecological, according to which relationality is not part of what it is to be human
and according to which affirmation of bodily discontinuity is politically dangerous. In a context of biocentric Man I do certainly worry about whether
elemental difference can be affirmed. The polis constantly reasserts itself. But
the risk is already being taken in work such as that of Irigaray and Fanon, as
well as the work of Eli Clare and Sylvia Wynter and Saidiya Hartman and
Paul Preciado and Karen Barad. The question I argue is not whether but
how to extend those efforts to seek the continuity of the political-​ecological
without either the problems that this distinction entails or the swallowing
universalism of the political of biocentric Man. I am not the whole of the
earth; I am a part of the earth.
Whereas the work of posthumanism following Latour leaves the question of what it is like to become human totally open and ultimately in an
incompatible relationship with ecology, as I have discussed, genre as an
embroidering of elemental differences and the study of morphology offers
a way of doing humanities differently. We are morphologically plural, but no
humanity, no tradition invented that morphological plurality in which all
humanities take part. This is a site of elemental agency in and as humanity.
We participate in and as morphology, though we are not the same bodies or
the same as bodies. We are acted upon as much as we act. “Technology,” as
craft, is not inherently problematic; it has always been a necessary participant in morphology. It is only when parties who are thought not to rule the
polis make use that technology is thought by the polis to be problematic. This
bodily plurality is what makes it necessary to relate to another—​to the “build
the world of you,”51 as Fanon puts it—​without deciding that I already know
what it is like to become someone else with respect to a shared genre. We alter
in relation to ourselves, and we alter in relation to each other, and we do not
do this in uniformity or homogeneity. This is the need for relationality, which
politics so badly misunderstands and abuses and alienates from that which it
considers to be ecological.
The affirmation of elemental difference reveals that the gesture of the
one of the body—​the very gesture of one or even two human bodies as the
completeness of humanity—​accounts for the problematic aspects of the
prevailing gesture of the human, not the question of humanity itself. The
question of humanity itself is only ecologically problematic because it still
51
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 206.
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277
is meant in an Aristotelian sense that arrays all bodies around one complete
human form. Humanity still usually means Man, as Wynter has argued. This
is the biocentric genre that Wynter laments, but it goes all the way back at
least to Aristotle. The philosophy of performativity is of enormous value
for thinking about the practices that institute this definition of humanity
as well as for debunking the notion of nature integral to it. This definition
of humanity is natural in the Aristotelian sense of “what each thing is when
fully developed . . . whether we are speaking of a man, a horse, or a family.”52
Fanon writes, “As painful as it is for us to have to say this: there is but one
destiny for the black man. And it is white.”53 Irigaray writes, “The ‘feminine’
is always described in terms of deficiency or atrophy, as the other side of the
sex that alone holds a monopoly on value: the male sex.”54 However partial
their observations, however limited, they are talking about the same biocentric Man, the very definition of the one of the body, according to which there
is one fate, as Fanon puts it, one complete, teleological human form. As I have
discussed in Chapter 1, the very idea of sex as something with no history, no
politics, is a reflection of this one complete human form and its definition of
nature, and so doubling that sex so that there are two human forms instead
of one human form is no help at all. What needs to be debunked is the gesture of the natural that sets one body up as the apex of nature itself because of
the capacity for a disembodied and unlocated speech. This is an impossible
ideal that is in confused celebration of the “immaterial,” form, the negation
of matter, and figures this with the one of the body. To insist on elemental
difference is to insist on the elemental relationality that makes this apex even
possible.
Performativity gives attention to the way that this apex is instituted as
nature itself, as complete, as perfect, both in language, in Butler’s earlier
articulations of performativity,55 and by means of “a more diffuse and complicated set of discursive and institutional powers,” in her more recent work.56
But the philosophy of political difference embedded in performativity
attributes differences from the one of the body, the one complete human
form, to the projections and linguistic and institutional maneuverings
52
Aristotle, Politics 1.2.1252b32–​33.
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, xiv.
54 Luce Irigaray, “The Power of Discourse and the Subordination of the Feminine,” in This Sex
Which Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter with Carolyn Burke (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
1985), 69.
55 Butler, Bodies That Matter, 13–​15.
56 Butler, Notes, 29.
53
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of this perfect human form. Butler argues in Bodies That Matter that “the
limits of constructivism are exposed at those boundaries of bodily life where
abjected or delegitimated bodies fail to count as ‘bodies.’ ”57 Abjected and
delegitimated bodies—​Butler here builds on and problematizes Irigaray’s
reading of the abjection of the feminine, that which fails to be the one, the
complete, the body—​are somehow not really bodies at all with respect to “the
matrix of gender relations.”58 They are bodies that fail to be bodies; they fail to
register in the polis. Butler continues, “If the materiality of sex is demarcated
in discourse, then this demarcation will produce a domain of excluded and
delegitimated ‘sex.’ Hence it will be as important to think about how and to
what end bodies are constructed as it will be to think about how and to what
end bodies are not constructed and, further, to ask after how bodies which
fail to materialize provide the necessary ‘outside,’ if not the necessary support, for the bodies which, in materializing the norm, qualify as bodies that
matter.”59 For Butler, it is the demarcation of some “bodies that matter” that
is responsible for the production of a domain of excluded and delegitimated
bodies. She follows Irigaray in writing of bodies that fail to be the one, the
body, the one complete human form, but she departs from Irigaray in arguing
that “the feminine is not the only or primary kind of being that is excluded
from the economy of masculinist reason, what and who is excluded in the
course of Irigaray’s analysis.”60 It is the performative hierarchization of some
bodies as bodies that matter that produces bodies that do not. She does not
argue that performativity is responsible for these bodies, but the significant
differences between them are political. Bodies are not entirely “constructed”
by normalization, in the preceding passage. The distance between bodies
that matter and bodies that don’t is a political distance, a difference wrought
by demarcation itself.
In a particularly difficult passage to read, Butler reiterates this philosophy
of political difference of performativity: “Most of us have had our genders
established by virtue of someone checking a box and sending it in.”61 She
admits that this is not the case for a person who is intersex; someone who
is intersex is in a relationship with “someone checking a box” in which that
medical authority is contested: “It might have taken a while to check the box,
57
58
59
60
61
Butler, Bodies That Matter, 15.
Butler, Bodies That Matter, 8.
Butler, Bodies That Matter, 15–​16; my emphasis.
Butler, Bodies That Matter, 49.
Butler, Notes, 28.
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279
or the check may have been erased a few times, or the letter may have been
delayed before it was sent.”62 This way of putting it sets the political situation
of intersex uncomfortably apart from the political situation of those who are
not intersex. But it also serves to suggest that not to be intersex means to be
subject to “a graphic event that inaugurated gender for the vast majority of
us.”63 Butler does not deny that there are trans bodies, so much as she is concerned with gender primarily as an assignment. Her aim is to insist upon the
institutional authorizations that legitimate and delegitimate certain practices
of gender, bodies that are the body versus bodies that do not politically register. Her interest is in the problematic character of assignments of gender,
and sex assignments for her are also part of the assigning of gender.
