Rosi Braidotti
Born in Italy, raised in
Australia, educated in Paris and currently employed in theNetherlands, Rosi
Braidotti drafted her first book, ’Patterns on Dissonance’, in French. The book
was eventually published in English and later rewritten by Braidotti starting
from the English translation. All this is to point
out that Rosi Braidotti is permanently in between countries, cultures, and
languages, and that the subject of her second and still most influential book,
‘Nomadic Subjects’, is crucial to understanding her academic and critical
trajectory.
‘Nomadism’ is anotion borrowed from the French philosophers Gilles
Deleuze and Félix Guattari (whose work, with that
of feminist philosopher Luce Irigaray, had an enormous influence on Braidotti’s
thinking). It denotes a state of continued in-between-ness. The notion is part
of Deleuze and Guattari’s revolt against the rounded, psychologized,
patriarchal subject that continues to dominate Western culture. The nomad is
the exact opposite of the rounded, grounded subject. The nomad is permanently
on the move, constantly (re-)inventing a self that is quintessentially
fragmented and schizophrenic, forever ‘becoming’. To Braidotti, this fractured
self, this ‘embodied difference’, is a perfect means to critiquethe binary opposition between
phallocentric conceptions of self that continues to define female identities.
Throughout Western history, and before feminism and women’s studies began to rewrite the essentially
phallocentric narrative that we came to accept as history, the female self has
always been defined in strict opposition to a rounded masculine self. The idea
of a fractured nomad with moveable roots provides a way out of this binary
choker: women should no longer be either/or, but can also be both/and; not
binary, but multiple, diverse, fragmented. Feminist critic Donna Haraway has
captured this idea of a dissolved binarity in her conception of the cyborg, a
creature that is always both/and - both man and machine, both man and woman,
etc. Braidotti has incorporated this notion of the cyborg in her own work and
compares it to another hybrid figuration, that of the monster. In ‘Between
Monsters, Goddesses and Cyborgs’, a book she edited with Nina Lykke, Braidotti
applies her theory of difference to the history of science, a history fraught
with a hegemonic doctrine of linearity, rationality and objectivity. Braidotti
will further investigate the biases of scientific doctrine in a forthcoming
book on ‘terratology’, the science of monsters. Rosi Braidotti continues to
explore notions of embodied difference through her teaching at the Department
of Women’s Studies at the University of Utrecht, as director of the
Netherland’s Research School of Women’s Studies, and in her
critical work (both in women’s studies, science studies and comparative
literature), which is widely regarded as having an innovative feminist
perspective on science and technology.
Tom Paulus
