Nomadic Theory: The Portable Rosi Braidotti

Nomadic Theory: The Portable Rosi Braidotti. Rosi Bradiotti (Columbia University Press, 2011).

Though nomadism, in its original sense, a way of life of peoples who do not live continually in the same place but move cyclically or periodically, declined in the 20th century for economic and political reasons, philosophical nomadism has been on the rise thanks to Rosi Braidotti, a philosopher and distinguished professor at Utrecht University. In Nomadic Theory, Rosi Braidotti develops Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s project on nomadology, outlined in Mille Plateaux (1980, A Thousand Plateaus), contending that it is not a utopian one. The book, a follow up to Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory (1994/2011), is a dense volume of selected essays, in which she elaborates and applies the main principles she delineated in Nomadic Subjects. As the titles of the two volumes indicate, Nomadic Theory, though it retains its feminist concerns, enlarges its scope and extends its exposition of Deleuze’s thought. The book can be read as a tribute to the philosopher, a major pedagogic encounter in Braidotti’s Parisian life, who shaped her nomadic vision away from deconstruction and psychoanalysis and towards process ontologies that emerged in the 70s and 80s but started to find fertile ground in the twenty-first century.

Braidotti’s ambitious project consists in setting up an all-encompassing theory on improving our contemporary world. Nomadic Theory exposes her vision of a meaningful, creative life in times of accelerated change and tumultuous developments. The author considers herself a cartographer defining cartography as “a politically informed map of one’s historical and social locations, enabling the analysis of situated formations of power and hence the elaboration of adequate forms of resistance” (271). In her cartographic setting, the nomadic subject, her politically informed image that portrays subjectivity, a socially mediated process, is thus endowed with agency. The type of power that Braidotti advocates for it is affirmative or potentia, the opposite of restrictive or potentas, the despotic power of authority. The terms go back to Spinoza whose legacy the author has fully embraced, just like some French philosophers in the 70s, to overcome dialectical oppositions. Her philosophical premises involve monism, a radical immanence, and a vital materialism.

Indeed, Braidotti’s central concept is Zoe, the affirmative power of life and vector of in-depth transformations animating the critical consciousness of nomadism which fiercely resists coded modes of thought and behavior. Her nomadic subject is a subject in perpetual becoming, capable of moving across established categories and levels of experience, and hence post-identitarian. Nomadic theory challenges any essentialist view of identities including those of minorities. As she puts it, “Crucial to becoming-nomad is the undoing of the oppositional dualism majority/minority and arousing an affirmative passion for the transformative flows that destabilize all identities” (41).

Another oppositional dualism that nomadic theory abolishes is human/nonhuman. Braidotti’s nomadism is post-anthropocentric, and in favor of a biocentered egalitarianism clearly steering away from advanced capitalism, whose “genius” exploited this position, and proposing the ethics of becoming-animal, “a process of redefining one’s sense of attachment and connection to a shared world.” (94). A prominent example of the ecophilosophical dimension of nomadic theory is offered by insects which are endowed with great capacity to “‘communicate with the cosmic’” (106). Hence, “becoming-insect” as the Deleuzian jargon goes, means being able to “be tuned into the nonhuman temporality of our cosmic world” (109).

Moreover, insects are also interesting because they provide “a model of polymorphous antiphallic sexuality” (111) advocated by nomadism as Zoe calls forth not only for the breakdown of species distinction but also for the dissolution of gender and its binary system. Virginia Woolf’s The Waves and Orlando offer for the author good cases in point. Woolf’s texts are analyzed through Braidotti’s concept of “intensive genre,” an accelerated space of becoming.

Indeed, Braidotti stresses the productive nature of desire steering clear from the Lacanian lack and forging a “matter-realism” nomadic feminism which embraces the posthuman. Dismissing fantasies of escaping from the body, and eager to establish a great affinity between cyborgs and nomads, both “new forms of literacy to decode today’s world” (66), she sees in the interconnection of human bodies and machines a new kind of “ecosophical” unity. The vitalist politics of her third wave feminism, the “political movement that best exemplifies the affirmative spirit of nomadic politics” (276), rests on a combination of feminist science studies, postcolonial studies and the Deleuze and Guattari’s feminism of “becoming-woman.”

In spite of the secular tradition in the feminist movement, Braidotti embraces Habermans’s “postsecular” vision which reconciles the persistence of religion with modernization and can enlarge the European feminist position entailing “if not a complete revision, at least a relativization of the dominant European paradigm that equates emancipation with sexual liberation” (186). In fact, Europe draws Braidotti’s concerns as she dreams of a post-nationalist European space and calls for the end of a fixed Eurocentric identity. Since the reader may still wonder whether there is such a thing as a European identity, it will be hard for them to follow the leap to a “post-European” identity. But change, no matter how fast it goes, is the key word in the nomadic vision, as Braidotti calls for a new European social imagery, a new theory of desire and love, “a new social and political theory that steers a course between humanistic nostalgia and neoliberal euphoria about biocapitalism” (333), and last but not least, a new approach to death.

Nomadic theory, in line with its posthuman ecophilosophy and its alternative ecologies of belonging, proposes a vision of mortality as a phase in the generative process, and a dynamic principle that discards grief and melancholia, cultivated by what she calls “the politics of death,” i.e. “the unleashing of the unrestricted sovereign right to kill, maim, rape, and destroy” (336). In her celebration of affirmation, Braidotti locates “the ethical moment of transformation” in “the empowerment of the positive side” (165). Her nomadic subject is not only politically engaged and highly critical of advanced capitalism and its perverse ideology of free mobility, but also ethically accountable and capable of containing pain.  Following Lyotard, she contends that “ethics consists in accepting the impossibility of adequate compensation – living with the open wound” (292), a position that those entitled to reparations/compensations for committed atrocities would find extremely hard to accept, to say the least. Braidotti’s response to their objections is Zoe’s “empowering forces against all negative odds” (361).

Though a materialist, she oxymoronically titles her conclusive chapter, “A secular prayer,” and finally introduces in her ongoing project on nomadism another guardian figure, her uncle Romano, a trained philosopher and ordained priest, adding what can only be read as a significant detail, a meaningful coincidence – “who died on Christmas day, 2008.” She summarizes her nomadic vision and acknowledges the role her uncle and mentor played in fashioning it. Though the former was a Christian believer and Braidotti defines herself as an “atheist,” they both share “an ethics of joyful affirmation and becoming, opposed to the economy of loss, the logic of lack, and the moral imperative to dwell in (…) irresolvable states of mourning” (365).

Her prose vibrates with intellectual energy as it is interwoven with a constellation of thinkers, whose density would certainly make it hard to follow for the common reader. Interestingly, Catharine Stimpson, in her article, “The Nomadic Humanities,” suggests a new category of studies, the “Nomadic Humanities,” that would provide a narrower focus than Mobility Studies, and uses Braidotti’s Nomadic Theory as a case study in this rubric.

In tune with her ideas, Braidotti’s tone is joyful, ebullient, rhapsodic. Her overflowing optimism will appear discordant with today’s multiple catastrophes which could remind us of “the weeping philosopher,” Heraclitus, the first philosopher of flux and becoming, but may also make her nomadic project all the more necessary and meaningful.

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