It is in precisely this respect that this passage illustrates not the denial
of difference, but the inability of performativity to account for departures
from norms of the one of biocentric Man, a conception of the two, the body,
whose apex is still the one complete human form. But of course the question
is why is what a medical professional observes about one’s body capable of
“establishing” anything about a person? What could checking a box ever establish when it comes to elementality? Butler does not question that there is
a limit to the powers of what she calls “construction” in Bodies That Matter,
and that is the difference as I understand it between social construction and
performativity. Performativity is a philosophy of social construction that
does admit the limits of the human power of construction. But she does not
acknowledge explicitly the agency of bodies, in the plural. The differences
that are of interest to her are differences of a political sort. My argument is
that according to the philosophy of performativity, the source of all difference
is the implicitly one, the body, the complete human form. This body alone accounts for difference itself as difference from itself. “Lives are supported and
maintained differently,”64 and this is what accounts for political difference.
The philosophy of political difference of performativity ultimately holds that
bodies of the polis do not in and of themselves differ from each other.
I think Butler is right to worry about the claim that empirically bodies
do differ from each other. That is in keeping with biocentric Man, who
determines the differences among bodies externally, non-​
consensually,
denying the capacity for genre, and therefore constituting a practice of
62
63
64
Butler, Notes, 28–​29.
Butler, Notes, 29.
Butler, Precarious Life, 32.
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dehumanization. But it is just as much in keeping with biocentric Man to
hold that ultimately we are all the same, that what it is like to be human is uniform, that “by virtue” of being human I can know, sense, intuit what it is like
to be you. This is a double bind of the polis: to insist on bodily difference is to
recreate the one of the body, but to deny bodily difference is also to recreate
the one of the body.
Affirming elemental difference means taking issue not so much with
performativity, that there is a sense in which political difference is both made
and unjust, as with its philosophy of political difference. Political difference
is a function of biocentric genre. However, genre-​making is always some
interpretation of human elementalities, and no genre invented the fundamental plurality of elementality. Biocentrism as a genre—​of which Aristotle
is still the clearest proponent—​ranks elementalities in their proximity to immaterial speech and immaterial thinking, and figures some of these to be
incompletions of the one, the body. In this way biocentrism distinguishes
between properly political bodies (who are relatable to the one, the body, the
complete human form) and ecological bodies (who are not). Political difference is in biocentric Man a difference from the one body, the body, the
complete human form. It is a function of the political-​ecological distinction.
This distinction would not be possible without elemental difference and especially not without the hostile relationship to elemental difference.
Reading Irigaray and Fanon together as an affirmation of elemental difference, neither reifying nor denying elementality, demonstrates that the one,
the body is not only a denial of elemental difference (Irigaray) and a vilification of the biological and zoological (Fanon), but also that the body, the one,
the complete human form, is an inherently unstable sense of self that needs
to determine the morphology of others in order to (mis)understand itself.
The one, the body is an inability to distinguish itself from those bodies that
it wants to subsume along the lines of the two-​sex model and is an inability
to relate itself to those bodies that it wants to destroy.65 All bodies are figured
in relation to itself. The relationship to elementality drives identifications of
the one, the body, the complete human form with some bodies. With bodies
it cannot identify, the relationship to elementality overdetermines the desire
to replace those bodies with itself. For this reason, the one of the body can
consider the planet to be the body, even as certain humans are on biocentric
grounds disqualified for national or even planetary citizenship.
65
Lorde, Sister Outsider, 108.
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281
I now want to read several passages, first in Irigaray and then in Fanon,
though there is nothing meant by this ordering. My desire is to weave these
together, to try to understand the morphology that is the body, the one, the
lone complete human form, which Irigaray articulates as man and Fanon
articulates as white. I am troubled by the lack of intersectionality of the account I am able to offer. But perhaps that lack of intersectionality is exactly
the point: the shape of political movements, movements seeking to gain traction in the polis, so often must track the body as well, speaking to the role
it has assigned them. I want to recall here a crucial theme of Chapter 1: it is
no accident that there is, in Wynter’s terms, no native who is also a woman.
That so many women’s morphologies are either elided or forgotten is a feature of the body and its desire to generate and reproduce only itself, to take
earth only for itself. And to add to Wynter, just to add dimensions to this, it
is not an accident that there is no person of advanced age, who is autistic,
who is intersex, who is also a woman. It is not an accident that there is, according to the one of the body and the two of the body, no trans person who
is also a woman. That these aspects of the what and who of so many people
are too often understood as lines that do not cross is an indication of the
morphology of the body. My hope is that this might provide a philosophical
opening for moving past what I’ve been able to gather here.
That the differences from the one of the body are not understood to be
in relation to each other is a structural necessity because this is the shape of
the polis. My conjecture is that Irigaray and Fanon are approaching an exposition of the same morphology—​an elementally alienated one, the body,
the complete human form—​from different elemental (indistinguishably
political-​ecological) positionings. The morphology of the one of the body
aspires to disembodiment through the assertions of a specific body.
In Irigaray’s Elemental Passions, the reader can appreciate a critique of
the very gesture of the one, the body, the lone complete human form. The
problem, according to Irigaray, is this one, not the project of trying to understand what it is like to be terrestrial and human in a general sense. She is interested in a critique of the one body, the body, the very gesture of a complete
human form as the apex of all that is natural, and the way in which this morphology determines the morphology of her own body’s failure to be this one.
Elemental Passions is written from a first-​person point of view, and I think it
is crucial to read it that way. It is not meant to be a reading of the encounter
of the one body, the body, with all bodies, but with the bodies that this one
body, this complete human form, subsumes as its own, the bodies that this
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one swallows. Irigaray suggests that the one, the body that considers itself to
be the completion of humanity, “has a spiritual and natural reference as he
becomes man.”66 Where Irigaray says “man,” I read the one, the body. With
respect to this spiritual and natural reference, “Woman no longer belongs
except biologically, and the world of man has made that biology its own.”67
Where Irigaray says “woman,” I read the two-​sex model that defines the one
body, the body and conveys religion-​race-​ability-​class-​language-​sex-​gender-​
sexuality-​nationality-​size-​please-​add-​to-​this terms as its differing but complementary and coercible other. With respect to the one of the body—​again
this is both a “spiritual and natural” figure—​such bodies are “still fertile earth
for him,” capable of being understood as affirmations of the one body of the
body, the complete and whole human form. Here one can appreciate just how
much the one body needs to instrumentalize other bodies on the basis of the
oppositional affirmation of biocentric Man that they provide. The one body,
the body, the one perfect human form subsumes such bodies and makes them
part of himself—​or herself or themself—​insofar as these might replicate certain polarizing aspects of the one body, the body. The contrasting body—​the
body that is the one that introduces contrast—​is overdetermined in its role as
a part of the whole of which the one, the body is “the head,” which is of course
figured as the controlling part in the upright-​ability-​fetishizing genre of biocentric Man. Irigaray writes, “Your infinity? An uninterrupted sequence of
projected points. With nothing linking them. Emptiness. There would seem
to be nothing there but production, recalling nothing, anticipating nothing.
Points programmed as such indefinitely, on a background of absence. What
terrifies you? That lack of closure. From which springs your struggle against
in-​finity. Origin and end, form, figure, meaning, name, the proper and the
self: these are your weapons against that unbearable infinity.”68 That unbearable infinity is taken by the one, the body to be its own non-​relational
extension. The one, the body takes other contrasting subordinately ecological bodies to be its own incomplete parts. And it does this in an effort to
avoid the terror of lack of closure. The one, the body then encloses all that it
considers its own. For Irigaray a fear of the lack of closure is a hallmark of the
one, the body. And this one of the body, the uniquely whole complete human
form, considers the earth to be its very own body. Nature would be the word
66
67
68
Irigaray, Elemental Passions, 2.
