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 http://fty.sagepub.com/ Feminist Theory

 http://fty.sagepub.com/content/8/3/356The online version of this article can be found at:

DOI: 10.1177/14647001070080030705

2007 8: 356Feminist Theory Robin Stoate

2, £18.99 (pbk)−−3596−−7456−−4, £55.00 (hbk); 0−−3595−−7456−−pp. ISBN 0Book review: Rosi Braidotti, Transpositions. Cambridge: Polity, 2006. 307

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Ettinger achieves this analysis through deliberate steps, although at timesshe verges into seeing the matrixial as the phallic’s own failure. Ultimately, theargument that art, as a repetition-compulsion, can involve the unconsciousmatrixial stratum of subjectivization manifesting its notions of the subjectholds together, finally giving us a psychoanalytic way of seeing ‘the female’ in

aesthetics as a presence other than absence, sameness or psychosis. For thosewho see the public of most art as a tiny body of patron-investors, the idea thatart functions to do anything is a repetition of those investors’ founding liberalhumanist myth. But Ettinger’s assertion that certain events in the psycho-dynamic development of the subject are aesthetic and so can be re-tracedaesthetically allows her to see art as not just one sort of symptom but as apractice where matrixial processes are caught. Psychoanalytic film theory inparticular should benefit from her de-stagnation of the relationship betweenthe female and the gaze. It is a pity, then, that Ettinger’s own artworks, used tomark the beginning of each of this volume’s components, are reproduced so

 badly.While much of the theory of the matrixial flows neatly from Ettinger’s

description of the subject-conditions of intrauterine and early post-natal exist-ence, in places it tends towards a gesture merely to state a reverse of phalliclogic: the trace that the matrixial leaves ‘is a resistance to and liberty from thePhallus which shakes the borderlines of culture into becoming thresholds anddraws openings towards new concepts that will retroactively account for atransgression to the m/Other via the eroticized antennae of the psyche’ (p. 56).The constant citing of the matrixial as functioning through between-ness is also

sometimes little more than a statement of between-ness. But this and an overallopacity are a consequence of a form of writing both describing and emulatingthe kind of discourse to which it alludes. This is a work based on usinglanguage to undo what certain words have been habituated not to meananything other than. She is, after all, working to avoid replicating, in thematrix, ‘woman’ as the phallic difference from ‘man’, ‘woman’ whose desire isself-directed, ‘woman’ whose challenge to man is merely to adequate thephallic, ‘woman’ as the absence of the penis, ‘woman’ as matter, ‘woman’ asthe unconscious, or ‘woman’ as the non-I from which individuation establishesseparation and for which it occasions nostalgia. For the most part, she also

convinces that, because of the matrixial stratum of subjectivization, thelanguage to which she is struggling almost exists.

A ND RE W S HA IL

St Anne’s College, Oxford 

Rosi Braidotti, Transpositions . Cambridge: Polity, 2006. 307 pp. ISBN 0–7456–3595–4,£55.00 (hbk); 0–7456–3596–2, £18.99 (pbk)

There has been an increasingly popular turn towards the work of Gilles Deleuzeas the philosophical reference point for all matters bodily in contemporarytheory, and particularly feminist theory. Continuing the uniqueDeleuze/Spinoza/Irigaray-inspired critique of the unitary subject of liberalhumanism that she began most explicitly with Nomadic Subjects (1994) andcontinued with Metamorphoses (2002), Rosi Braidotti here develops the notionof ‘philosophical nomadism’ to begin to illustrate the foundations of what she

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intends to be a project to provide an account of the possible ethics of thatnomadism and so initiate a response to ‘the specific ethical challenge repre-sented by postmodernity’ (p. 23). It also constitutes a defence against the all-too-common charges of poststructuralist theoretical endeavours as relativist,which are comprehensively and regularly shot down in advance by Braidotti

as she strives to show the tenacity and ‘ethical pragmatism’ of a consistentmaterialist approach (p. 12).

Initially posited as a response to what Deleuze and Guattari notoriouslyidentified as the ‘schizophrenia’ of late capitalism, Braidotti’s work theorizes apossible way out of the West’s technocultural ‘double-pull’ of resisting changewhile hungering for (highly commodified) technological product developmentand the multiplication of marketable ‘others’ as an alibi for genuine restructur-ings of social agency and equality (p. 2). For Braidotti, the capital-driven multi-plication of subject positions (that is then narrativized as ‘social progress’ bythe dominant ideology) is an inadequate solution to this disenfranchisement.

She stresses the importance of first fundamentally reconfiguring the subject asone of immanence rather than universality and completeness, in order tosidestep the limitations of Enlightenment logics of the self.

