Deleuze and the Non/Human

H. Stark, J. Roffe, H. Stark, J. Roffe

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9781137453686
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137453693
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ecology

This groundbreaking interdisciplinary collection interrogates the significance of Deleuze's work in the recent and dramatic nonhuman turn. It confronts questions about environmental futures, animals and plants, nonhuman structures and systems, and the place of objects in a more-than-human world.

1

Deleuze and the Nonhuman Turn: An Interview with Elizabeth Grosz

Jon Roffe and Hannah Stark

Recently the category of the human has been besieged from all sides. Not only has it been revealed to have been complicit with the violent exclusions of those considered to be less-than-human, understood as a normative notion (women, nonheterosexuals, people of color, the disabled) but its metaphysical security has also been challenged by the flourishing of theoretical interest in the nonhuman: forces, animals, objects and plants. How do you position your own work in relation to the critique of the human – in both its liberal and metaphysical forms – and how do you see the nonhuman turn developing?

This is a multi-faceted question. On the one hand, along with many others, I applaud the opening up of the category ‘human’ to those others that dominant forces have considered nonhuman or partially human or pre-human (exclusions that bring together not only women, peoples of color of every variation, people distinguished by class, or by ability, as well as the exclusion of children). If we could take a species-based model of the human, it would have to include all types of human beings and all their variations, all corporeal and psychological differences. These differences could not be categorized hierarchically but only described in their variations. But on the other hand, it is no longer clear that the category ‘human’ is, after all, that to which we should aspire in our various political struggles. This may be true both in terms of our received history (just as man may not provide the ideal to which women should aspire, it is not at all clear that our aims should be to be or become human, especially if this is a label or category of which we have been deprived) and in terms of positive ideals of difference that many working in feminist, anti-racism, post-colonial and queer projects invoke. Does the human provide a generic label which may in some way unify us in a way that it hasn’t before? Doesn’t the use of this term as a universal always deprive the multitude of its multiplicity, its particularity and heterogeneity?

The nonhuman turn, one of many ‘turns’ occurring at the moment, is one of the implications of a critique of the restriction of the human to the able-bodied, Western, white, civilized, masculine man, and forms of control exerted by the category ‘human’. At its best, a reorientation beyond the self and its modes of recognition, beyond the limited perspective of human self-interest opens up an entire world of questions not limited to the human, better able to address the human from a broader framework than that provided by introspection and identification, that is, capable of addressing the place of the human in a bigger world. It would be a new opening for the discourses of culture and politics, especially the politics of various forms of identity-structures and identifications, to look out to the world rather than in to the self to discover who one is. Worlds await and have yet to be thought about in political and theoretical terms. The human is, obviously, a hinge, a pathway, one of many, by which the world may understand itself, by which thought or conceptuality is added to or elaborated in the world. But if the human and its modes of conceptualization understood this world better, the place of the human would not be so perilously close to extinction, so self-destructive as it has been. If the human is seen as one among a huge number of species and billions of living beings, this provides a kind of antidote to the endless spirals of self-inspection.

In your opinion, what role has Deleuze’s work played in facilitating a consideration of the nonhuman?

For me, Deleuze’s work has been indispensible. I am not sure that this is true for many others working in the nonhuman or post-human field. Many have come from the emerging fields of animal studies and ecophilosophy, others from within the world of art and/or technology studies, and others again from religious studies and theology. The human is under conceptual assault since the eruption of so-called post-modern philosophy, which first of all made man an effect of history, of language and of politics rather than their cause. Foucault, Derrida, Lyotard, Irigaray, Nancy and many others, following in the wake of Nietzsche, have invoked the death of man, and inhuman forces, ghosts and spirits as well as animated matter and regimes of governmentality to explain the constitution of man as a philosophical concept, and to address the limits, the forms of self-undermining, that this concept entails. Deleuze, from his earliest to his final writings, focuses primarily on this question: what of the nonhuman or the inhuman exceeds man? What forces run through humans to connect them to animals and plants, to incipient brains, to milieus and atmospheres, to geographical and historical events – that is, what forces make the human exceed itself? Which is the same question as what makes the human think? And sense? And calculate? What in the world imposes itself enough on the human to generate concepts, affects and percepts? Rather than focus on the human in its engagements with the nonhuman (as does, say, phenomenology), it is the nonhuman forces that interest him most. These nonhuman forces – from the smallest sub-atomic forces to the operation of solar systems, forces comprising the human and its overcoming, forces that cannot be comprehended by the human (the plane of immanence) but that connect the human to all that is both human and nonhuman – are Deleuze’s primary preoccupation throughout his work. Just as significant as his own writings are the wealth of writings that he utilizes from the history of philosophy – from the Stoics to Spinoza and Nietzsche, through to Gilbert Simondon and Raymond Ruyer – that demonstrate a vast historical body of writings on the human’s delusions of its own significance in the order of things. Deleuze provided me with more than his own work to think through this question of the beyond of the human, the more-than-human.