Irigaray, Elemental Passions, 2.
Irigaray, Elemental Passions, 71.
The Problem Is the One, the Body
283
for earth that serves in this role, a nature whose agency must conform with
that of the one of the body.
This strategy is never one that is only deployed by men. There are women
of the one of the body who do this, too, Irigaray worries. In this way Irigaray
herself suggests that what is ultimately problematic is the gesture of the incomparable body, the one, the complete human form.
On the basis of what I have written in Chapter 1, I would add that women
of the two, the body do this, too. This strategy of struggling against the openness of infinity by forcing the other, an other body overdetermined as other
precisely because of a vilification of the differentiations of bodies themselves,
a differentiation that is in truth a feature of the one, the body, a denied feature,
is one that is just as frequently used, for example, by white normate cis women
in their confrontations with Black and brown women, with trans women,
with autistic women, with Black and brown trans autistic women. Such white
normate cis women are fighting over the crumbs of political influence with
respect to the one body, the one. They, too, consider the earth to be their
body. They consider themselves to be the whole. Irigaray herself—​in celebrating “the lips”69 and especially in never addressing the differential race-​
language-​ability-​sex-​gender-​religion-​nation positioning that the two-​sex
model affords—​considers herself to be the whole of earth. When “women”
is taken to be a bodily generic, a false generic, this is an assumption that all
women share a body, and only women share a continuity of bodily events.
I am thinking both of the lack of attention to forced sterilization on the part
of white and normate feminists, and the exclusion of (trans)men and nonbinary people from reproductive rights movements. In keeping with biocentric
Man’s naturalization of the sex-​gender of the two-​sex model, a naturalization
again that white feminists rightly understand as an attempt to exclude them
from the polis, these are also repetitions of the genre of that one, the one, the
body, the biocentric Man, that take a falsely generic bodiment for granted.
A better response to the invention of the two-​sex model would have been
to dispute the presupposition of sex that has been part of the morphology
of the polis for so long. But instead it is because of the one, the body as a
morphology that many who are not at all biocentric Man instrumentalize
the morphologies of others in order to bolster their own aspirations in the
polis. They understand their own bodies by means of a coerced contrast with
others.
69
See, for example, Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, 205–​218.
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Irigaray has nevertheless made it possible to appreciate that the genre of
the one, the body, of biocentric Man is in a relationship of desiring to subsume certain bodies made to be complementarily different from the one, the
body. An enclosed sense of self according to the very gesture of the one of
the body requires the reifying of an other body or bodies in a contrasting,
supporting role in order to performatively institute a bounded sense of self
that considers the entire world to be an affirmation of its own natural, in the
Aristotelian sense of complete, self. “I was matter for you,”70 Irigaray writes.
The one, the body takes certain bodies as affirmation of its own sense of self,
and makes them play a role it considers capable of defining and assigning.
If Irigaray illustrates the ways in which the one, the body instrumentalizes
some bodies by taking them into itself, by swallowing them, making the other
play a role internal to the one, the body, Fanon illustrates the ways in which the
one, the body denies and destroys some other bodies in closing itself off from
them. These are the outlines of the shape of the polis. The one, the body walls
off certain bodies it takes to be unrelatable. And this has, I would argue, always
been the shape of the polis. While Irigaray writes of the terror of the “lack of
closure”71 of biocentric Man in her first-​person account in Elemental Passions,
while she encounters the one, the body as a morphology that wants to subsume
her, Fanon encounters the one, the body as a morphology that destroys him.
Fanon writes not of the fear of a lack of closure but of a desire for closure—​a
closure that shuts him out—​that threatens his life, that needs to shut him out
from a sense of self that cannot include him. Fanon in other words illustrates
another relational implication of a morphology of the one, the body, a relational implication to which Irigaray does not speak. He writes of the impediment that the one who is seen as “black/​negro [le nègre] through his body
hinders the closure of the White’s [du Blanc] postural schema.”72 “Black” or
“Negro” is the best English translation for this term le nègre that Fanon writes
in lowercase. Le nègre, Fanon argues, is taken to be the part that introduces contrast, a departure from a whole self that wants to close without him. The “cycle
of the biological,” Fanon writes, begins with this, le nègre,73 which we could
say is the black with respect to the white as bodily features that Fanon argues
seemingly cannot be observed without cortico-​visceral and Manichaean valuation by a white morphology that takes the earth for itself, presupposes it
70
71
72
73
Irigaray, Elemental Passions, 60.
Irigaray, Elemental Passions, 71.
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 138; Fanon, Peau noire, masques blancs, 193.
Fanon, Peau noire, masques blancs, 193.
The Problem Is the One, the Body
285
for itself. It is le nègre that prevents the one, the body from feeling properly
bounded and whole because when black appears, the one, the body cannot
close. Le nègre introduces something that means something about the one, the
body, Fanon suggests, and yet le nègre cannot be included in it. Fanon indicates
by defining le nègre as a psychological event for the one, the body, the uniquely
whole human, that this is not the same as le Noir: “Le Noir est un homme noir”
(the Black is a man who is black), as opposed to black/​Negro, le nègre.74 Fanon
continues: “The Black is a man who is black; in other words, owing to a series
of affective disorders he has settled into a universe from which we have to extricate him.”75 And later in the book, as I have discussed in Chapter 3, Fanon
argues that the “cycle of the biological,” the vilified biological that is a terror for
the one, the body, the perfect human form, begins with le nègre, the notion of
the Negro, not le Noir, a Black person: “What is important to us here is to show
that the biological cycle begins with negro [avec le nègre commence le cycle du
biologique].”76 According to Fanon, to the extent that le Noir is made to share
this morphology of the one, the body, then he, she, or they will likewise share
this le nègre as a psychological event. White does not desire to swallow black;
white needs to negate black, shut it out from its phenomenal world. The morphology of the one of the body feels exposed and desires to close, to wall itself
off, “at the very moment when the Black person [le Noir] emerges into the
phenomenal world of the White [dans le mode phénoménal du Blanc].”77 What
Fanon chronicles is the one, the body, the biocentric Man as perfect human,
whom he suffers from appreciating, from being made to appreciate as the teleological “destiny”78 of his own body, even as in fact this morphology seeks to
destroy him.
Irigaray and Fanon each write in a way that allows the reader to sense the
limits of their accounts, accounts that can be linked up with other accounts
of the one, the body, the complete human form that considers its own self to
be implicated by imperfect reflections of the one. The history of philosophy
of the one could be reread along these lines, lines indicated by Irigaray and
Fanon, but only partially followed through. There are surely many aspects of
the one, the body that have yet to be articulated, the pretension to displacement of earthly agencies.
74
75
76
77
78
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, xii; Fanon, Peau noire, masques blancs, 64.
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, xii, translation altered; Fanon, Peau noire, masques blancs, 64.
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 139; Fanon, Peau noire, masques blancs, 193.
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 138; Fanon, Peau noire, masques blancs, 193.
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, xiv.
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I have argued that Irigaray and Fanon illustrate different moments of the
genre of the one, the body. This is a genre that like all genres has some relationship to elemental difference. It is a weaving of relationality. The one that
understands itself as the body subsumes some bodies and rejects others. It
swallows and destroys. And all of this illustrates a certain relationship to elemental difference as a feature of what it is like to become human.
