Rosi Braidotti’s talk and seminar represented a significant shift in the series– from the worlds of biology and biological anthropology back to (what was for us) more familiar terrain in the humanities proper, the world of Western philosophy and its discontents. Two of those discontents, Spinoza and Deleuze, shape Braidotti’s critique of humanism and provide the scaffolding for her vitalist-materialist version of feminist theory.
So after Fuentes, Landecker, and Gilbert, it would seem that we are no longer dealing with “life” on the cellular level, but with “life” as humanists– or, I should say, scholars in the humanities who find the legacy of humanism limiting and/or troubling– know it. And yet Braidotti’s emphasis on life as zoe, on an anti-anthropomorphic understanding of the vitality of matter, makes her project open in principle– and perhaps in practice? (that is one of the things we hope to find out in the course of this project)– to the developments and challenges mounted by scholars like Landecker and Gilbert, whose work suggests (among other things) that Lynn Margulis was right about symbiosis– and perhaps that a Deleuzean understanding of zoe makes sense even, or especially, on the cellular level. We are all vitalist lichens? When all nine Boundaries participants convene in April 2017, we will have a chance to see whether my intuition makes sense. For now, however, I want to call attention not to Braidotti’s theory of life but to her theory of death. In the seminar that followed her presentation, I asked Braidotti about the following passage from The Posthuman:
The awareness of the “beyond” has to do with death as the experience that has always already happened, not as transcendental what-have-you. While at the conscious level all of us struggle for survival, at some deeper level of our unconscious structures all we long for is to lie silently and let time wash over us in the stillness of non-life. Self- styling one’s death is an act of affirmation because it means cultivating an approach, a “style” of life that progressively and continuously fixes the modalities and the stage for the final act, leaving nothing un-attended.(135; emphasis mine).
The passage appears in a section headed “Death of a Subject,” which opens with the sentence, “My vitalist notion of death is that it is the inhuman within us, which frees us into life” (134). I think I found this section, and this passage, so arresting partly because death is, how shall I say, undertheorized in the humanities. I hear an echo of Freud and thanatos here, but I have not heard much– save for side conversations during a meeting of the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes in 2014– about the question of how we are to understand the concept of “the good death.” Surely ideas about the good death inhere in ideas about the good life?
I did not want– and I do not want– to let this question default into a policy debate. I am all too familiar with disability-rights critiques of Oregon’s “Death with Dignity Act,” critiquing physician-assisted suicide on the grounds that it will always set the lives of people with disabilities at a discount. I disagree with that position, having read the amicus brief filed by the disability advocacy group Not Dead Yet, but as I say, that’s not where I want this thought to go. Instead, I want to linger with the thought of what it might mean to self-style one’s death as an act of affirmation. I am not thinking of overtly political self-stylings, Thich Quang Duc burning on a busy street in Saigon in 1963 or Mohamed Bouazizi launching the Tunisian revolution in 2010. I am not thinking about martyrdom or heroism or even just plain goodbye-cruel- worldism. I am thinking more along the lines Braidotti suggested when, in response to my question, she cited David Bowie’s recent death as a sublime work of art. (The very fact that she responded by talking about Bowie told me that we were on the same death-as-affirmation wavelength.) And I am wondering how such an attitude toward death can help us think about life– our lives as humans, my life as a human, but more importantly, life in the Anthropocene, life on earth, life as such.