Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory

By Rosi Braidotti

Nomadic Subjects argues for a new kind of philosophical thinking, one that would include the insights of feminism and abandon the hegemonic mode that is conventionally adopted in high theory.

Braidotti's personal, surprising, and lively prose insists on an integration of feminism in mainstream discourse. The essays explore problems that are central to current feminist debates including Western epistemology's relation to the "woman question," feminism and biomedical ethics, European feminism, and how American feminists might relate to European movements.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Release date: May 31, 2011
• ISBN: 9780231515269

Rosi Braidotti

Rosi Braidotti is Distinguished University Professor and Director of the Centre for the Humanities at Utrecht University. She is the founder of the interuniversity SOCRATES network NOISE and of the Thematic Network for Women’s Studies ATHENA, which she directed until 2005. Her research combines social and political theory, cultural politics, feminist theory, and ethnicity studies. She is the author of Patterns of Dissonance: A Study on Women in Contemporary Philosophy (1991), Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory (1994), Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming (2002), and Transpositions: On Nomadic Ethics (2006). Her latest publications, The Posthuman (2013) and Posthuman Knowledge (2019), call for a new type of critical knowledge, one able to address and challenge the intersections of power and violence, privilege and discrimination, arising out of human interactions.

Book preview

Introduction

This new edition of Nomadic Subjects, fifteen years after its original publication, indicates that both the nomadic predicament and its multiple contradictions have truly come of age. At the start of the third millennium, a diffuse sort of nomadism has become a relevant condition for a great deal of the world’s denizens. Furthermore, after thirty years of poststructuralist, postcolonial, and feminist debates for, against, or undecided on the issue of the nonunitary—split, in-process, knotted, rhizomatic, transitional, nomadic—subject, issues of fragmentation, complexity, and multiplicity have become household names in critical theory. The ubiquitous nature of these notions, however, and the radical-chic appeal of the terminology does not make for consensus about the issues at stake, namely, what exactly are the implications of the loss of unity of the subject. In other words, the so what? part of the discussion on nomadic subjectivity is more open than ever, while the contradictions and the paradoxes of our historical condition multiply all around us. Consequently, the questions that motivate this book: what exactly are the political and ethical conditions that structure nomadic subjectivity, and what are their implications for critical theory?

This philosophical line of inquiry is not to suggest, however, that the nomadic subject should ever be taken as a new metaphor for the human condition. The banality of such generalizations is not helpful in times of fast changes and economic and social transformations. What we need, instead, is higher degrees of accuracy in accounting for both the external factors and the internal complexity of nomadic subjectivity. The different modes and forms of nomadism complicate the task of the social and cultural critic. They require more historically grounded, socioeconomic references and subtler degrees of differentiation. Thus nomadic thought amounts to a politically invested cartography of the present condition of mobility in a globalized world. This project stresses the fundamental power differential among categories of human and nonhuman travelers or movers. It also sustains the effort to develop suitable figurations for the different kinds of mobility they embody and engender.

Figurations are not figurative ways of thinking, but rather materialistic mappings of situated, i.e., embedded and embodied, social positions. A cartography is a theoretically based and politically informed reading of the present. A cartographic approach fulfills the function of providing both analytic and exegetical tools for critical thought and also creative theoretical alternatives. As such, it responds to two requirements that are central to my work, namely, to account for one’s locations in terms both of space (the geopolitical, social, and ecophilosophical dimension) and time (the historical and genealogical dimension). Implicit in this is the added objective to provide alternative figurations or schemes of representation for these locations. The Foucauldian legacy shapes my cartographic project in that I analyze locations in terms of power defined both as restrictive (potestas) and also empowering or affirmative (potentia). This political passion sustains the process of nomadic subjectivity as ethically accountable and empowering.

The central concern for my nomadic subject is that there is a noticeable gap between how we live—in emancipated or postfeminist, multiethnic globalized societies, with advanced technologies and high-speed telecommunication, allegedly free borders, and increased border controls and security measures—and how we represent to ourselves this lived existence in theoretical terms and discourses. The systems of theoretical representation we have inherited from critical theory in the past are simply inadequate to the task. This imaginative poverty can be read as the jet lag problem of being behind one’s time, or inhabiting simultaneously different time zones, in the schizophrenic mode that is characteristic of the historical era of postmodernity. Filling in this gap with adequate figurations is therefore one of the greatest challenges of the present.

