Philosophies of Difference

Nature, Racism, and Sexuate Difference

Ryan S. Gustafsson, Rebecca Hill, Helen Ngo, Ryan S. Gustafsson, Rebecca Hill, Helen Ngo

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367585945
• eBook ISBN: 9780429867170
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filosofía
• Subtopic: Biografías filosóficas

Philosophies of Difference engages with the concept of difference in relation to a number of fundamental philosophical and political problems. Insisting on the inseparability of ontology, ethics and politics, the essays and interview in this volume offer original and timely approaches to thinking nature, sexuate difference, racism, and decoloniality. The collection draws on a range of sources, including Latin American Indigenous ontologies and philosophers such as Henri Bergson, Jacques Derrida, Luce Irigaray, Immanuel Kant, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Charles Mills, and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro.

The contributors think embodiment and life by bringing continental philosophy into generative dialogue with fields including plant studies, animal studies, decoloniality, feminist theory, philosophy of race, and law. Affirming the importance of interdisciplinarity, Philosophies of Difference contributes to a creative and critical intervention into established norms, limits, and categories. Invoking a conception of difference as both constitutive and generative, this collection offers new and important insights into how a rethinking of difference may ground new and more ethical modes of being and being-with. Philosophies of Difference unearths the constructive possibilities of difference for an ethics of relationality, and for elaborating non-anthropocentric sociality.

The chapters in this book were originally published in a special issue in Australian Feminist Law Journal.

Interview
ONTO-ETHICS AND DIFFERENCE: AN INTERVIEW WITH ELIZABETH GROSZ

Elizabeth Grosz and Rebecca Hill

Abstract. Elizabeth Grosz is the author of ten books and an influential contributor to the elaboration of the philosophy of difference and feminist thinking on sexual difference. Rebecca Hill, one of the co-editors of this special issue, invited Grosz to speak further about some central concepts and themes in her two most recent books, Becoming Undone and The Incorporeal and the article ‘Irigaray, the Untimely, and the Constitution of an Onto-Ethics’. The interview was conducted in November 2016.

Rebecca Hill: Critique is foundational to feminist theory. Often feminism defines itself in terms of the task of pointing out sexism – of identifying the operation of sexism in a state of affairs, or in diagnosing sexism’s workings in a representational schema and then of criticising the sexism that it identifies. The labour of critique is frequently the pre-condition for the articulation of new values that would take us beyond patriarchy. For instance, critique is the pre-condition for the postulation of gender equality in liberal feminisms and critique is the pre-condition for the affirmation of sexual difference for Luce Irigaray and other scholars working in difference feminism. Critique is also central within the discourses of feminist theory itself. To name some of the most important trajectories of critique in which feminists address the blind spots and prejudices of one another’s scholarship, there are critiques of racism and white-centrism, critiques of classism, of first worldism, of heterosexism, of cis-sexism, of ageism, of ableism, of colonialism and neo-colonialism, and critiques of anthropocentrism.

While you affirm the importance of critique to the evolution of feminism in the academy in the last few decades, you argue that critique has reached its limit in feminist theory. Critique-oriented feminisms focus on the states of affairs and representations that make up the present and on pointing out who and what is and is not represented and recognised. For you, for instance, an obsessive attentiveness to differences between women leads to a limitless regress because everyone is different from one another and even from ourselves over the time of our lives.¹

1 Elizabeth Grosz, Becoming Undone: Darwinian Reflections of Life, Politics and Art (Duke University Press 2011) at 89.

Rather than engaging in the diagnosing and judging of the work of others for failing to recognise and affirm the specificity of differences between women, you argue that the most promising directions for feminist theory lie in the invention of new modes of thought and life. To do this, you suggest that we focus less on different subjectivities and more on the forces of difference that generate (and undo) our subjectivities. Would you speak further about your argument that feminist theory should move away from critique? Would you also say more about the way that this sense of difference as the very ground of our subjective differences is the basis of invention?²

2 ‘We need to ask with more urgency now than in the past: if a subject strives to be recognized as a subject in a culture which does not value the subject in the terms that it seeks, what is such recognition worth? And once the subject is recognized as such, what is created through this recognition? To focus on the subject at the cost of focusing on the forces that make up the world is to lose the capacity to see beyond the subject, to engage with the world, to make the real. We wait to be recognized instead of making something, inventing something, which will enable us to recognize ourselves, or more interesting, to eschew recognition altogether. I am not what others see in me, but what I do, what I make. I become according to what I do, not who I am. This is not to ignore the very real differences between subjects and their various social positions, only to suggest that these differences, and not the subjectivity between which these differences are distributed, are the vehicles for the invention of the new.’ As above at 84–5.

