Rosi Braidotti

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## Biography

* Rosi Braidotti was born September 28, 1954
* She is a distinguished professor in the humanities at Utrecht University, founding director of the Centre for the Humanities
* She's also a honorary visiting professor in the School of Law at Birkbeck College, University of London.
* She has published extensively in feminist philosophy, epistemology, poststructuralism, and psychoanalysis.
* Her books include *Patterns of Dissonance* (Polity, 1991), *Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory* (Columbia Up, 1994), *Metamorphoses:Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming* (Polity, 2002), and *Transpositions: On Nomadic Ethics* (Polity, 2006).

## "Animals, Anomalies, and Inorganic Others"

### **Background and Historical Context**

Braidotti is a posthumanist, feminist continental philosopher. She is concerned with understanding the natural world as it intersects with the human experience as compared to analytical philosophy.

### **Key Words and Terms**

**Bioegalitarianism** - A recognition that humans and animals are equal and connected

**Anthropocentrism** - The belief that considers human beings to be the most significant entity of the universe and interprets or regards the world in terms of human value and experiences.

**Bios** - Discursive, intelligent, social life

**Zoe** - Brutal 'animal' life

**Logocentrism** - (1) A philosophy holding that all forms of thought are based on an external point of reference which is held to exist and given a certain degree of authority; (2) a philosophy that privileges speech over writing as a form of communication because the former is closer to an originating transcendental source (“Logocentrism”).

**Phallogocentrism** - In post-structuralist, especially feminist, theory: a structure or style of thought, speech, or writing (often considered as typical of traditional western philosophy, culture, or literature), deconstructed as expressing male attitudes and reinforcing male dominance; phallocentrism implicitly communicated in or through language (“Phallogocentrism”).

**Oedipalize** - To make Oedipal; to integrate into, or affect with, an Oedipus Complex.

### **Key Quotations**

"The 'body without organs' signs the praise of anomalies. It also introduces a joyful insurrection of the senses, a vitalist and panerotic approach to the body. It is recomposed to induce creative disjunctions in this system, freeing organs from their indexing to prerequisite functions" (527). “...thinking cannot and must not be reduced to reactive (sedentary) critique but must also involve significant doses of creativity” (527).

"Considering the extent of this posthumanist turn, to become animal or minoritarian you are better off cultivating your inner housefly or cockroach, instead of your inner child"(527).

"In terms of the human/animal interaction, the familiar ego saturation of the past is replaced by a bioegalitarianism, a recognition that we humans and animals are in this together. The bond between us is a vital connection based on sharing this territory or environment on terms which are no longer hierarchical or self-evident"(528).

“Animals are no longer the signifying system that props up humans’ self-projections and moral aspirations. Nor are they the keepers of the gates between species. They have, rather, started to be approached literally, as entities framed by code systems of their own” (528).

"From the angle of critical theory, psychoanalysis propels the unconscious into a critique of rationality and logocentrism. Evolutionary theory, on the other hand, pushes the line of inquiry outside the frame of anthropocentrism and into the fast-moving sciences and technologies of life" (528).

"In advanced capitalism, animals are disposable bodies traded in a global market of posthuman exploitation" (529).

"Becoming animal consequently is a process of redefining ones sense of attachment and connection to a shared world, a territorial space. It expresses multiple ecologies of belonging, while it transforms one's sensorial and perceptual coordinates, to acknowledge the collectiveness and outward direction of what we call the self" (530).

"As such, I am a she-wolf, a breeder that multiplies cells in all directions; I am incubator and a carrier of vital and lethal viruses.  I am Mother Earth, the generator of the future" (531). "The ethical relation is essentially a matter of affinity: being able to have positive encounters with another entity. They express one's *potentia* and increase one's capacity to enter into further relations and to grow" (531).

"Becoming animal, minoritarian, or world speaks to my feminist self, partly because my sex, historically speaking, never made it into full humanity, so my allegiance to that category is negotiable and never to be taken for granted" (531).

### **Discussion**

#### The Cash Nexus

This section looks at the materialistic value of animals and shows that humans attempt to remove themselves from animals by seeing them as commodoties, even though animals have been helpful in science diplomacy and have made some sureries and suh possible, thus, keeping humans alive and blending human and animal body parts. Humans adopt the parts of the animal that help them and in a sense become the animal.

### **Major Criticism and Reception**

"Particularly significant is Braidotti’s account of antihumanism, an area of reflection which, although part of the posthuman scenario, is rarely treated in such a detailed and sustained manner. Braidotti’s own historical affiliation with the antihuman approach makes her reflection particularly insightful. However, an aspect which could have been more extensively developed is the difference between posthumanism and transhumanism, movements which consider similar topics, but do not share the same perspectives or genealogies" (The Posthuman).

"Rosi Braidotti’s recent work The Posthuman gives us a timely and accessible formulation of such an ethics. Braidotti acknowledges the levelling of nonhuman and human agency implied by the new cognitive and life sciences. However, she is impatient with a disabling political neutrality that can follow from junking human agency as the arbiter of the right and the good. She argues that a posthuman ethics and politics need to retain the idea of political subjectivity capable of constructing new forms of ethical community and experimenting with new modes of being" (Book Review: Braidotti's Vital Posthumanism).

### **Related Works**

* Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. *A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia.* Translated by Brian Massumi, University of Minnesota Press, 1987.
* Haraway, Donna. *A Manifesto for Cyborgs.*
* Woolfe, Cary. "Human, All Too Human."
* Said, Edward. *Orientalism*.
* Marx, Karl. *Capital, Volume 1*.
* Althusser, Louis. *Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses*.
* Said, Edward. *Orientalism*.

## References

Braidotti, Rosi. “Animals, Anomalies, and Inorganic Others.” *PMLA*, vol. 124, no. 2, Mar. 2009, pp. 526–532. *JSTOR*, doi:10.1632/pmla.2009.124.2.526.

“Logocentrism.” *Merriam-Webster*, Merriam-Webster, www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/logocentrism.

“Phallogocentrism.” *Oxford Dictionaries*, en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/phallogocentrism.

Simon, Peter, editor. *The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism*. W. W. Norton & Company, 2010.

Francesca Ferrando, 'The Posthuman.' Published on Plurilogue: Politics and Philosophy Reviews, 23 January 2014.

David Roden,'Book Review: Braidotti's Vital Posthumanism.' Published on h+Magazine, 18 November 2013.