Global Hybridity

The notion of figuration as a politically informed map that outlines our own currently situated perspective in a globalized contest is the premise for my project of redesigning subjectivity as a process of becoming nomad. The figuration of the nomad renders an image of the subject in terms of a nonunitary and multilayered vision, as a dynamic and changing entity. This is a very adequate image of our historical condition. In socioeconomic terms, the perverse hybridization induced by advanced capitalism translates to a state of so-called flexibility of a large proportion of the working force. Interim, untenured, part-time, substandard, underpaid work has become the norm in most advanced liberal economies. The universities and the research world are far from immune from this fragmentation and exploitative approach. This negative and exploitative brand of capitalist flexibility induces the fracture of life-long careers or professions, offering little compensation in return.

Political theorists have addressed this pseudo nomadism as a feature of advanced capitalism, notably Hardt and Negri (2000), Virno (2001), and the group gathered round the journal Multitudes. My nomadic subject is part of the same theoretical tradition, though genealogically it plunges its roots in feminist theory and antiracist politics. Politically, nomadic subjectivity addresses the need to destabilize and activate the center. Mainstream subject positions have to be challenged in relations to and interaction with the marginal subjects.

A world economy linked by a thick web of transnational flows of capital and labor functions by internal and external flows of migration and mobility. The so-called flexibility or precariousness of actual work conditions makes for social instability, transitory citizens, and impermanent settlements. Globalization is about the mobilization of differences and the deterritorialization of social identity; it simultaneously challenges the hegemony of nation-states and their claim to exclusive citizenship (Cohen 1997) and strengthens their hold over territory, cultural identity, and social control. It also produces a political economy of disperse power relations known as: scattered hegemonies (Grewal and Kaplan 1994). Advanced capitalism is a surveillance society, a system of a centerless but constant security that pervades the entire social fabric. It installs a complex political economy of fear and consumeristic comfort, which operates not only between the geopolitical blocs that have emerged after the end of the Cold War but also within them. Postindustrial or information societies actively induce a qualitative proliferation of differences, for the sake of consumeristic consumption. For instance, global multiculturalism promotes a fashionable market for diversity, which commodifies different ethnicities and races under the general cover of world music, fusion cuisine, and black looks (hooks 1990b). These quantitative cumulations neither shift nor challenge the basic power relations between self and others—they merely quantify them.

Firmly grounded and centered in world cities that function as organizing principles in the stratification and distribution of wealth, the globalized network society practices a perverse force of nomadism. Goods, commodities, and data circulate much more freely than human subjects or, in some cases, the less-than-human subjects who constitute the bulk of asylum seekers and illegal inhabitants of the world (Balibar 2001; Braidotti 2006; Gilroy 2000). A commodified form of pluralism is the capitalist brand of pseudo nomadism that proliferates today. The dense materiality of bodies caught in the very concrete conditions of advanced global societies flatly contradicts advanced capitalism’s claims to being immaterial, flowing, or virtual. Irigaray argues that the differences proliferating in advanced capitalism are the others of the Same. As such they are still caught in an oppositional logic of negativity. Expressed with Deleuze: these differences are not qualitative but rather quantitative, and as such they do not alter the reactive power of the majority as the phallo-Eurocentric master code. The centers proliferate in a fragmented manner but lose none of their powers of domination. The conclusion is clear: it is important to resist the uncritical reproduction of sameness on a planetary scale.

