Afterword

Abstract

This afterword deals with the scientific and social status of the concepts of complexity, materialism, and difference in relation to the process of subject formation. It pays special attention to the historical context of advanced capitalism and the extent to which it has altered our understanding of notions and practices of embodiment and interrelationality. It discusses issues of biopower on the one hand and new forms of vital politics on the other, in relation to the political and theoretical project of sexual difference.

Keywords:

• complexity
• materialism
• difference
• vitalism
• nomadic subjects
• embodiment

Notes

Parts of this paper have been published in Rosi Braidotti, Transpositions: On Nomadic Ethics (Cambridge: Polity, 2006).

1. Paolo Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude (New York: Semiotext(e), 2004); Maurizio Lazzarato, “Immaterial Labor” in Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics, eds. Michael Hardt and Paolo Virno (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1996).

2. Vandana Shiva, Biopiracy: The Plunder of Nature and Knowledge (Boston: South End, 1997).

3. Ulrich Beck, World Risk Society (Cambridge: Polity, 1999).

4. Anna Fausto-Sterling, Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality (New York: Basic, 2000) 235.

5. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1987).

6. Zillah Eisenstein, Global Obscenities: Patriarchy, Capitalism and the Lure of Cyberfantasy (New York: New York UP, 1998).

7. Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology” in Basic Writings, ed. David Krell (New York: HarperCollins, 1993).

8. This term was coined by the avant-garde movement of the surrealists to refer to artworks and other forms of non-functionalist object production. The bachelor machine is sterile and pleasure-prone, not productive and re-productive.

9. Keith Ansell Pearson, Viroid Life: Perspectives on Nietzsche and the Transhuman Condition (New York: Routledge, 1997) 202.

10. Isabelle Stengers, Power and Invention: Situating Science (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1997).

11. Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991) 61ff.

12. Rosi Braidotti, Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming (Cambridge: Polity, 2002).

13. Nikolas Rose, “The Politics of Life Itself,” Theory, Culture and Society 18.6 (2001): 1–30.

14. Mariam Fraser, Sarah Kember, and Celia Lury, eds, Inventive Life: Approaches to the New Vitalism (London: Sage, 2006).

15. Rosi Braidotti, Transpositions: On Nomadic Ethics (Cambridge: Polity, 2006).

16. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2000) 215.

17. For example, Genevieve Lloyd, The Man of Reason: Male and Female in Western Philosophy (London: Methuen, 1985).

18. See Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus.

19. Brian Massumi, “Requiem for our Prospective Dead (Toward a Participatory Critique of Capitalist Power)” in Deleuze and Guattari: New Mappings in Politics, Philosophy and Culture, eds. Eleanor Kaufman and Kevin Jon Heller (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1998) 60.

20. Donna Haraway, Modest__Witness@Second__Millennium. FemaleMan^© __MeetsOncoMouse™: Feminism and Technoscience (London: Routledge, 1997) 74.

21. Manuel DeLanda, Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy (London: Continuum, 2002).

22. Elizabeth Grosz, The Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution, and the Untimely (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1994).

23. Idem, Space, Time, and Perversion: Essays on Bodies (New York: Routledge).

24. This term is widely circulating in cyberspace to refer to the physical body, which is wet in relation to the dryness of electronic circuitry.

25. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990).

26. More in Braidotti, Transpositions.

27. Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1985); Ce sexe qui n’en est pas un (Paris: Minuit, 1977).

28. Claire Colebrook, “Is Sexual Difference a Problem?” in Deleuze and Feminist Theory, eds. Ian Buchanan and Claire Colebrook (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2000).

29. Patricia MacCormack, Cinesexuality (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008).

30. Braidotti, Metamorphoses.

31. Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” October 59 (winter 1992): 3–7.