From: squigle-AT-panix.com
Date: Thu, 6 Jun 1996 14:05:33 -0500
Subject: Rosi Braidotti Interview, Part II


PART II
>
>                     NOMADIC PHILOSOPHER:
>              A CONVERSATION WITH ROSI BRAIDOTTI
>           (Utrecht, The Netherlands.  August 1995)
>
>with Kathleen O'Grady, (ko10001-AT-cus.cam.ac.uk)
>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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