The disposable bodies of women, youth, and others who are racialized or marked off by age, gender, sexuality, and income, reduced to marginality, come to be inscribed with particular violence in this regime of power. They experience dispossession of their embodied and embedded selves, in a political economy of repeated and structurally enforced eviction (Sassen 1996). Translated into the language of philosophical nomadism, the global city and the refugee camp are not dialectical or moral opposites: they are two sides of the same global coin. They express the schizoid political economy of our times. Massive concentrations of infrastructures exist alongside complex, worldwide dissemination of goods. The technologically driven advanced culture that prides itself in being called the information society is, in reality, a concrete, material infrastructure that is concentrated on the sedentary global city. The contrast between an ideology of free mobility and the reality of disposable others brings out the schizophrenic character of advanced capitalism. Namely, the paradox of high levels of mobility of capital flows in some sectors of the economic elite with high levels of centralization and greater immobility for most of the population. As Vandana Shiva points out, within globalization we must distinguish between different modes of mobility. One group is mobile on a world scale, with no country, no home, but the whole world as its property the other has lost even the mobility within rootedness lives in refugee camps, resettlement colonies and reserves (Shiva 1993:98).

Zygmunt Bauman echoes these concerns in his ethical mapping of different postmodern ethical subjectivities. He specifically criticizes the consumeristic focus of mobility embodied in the tourist and praises instead the pilgrim as a subject that combines loyalty with itinerant life patterns. Suspicious of the nomad, Bauman develops more concern for the vulnerable, disposable bodies that constitute the human waste of the globalized world (1983).

Given the fluid, internally contradictory and ferocious nature of advanced capitalism, the social and cultural critic needs to innovate on the very tools of analysis. A transdisciplinary approach that cuts across the established methods and conventions of many disciplines is best suited to the task of providing an adequate cartography of the shifting lines of segmentation and racialization of the globalized labor market. This process cannot be kept separate from the genderization and sexualization of the same market. The point of nomadic subjectivity is to identify lines of flight, that is to say, a creative alternative space of becoming that would fall not between the mobile/immobile, the resident/the foreigner distinction, but within all these categories. The point is neither to dismiss nor to glorify the status of marginal, alien others, but to find a more accurate, complex location for a transformation of the very terms of their specification and of our political interaction.

In this respect, my nomadic subject project constitutes an act of resistance against methodological nationalism and a critique of Eurocentrism from within. Both politically and epistemically, nomadic subjectivity provokes and sustains a critique of dominant visions of the subject, identity, and knowledge, from within one of the many centers’ that structure the contemporary globalized world. The methodology that sustains this is derived from the feminist politics of location and figurations. The work on power, difference and the politics of location offered by postcolonial and antiracist feminist thinkers like Gayatri Spivak, Stuart Hall, Paul Gilroy, Avter Brah, Helma Lutz, Philomena Essed, Gloria Wekker, Nira Yuval-Davis, and many others who are familiar with the European situation is especially important for my nomadic project. In late postmodernity Europe shares with the rest of the world the phenomenon of transculturality or cultures clashing in a pluriethnic, polylingual, and multicultural social space. World migration—a huge movement of population from periphery to center, working on a worldwide scale of scattered hegemonies (Grewal and Kaplan 1994), has challenged the claim to the alleged cultural homogeneity of European nation-states and of the incipient European Union. Present-day Europe is struggling with multiculturalism at a time of increasing racism and technophobia. The paradoxes, power dissymmetries, and fragmentations of the present historical contest rather require that we shift the political debates from the issue of differences between cultures to differences within each culture. In other words, one of the features of our present historical condition is the shifting grounds on which periphery and center confront each other, with a new level of complexity that defies dualistic or oppositional thinking.

If it is the case that a sociocultural mutation is taking place in the direction of a multiethnic, multimedia society, then the transformation cannot affect only the pole of the others. It must equally dislocate the position and the prerogative of the same, the former center. In other words, what is changing is not merely the terminology or metaphorical representation of the subjects but the very structure of subjectivity, the social relations and social imaginary that support it. It is the syntax of social relations, as well as their symbolic representation, that is in upheaval. The customary standard-bearers of phallocentrism no longer hold in a civil society that is, among others, sexed female and male, multicultural, and not inevitably Christian. More than ever, the question of social transformation begs that of representation: what can the male, white, Christian monotheistic symbolic do for them? The challenges as well as the anxieties evoked by the question of emerging subjects-in-process mark patterns of becoming that require new forms of expression and representation, that is to say, socially mediated forms that need to be assessed critically. Feminist theory is a relevant and useful navigational tool in these stormy times of locally enacted global phenomena, i.e., G-local changes.