Elizabeth Grosz: OK, that is a very difficult and timely question – it summarises pretty much the dilemma of radical political thought and action today. There is a two-fold orientation to all kinds of political struggles in the present – those directed to sexism, racism, classism, xenophobia, nationalism, and other forms of oppression. There needs to be both critique and construct, as I have called them in an earlier moment.³ Without an earlier, even if implicit, form of critique the political motivation to produce new practices and modes of thinking isn’t really there. These creative endeavours risk remaining vanity projects or merely forms of self-expression without an understanding of the forces of oppression that infuse all social orders with the need to move beyond them and provide alternatives to them. I am not here suggesting that all art, or all thought, or all social practices, need to be ‘political’ in any direct way, or even share a sense of what politics and political struggle may be, but all such practices always already do participate, in their history and using their contemporary forces, in such a politics. So I don’t think that everyone in all circumstances should abandon critique in order to undertake the constructive production of the new; but I do think that, especially in the case of the development and production of ideas, critique has both its strengths and its limits. Its strength, as you suggest, is its ability to recognise problems, questions that address the inequities of what is given; but its limit is, as I have claimed in Becoming Undone and elsewhere, that critique must always give primacy and privilege to what it critiques, it must internally inhabit what it wants to overcome in order to discover inconsistencies or vulnerabilities from within. It does not provide us with an outside, an other, alternative strategies, or different ways to live. I am not sure that I want to spend my life considering how bad patriarchy, racism, electoral politics, or even leftist politics is! This is a fundamentally depressing project!

3 Elizabeth Grosz, ‘Philosophy’ in Sneja Gunew (ed) Feminist Knowledge as Critique and Construct (Routledge 1990) 147–75.

So rather than be preoccupied with the horror that is real and evident regarding women, minorities, indigenous peoples, refugees, a horror that others have devoted their lives to elaborating and archiving, a project for which I probably do not have fortitude, there are other activities that one might undertake in a manner of amelioration that is neither utopian, which is to say, impossible, nor simply critical. This is what I understand as the elaboration of difference as a positivity, the elaboration of a positive conception of difference. I don’t think this is or should be the project that dominates or defines feminist theory or politics; but it is a significant project and deserves a place in the interrogation of patriarchal, racist, and xenophobic thought. The study of difference is a philosophical-artistic-cultural-biological analysis, one strand of feminist thought that is as significant, original, and provocative as any form of feminist politics.

To be clear: it is important that what we might call ‘identity politics’, the theorising of the position of the knowing and experiencing subject as a key condition for the production and contestation of knowledge and power, has a place in feminist thought. It was only under the conditions of a first emergence of ‘identity politics’ that feminism, or anti-racism, became possible, that is, it is only when a distinct group is recognised, and recognises itself in the systematicity of its negative treatment, that the new politics of the 1960s was possible, and continues to exert its appeal for each generation. In recognising oneself as a member of an oppressed category, one recognises that others are also in the same position and that something needs to be done about this systematic treatment. But it is also important that this is not the only factor or issue in play in feminist thought or practice. Identity is complicated by fissures, divisions, differences that we each recognise in ourselves, but that have not been adequately addressed, and we haven’t yet developed the theoretical tools and models to adequately understand them – any given social-biological identity is itself always undergoing changes, transformations, events that mark and change it. It always exceeds itself. It is the exploration of these excesses or shortfalls in identity that interests me more.

RH: For many years, you have drawn attention to the importance, even the necessity, for feminists and other radical theorists of working in ontology. If I have read correctly, you are arguing for the importance of theorists articulating reality in our own terms rather than diagnosing the forms of reality given in this or that theoretical approach to knowledge. For you, ontology designates the very stuff that makes things and beings what they are, reality in its most fundamental sense. In Becoming Undone you emphasise that ontology should not be understood in terms of static being but rather in terms of becoming.⁴ Reality is changing and the effort to think and to articulate ontology must take account of this moving reality. In your new book, The Incorporeal, you argue for what you call ‘onto-ethics’, that is for ontology that describes not just what is (which is constantly changing) but also an ontology of what might become and what ought to happen. Can you speak further about this gesture of articulating ontology in terms of what ought to be?

4 Grosz above note 1 at 51.

EG: Thank you for this question. I am very happy to try to explain what I see as the link between ontology and the creation of an onto-ethics because it is the trajectory of my current work. It is not often one has the opportunity to reflect on the processes of change that occur in one’s writings. So I appreciate this opening you have given me. Ontology is, as I understand it, our conception of the real. It is, of course, not the real itself, but the real is the object which different ontologies, theoretical models of the real, contest and reframe, from time to time, as the limits of any particular epistemology become clear. Ontology, for me, was a kind of refuge from the endless contestations of truth claims that mark most forms of epistemology, including feminist epistemologies, and these epistemological claims quite rightly addressed the limits of knowledge and its very particular and limiting historical nature. But ontology too has its limits – any ontology describes, analyses, addresses, or contests what is. Ethics and politics, in different but related ways, address the question, not only of what is but also of what could be. And for me, this is really what drew me to ontology in the first place, not only what is, but how what exists or is might enable what doesn’t (yet) exist but could exist.

