Alenka Zupančič, The Odd One In: On Comedy

In Absolute Recoil, Slavoj Žižek offers a Lacanian reading of two Hegelian figures of moral consciousness in the Phenomenology of Spirit, the “Beautiful Soul” and the “Law of the Heart,” criticizing Lacan’s condensation of these two figures into one. Žižek stresses the importance of keeping their distinction, describing these figures within Lacan’s own framework: the Beautiful Soul as a figure of moral withdrawal and narcissistic pleasure whose refusal to act paradoxically sustains the symbolic order it criticizes (hysteric’s attitude) and the Law of the Heart as the self-proclaimed savior who seeks to impose its own will on society (psychotic’s attitude).¹

Žižek’s analysis appears to overlook an important transitional figure of moral consciousness in Hegel’s Phenomenology, the “Knight of Virtue,” which is a necessary dialectical stage and can complicate Žižek’s binary framework and his opposition between the hysteric and the psychotic by introducing a third position that acts within the Symbolic but fails through over-identification with abstract virtue. Reintroducing the Knight restores a dialectical mediation and perhaps also invites a reconsideration of Lacan’s so-called “mistake” as a deeper intuition, a recognition of the structural entanglement between the figures Žižek distinguishes.

The Knight of Virtue, emerging between the Law of the Heart and the Beautiful Soul, reveals the internal progression from subjective moral conviction to protest to symbolic failure. Unlike the Law of the Heart, which hallucinates universality, or the Beautiful Soul, which retreats from action, the Knight acts. But this action is futile, rigid, and performative, ultimately reinforcing the very order it seeks to oppose. It marks the dialectic’s comedic moment: the hysteric’s empty gesture, blind to its own complicity in sustaining the structure it criticizes.

Žižek’s bypassing of this figure collapses Hegel’s rich trajectory into a binary of delusion (the Law of the Heart) and withdrawal (the Beautiful Soul), flattening the tragicomic complexity of the moral subject’s entanglement with the Symbolic.

The Law of the Heart: Subjective Universality and the Collapse of Mediation

The Law of the Heart appears in the “Reason” chapter of Hegel’s Phenomenology, where consciousness tries to reconcile individuality with universality. After the alienation of the Unhappy Consciousness, Reason affirms that reality is accessible to self-consciousness and not external/unknowable. It starts by observing the world scientifically, studying nature, psychology, and itself, to uncover rational laws beneath appearances. This project fails, collapsing into reductive absurdities like physiognomy and phrenology, mistaking outer form for inner essence. Then comes a shift to practical reason, in which consciousness attempts to actualize freedom in the social world. Figures like Don Juan and Faust, who pursue fulfillment through seduction or knowledge, also fail, revealing that individual desire cannot shape the world. From these failures emerges a new figure: the “Law of the Heart and the Frenzy of Self-Conceit,” the next shape of consciousness beyond pleasure & necessity.

In the Law of the Heart, the subject no longer pursues fulfillment in personal desire or pleasure but rather identifies an inner moral law within itself. The inner law is experienced as universal and necessary even though it is subjective. This subject believes that its inner feeling (“heart”) expresses not only a personal truth but the truth of all humanity. It speaks as if in the name of everyone, attempting to lead others to righteousness by imposing its own moral vision onto the world.

But of course, the world does not recognize this subject’s law as universal, and this leads to a clash between subjective conviction and objective reality. As competing “laws of the heart” collide, the subject experiences the world as corrupt, unjust, or deceived. There must be moral blindness, systemic corruption, or conspiracy. Then comes a spiral of rage, self-righteousness, and isolation. The subject hardens into a delirious self-certainty that demands others become like itself, and lives in paranoia and resentment. It mistakes subjective conviction for objective truth and fails to grasp the intersubjective and historical mediation of ethical life.

Žižek, following the Lacanian formulation, associates the figure of the Law of the Heart with the “psychotic attitude—that of a self-proclaimed Savior who imagines his inner Law to be the Law for everybody and is therefore compelled, in order to explain why the ‘world’ does not follow his precepts, to resort to paranoid constructions, to the plotting of dark forces.”²

But perhaps, the Law of the Heart can rather be seen as structurally unstable. It does not yet display the full features of either psychosis or hysteria, as it immediately begins to break down under the weight of its own delusion. By identifying its personal feeling with universal Reason, it stages a moment of immediate fusion between the inner and the outer. It appears as a border phenomenon in which an assumed/fantasized unity obfuscates a sharp contradiction.