Black, postcolonial, and feminist critics have, however, and rightfully, not spared criticism of the paradoxes as well as the rather perverse division of labor that has emerged in postmodernity. According to this paradox, it is the thinkers located at the center of past or present empires who are actively deconstructing the power of the center—thus contributing to the discursive proliferation and consumption of former negative others. Those same others, however—especially in postcolonial but also in postfascist and postcommunist societies—are rather more keen to reassert their identity rather than deconstruct it. The irony of this situation is not lost on any of the interlocutors: think, for instance, of the feminist philosophers saying: how can we undo a subjectivity we have not even historically been entitled to yet? (Braidotti 1991b). Or the black and postcolonial subjects who argue that it is now their historical turn to be self-assertive. And if the white, masculine, ethnocentric subject wants to deconstruct himself and enter a terminal crisis, then—so be it! The point remains that difference emerges as a central—albeit contested and paradoxical—notion and practice. Which means that a confrontation with different locations is historically inevitable, as we—postmodern subjects—are historically condemned to our history. Accounting for them through adequate cartographies consequently remains a crucial priority.

Contrary to what some ungenerous critics suggested (Gedalof 2000:337–354; Boer 1996:7–26; Felski 1997:1–22; Pels 1999:63–86), my nomadic subject pursues the same critique of power as black and postcolonial theories, not in spite, but because of the fact that it is located somewhere else. Philosophical nomadism addresses, in both a critical and creative manner, the role of the former center in redefining power relations. Margins and center shift and destabilize each other in parallel, albeit dissymmetrical, movements. My position is equally resistant to the identification of the center as inertia and self-perpetuation and to the aporetic repetition of Sameness. The challenge is to destabilize dogmatic, hegemonic, exclusionary power at the very heart of the identity structures of the dominant subject through nomadic interventions. If we are to move beyond the sociology of travel and the breast-beating of critical thinkers squashed by white guilt, we need to enact a vision of the subject that encompasses changes at the in-depth structures. The point is not just mere deconstruction, but the relocation of identities on new grounds that account for multiple belongings, i.e., a nonunitary vision of a subject. This subject actively yearns for and constructs itself in complex and internally contradictory webs of social relations. To account for these, we need to look at the internal forms of thought that privilege processes rather than essences and transformations—rather than counterclaims to identity. The sociological variables (gender, class, race and ethnicity, age, health) need to be supplemented by a theory of the subject that calls into question the inner fibers of the self. These include the desire, the ability, and the courage to sustain multiple belongings in a context, which celebrates and rewards Sameness, cultural essentialism, and one-way thinking. Nomadic Subjects is my contribution as a European nomadic subject, moving across the variegated landscape of whiteness, to a debate that blacks, antiracists, as well as postcolonial and other critical thinkers have put on the map. There is something about a claustrophobic self-referential Eurocentered philosophical thought that does not live up to the challenges of diverse multiculturalism and the kind of mediated societies we have already become.

Against Metaphors

Given the nondialectical structure of advanced globalized societies, however, the center-margin relation is neither fixed nor unitary, but rather floating and multilocated. These complex in-between states of social (im)mobility and stages of transit are crucial in that they challenge the established modes of theoretical representation and ask for an extra effort on the part of the social and cultural critic. Cartographic maps of multiple belonging and of power relations can help identify possible sites and strategies of resistance.

A figuration is a living map, a transformative account of the self; it’s no metaphor.