Feminism seems to have played a significant role in the advent of the nonhuman turn. It is particularly striking that many of the people who are currently engaging with the nonhuman in Deleuze studies emerged out of feminist theory – beyond your own work, we could cite Rosi Braidotti, Claire Colebrook and Patricia MacCormack, to name just a few.¹ What do you think is involved here? What, in your view, are the commonalities between feminist theory and work on the nonhuman? And, looking forward, what potential do you see for future work at the intersection of these two areas of inquiry?

The question of the nonhuman has been central in the work of many feminists, and particularly those influenced by Deleuze. It is also a thread that runs through the work of feminists influenced by Irigaray; and perhaps through certain strands of ecofeminism. Its centrality is the result precisely of the way the history of thought – and not just Western thought – has systematically excluded women and femininity from the characteristics that mark the universal (read: masculine) human. If reason is that characteristic that marks the human, then women have been understood as unreasonable, irrational, unruly; if language defines the human, then ‘great writing’ is that undertaken by men; if political (or religious) community defines the human, then women are relegated to the tasks of handmaiden and server. To the extent that the human is regarded as an accomplishment, it is denied to women, mothers, girls and all those associated with their denigrated or less-than-adequate characteristics.

While there is a schism between feminists committed to the social, economic and political equality of women in regard to the human and feminists committed to concepts of sexual difference or sexuate autonomy, there is a common recognition by a great many feminists that the concept of the human, man, has always been masculine or understood in terms that privilege the masculine. Egalitarian feminists aim to create a more inclusive concept of the human, one that now makes room for the excluded others that the human as produced as a biased and politicized concept; while many within so-called difference feminism are more attracted to a concept of what may be beyond the human, and thus perhaps beyond the masculine. Deleuze studies have become increasingly influential within this strand of feminist thought because Deleuze and Guattari have shown that the inhuman both inhabits the human, and that the human always resides in and partakes of a world that is nonhuman. Deleuze’s work has become a conceptual tool in feminist conceptions of what two – or more – sexes may be like. In this sense, his work profoundly complements Irigaray’s conception of woman as that which has yet to exist. If this is true, the human as such has yet to exist, and indeed may never come into existence.

Deleuze’s influence on feminist thought was slow in developing, at least relative to the influence of other (male, French) philosophers, Lacan, Derrida, Foucault, who all discuss the limits of human consciousness and intentionality and have exerted a powerful influence on a generation of feminist theorists. I think it is in part the result of the difficulty and abstractness of Deleuze’s thought that, until quite recently, it generated strong resistance on the part of feminists, even though Braidotti, and other feminists, such as Dorothea Olkowski and Tamsin Lorraine have written positively about Deleuze for a couple of decades.² Deleuzian feminism still remains a rather small branch of feminist theory, perhaps because his work upsets the terms by which we commonly understand ourselves as human, upsets the fantasy of linear historical progress in political struggles and upsets a notion of a politics directed to particular goals, knowable in advance.

Since your own work on time in Time Travels (2005) and The Nick of Time (2004) we have seen an intensification of interest in nonhuman timescales – Timothy Morton’s work on global warming as a Hyperobject (2013) is the example that comes to mind, as does Claire Colebrook’s work on human extinction (2014), and Ray Brassier’s engagement with the time of extinction (2007). In Becoming Undone you describe the human as ‘but a momentary blip in a history and cosmology that remains fundamentally indifferent to this temporary eruption’ (2011: 24–25). How do you see your own work on time intersecting with this recent political interest in the place of the human in timescales that radically undermine its position at the center of all things?

