Our Times Are Always Out of Joint: Feminist Relational Ethics in and of the World Today: An Interview with Rosi Braidotti

Abstract

Rosi Braidotti is a philosopher and distinguished university professor at Utrecht University and the founding director of the Centre for the Humanities in Utrecht. Her first book, Patterns of Dissonance (1991), undertook the balancing act of connecting the redefinition of the feminine in post-Hegelian philosophy with the demand for feminist subjectivity. For Braidotti, becoming-woman is a qualitative multiplicity that simultaneously unfolds other becomings, including becoming-animal, becoming-minoritarian, becoming-machine, becoming-other and becoming-nomad, all from a politics of location that demands accountability. Nomadic Subjects (1994) signalled a new point of departure for feminist thinkers when it was first published, and has now gone into a thoroughly revised second edition (2011). Metamorphoses (2002) and Transpositions (2006) explore zoe as an affirmative, non-human force of connection, generating groundbreaking insights into the social imaginary and sexual and racial difference, as well as posthumanism, which is further developed in The Posthuman (2013). Braidotti has also edited a number of influential volumes on Deleuze, post-secularism and cosmopolitanism, and, most recently, with Paul Gilroy, Conflicting Humanities (2016). Her influence and prestige continue to grow and, in March 2017, she gave the Tanner Lectures on Human Values at the Whitney Humanities Center, Yale University—two public lectures and a conversation with Rüdiger Campe (Professor of German and Comparative Literature) and Joanna Radin (Professor of History of Medicine and History) jointly titled ‘Posthuman, All Too Human’. This interview took place on 11 October 2016, during Braidotti’s time as the Hope Street Writer in Residence with the Department of English and Centre for New and International Writing at the University of Liverpool.

Keywords:

• Braidotti
• Brexit
• Deleuze
• European Union
• fascism
• feminism
• gender
• humanities
• nationalism
• nomad
• nomadology
• posthuman
• Spinoza

Notes

1 In 2010, the ATHENA Network was awarded the Erasmus Prize by the European Commission’s Lifelong Learning Programme in recognition of its outstanding contribution to fostering social inclusion in and through education and training.

2 This discussion took place at the First Supper Symposium at the Chateau Neuf Concert Hall, Oslo, 12 May 2014. A video of the talks and the discussion is available at www.thefirstsuppersymposium.org/index.php/en/symposium-2014/video-2014.