Being nomadic is not a glamorous state of jet-setting—integral to and complicitous with advanced capitalism (Alcoff 2006). It rather points to the decline of unitary subjects and the destabilization of the space-time continuum of the traditional vision of the subject. Being homeless, a migrant, an exile, a refugee, a tourist, a rape-in-war victim, an itinerant migrant, an illegal immigrant, an expatriate, a mail-order bride, a foreign caretaker of the young or the elderly of the economically developed world, a high-flying professional, a global venture financial expert, a humanitarian relief worker in the UN global system, a citizen of a country that no longer exists (Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, the Soviet Union): these are no metaphors. Having no passport or having too many of them is neither equivalent nor is it merely metaphorical, as some critics of nomadic subjectivity have suggested (Boer 1996; Gedalof 1999; Felski 1997). These are highly specific geopolitical and historic locations—it’s history and belonging tattooed on your body. One may be empowered or beautified by it or be scarred, hurt, and wounded by it. Learning to tell the difference between different forms of nonunitary, multilayered, or diasporic subjectivity is therefore a key ethical as well as methodological issue. Figurations attempt to draw a cartography of the power relations that define these respective and diverging positions. They don’t aim to embellish or metaphorize: they just express different socioeconomic and symbolic locations.

In other words, the point is finding adequate representations for the sort of subjects we are in the process of becoming. This cartographic project was raised to new heights by the poststructuralist generation: it results in neither a retreat into self-referential textuality nor in apolitical resignation. Nonlinearity and a nonunitary vision of the subject do not necessarily result in either cognitive or moral relativism, let alone in social anarchy. I rather see nomadic subjectivity as both an analytic tool and a creative project aimed at a qualitative shift of consciousness that is attuned to the spirit of our age. The ultimate purpose is to compose significant sites for reconfiguring modes of belonging and political practice.

For instance: where figurations of alternative feminist subjectivity, like the womanist/the lesbian/the cyborg/the inappropriate(d) other/the nomadic feminist, etc., etc., differ from classical metaphors is precisely in their commitment to account for the material conditions that sustain these different subject positions. They consequently call into play a sense of accountability for one’s locations. Figurations express materially embedded cartographies of different nomadic subjects and as such are self-reflexive and not parasitic upon a process of metaphorization of others. On the contrary, they target dominant subject formations from within. This kind of self-reflexivity is, moreover, not an individual activity, but an interactive collective process that relies upon interrelations and social networks of exchanges. Figurations are an integral part of the process of subject formation and are immanent to the nomadic cartographic practice. In fact, quite a remarkable range of alternative subject positions has emerged in social theory and philosophy since poststructuralism. They are hybrid, contested, multilayered figurations that challenge dichotomous and dialectical oppositions between margins and center. Within the inflationary logic of advanced capitalism, this proliferation of different subject formations perpetuates exploitation, but also expresses new emerging actors and positively self-defined others. It is just a matter of respecting the different locations.

By extension, new figurations of the subject (nomadic, cyborg, black, etc.) function like conceptual personae in Deleuze’s sense of the term. For Deleuze a conceptual persona is a theoretical navigational tool that evokes and mobilizes creative possibilities in order to change the dominant subject position. The latter is defined as coinciding with the image of thought that equates subjectivity with consciousness, rationality, and liberal individualism. Processes of becoming-minoritarian are the affirmative alternative to this phallologocentric vision of the subject, which the poststructuralists, Lacan, Derrida, Deleuze, Irigaray, have criticized. The processes of becoming-other get expressed through suitable figurations—like my nomadic subject. As such, they are no metaphors, but rather critical tools to account for the materially embedded and embodied locations and power relations. They are also creative expressions for the intensity, i.e., the rate of change, transformation or affirmation, the potentia (positive power) one inhabits. Following Deleuze’s Spinozist formula we simply must assume that we do not know what a body can do, what our embodied selves are capable of. Life as the exploration of this affirmative capacity or potentia is the core of Spinozist politics. Nomadic subjects are transformative tools that enact progressive metamorphoses of the subject away from the program set up in the phallologocentric format.