This picture is of a genre characterized by a fundamentally unstable morphology, one that must alternatively subsume and reject. That instability is
of course agency. This is clearly not a full picture of the genre of the one, the
body, but its basic commitment is there: the one, the body is a false universality that instrumentalizes some and denies others and also denies that it
is relating at all and denies the ways in which it is acted upon. It is in a very
specific and hostile relationship to elementality, and reacts when revealed as
elemental, as relational. And it does all of this in denial not only of elemental
difference but also in denial of the very constructions of morphology that are
also elemental difference. These are the contours of the genre of the one, the
body, the one complete human form that denies elemental difference.
Fanon writes, “I grasp my narcissism with both hands and I reject the vileness of those who want to turn man into a machine. If the debate cannot
be opened up on a philosophical level—​i.e., the fundamental demands of
human reality—​I agree to place it on a psychoanalytical level: in other words,
the ‘misfires,’ just as we talk about an engine misfiring.”79 For Fanon, I would
argue, the crucial feature of a machine is that it has no psychic life. A morphology can be structured to include or exclude, and understanding this goes
some way toward a better appreciation of humanity than the “global” account
in which none of this relating or refusal of relating is happening. This is the
significance of psychoanalysis for Fanon; it allows one to study how cortico-​
visceral80 bodies relate to each other, how they position themselves in relation to each other.
By what philosophical commitments is the shape of the philosopher motivated? What philosophy of Man or the one, the body is being articulated,
and what is the value of that philosophy? What shape does the philosopher’s
city take, what articulations of the cosmos in the shape of the city? Fanon
articulates in very productive ways the elementality of what it is like to be
and to become human, ways in which we need to keep struggling to develop
79
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 6–​7.
As I have pointed out previously, Fanon is ultimately critical of this distinction, but he prefers it
to the gesture of unlocated brains. See Wretched of the Earth, 216 n. 35.
80
The Problem Is the One, the Body
287
modes of reflecting on genre. If, as Fanon says, the debate could not be
opened up on a philosophical level81 by Fanon himself, it must open today.
We don’t need to know what it is like to be the whole earth in order to appreciate our own elementality. As Irigaray has written,
Human being in a way became lost in the world, whatever its claim to
master it, without a possible return to itself, without building a passage between the outside and the inside of its self. Hence the projection of this self
onto the world and the incorporation of the world into the self, two processes that prevent us from inhabiting or dwelling both in the outside and
in the inside. In other words, they [the two processes] prevent us from being
able to stay in ourselves through recognizing the otherness of the other and
the fecundity of meeting with all sorts of others that constitute the world.82
As I have tried to suggest, though Irigaray is rightly focused on the ways in
which the one of the body “incorporates the world into itself,” selectively
identifying with certain of the animals and intermittently considering the
earth to be the body, there is more to the story. But this aspect of Irigaray’s
work can be reread as part of a larger story of the polis and its morphology.
It is difficult to live the outside precisely because of the vacant, scared, inflated, or otherwise disturbing inside. What needs to be developed, Irigaray
suggests, is the capacity to “inhabit” oneself, and to perceive the role of one’s
own morphology in a world of morphology, a fluid relationality that will
not admit of sharp distinctions of inside and outside, since what is inside is
shaping what is outside and vice versa. A certain quality of relating is necessary to ourselves as elemental difference, an appreciation of the requirement
of elemental difference in order to be and to become at all.
This is what it is like to be human, and yet it is absent in the philosophical tradition of the polis. Irigaray argues that this neglect is “already at
work in Early Greek culture,”83 in which the one, the body, the lone perfect
human form is differentiated precisely away from other bodies of which it
is the perfection and in this very gesture is differentiated from the entire
earth-​fire-​water-​air.84 But for the one of the body, humanity is not so easy
81
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 6–​7.
Luce Irigaray, To Be Born: Genesis of a New Human Being (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2017), 25.
83 Irigaray, To Be Born, 25.
84 Irigaray, “There Can Be No Democracy,” 194.
82
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to differentiate in a world of elemental difference. And it is not wrong to
wonder just how close or different humanity is from other breathing things.
Perhaps it is impossible to quantify. The one, the body makes new discoveries in the field of “animal studies” every day. But part of why it feels as if it
is necessary to compare humanity to other breathing things is because the
polis tradition has defined itself in opposition to morphology and in relation to an unstable gesture of “animality” that occasionally is part of an earth
that the polis considers to be its own body and occasionally is that which
the polis escapes. The instability of this gesture is a repetition of the instability of the morphology of the body. Sometimes humans feel that they are
the animals, and sometimes they destroy the animals. Irigaray writes, “As
plants or animals sometimes fight over the territory essential to their subsistence and their growth, humans fight over the cultural universe that they
have constructed when they have not succeeded in inhabiting themselves
and coexisting as living beings.”85 Clearly humans fight over territory, too, in
their own way. Territory is another word for morphology. The one, the body,
the one complete human form is an effort to take the territory, the earth, as
belonging to that one, the body, the one homogeneous human body. This is a
genre that attempts to collect itself, unstably, by swallowing some and devastating others to whom it feels that it does not relate.
5.3. The Ecological of the Body Is a Denial
of Elemental Difference
My interest in elemental difference is not an interest in bodily difference
per se, but rather an effort to understand the mutual conceptual relationship of the political and ecological and the role that the denial of elemental
difference plays not only in that conceptual distinction but also in the ecological breakdown with which the distinction is, on my understanding,
synonymous. Political and ecological become distinct realms by means of
installing the polis and denying admittance to elemental difference—​the
agency of earth-​air-​fire-​water, including languages, accent, dialect, calendar,
including patterns of rest and holiday, all the ways in which humanities engage in shaping, in morphology. The polis is a morphology, a sense of I, but it
must deny that. In a genre of the one, the body, it is difficult to find gestures
85
Irigaray, “Starting from Ourselves,” 105.
The Problem Is the One, the Body
289
that affirm elemental agency, even of that which is obviously present. The
denial of shaping, morphology, to those who are felt to be in close relation to
the one, the body—​departures of these from each other both within and as
genre—​is dehumanization, denying of humanities.
The gesture of the political is rooted in the concept of the polis, a crucial
concept in the present that is to this day most consistently articulated by
Aristotle. I have argued that while Frantz Fanon locates the splintering of
the political from the ecological in the figure of the native-​nature-​the biological, already this distinction appears in the shape of the polis of Aristotle, for
whom the polis is made up of households (oikos). The households by nature
are men, women, children, slaves, property. The polis is the whole of which
oikoi are parts. And there is a beyond of the polis, a natural non-​location for
humans. Aristotle’s Politics is an exploration of various modes of rule that
have in common a certain one, the body, the one complete human form that
rules. This is what Sylvia Wynter will call biocentric Man.86 This is a body
who rules by nature, defined by Aristotle as “what each thing is when fully
developed whether we are speaking of a man, a horse, or a family.”87 For
Aristotle, Man is a completion of which women, slaves, children, and property are fractional resemblances. Each is a falling short of the fullness of
Man. While proponents of the scientific concept of racism in the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries would later use Aristotle’s philosophy of natural
slavery, that some are “from the hour of their birth . . . marked out for subjection,”88 in order to make a justification that apparently needed making,
Benjamin Isaac has argued that already “for Aristotle . . . it is clear that slaves
by nature are non-​Greeks and the masters by nature Greeks.”89 There is thus
already in the structuring of the polis and in its constitutive households (“a
complete household consists of slaves and freemen”)90 a distinction between
who ought to rule the polis and everyone else who is part of it but excluded
from complete identification with the one whole human. The polis, the content of the term “political,” is a bodily definition of the one human articulated
in terms of the polis and the parts that ought not to rule it.