This is a moment in history, after devastating worldwide wars, global economic crises and global climate upheaval, where philosophy has devoted a good deal of thought to reconsidering geopolitics and its key terms. But the question of temporality, the temporality of life, the temporality of evolution, the temporality of the universe itself has remained a relatively underdeveloped and politically uninteresting topic. For me, it was the coupling of Darwin and Bergson, a natural coupling given Bergson’s profound fascination with Darwinism, that brought about a realization of temporality as an active, immaterial force that frames and distributes matter and life. Morton, Brassier, Graham Harman and those associated with ‘Object Oriented Ontology’ or ‘Speculative Realism’ have taken a broader perspective on being, and life, than an earlier generation of feminists and activist philosophers which inevitably, given the change in scale of objects themselves – no longer the singular tree of Merleau-Ponty, a human-scale entity that reflects and is reflected by a perceiving subject in a mutual but always humanized encounter – but mega- or hyperobjects whose scale and composition can no longer be recognized or contained by a living being; this brings with it a broader, longer and more abstract concept of duration.³

Claire Colebrook is of course quite different in her interests than this quite non-feminist (and loosely related) group of thinkers, for not only does she use the work of Heidegger (in common with some of these thinkers), she uses Deleuze and Irigaray very effectively to rethink vitalist and life affirming philosophies from the scale of catastrophic extinction. What we all share, if anything, is an understanding of the embeddedness of local, human-to-human relations with a much broader network of connections that takes us, eventually, to the furthest reaches of time and space. Between us, though, I suspect that this shared perspective hides a number of differences.

While Deleuze is clearly a key resource here, there are also not-insignificant elements that seem to emphasize the priority of the human in his work – we’re thinking of the invocation of the semi-divine power to choose at the close of Bergsonism (1991), the place of psychic systems in Difference and Repetition (1994), and even the ethics of counter-actualization in Logic of Sense (1990). Perhaps here we confront a tension in Deleuze, but it may also be a matter of emphases, or even a case of his own position changing across the length of his work. What do you make of this situation?

I am not sure that I agree with this. It isn’t a question of the priority of the human in Deleuze’s work. The human and many of its characteristics are of course objects of analysis and discussion in his work. But in the Bergson book, for example, he speaks in and through Bergson in elaborating Bergson’s philosophical invention, duration and with it, indetermination or degrees of freedom. In Difference and Repetition, he speaks in and through Freud and Lacan of their concepts of psychical and energetic systems, and in The Logic of Sense, he speaks through the Stoics, among others he re-animates. These are not so much affirmations of the human or its priority as articulations and analyses of what we might call a human-effect, an ‘all-too-human’ perspective he must address insofar as they provide the terms he moves beyond. In this, his model is perhaps more Spinoza, ‘the prince of philosophers’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994: 48), than anyone else. Spinoza moves from what appears to be and is perceived by the human to be an impersonal plane of immanence, God or nature, in which the human finds its miniscule place. The philosophers who attract him the most – Zeno, Chrysippus, Epictetus, Spinoza, Kant, Nietzsche, Bergson, among many others – emphasize the smallness of the human in the largeness of the universe. My favorite quote to illustrate this comes from Epictetus: ‘You are a tiny soul carrying a corpse’! This really makes clear in an unavoidable way this smallness of the human in the order of nature. There is only a tension or uneasiness when we place the human above or beyond the world, when we attach to the human the capacity for transcendence or an exceptional position of sovereignty over nature. When we understand the human, not as the telos or end of nature but as a small part of it, many philosophical claims about human privilege fall away.

In Becoming Undone, you write: ‘A new humanities becomes possible once the human is placed in its properly inhuman context’ (2011: 21). What does serious consideration of the nonhuman mean for the humanities and for disciplinarity more generally?

This is a tough question, partly because what a ‘new humanities’ might mean isn...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction: Deleuze and the Non/Human
• 1  Deleuze and the Nonhuman Turn: An Interview with Elizabeth Grosz
• 2  Nonhuman Life
• 3  Objectal Human: On the Place of Psychic Systems in Difference and Repetition
• 4  Human and Nonhuman Agency in Deleuze
• 5  Beyond the Human Condition: Bergson and Deleuze
• 6  Insects and Other Minute Perceptions in the Baroque House
• 7  Iqbals Becoming-Woman in The Rape of Sita
• 8  Becoming-Animal Is a Trap for Humans: Deleuze and Guattari in Madagascar
• 9  The Companion Cyborg: Technics and Domestication
• 10  Deleuze and Critical Plant Studies
• 11  Mechanosphere: Man, Earth, Capital
• 12  Who Comes after the Post-human?
• Index