This point is quite poignant for me because when I started the project of nomadic subjectivity, almost twenty years ago, I had no idea that it would end up producing a trilogy of interconnected and yet self-contained books on the topic. At the onset there are two agenda-setting books, Patterns of Dissonance (1991) and Nomadic Subjects (1994), which then spin off two other volumes: Metamorphoses (2002) explores the cultural politics of the nomadic condition, and Transpositions (2006) the ethical implications. With the privilege of hindsight, it is tempting to assert some power of synthesis over this vast project. The coherence of the main lines of thought and investigation not withstanding, I must say, however, that the issues appeared considerably less self-evident as the project was in full swing. I think it is fairer to say that the project of nomadic subjectivity is quite rhizomatic in itself and that it grew organically from a cluster of central and interrelated ideas. Moreover, the fact that this second edition of the foundational text will appear concurrently with a selection of my best essays from recent years is a very fitting comment to the overall project. It is as if there is no possible conclusion, only more productive proliferations. The nomadic subject is my chosen figuration to engage in the task of drawing a cartographic reading of the present, in terms of cultural, political, epistemological, and ethical concerns. More like a weather map than an atlas, my cartographies mutate and change, going with the flow while staying grounded.

Critique as Creativity

The motivation to explore nomadic subjectivity comes from the conviction that, in these times of accelerating changes, many traditional points of reference and age-old habits of thought are being recomposed, albeit in contradictory ways. At such a time more conceptual creativity is necessary, more theoretical effort is needed to bring about the conceptual leap across inertia, nostalgia, aporia, and the other forms of critical stasis induced by our historical condition. We need to learn to think differently about the kind of nomadic subjects we have already become and the processes of deep-seated transformation we are undergoing.

As an approach, nomadic philosophy consequently challenges the separation of critique from creativity and of reason from the imagination. Maybe this profound faith in the imagination as both a source of cognition and as the motor of political action is the defining mark of my generation, who grew up in the 1968 slogan of power to the imagination! As the baby boomers had to learn, however—often at their own expense—all dreams fade in the twilight of a post-1989 world that has proclaimed both the death of ideology and the end of history (Fukuyama 1992).

In opposition to the dominant cynicism and melancholy, my project of nomadic subjectivity stresses the affirmative force of a political imagination that is not tied to the present in an oppositional mode of negation. It rather actively strives to create collectively empowering alternatives. The imagination is not utopian, but rather transformative and inspirational. It expresses an active commitment to the construction of social horizons of hope. Hope is a vote of confidence in the future. This brings me back to the emphasis I want to place on issues of figuration: political fictions may be more effective, here and now, than theoretical systems.

The choice of an iconoclastic figure, such as the nomadic subject, is also a move against the settled and conventional nature of theoretical and especially philosophical thinking. Nomadism functions as counterdiscourse, as a way of mobilizing the untapped resources and traditions of thought that were never mainstream in the institutional practice of philosophy. Nomadic thought cross-refers to the hidden face of Western philosophy, to its antilogocentric undercurrents, which François Chatelet described as the demonic tradition best symbolized by Nietzsche (Chatelet 1970). Foucault initiated the process of philosophical countermemories and discourses of resistance (Foucault 1977b). Deleuze builds on the multilayered lines of philosophic countermemory and activates nomadic thought as a genealogical practice that relocates thinking away from the pull of sedentary self-replication (Deleuze 1973). The point being that, the challenge for philosophy in our rapidly changing times is how to think about processes rather than concepts. More specifically, it is about how to combine the creation of new concepts and a continuing dialogue with certain disciplinary conventions so as to forge a new relationship to the living archive that is the actual philosophical corpus.

In this respect the nomadic subject is not a utopian concept, but more like a road sign. It enacts an intervention on the social imaginary that perceives philosophy as the rational discourse of a dominant, masculine, Eurocentric subject. As an exercise in positioning and in accountability, it is equally committed however to avoid the pitfalls of relativism, proposing instead the cartographic politics of location as the alternative. In relation to the history of philosophy, it explicitly refers to Nietzsche via Deleuze and hence it connects back to an eminent, albeit minority, tradition within this discipline. This rather marginal but highly dynamic strand of thought is very critical of rationalism and of the transcendental illusion that is so dominant in philosophy.