Now there are many ways in which we may address an onto-ethics: this is one of the continuing questions that occurs in the history of Western philosophy, in the writings of the Pre-Socratics, in Spinoza, in Nietzsche, and others. The question of ‘what is’ – or its variant ‘what becomes’ – is not addressed for abstract or merely philosophical reasons, but because it informs and helps to direct the more pressing and less abstract question: How am I, how are we, to act? What is this I or we that acts, and in what world(s) does it act? How are acts made possible by the world? And in what ways can our acts honour the world? In working on an onto-ethics, which no doubt comes in many forms, I am less interested in the conventional question that has regulated ethics since Kant: what general or universal principles should regulate all our acts, the actions that we all undertake? What principles should govern our behaviour? The question that may be more readily addressed is not ‘How do we all accept and act according to universal principles’? but ‘How can I act for myself, and for a future, in a world that is as it is’? Or in a more Greek fashion: ‘How can I be worthy of my fate, of the future that, unknown to me, awaits me?’ This fate, this entanglement with and as part of the world is less than agency as we usually use the term (a conscious agent making decisions about itself in the world) but more than determinism. Ethics is our manner of living in the world with others. Politics is our mode of collective contestation of the ways in which such forms of living occur, and their costs, in the world. Ethics and politics are not two different levels of asking this question but two different dynamics by which to understand, find, and invent ways to live individually and collectively.

If I can say one more thing to qualify what I have just said: I am not sure that it is either an ontology, strictly speaking, or an ethics, in its more conventional sense, that draws me to the idea of an onto-ethics. Rather, it is the questioning of ontology and ethics as they are usually understood that is appealing about their union. So if, conventionally, ontology is concerned with being, and ethics with individual moral actions, then it is an ontogenesis, an account of the world as a world of becoming, a world of actions and passions, of things and living beings without clear-cut distinction, that is needed. Such an ontogenesis does not require a separate ethics, an external set of rules to regulate or direct its operations, for there is no one subject or agent of ontogenesis but the comings into being of different orders of agent and action, and of action and ideal. Actions without agents – such as the embryo’s capacity to make itself – are always directed by an ideal, that is, a plan, a manner of being oriented to a world. Ethics is the ‘ethology’, the modes of interaction, of action and passion, between agents (of various orders, including those above and below the level of the human subject) and ideals. Such an ethology, the study of the actions and passions, or as Spinoza calls them, the speeds and slownesses of living beings, cannot be reduced to the study of the behaviour of animals. More broadly, it must be understood, as by the founders of ethology – Jakob von Uexküll, Konrad Lorenz, Nikolaas Tinbergen – as the study of animals and the worlds that animal occupy. So it is the study of the actions and passions of animals, including the human animal, in their specific worlds, the worlds that in advance of their existence are already laid out in a manner that enables their existence – that is, in a manner that always already orients how they address their worlds. The individual can only produce ideals for themselves – and all individuals do – to the extent that such ideals pre-exist them, and direct the manner of their bodily and conceptual self-formation.

RH: ‘New materialism’ is a post-humanist theoretical position that emphasises the unpredictable behaviour of organic and inorganic matter as the basis for a new politics, a politics which affirms the openness of matter as the basis for agencies that function beyond the freedom that used to be restricted to human consciousness. While you share the new materialist interest in going beyond the human in thinking indetermination, it seems to me that the openness of forces that your work emphasises pertains to forces that exceed, precede, and even condition materiality. For instance, in The Nick of Time, you privilege duration qua Bergson as that which is outside and before matter, as that which dynamises matter with virtuality. In Becoming Undone and especially in your new book, The Inco...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: Philosophies of Difference
• 1. Onto-Ethics and Difference: An Interview with Elizabeth Grosz
• 2. Irigaray, the Untimely, and the Constitution of an Onto-Ethics
• 3. At Least Two: The Tendencies of Sexual Difference
• 4. Irigaray between God and the Indians: Sexuate Difference, Decoloniality, and the Politics of Ontology
• 5. Plants and the Law: Vegetal Ontologies and the Rights of Nature. A Perspective from Latin America
• 6. Depth, Nature, Participation
• 7. Simulating the Lived Experience of Racism and Islamophobia: On ‘Embodied Empathy’ and Political Tourism
• 8. Caught between Character and Race: ‘Temperament’ in Kant’s Lectures on Anthropology
• 9. Reinventing Invention: The Event of Poetry and the Time of Difference
• Index