While the polis is a bodily identification of the one, the body, the complete
human form, it is also a mutual definition of the culmination of that which
86
87
88
89
90
Wynter, “1492,” “The Ceremony Found,” “No Humans Involved.”
Aristotle, Politics 1.2.1252b32–​33.
Aristotle, Politics 1.5.1254a22–​23.
Isaac, Invention of Racism, 178.
Aristotle, Politics 1.3.1253b1.
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is ecological. Ecological pertains to the oikoi and the bodies that constitute
them as anonymous parts of the polis. The polis-​oikos distinction is the basic
ordering of a wider elementality by means of the ordering of those bodies
whose culmination is the one, the body, the complete human form. The one of
the body is distinguished by the capacity for rule in the polis and in the household that this body has by virtue of its capacity for thinking and the “apprehension of future possibilities.”91 The entire edifice points upward and away from
itself to an immaterial agent that directs the whole, this capacity for thinking
that introduces intelligence and freedom from necessity into the polis.92
Bruno Latour argues that the modern indicates an aspiration to entirely divide this polis from previously constitutive but un-​acting parts. The modern
“designates two sets of entirely difference practices,” translation that creates
hybrids of nature and culture and purification that creates two “entirely distinct zones” of “human beings” and “nonhumans.”93 He writes that the second
practice, purification, is “the modern critical stance,” according to which a
properly modern human seeks to create hybrids of nature and culture of wise
design. Latour argues that when one no longer makes the human-​nonhuman
distinction, when in other words one returns to humans a “share of things,”94
this alters the character of the making of hybrids so that one can appreciate that
one has been blending nature and culture all along. And with this open mixing
of powers both human and nonhuman, “our future begins to change.”95
The modern polis of which Latour writes is a deepening of the edifice of
the ancient polis that was already in place. Without a critique of the one, the
body, the bodily ruler of the polis, the Latourian strategy threatens to become
a return to the holistic Aristotelian picture. Without a critique of the bodily
structuring of the polis, there is a return to familiar but troubling images: Gaia
and the barbarian.96 While Latour does explicitly reject the gesture of nature,
the understanding of nature that he rejects is the modern one in which nature and politics are mutually distinguished. He doesn’t seem to reject the nature of the Aristotelian polis. He does acknowledge the ingredient of “Greek
politics” in the making of nature as it still conceptually functions: “Political
ecology has nothing at all to do with ‘nature’—​that blend of Greek politics,
French Cartesianism, and American parks. Let me put it bluntly: political
91
Bianchi, The Feminine Symptom, 178.
Bianchi, The Feminine Symptom, 89.
93 Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, 10–​11.
94 Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, 136.
95 Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, 11.
96 See, for example, Facing Gaia and the passage on “the barbarian” in Politics of Nature, 71. On the
identification of imperfect human form and organic nature, see Merchant, The Death of Nature.
92
The Problem Is the One, the Body
291
ecology has nothing to do with nature.”97 But when he indicates how “to mix
scientific controversy and political discussion together into a single arena,”
he writes that the human tendency to “blather on” is “insurmountable” in
both theory and practice:
Humans are still the ones who blather on. Here we have an asymmetry that
is not only insurmountable in practice but insurmountable in theory, if we
want to maintain the eminent place of humans and retain the admirable
definition of the “political animal” [a direct reference to Aristotle] that has
always served as a basis for public life: it is because he spoke freely on the
agora that man—​at least the male citizen—​had the right of citizenship.
Fine; who is saying anything different? Who wants to question this definition? Who wants to undermine its foundation? I am indeed situating myself in the concatenation of these principles.98
He then invokes and endorses Aristotle’s distinction between participants in
representative assemblies from “the barbarian” who is either “ignorant” or
“acts, out of prejudice, to limit their [representative assemblies’] importance
and scope; someone who claims indisputable power through which he short-​
circuits the slow work of representation”:99 “Far from calling this acquisition
[of “these principles”] into question, I claim on the contrary to be extending
it, naming the extension of speech to nonhumans Civilization.”100 In other
words, Latour reintroduces the political-​ecological account of Aristotle, its
morphology of the one, the human, including the figure of the barbarian
who threatens this rule. Latour argues that this holistic framework will give
to all humans their “share of things”101 and give to nonhumans voices as citizens, so long as there is a universalization of who is authorized to speak and
to rule. As I have argued in Chapter 3, there is no sustained critique of the
gesture of the polis in Latour’s account. Because the human is ultimately a
universal one, the body, for Latour what needs to be done is to appreciate the
agency of things. Latour contends that appreciating the agency of things will
change the way the humans relate to each other.
As Saidiya Hartman and Frantz Fanon have suggested, the agency of things
is already appreciated. We can appreciate this in the anger and entitlement
97
98
99
100
101
Latour, Politics of Nature, 4–​5.
Latour, Politics of Nature, 71.
Latour, Politics of Nature, 71.
Latour, Politics of Nature, 71.
Latour, We Have Never Been Modern,136.
292
The Climate of the Body
integral to the gesture of the one, the body, the complete human that floats
above elemental difference according to the one. The one, the body considers
itself to be abodily, and thus elemental difference, Fanon and Hartman implicitly confirm, when the one feels this most keenly, is placed on the wrong
side of the political-​ecological divide. The one, the body that is the perfection of human form is the political. All other bodies are either accessories
to this rule or threaten it. What is crucial to observe is that this divide can
remain after Latour’s critique of the nature-​culture distinction. It can remain
after Butler’s demonstration of the political character of the gesture of matter.
There is a nature proper to the political, a nature of the polis, a proper end
of the polis. This proper end is only demonstrable by virtue of the mutually
informing concept of the ecological, and both political and ecological structure the genre of the one. This is what makes ecological fascism or ecofascism
not only possible, but a distinct danger of the conflation of humans and
nonhumans without a critique of the polis, the one, the body, the one perfect
human form. Whereas Latour is right to question the emptying of culture out
of what is described as nature in gestures and aspirations to be modern, what
he is not appreciating is that the very distinction between the political and
the ecological is nature of another sort, a genre according to thinking Man,
who rules among things.
The one, the body is a denial of elemental difference that is therefore not
strictly political, in the sense that it pertains to that which is relational in
humanity. It is ecological in that it overdetermines a characterization of bad
agency assigned to any bodies that demonstrate the lie of the one, the body,
and the elemental relationality of this one to other bodies. Would-​be humans
are uniquely positioned to demonstrate the elementality of the body itself, its
in fact bodily specificity. The one is a gesture of political positioning and ecological distancing, and this entire edifice is threatened most by other genres,
other humanities, because of the threat of the perception of the biological
when it comes closest to biocentric Man.
The denial of elemental difference is in this way an overdetermination of
both polis animosity and ecological breakdown and cannot be parsed as either political or ecological. It is the enforcement of the distinction itself. In
Chapter 4 I discussed the sides currently being implicitly taken regarding
climate disruption. On one side you have Bruno Latour, who argues that
the causes of climate disruption have to do with a lack of appreciation for
the agency of things. On the other side you have Ghassan Hage, who argues
that the causes of climate disruption have to do with a certain political positioning that he names “generalized domestication” that aims to “evacuate
The Problem Is the One, the Body
293
the human . . . from anything perceived as animal and vice versa” and is always “trying-​to-​be-​domesticator, trying-​to-​be-​human, trying-​to-​be-​white,
trying-​to-​be-​male person.”102 (Hage is speaking precisely of the one of the
body, using the two-​sex model to do so.) I have argued that ultimately Sylvia
Wynter’s work is on the side blaming politics for climate change.