This more hidden, demonic, or nomadic force of Western philosophy is an invitation for this discipline to bypass its tendency for self-referentiality. The aim is to enter into a series of interdisciplinary connections to other discourses. This objective rests on two important assumptions: first, that there is a great deal of philosophy taking place in places one would not expect it to be. These include the arts, music, architecture, cinema, and the media as well as political practices and movements like feminism, environmentalism, antiracism, and alternative globalization movements. The second assumption is that philosophy is an institutional practice that emerges from an honest confrontation with the world we now inhabit. This is an ethically mixed, technologically mediated, gendered world where European hegemony is on the wane. The decline of Eurocentrism questions the philosophical mind-set based on universalism as a disembedded and disembodied subject position. Nomadism is about critical relocation, it is about becoming situated, speaking from somewhere specific and hence well aware of and accountable for particular locations. Thinkers who are identified with undifferentiated universals cannot live up to this challenge.

The notion of bodily materialism and of the embodied or enfleshed subject is central to my understanding of the kind of philosophical materialism that I support. Historically I see it as one of the most fruitful aspects of French Continental philosophy, namely, the extent to which it highlights the bodily structure of subjectivity and consequently also issues of sexuality and sexual difference. This tradition offers complex models of analysis for the interrelations between the self and society, the inside and outside of the subject. Reactivated by the social movements of the late sixties and seventies, this tradition of embodied materialism lay the ground for a radical critique of power and the dissolution of the humanist subject.

In order to accomplish this shift of perspective, we need immanent regroundings. One of my favorite methods to achieve this is the feminist politics of location—a method as well as a political tactic that aims at accounting for the diversity and complexity within any given category—like women, feminists, lesbians, gays—while avoiding cognitive and moral relativism and thus safeguarding political and ethical agency. The politics of locations combines epistemological with political accountability by concentrating its methodological efforts on the analysis of the multiple power locations one inevitably inhabits as the site of one’s subjectivity.

The practice of accountability (for one’s embodied and embedded locations) as a relational, collective activity of undoing power differentials is linked to two crucial notions: memory and narratives. They activate the process of putting into words, that is to say, bringing into symbolic representation, that which by definition escapes consciousness. A location, in fact, is not a self-appointed and self-designed subject position, but rather a collectively shared and constructed, jointly occupied spatiotemporal territory. A great deal of our location, in other words, escapes self-scrutiny in that it is so familiar, so close, that one does not even see it. The politics of location consequently refers to a process of consciousness-raising that requires a political awakening (Grewal and Kaplan 1994) and hence the intervention of others. Politics of locations are cartographies of power that rest on a form of self-criticism, a critical, genealogical self-narrative; they are relational and outside directed. This means that embodied accounts illuminate and transform our knowledge of ourselves and of the world. Thus black women’s texts and experiences make white women see the limitations of our locations, truths, and discourses. Feminist knowledge is an interactive process that brings out aspects of our existence, especially our own implication with power, that we had not noticed before. In Deleuzian languages, it deterritorializes us, i.e., it estranges us from the familiar, the intimate, the known and casts an external light upon it; in Foucault’ s language, it is micropolitics, and it starts with the embodied self. Feminists, however, knew this well before either Foucault or Deleuze theorized it in their philosophy.

One of the crucial methodological implications of the immanent regrounding accomplished by the politics of location is a higher degree of consciousness and hence increased self-reflexivity. The awareness of one’s location, expressed in adequate, transformative figurations, acts as a spotlight illuminating aspects of one’s material and discursive conditions that were blind spots before. With increased self-reflexivity comes also another important side effect: defamiliarization. A new critical distance is established between oneself and one’s home grounds—a sense of estrangement that is not painless, but rich in ethical rewards and increased understanding. The multiple differences of locations, which reflect the diversity of possible subject positions, therefore coalesce in the practice of disidentification from the familiar, estrangement from the already known. Like an epistemic detox cure, this practice marks the beginning of nomadic wisdom.

Which takes me to one last important implication: the multiplicity of locations and the forms of knowledge claims, self-reflexivity, and defamiliarization from the obvious they entail are a powerful antidote to the risk of relativism. The dependence on one’s location is a form of immanence, amaterialist regroundings. Differences, including sexual differences, are just the starting point for this process—they are not a problematic stumbling block. I refuse to conceptualize differences in a Hegelian framework of dialectical opposition and mutual consumption of self and other and other by self. I do approach them instead as unhinged from the dialectical scheme, engaged in a nomadic, rhizomatic logic of zigzagging interconnections.

