This chapter interrogates the search for origin in classical antiquity alongside the search for an underlying reality in contemporary physics. Drawing on Butler’s notion of gender performativity as well as a phenomenological approach to the natural world that brings to bear the thinking of John Sallis, Alphonso Lingis, and Luce Irigaray upon early Greek texts, Bianchi develops a phenomenological and elemental account of nature as itself thoroughly performative, a theater of display, effect, and response that may never succumb to full epistemic illumination. In so doing, she at once radicalizes the Heideggerian account of ancient physis, while mounting an intervention into what she sees as the reductionism and scientism of contemporary theorists of the posthuman such as Karen Barad.
Two Notions of Vulnerable and Intensely Affected Body: Gilles Deleuze and Alphonso Lingis
