Here's the second half of the interview w/ Rosi Braidotti.
Stefanie
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PART II
NOMADIC PHILOSOPHER:
A CONVERSATION WITH ROSI BRAIDOTTI
(Utrecht, The Netherlands. August 1995)
with Kathleen O'Grady, ([EMAIL PROTECTED])
Trinity College, University of Cambridge
Reprinted from _Women's Education des femmes_. Spring 1996 (12,
1): 35-39. This document may be distributed and copied for
classroom and other educational purposes as long as the journal
and author is credited. Permission must be requested from the
journal for reprinting this interview in a book or another
journal.
PART II
K: You comment that "feminism is THE discourse of modernity".
Is this observation generated in the understanding that the so-
called "death of man" is not the beginning of a crisis but an
opening that allows for dialogue on sexual difference?
B: I always sound very categorical when it comes to feminism.
I may quote a long text I have co-written with Judith Butler in
the last issue of differences about this where she asks me a
question: do you give feminism a higher explanatory value than
any other critical philosophy? After a long, elaborate answer
I basically say, yes I do, I do have a tendency to. I do believe
very much, obviously, in the priority of this particular
framework, which is feminist theory. I always do think that the
woman-question is built into the crisis of modernity, but I also
know that it is not the only one. I think the woman, the
machine, the ethnic other, nature as other, are all edges of this
reconstitution, reconfiguration of otherness in modernity within
which we are still moving and trying to find our way. It is not
as if woman is alone and I think that maybe in Patterns of
Dissonance I am over-emphasizing sexual difference to the
detriment of other differences. But in any case, the centrality
of the feminine other and the organization of our entire modern
way of thinking is something that gives feminists an edge of
optimism when it comes to assessing what you can do with the
crisis and how you can find a way out of it. In a sense, it is
not a crisis of the female subject; she was never a subject to
begin with. And it is not the crisis of the black subject;
he/she was never a subject to begin with. So it is the emergence
of peripheral subjectivities, and in that sense, it is a
fantastic and very positive moment.
K: You have commented that the "gender theorists" of the Anglo-
American tradition and the "sexual difference theorists" of the
French and European traditions are involved in a potentially
false polemic. In what way?
B: There are really interesting, crucial differences which have
to do with the way in which sexuality is positioned in the
different cultures, the construction of sexuality, in the way in
which identity is then conceptualized in relation to sexuality.
Of course, language has a lot to do with it. The same with the
famous sex and gender distinction. You may say that it is like
the ideals of the French revolution. It has conquered the world,
but its universal applicability is questionable: it is a
distinction that makes very little sense in non-English, non-
Anglo-Saxon languages and translates very badly in a great deal
of romance languages. So people in other feminist, political
cultures have a lot of difficulties making due with that.
The way in which sexual difference in French theory was then
marketed back into English, especially in the U.S., led to a
tremendous amount of incompetency: Is this nature? Is this
culture? Does Irigaray by sexual difference mean something innate
and given? Is it essentialistic? Is it not? I mean the whole
essentialism thing was really due to harried, hasty
mistranslations, and we should have instead looked very carefully
at the real conceptual differences that there are at stake in
people working out of the French tradition and the people working
out of the more Anglo-Saxon tradition. It has been hastily put.
There are some interesting questions there. For instance, how
do you conceptualize sexed identity in a French context or in an
Italian context as opposed to an Anglo-American context let alone
in a post-colonial or "black" perspective? But it has not been
dealt with. Now, after fifteen years of useless debate on
essentialism we are finally coming to some interesting discussion
on where to position the self vis a vis the political. Where is
the edge of the political? How does fantasy life intersect with
the political? But these are questions for the nineties, and for
years we wasted time in false polemic. I am sick of that polemic
and I would like some real confrontations with the real
differences, and there are many.
K: At the conclusion of Nomadic Subjects (1995), your most recent
book, you advocate a transnational and transdisciplinary
methodology that, in the spirit of Irigaray, invokes "mimetic
repetition" as a strategy to manipulate the philosophical canon.
What is the primary agenda for a feminist post-structuralism that
is framed by a nomadic subjectivity?
B: I think it is definitely a political agenda. It is definitely
how to put the politics of female subjectivity, which has always
been the focus of a particular sexual difference school, how to
conjugate that with broader concern for a redefinition of what
we would call "the human" at a time when it is being so
dramatically restructured because of the global economy, the
technological revolution, and the obvious emergence of
multiculturalism and the social and theoretical cultural reality.
So it is that kind of dialogue that I see as crucial.
In my reading, post-structuralism was always avidly political.
It was never the bad poetry that its critics accused it of being.
So I see a lot of potential for an emphasis on subjectivity
broadening out to concern, what Donna Haraway calls the "semiotic
material agency". Your constant interaction with what used to
be called nature, what used to be called culture, through the
mediating factor which is this universal technology that we are
moving in and consequently drawing into the environmental issues,
drawing on the political question of new technologies, drawing
on the kind of spirituality and issues of spirituality that are
so important if we are going to make sense of this real cultural
upheaval we are going through. And keeping in mind, basically
and almost naively, the importance to still reassert the
difference that women can make. This, for me, is the central
issue: to go on reasserting a sexual difference as a positive
factor of dissymmetry between men and women. We have got
something else to offer and that may not sound very post-
structuralist, but I could care less because it is ultimately
that political passion that is going to carry through.
K: And finally, Iris Murdoch once wrote that it is "always
significant to ask of any philosopher, what he is afraid of."
So I ask you, what is your greatest fear?
B: My greatest fear is to become petrified: to become a tree, to
put out roots and not be able to move. I have a fear of
immobility, of being stuck in one spatio-temporal dimension. It
is a variation of a fear of death, a kind of death, of turning
to stone and not being able to move again.
K: That is appropriate for someone who has written a book
entitled, "Nomadic" Subjects.
B: Yes, I suppose I wrote the book because I was trying to both
express and rationalize my own need to continually move....A
lovely form of "being lightly".
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Linda Lopez McAlister, Editor, HYPATIA and Listowner SWIP-L
Dept. of Women's Studies, University of South Florida, Tampa
Tel. 813-974-0982/FAX [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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Stefanie S. Rixecker
Centre for Resource Management/
Department of Resource Management
Lincoln University
Canterbury
Aotearoa New Zealand
E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Phone: (64) (03) 325-2811 x8377
Fax: (64) (03) 325-3841
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