Deleuze and Guattari are particularly intent upon reimagining the practice of philosophical subjectivity in this vein. Luce Irigaray’s project is analogous: she focuses her critique on the phallogocentric structure of thought and the systematic exclusion of the feminine from theoretical representation of the knowing subject. Whereas Irigaray draws inspiration from the underestimated and often invisible resources of a virtual feminine, which feminists have to reconfigure in their own specific social practice and collective imaginary, Deleuze bypasses the binary structure of sexual difference altogether and works toward in-depth exploration of the multiple sexualities inherent to a subject in terms redefined as transversal, collective, and dynamic. There is a significant point of convergence between Irigaray and Deleuze in their effort at reinventing the very image of the subject as an entity fully immersed in processes of becoming, in productive relations of power, knowledge, and desire. This implies a positive vision of the subject as an affective, productive, and dynamic structure. Thus my choice of the nomadic figuration is also a way of situating myself vis-à-vis the institution of philosophy as a discipline in which I never held any professional position. It is a way of inhabiting it, but as an outsider within, following Virginia Woolf, that is to say, critically, but also with deep engagement. Last, but not least, the figuration of the nomad has an imaginative pull that I find attuned to the energizing and transnational structure of our historical situation.

The cartographic approach of philosophical nomadism requires that we think of power relations simultaneously as the most external, collective, social phenomena and also as the most intimate or internal. Or rather, power is the process that flows incessantly in between the inner and the outer. As Foucault taught us, power is a strategic situation, a position, not an object or an essence. Subjectivity is the effect of the constant flows of in-between interconnections. What attracts me to French philosophies of difference such as Deleuze’s multiple subjects of becoming or Irigaray’s virtual feminine is precisely that they do not stop at the surface of issues of identity and power, but rather tackle their conceptual roots. In so doing they radicalize social constructivist theories and methods and push the psychosociological discussion of identity toward issues of subjectivity, that is to say, of entitlement and power. It is particularly important not to confuse the concept of subjectivity with the notion of the individual or individualism: subjectivity is a socially mediated process of entitlements to and negotiations with power relations. Consequently, the formation and emergence of new social subjects is always a collective enterprise, external to the individual self while also mobilizing the self’s in-depth and singular structures.

A dialogue with psychoanalytic theories of the split nature of subjectivity and the role of unconscious desires is consequently high on my agenda and will remain a term of reference throughout this book. In this perspective, subjectivity names the process that consists in stringing the reactive (potestas) and the active instances of power (potentia) together under the fictional unity of a grammatical I. The subject is a process, made of constant shifts and negotiations between different levels of power and desire, that is to say, willful choice and unconscious drives. Whatever semblance of unity there may be is no God-given essence but rather the fictional choreography of many levels into one socially operational self. It implies that what sustains the entire process of becoming-subject is the will to know, the desire to say, the desire to speak, it is a founding, primary, vital, necessary, and therefore original desire to become (conatus).

Thinking with and working through nomadic figurations thus implies the refusal to separate reason from the imagination, and, since this affects the style of writing and the theoretical production, it also alters the terms of the conventional pact between the writer and her readers. The theoretical text is to be approached not as the written statement of truths sanctified by the authority of the author or proper noun that signs it. It rather functions on the model of interconnection, as a navigational tool in a collectively shared cartography of discursive, affective, and social relation. The writer/reader binary couple is recombined accordingly and is distributed across the intensive elements that both sustain connections and are generated by them. A new impersonal writing/reading mode is consequently created as the appropriate way of doing nomadic philosophy. This impersonal style is rather postpersonal in that it allows for a web of connections to be drawn on the axis of subjectivity and not merely along the vicissitudes of identity. Meaning production therefore does not function in terms of the author’s intentions and the reader’s reception, but rather in a much wider, more complex set of possible resonances and interconnections. The question of style is crucial to this project. As readers in an intensive mode, we are transformers of intellectual energy, processors of the insights that we are exchanging, and cobuilders of possible interrelations. These in-sights and nonconnections are not to be thought of as plunging us inward, toward a mythical inner reservoir of truth. On the contrary, they are