Where Transpositions develops most clearly from her previous work is in itsexplicit focus on attempting to account for this nomadic subject’s possibilityfor maintaining a consistent but non-essentialist and non-moralistic ethics; onewith no a priori framework of judgement. It is, in short, Braidotti’s project toalign ethics with ‘human affectivity and passions as the motor of subjectivity’rather than ‘the moral content of intentionality, action or behaviour or the logic

of rights’ (p. 13).Braidotti tries to avoid a transcendent basis for her ethical project and is keento reject the discourse-oriented Derridean/Levinasian turn of an automaticsubmission to ‘anthropocentric’ radical alterity (p. 12). To negotiate this, sheappeals to the importance of a materialist reconfiguration of the concept of ‘life’, rethinking it as not so much a fragile specular metaphysical entity thatrequires protection at all costs, but as an endlessly and relentlessly creative(physical) force of qualitative and topological transformation. This ‘life’ is akind of less-transcendent vitalism – indeed, Braidotti is not afraid to deploythat term, with the caveat of a ‘vigorous’ re-examination to remove its unfortu-

nate fascistic connotations (p. 183). Basing this idea of life on redressing the balance in the distinction between bios (the political-discursive capacity of certain privileged human beings) and zoe (the non-, pre- or a-human vitalisticforce of material generation and the explication of potential) she firmly rootsthe human body as the point of intersection between these two sides of ‘life’and so a central ‘contested space’ (p. 37).

The main problem is that the level of explication one would expect fromsuch a potentially important intervention in poststructuralist ethics seems at afew points to not be entirely forthcoming. This is notable in particular whenBraidotti critiques existing poststructuralist ethical projects: the aforemen-tioned dismissal of discursive models is only briefly investigated and I waskeen for a much more extended disassembling of their problems (p. 37). Simi-larly, moves to, for example, address the myth of the ethereal informationsociety and highlight its heavily material base could have run much deeper(pp. 51–2). Of course, this is an ambitious project that covers vast theoretical,cultural, and philosophical ground and indeed the basic nature of Braidotti’s

Book reviews  357

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ethics of philosophical nomadism understandably resists an argumentativetrajectory that would dwell too long on narrow specifics, or overextend theminto universals and pre-close the possibility for interpretation. What we do getinstead at these points is generally just repetition of Braidotti’s position, albeitin a witty, inviting way. Perhaps ‘affirmation’ would be a more suitable term

for these instances – it is one that Braidotti deploys when considering ways of turning the ‘negative’ into ‘positive’ (p. 201).

Zoe itself does feel somewhat transcendent, too. At times when encounter-ing this aspect of Braidotti’s neo-vitalist refiguring of the animal/politicalhuman I even felt echoes of the Rabelaisian carnivalesque as noted by MikhailBakhtin (1984); the positively socially disruptive acorporeal bodily force of desire erupting with gusto through the surface of oppressive networks of power. Zoe emerges in a way that may at times touch the kind of universal-ism that Braidotti wishes to avoid – although she does note its capacity fordestructiveness and part of her ethical project of philosophical nomadism is

to emphasize ‘sustainability’ in a subject’s relationship to, with, and amongthat force. It is, too, certainly not a metaphysical alibi for immortality –indeed, Braidotti’s posited relationship with death provides an optimisticalternative to seeing it as the horizon against which life itself is alwaysalready judged – death is inevitable and ‘self-styled’; ‘I’ disappear, but zoe

powers on (p. 247).This is, then, obviously a book that is, at times, meant to be felt more in

the skin and the blood than in the mind (wheresoever that may be located,of course – and one must be careful not to ratify the division that Braidotti

herself so successfully rejects). It wears its affective colours proudly, and thewriting glows with a passionate, somewhat hungry approach to the topic athand. That is not for a moment to suggest, though, that there is not an obviouscommitment to maintaining academic rigour: the Deleuzean ‘ethical pragma-tism’ (p. 14) that Braidotti very much wants to stress is rendered with greatpassion and care, and is thickly armoured against accusations of relativistuselessness.

Reference

Bakhtin, M. M. (1984) Rabelais and his World , trans. Helene Iswolsky.

Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.R O BI N S TO AT E

Newcastle University 

Lisa Guenther, The Gift of the Other: Levinas and the Politics of Reproduction. NewYork: State University of New York Press, 2006. 190 pp. ISBN-10: 0–7914–6847–X,ISBN-13: 978–0–7914–6847–0, $74.50 (hbk); ISBN-10: 0–7914–6848–8, ISBN-13:978–0–7914–6848–7, $24.95 (pbk)

The French philosopher and ethicist, Emmanuel Levinas, has proven contro-versial for feminist theorists. On the one hand, he acknowledges the signifi-cance of femininity within his ethical frameworks. He invokes themetaphorical images of the welcoming woman of the home as the preconditionfor and precursor of the ethical relation proper, which is in turn encapsulated

 by the metaphor of the maternal body. The woman who provides hospitality

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