Each of these ultimately takes a side of a distinction, and in this way the
distinction itself remains unquestioned. I argue that the sides themselves—​
political and ecological—​are the morphology of the one, the body, the lone
complete human form that both identifies itself as white, as masculine-​by-​
nature, as a natural sex-​gender, and also installs a specific body as the figure of
the political-​immateriality, a figure of where the political is and where the ecological is not. There is a certain morphology that takes a distinct bodiedness
for its evidence and goal, and this is seen not only in the genres most responsible for inventing and promoting technologies of climate disruption, but
also in who and what is in power in meetings and summits meant to address
ecological breakdown. The body of the polis assembles to address ecological breakdown, but of course this cannot address the root of the problem, a
disbelief in bodiment that figures that disbelief with the one of the body, the
triumphant complete polis form.
This brings me back to a theme with which this book begins, what Achille
Mbembe names the age of security. The age of security is the form that denial
of elemental difference takes in the present. Not only are the implications
of global heating, increased fires, unprecedentedly forceful and numerous
hurricanes, ocean level and acidity, bee colony collapse underestimated in
the confused anger of the one, the body. Not only is the full measure of these
events not felt. They are replaced with the fears of the polis of the need to
reconstitute itself after centuries of incursion. The morphology of the security in question is not universal; it is a desire to secure the one, the body,
and the integrity of the polis. It is a desire for enclosing the polis, as Fanon
has articulated this and as I have discussed. Recall that for Mbembe the age
of security is characterized by an intense assignment of racial difference to
bodies that mean the biological with respect to the polis. In the age of security the cataloging of appearances of bodies becomes a security device.
Race, he writes, is “a more or less coded way of dividing and organizing a
multiplicity, fixing and distributing it according to a hierarchy.”103 Race, as
appearances that constitute what is real, “makes it possible to identify and
102
103
Hage, Racism an Environmental Threat, 98–​101.
Mbembe, Critique of Black Reason, 35.
294
The Climate of the Body
define population groups in a way that makes each of them carriers of differentiated and more or less shifting risk.”104
Mbembe argues that because “the Other is at once difference and similarity,
united,” then “what we must imagine is a politics of humanity that is fundamentally a politics of the similar, but in a context in which what we all share
from the beginning is difference. It is our differences that, paradoxically, we
must share.”105 As I have argued throughout the book, difference has been and
is still conceived of as ecological, a threat to that which is polis. The ecological
is a side that is defined against an absolute similarity-​in-​complementarity of
the polis, that which is political. Thus the “politics of humanity” is already “a
politics of the similar.” Similarity is a sign of the polis; difference is a sign of
the ecological. However practicable ecological breakdown becomes, for those
who identify with the polis, nature is still their own proper body. The polis in
its undifferentiable form gives a person an abstract, universal morphology as
the entire world, a world that they own. A world that they must protect. What
is not nature according to the body, any part of those whose teleological end
is the human, needs to be shut out in order to reconstitute the polis and its
nature: denial of the thing-​powers of earth, denial of the elemental difference
without which there would be no one, the body, at all.
An affirmation of elementality is a way of responding to this age of security. Relationality is elemental, and thus there is no one, the body, without
bodies that are made to compare with it. Biocentrism is a genre, not the definition of what it is like to become human. And biocentrism must be exposed
for the denial of earth that it in fact is. Each of us is one part of an earth that
exceeds us, without which I would not be. I am part of earth-​fire-​water-​air.
I am not the whole of this, though “I” am a brief site of their confluence. The
gesture of security denies of all of this—​the threat that it perceives in the biological, the very distinction between the political and the ecological. The gesture of security, like biocentrism, pretends to be a perception of teleological
events. It defines the human as the one of the body who transcends ecological breakdown in transcending the ecological. The polis seeks, as Mbembe
writes, the safety of enclosure.106 Is it a coincidence that the Anthropocene is
the age of security? No. This is the very shape of the polis.
104
105
106
Mbembe, Critique of Black Reason, 35. See also Browne, Dark Matters.
Mbembe, Critique of Black Reason, 178.
Mbembe, Necropolitics, 96.
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Index
For the benefit of digital users, indexed terms that span two pages (e.g., 52–​53) may, on
occasion, appear on only one of those pages.
Afro-​pessimism, 39–​40, 44
See also Frank Wilderson
agency
material agency as oxymoron, 140–​41,
143, 158, 214
material agency as unauthorized threat,
166–​67, 186, 188–​94, 199–​200,
214, 255–​56
polis as authorized, matter
as unauthorized, 192–​93,
223–​24, 274–​75
polis as synonymous with, 3–​5, 28–​29,
45, 53–​54, 140–​41, 143, 158–​59,
171–​73, 175–​76, 202, 214–​15, 224,
243–​44, 245–​46, 256–​58, 265–​66
as undermining the polis-​oikos
distinction, 3, 5–​6, 191, 199–​200,
276, 288–​89
versus actancy in political ecology,
119–​20, 139–​40, 145, 146–​47,
148, 149–​50, 153–​55, 158–​59,
