Latour’s Modern Is Fanon’s Manichaean

The third chapter looks to the work of Bruno Latour and Frantz Fanon, each of whom offers a way of bridging the concerns of Barad and Hartman. Latour and Fanon are often read as primary sources in political ecology and performativity respectively. And yet political ecology and social construction each represent a polarization explored in different ways by Latour and Fanon themselves. This chapter argues that Latour’s denunciation of the modern is helpful, but it does not offer an adequate response to ecofascism. This chapter argues that Fanon’s exposition offers a better framework for bridging the ecological and the political. Although Fanon’s work concurs, with Latour, that that which is biological is polarized with respect to the political, Fanon suggests that the biological is not understood to be without agency so much as it is problematically agential. This chapter completes the philosophy of elemental difference begun in Chapter 1.

The Problem Is the One, the Body

This chapter advocates re-engagement with the question of what it is like to become human and the sub-question of what dehumanization means. The question of what it is like to be human is indistinguishably ecological and political, and it is necessary to address not the ecological and the political but the distinction itself. The distinction itself hides this question of the one, the body, the very gesture that pretends that the political is not bodily. This chapter argues that advocates of performativity and political ecology each take up one side of the problem of the body, but what needs to be taken up is the question of the distinction itself.

Introduction

The introduction explains that both philosophers of performativity and philosophers of political ecology ultimately dissociate what is considered political from what is considered ecological. What is needed is an exposition of the tradition of the polis. This book argues that the distinction between political and ecological is rooted in the concept of the polis: the leaders of the city, those bodies exemplary of the promise of the polis, were those capable of disembodied, eternal, immaterial thought. It is the dynamics of the polis that both performativity and political ecology aim to critique, but they cannot do so as long as they distinguish themselves from each other.

A Revised Irigarayan Study of the Hierarchy of Form and Matter, This Time without Sexual Difference

Chapter 1 discusses the work of Luce Irigaray, whose philosophy of sexual difference is almost the needed exposition of the polis. The discussion in this chapter attempts to learn from the work of Luce Irigaray without endorsing her philosophy of sexual difference. For Irigaray, no human invented the fact that human bodies are not all alike and cannot share a generic morphology. This chapter seeks to rewrite this claim in terms of elemental difference, as opposed to sexual or sexuate difference. The denial of the elementality of difference anchors a divide between concepts of form and matter, polis and its matter, oikos, and thus anchors matter’s politics, the relationalities that flow from assumption of these concepts. The denial of elemental difference also anchors a divide between two gestures closely related to these: the body and bodies. This chapter offers a new way to practice feminist philosophy, as skepticism toward the body, rather than as advocacy of those of “one’s own sex.”

Performativity and Political Ecology, Matter’s Politics

This chapter considers the work of Karen Barad, placing her account of the need for a concept of agential realism beside the performative account of racial difference in the work of Saidiya Hartman. Chapter 2 shows that there are not one but two concerns with performativity: (1) a political ecology concern about the lack of attention to “nonhuman” agency in the sense of technology, in the work of Barad, and (2) a performativity concern about whether performativity can contain the intensity of the bodily conscription that whiteness requires, in the work of Hartman.

Sylvia Wynter and the Climate of Biocentric Man

Chapter 4 discusses the philosophy of climate change of Sylvia Wynter. Wynter’s work extends that of Fanon into a philosophy of genre. Wynter argues that the inspiration for the sciences of sex, madness, illness, indigence, and sexual classification of the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries in Western Europe is the science of racial anatomy. And this science of racial anatomy is what creates the current genre of biocentrism that is also responsible for climate change. This chapter examines the gesture of hybridity in the work of both Bruno Latour and Sylvia Wynter.