Twenty-first Century: Genesis, Enfleshed

Abstract

This article analyses Alina Reyes' La Settima Notte (2004) through the philosophy and ethics of Luce Irigaray's The Way of Love (2002) and Rosi Braidotti's most recent work. Reyes' novel is compared and contrasted to the beginning of Genesis. The aim of the article is to show how a new ethics of nomadism and of female desire is being expressed both in philosophy and fiction, and this can be taken as a feminist ethics that refuses to see heterosexuality as ‘sleeping with the enemy’. This is also an ethics in clear contrast to patriarchal, logocentric visions of ethics. The importance of the process of becoming in relation to the other for an enfleshed subjectivity, and the importance of zoe, that is, the animal part of the subject, point to new figurations of subjectivity that aim at going beyond post-modern (and often still patriarchal in vision) ideas of hybrid disembodied subjects lost in a dystopic world. The nomadic, enfleshed subject is seen as sensuously relational and respectful of alterity. Further, as a patriarchal binary discourse is undermined, the idea of the divine as residing in each and every subject is also taken to represent a new direction which feminism could explore further.

Keywords:

• Genesis
• enfleshed nomadic subject
• being in relation with the other
• female desire
• the divine

Notes

¹ The term ‘God’, in upper case, is used throughout the article when referring to the Biblical God, and the term ‘god’, in lower case, is used to refer to the idea of divinity drawn from Reyes' novel and Braidotti's work. Similarly, when referring to the Genesis of the Bible the upper case is used, and when referring to the idea of a new feminist-nomadic genesis as implied by Reyes' novel the lower case is used.

² See for reference feminist literature that envisages the first creation narrative as a creation of equals, for example, Phyllis Trible, God and the Rhethoric of Sexuality (1978), pp. 13–21. For alternative feminist discussions that interpret the second creation myth as only patriarchal when translated by androcentric cultures, but not as originally presenting a gender hierarchy, see Ellen van Wolde, A Semiotic Analysis of Genesis 2–3 and Mary Phil Korsak, At the Start … Genesis Made New: A Translation of the Hebrew Text (1992) .

³ See for example the work of Sarah Margaret Fuller, Virginia Woolf and Carolyn Heilbrun.