257–​58, 265–​66
Alcoff, Linda Martín, 11–​12, 12n.40,
14n.44, 96–​98, 103–​4, 105, 106–​9,
106n.7, 107–​8n.14, 109n.20
Al-​Saji, Alia, 36, 183n.171
animality, 10, 40–​41, 151–​52, 154, 169–​70,
181–​82, 251–​52, 287–​88
Anthropocene, 14n.46, 32–​34, 33n.26, 50,
78, 90, 133–​34, 144–​45, 172–​73, 187–​
88, 203–​4, 267n.35
as age of security, 34, 50, 78, 172–​73, 294
anthropocentrism, 2–​3, 17, 18, 102n.1,
117–​18, 257n.5
Aristotle, 3–​6, 4n.14, 5n.19, 7, 27, 28–​30,
44, 45, 46–​48, 50–​51, 52, 54, 55n.95,
58–​59, 60, 69n.138, 71–​72, 74, 77,
79–​80, 84–​85, 87, 88–​90, 91–​92, 96,
97–​98, 98n.217, 163–​64, 181n.164,
189, 190–​91, 193, 198–​99, 201n.9,
206–​8, 209–​10, 216–​17, 219, 232,
233–​34, 235–​37, 241n.124, 243–​47,
245n.129, 248, 250–​51, 263–​64, 276–​
77, 280, 289, 291
on “equality for equals”
28–​29, 264–​65
Barad, Karen, 15–​16, 17, 20–​21, 90, 115–​
24, 136–​37, 139, 139n.1, 143, 145,
147–​48, 149–​50, 158–​59, 180, 202–​3,
242–​43, 255–​56, 262–​64, 275–​76
Belle, Katherine Sophia, 98n.217,
168n.103
Bennett, Jane, 13n.41, 17–​18, 52n.89,
82–​83, 89, 101, 116–​18, 118n.54, 119,
120–​21, 123–​24, 134, 140–​41, 141n.3,
148–​49, 153, 158–​59, 215
Bettcher, Talia Mae, 32, 41, 43–​44,
69, 189–​90
Bianchi, Emmanuela, 69n.138, 77,
77n.162, 87, 87n.192, 241n.124,
245–​46, 248
biocentric Man, 6, 7–​9, 197–​224, 232–​33,
256, 270–​88
as the aspiration to
disembodiment, 256–​58
See also biocentrism
biocentrism, 6–​8, 31, 32–​78, 84–​85, 199–​
201, 220–​22, 232–​33, 243–​44
as bios-​centrism, 46–​47, 53–​54, 241
as thought-​centrism, 6–​7, 201, 240, 241,
243–​44, 256–​59
biological, the. See Fanon, Frantz
biopolitics, 60–​61, 161–​64, 172–​73
306
Index
bios, 6–​7, 45, 47, 53–​54, 55n.95, 71–​72, 84,
161, 163, 170–​71, 180, 241, 248
and mythos in Sylvia Wynter, 241,
247–​48, 250–​51
body, the, 4–​7, 78–​101, 288–​94
in contrast to the question of
humanity, 276–​77
the one of, 4–​6, 7–​9, 10–​12, 27, 44, 51–​
52, 53–​54, 62–​63, 70–​71, 74, 77, 137,
139, 188–​89, 191, 192–​93, 214–​15,
216–​17, 232–​34, 235, 236–​37, 244,
246, 257–​58, 269, 271–​72, 276–​77,
279–​80, 281
as participant in a double bind of the
polis, 279–​80
the two of, 7–​9, 27, 50–​51, 62–​63, 70–​
71, 76–​77, 188, 191–​92, 201–​2, 234,
279, 283
Braidotti, Rosi, 2–​3, 105n.6, 257n.5,
267n.35, 273n.45
See also posthuman predicament
Butler, Judith, 12–​15, 105–​15, 198–​99,
202–​3, 220–​21, 259–​88
on Irigaray, Luce, 36, 260
on matter, 90, 108–​9, 112–​14, 263–​64
on performativity, 109–​10, 111–​12,
115, 260–​63
Clare, Eli, 9–​10, 44–​45, 275–​76
climate change, 2–​3, 3n.12, 55n.96, See
also climate disruption; climate
emergency; global heating
climate disruption, 2, 3, 6–​7, 12, 15, 22–​23,
168–​69, 202–​3, 224, 253, 257–​59, 293
climate emergency, 202, 251
Combahee River Collective, 35–​36, 95–​96,
98–​101, 220–​21
Connolly, William E., 95, 217n.51
democracy, 32–​34, 59n.103, 91–​92, 93–​
94, 147n.30, 147–​48, 155–​56, 189,
192, 267
disability, 11–​12, 11n.36, 52–​53, 122, 151–​
52, 175n.132, 192
diversity-​universality conundrum, 203–​4
ecoapartheid, 172–​73
ecocide. See genocide-​ecocide distinction
ecofascism, 21, 98–​99, 157–​58, 159–​61,
162, 163–​64, 164n.92, 165, 172–​73,
214–​15, 217–​18, 265–​66, 267, 291–92
elemental difference
definition of, 3–​6, 94–​95, 188–​94, 276
is not sexual difference, 5, 19–​20, 32–​78
envelope-​thing, 85–​86, 87–​88, 133, 214
environmentalism
Fanon’s rejection of, 30, 168n.102,
180, 186–​87
Irigaray’s rejection of, 28, 30–​31, 87–​88,
101, 214
political ecology as a rejection of, 17–​
18, 30–​31, 52n.89, 102n.1, 117–​18,
148–​49, 156, 158–​59
Fanon, Frantz
on agency, 73–​74, 140–​42, 166–​67, 175–​
76, 179, 184–​85, 186–​87
as anticipator of both political ecology
and social construction, 142–​43
on the biological, 54, 141–​42, 170–​71,
174, 183, 210
on “delirious Manichaeanism” 19–​20
on Manichaeanism, 19, 21–​22,
73–​74, 165–​88
on the zoological, 54, 161, 176, 181,
183, 210
Fausto-​Sterling, Anne, 13–​15,
61n.108, 61–​62
feminist philosophy, 7–​8, 48–​49, 50
flesh, 40–​43, 44–​45, 51, 74, 104, 109–​10,
118, 126, 129, 130, 132, 236, 237–​38,
242–​43, 273–​74
form-​matter distinction, the, 21–​22, 78–​101
hierarchy as an inherent feature
of, 79–​80
sex-​gender distinction as an instance
of, 14n.48
See also hylomorphism
Foucault, Michel, 47–​48, 52, 193, 205–​7,
205n.15, 208
Garland-​Thomson, Rosemarie,
11–​12, 220–​21
See also normate
genocide. See genocide-​ecocide
distinction
Index
genocide-​ecocide distinction, 202–​3, 210–​
11, 223–​25, 236–​39
genre
the body as, 15, 52–​53, 94, 270–​94
definition of, 273–​75, 280, 286
Wynter, Sylvia on, 21–​23, 55, 56–​57,
200–​1, 202–​3, 219–​20, 221–​22, 224,
225–​42, 243–​44, 246
See also Wynter, Sylvia
Gines, Kathryn T. See Belle,
Katherine Sophia
global heating, 2, 55, 223–​24, 256, 293–​94
Grosz, Elizabeth, 44–​45, 61–​62
Hage, Ghassan, 251–​52, 252n.154,
253, 292–​93
Hartman, Saidiya, 124–​38
as Afro-​pessimist, 40, 136
on Anthropocene, 133–​34
on equality as a tool of exclusion, 128–​29
on mundane practices of
enslavement, 125
on pageantry of the coffle, 125
on performativity of white
disembodiment, 104, 115, 127,
128–​29, 132
reservations regarding performativity,
124–​30, 132–​33
on sheer weight of a history of terror,
124–​25, 128
on use of the thing, 87–​88, 104,
133, 134–​35
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 32,
86–​87, 90–​91
hierarchy
as aspiration to immateriality, 79–​80
of body-​bodies, 12, 52–​53
of form-​matter, 79–​80, 89, 96
Huffer, Lynne, 1n.1, 5n.21, 68n.134
hybridity, 22n.65, 203
See also Latour, Bruno; Wynter,
Sylviahylomorphism, 87, 88–​89,
See also form-​matter distinction
identity politics, 30, 95–​96, 98–​101
International Governmental Panel on
Climate Change (IPCC), 55–​56, 223–​
24, 236, 256
307
intersectionality, 37–​38, 38n.43, 182, 281
Irigaray, Luce
on envelope-​thing, 86–​88, 93–​94, 101,
133, 214
on “formal and empty one” 90–​95
