Sex After Life

Sex After Life Sex After Life aims to consider the various ways in which the concept of life has provided normative and moralizing ballast for queer, feminist and critical theories. Arguing against a notion of the queer as counter-normative, Sex After Life appeals to the concept of life as a philosophical problem. Life is neither Sex After Life a material ground nor a generative principle, but can nevertheless offer itself for new forms of problem formation that exceed the all too human logics of Essays on Extinction, Vol. 2 survival. Claire Colebrook Claire Colebrook is Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of English at Penn State University. She has written many articles and books on visual culture, poetry, literary theory, queer theory and contemporary culture, including most recently Theory and the Disappearing Future with Tom Cohen and J. Hillis Miller (2011). Colebrook Cover Image: “Improvisation 7.09” (detail) Dominic Minichiello © Creative Commons CC-BY-NC-SA Oil on board, 2009 Series: Critical Climate Change Sex After Life Critical Climate Change Series Editors: Tom Cohen and Claire Colebrook The era of climate change involves the mutation of sys- tems beyond 20th century anthropomorphic models and has stood, until recently, outside representation or address. Understood in a broad and critical sense, climate change concerns material agencies that impact on biomass and energy, erased borders and microbial invention, geological and nanographic time, and extinction events. The possibility of extinction has always been a latent figure in textual production and archives; but the current sense of deple- tion, decay, mutation and exhaustion calls for new modes of address, new styles of publishing and authoring, and new formats and speeds of distribution. As the pressures and re- alignments of this re-arrangement occur, so must the critical languages and conceptual templates, political premises and definitions of ‘life.’ There is a particular need to publish in timely fashion experimental monographs that redefine the boundaries of disciplinary fields, rhetorical invasions, the in- terface of conceptual and scientific languages, and geomor- phic and geopolitical interventions. Critical Climate Change is oriented, in this general manner, toward the epistemo- political mutations that correspond to the temporalities of terrestrial mutation. Sex After Life Essays on Extinction, Vol. 2 Claire Colebrook OPEN HUMANITIES PRESS with Michigan Publishing – University of Michigan Library, Ann Arbor 2014 First edition published by Open Humanities Press 2014 Freely available online at http://dx.doi.org/10.3998/ohp.12329363.0001.001 Copyright © 2014 Claire Colebrook This is an open access book, licensed under Creative Commons By Attribution Share Alike license. Under this license, authors allow anyone to download, reuse, reprint, modify, distribute, and/or copy their work so long as the authors and source are cited and resulting derivative works are licensed under the same or similar license. No permission is required from the authors or the publisher. Statutory fair use and other rights are in no way affected by the above. Read more about the license at creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0 Cover Art, figures, and other media included with this book may be under different copyright restric- tions. Please see the Permissions section at the back of this book for more information. ISBN-13 978-1-60785-300-8 Open Humanities Press is an international, scholar-led open access publishing collective whose mission is to make leading works of contemporary critical thought freely available worldwide. Books published under the Open Humanities Press imprint at Michigan Publishing are produced through a unique partnership between OHP’s editorial board and the University of Michigan Library, which provides a library-based managing and production support infrastructure to facilitate scholars to publish leading research in book form. OPEN HUMANITIES PRESS www.publishing.umich.edu www.openhumanitiespress.org Contents 1. Feminist Extinction 7 2. Norm Wars 23 3. Post-Phenomenology’s Evil Cartesian Demon 49 4. Queer Aesthetics 75 5. Queer Vitalism 100 6. Difference, Time and Organic Extinction 126 7. Ethics of Extinction 137 8. Just Say No to Becoming Woman (and Post-Feminism) 149 9. How Queer Can You Go? 179 10. Postmodernism Is a Humanism: Deleuze and Equivocity 203 11. On the Very Possibility of Queer Theory 236 Works Cited 253 Permissions 265 Chapter 1 Feminist Extinction The Bloated Monster As the human race hurtles toward extinction, primarily as a result anni- hilating its own milieu, we feminists might respond by saying, ‘I told you so.’ Feminism is, like any ‘ism,’ perhaps too diverse to be given any grounding identity, yet it has most certainly been marked by critiques of man. Even in its earliest, liberal, and inclusive phases, feminism’s claim to include women within the category of ‘man’ or humanity did so not so much for its own sake as for the sake of life in general. It was not a ques- tion of women selfishly making a claim for themselves so much as a call for a better life for all in a new world of sex equality. Feminism has never been a special interests claim but has always appealed to some broader justice in which all humans would be included. As long as man excluded and enslaved what was other than himself—as long as he treated women as mere chattels—his own humanity would be diminished. As Mary Wollstonecraft pointed out in 1792, the relation of master to slave not only enslaves the weaker party, but also precludes the full development of ‘man’ as a rational being: ‘Birth, riches, and every extrinsic advantage that exalt a man above his fellows, without any mental exertion, sink him in reality below them. In proportion to his weakness, he is played upon by designing men, till the bloated monster has lost all traces of humanity’ (Wollstonecraft 2008, 53). Wollstonecraft’s argument is a typical early instance of an insistence on feminism as a better logic for all life. Even before the emergence of explicitly ecological modes of feminism, there had been a long-standing criticism of the limits or self-enclosure of man. But this long-standing resistance to man is intrinsic to the history of humanist self-critique. 8 Chapter 1 Feminism is best seen as an ultra-humanism in that it has, from its incep- tion, been based on the idea that man can only come to himself and be properly human through the recognition of women. The very concept of feminist emancipation harbors an implicit ecology. From liberal to radical and post-structuralist feminisms, women have always fought for themselves in the name of justice and equilibrium (and not as a warring special-interest group). It should come as no surprise, then, that feminism would eventually claim an affinity to otherness in general (Schwab 1996, 34; Hitchcock 1993), and see itself as extending naturally into environmental and class concerns: More and more men are embracing eco-feminism because they see the depth of the analysis and realize that in shedding the privileges of a male-dominated culture they do more than create equal rights for all, that this great effort may actually save the earth and the life it supports. (Plant 1997, 129) There is—according to most forms of eco-feminism—something like an affinity and passion for life as such that has been deflected by a male or masculinist tendency towards mastery and domination of all otherness; this care or concern for life in general might be redeemed by a return to a saved earth. The relation between environmentalism and ethics is co- determining: without a concern for our milieu or the earth we could not possibly build a world of social justice, but without a harmonious and sexually ethical social order we could not possibly respond properly to our ecological milieu. It is not only in the specific branch of an ‘ethics of care’ or eco-feminism that the critique of masculinism becomes inter- twined with a concern for the nonhuman. Eco-feminism is no minor off- shoot of feminist thought but structures its genealogy: liberal feminism begins by saying that one cannot exclude a group of bodies from the rights of the humanity in general. Insofar as one is human (and therefore finite) there can be no precedence or pre-political mastery over any other being: sexual equality follows on from a liberal refusal of transcendence. But that refusal of transcendence not only precludes human-human mastery but indicates an overcoming of mastery as such. In the absence of any transcendent or absolute moral order we are all placed in a position of humility (Langton 1988). If an appeal to humanity in general overturns Feminist Extinction 9 any possibility of a pre-given political hierarchy, because all humans are born equally rational, then that same humanizing gesture will lead to a questioning of the human. By what right can humanity be declared to be definitively rational, definitively self-conscious or definitively social- political? Who defines these privileged predicates? Second-wave feminism questions the very nature of ‘the human,’ and certainly does not embrace liberalism’s ‘self-evident’ values of instru- mental reason and universalism. Perhaps the notion of the self freed from all prejudice is an elevation of a certain type of self, and perhaps another ethics of local attachments, embodied passions and specificity would be just as worthy of being deemed to be human. By the time eco- feminism emerges, the concern for the environment explicitly takes feminism from a mode of human-human combat (women fighting for their rights, for the sake of all humanity) to a war on the man of reason; for it is man whose drive to mastery for the sake of his own self-maintenance has resulted in an unwitting suicide.

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