on form-​matter hierarchy, 79–​90
on morphology, 95–​98, 101
on sexual difference, 4–​5, 19–​20, 32–​78
Jones, Rachel, 5n.19, 32n.19, 33n.26, 66–​
68, 68n.134, 83n.181, 85n.185, 88,
88n.194, 96, 245–​46, 248
Kant, Immanuel, 148–​49
Karera, Axelle, 11–​12, 90
Kjellén, Rudolph, 161–​62, 163–​64
See also biopolitics
Koyama, Emi, 38n.43, 182n.169
Laqueur, Thomas
on the one-​sex model, 69
on the two-​sex model, 8, 59, 68, 69–​70
Latour, Bruno
on actancy versus agency, 257–​58
on humanity, 22–​23, 217, 257–​58,
259–​70, 291
on hybridity, 21–​22, 143–​65, 242–​54
on modernity, 46–​47, 71, 72–​73, 92–​93,
143–​65, 189, 198–​99, 290–​91
as political ecologist, 18–​19, 21, 83,
143–​65, 268–​69, 291
Lorde, Audre, 78
Lugones, María, 28n.4
matter
Butler’s rejection of concept of,
108–​15, 119, 120–​21, 123–​24,
127–​28, 131–​32
material agency as unauthorized threat,
166–​67, 186, 188–​94, 199–​200,
214, 255–​56
as opposed to form in Irigaray, 78–​101
See also agency
Mbembe, Achille
on age of security in the Anthropocene,
32–​34, 293–​94
on Fanon, 176
Merchant, Carolyn, 208–​13, 215
308
Index
mind-​body distinction, 45, 174–​75, 181–​
82, 183–​86, 187
morphology, 5n.19, 95–​96, 99–​101
nature-​culture distinction, 52–​53,
67n.132, 73–​74, 88–​89, 113–​14, 116,
119, 140–​41, 144–​45, 146, 156, 157,
158, 159–​60, 166–​67, 177, 178–​79,
198–​99, 267–​68, 291–92
new materialisms, 1n.1, 13n.41, 180, 209
nonhuman
ecological, 3, 16–​17, 20–​21, 71, 116,
120–​22, 123, 124, 136, 143–​65
political, 20–​21, 32–​34, 121, 123–​24,
127–​28, 136, 165–​88
as two distinct indications of the polis,
136–​38, 139–​40, 217–​18, 269–​70
normate, 11n.36, 76, 122–​23, 189–​90,
241, 283
nous, 3–​4, 22n.65, 45, 71–​72, 95–​96, 199–​
200, 240, 241, 241n.124, 244, 245–​47,
248, 258–​59
one-​sex model, 32, 69–​70, 233
Oyěwùmí, Oyèrónkẹ́ 28n.4, 45, 48–​51, 52–​
53, 54, 67n.132, 197, 232–​33
performativity
Butler, Judith on, 13–​15, 62–​63, 105–​15,
151, 259–​70
Hartman, Saidiya on, 104, 115,
124–​38
as philosophy of climate disruption, 3,
202–​24, 242–​54, 259–​65, 292–​93
political ecologists’ critiques of, 1–​2,
102–​3, 115–​24, 263–​64
Wynter, Sylvia on, 55, 57, 225–​43, 264,
270–​71, 272–​73, 274–​75
Plato, 3–​4, 6, 32, 44–​45, 54–​55, 60, 72,
87n.192, 120–​21, 154n.58, 171–​72,
209, 245–​46
polis
agency as synonymous with, 5, 28–​29,
45, 53–​54, 140–​41, 143, 158–​59,
171–​73, 175–​76, 202, 214–​15, 224,
243–​44, 245–​46, 255–​58, 265–​66
definition of, 2–​3, 6–​7, 188–​94, 289–​90
equality as hallmark of, 28–​29, 37, 77
modern versus ancient, 50–​51, 71–​73,
77, 89–​90, 91–​92, 93–​94, 96, 189–​91,
198–​99, 233–​34, 243–​44, 290–​91
See also agency
polis-​oikos distinction, 22–​23, 47–​48,
93–​94, 185–​86, 190–​91, 192, 198–​99,
213–​14, 218, 220–​21, 233–​34, 236–​
37, 239, 242, 244, 253, 269–​70, 290
See also political-​ecological distinction
political-​ecological distinction, the,
39, 78, 150, 193–​94, 203, 214, 223,
258–​59, 280
See also polis-​oikos distinction
political ecology
Barad, Karen on, 115–​24, 136
Bennett, Jane on, 17–​18, 89, 101, 116,
117–​18, 119, 153, 158–​59
definition of, 117–​18
Latour, Bruno on, 143–​65, 242–​54, 259,
265–​10, 288–​92
performative critiques of, 15,
120–​21, 149
as philosophy of climate disruption,
3, 117–​18
rejection of environmentalism by, 17–​
18, 30–​31, 52n.89, 102n.1, 117–​18,
148–​49, 156, 158–​59
reliance on performativity of, 15–​16, 18,
115–​24, 137–​38, 148–​49
posthuman predicament, 2–​3
posthumanism, 183–​84, 211n.36, 257–​58,
257n.5, 266–​67, 273, 276
See also posthuman predicament
Prakash, Gyan, 152–​53
precarity, 13–​15, 115, 123–​24, 260–​66,
261n.17
Preciado, Paul B.
on multimorphism, 63, 275
on pharmacopornographic era, 63–​65
as political ecologist 22–​23, 63–​65,
64n.123, 134
on two-​sex model, 41, 60–​62, 63–​65, 76
race
the one and two of the body as source of
concepts of, 8, 46–​47, 72, 84–​85, 169–​
70, 176, 191–​92, 233–​34, 236–​37,
239, 281–​83
Index
309
performative philosophy of, 1–​2,
125, 126, 127–​28, 207–​8, 219, 222,
227–​30, 235–​36
as religion of secularism, 53–​54, 56
as science of anatomy, 13–​15, 56,
80n.170, 202, 203–​4, 206, 210, 224,
229–​30, 231, 232, 235–​36, 243–​44
as security device in the Anthropocene,
32–​34, 36, 37–​39, 50–​51, 293–​94
(see also Mbembe, Achille)
social construction of, 13–​15,
96–​97, 216–​17
recognition, 100–​1
135, 136, 137–​38, 148–​49, 153, 158–​
59, 215, 294
See also Jane Bennett; Saidiya Hartman
on the use of the thing
Thomson, Rosemarie Garland. See
Rosemarie Garland-​Thomson
transfeminism, 51–​52, 182
two-​sex model, 8, 27, 78–​101, 189–​90,
191–​92, 267–​68, 283
See also the two of the body
secularism, 34–​35, 36, 38–​39, 46, 53–​54, 56,
206–​36, 219, 222, 241, 242, 256, 264
race as the religion of, 46, 53–​54, 56
sex-​gender distinction, 40–​41, 42, 49–​
50, 60–​61, 61n.108, 62–​63, 66–​68,
100, 110–​11
Sexton, Jared, 49, 235–​36
Sharpe, Christina, 33n.26, 108, 121n.68
Smith, William A. 37–​39, 40
Snorton, C. Riley, 41, 42–​43, 44, 62–​63,
65–​66, 74
social construction
definition of, 105, 106
difference between performativity and,
13–​15, 14n.45, 113–​14
Spillers, Hortense J. 28n.4, 40–​41, 42–​43,
44, 62–​63
Stryker, Susan, 95, 96, 100–​1
whiteness, 20–​21, 106–​7, 108, 125, 127,
128, 129–​30, 131–​32, 171–​72
Wilderson, Frank, 13–​15, 31n.13, 39–​41,
42, 126, 171–​72, 235–​36
Willett, Cynthia, 32, 154n.58
Wynter, Sylvia
on biocentrism and biocentric
Man, 7–​8, 21–​22, 32, 55–​56,
203–​24
on Fanon, Frantz, 187–​88, 225–​42
on genocide-​ecocide, 55, 203–​24
on genre, 21–​22, 225–​42
on hybridity, 225–​26, 242–​54
on Irigaray, Luce, 34–​36
on Man 1 and 2 205n.15, 206–​8
on Man 2 205n.15, 206–​8, 224
on performativity, 55, 57, 225–​43, 264,
270–​71, 272–​73, 274–​75
on secularism, 53–​54
thing-​power, 13n.41, 17–​18, 101, 116,
117–​18, ​118n.54, 119, 123–​24, 134,
United Nations, 55–​56, 123–​24, 223–​24,
236, 256
zoological, the. See Fanon, Frantz