Unlike a psychotic position grounded in paranoid self-legislation, the Law of the Heart can be understood more cautiously as a moment of collapsing immediacy in which inner conviction and universality are prematurely merged; a transitional collapse of mediation where subjective conviction is mistaken for universality. Perhaps what is desired is consistency in immediacy, but this subject’s ultimate experience essentially explodes into an unsettling inversion.

In fact, what Hegel shows in the Law of the Heart can be seen as a fundamental inversion: the subject believes it is expressing a purely personal moral belief, but the very act of speaking it transforms it into an impersonal demand, indistinguishable from the universality of the “way of the world” (the “fancied universal”)³. What appears as inner authenticity turns into external necessity, revealing the Law of the Heart as already caught within the structure it claims to oppose. Hegel writes: “The heart-throb for the welfare of mankind therefore passes over into the bluster of a mad self-conceit. It passes over into the rage of a consciousness which preserves itself from destruction by casting out of itself the very topsy-turvy inversion which is itself and which makes every effort to regard and to express that inversion as something other than itself.”⁴

This topsy-turvy experience is indeed tragic. In asserting its singular moral truth, the Law of the Heart inevitably converts it into a universal demand, loses its individuality, and becomes part of the world it condemns. This inversion marks its collapse: what appears as immediate unity between inner law and the world reveals itself as a confused/failed identification of individuality with universality.

So, while Žižek in his reading emphasizes psychosis (foreclosure, paranoia), the focus can perhaps be shifted to collapse through immediacy (failed mediation). Hegel’s emphasis on inversion, the transformation of conviction into universality, and the absorption of subjective law into “the way of the world” allows us to read the Law of the Heart not simply as a hysteric or psychotic, but as a threshold figure whose failure prepares the Knight of Virtue, who vanishes in Žižek’s analysis.

The project/failure of the Law of the Heart doesn’t directly lead to retreat or withdrawal (i.e., Beautiful Soul) but continues through virtue and action. The ambiguous position of the Law of the Heart makes visible the dialectical necessity of the Knight as a missing mediating moment in this journey.

The Knight of Virtue: The “Professional Protester”

As noted above, Žižek criticizes Lacan for making a “deeply significant mistake” by condensing the Law of the Heart and the Beautiful Soul. Lacan speaks of “the Beautiful Soul who, in the name of its Law of the Heart, rebels against the injustices of the world,”⁵ thereby conflating positions that Žižek insists must be kept apart. For Žižek, the Beautiful Soul “designates the hysterical attitude of deploring the wicked ways of the world while actively participating in their reproduction,” whereas the Law of the Heart “clearly refers to a psychotic attitude” imposing its will on all of humanity.⁶

Žižek finds “Lacan’s slip all the more mysterious,” since these figures map cleanly onto Lacanian structures: the hysterical Beautiful Soul situates itself within the big Other and addresses it with a demand within an intersubjective field, while the psychotic Law of the Heart suspends or rejects what Hegel calls “spiritual substance.”⁷ So, the Law of the Heart, as a psychotic figure, hallucinates his inner law as universal, resorting to paranoia when the world resists; and the Beautiful Soul is its hysterical counterpart, retreating from action into self-righteous moral purity. Importantly, Žižek, even though he criticizes Lacan for confusing these two figures, partially defends the slip, as both figures express moral self-certainty that society registers as failure or crime.⁸ Still, he moves too quickly from delusional action to melancholic withdrawal.

To briefly return to the Law of the Heart, Hegel explains that even if the Law of the Heart becomes institutionalized, it loses its subjective authenticity and becomes estranged from the self. What was once a personal conviction now stands above it as an impersonal universal, causing deep disillusionment. The universalization removes the law’s personal meaning which was its origin. As soon as it becomes outwardly expressed, inner truth ceases to be personal. In response to this failure, the individual turns to virtue, which is not merely a moral feeling but also a commitment to redeem the world through action: a revolutionary passion that culminates in the figure of the Knight of Virtue.

Unlike earlier figures of pleasure & necessity, such as Don Giovanni or Faust, the Knight of Virtue believes in sacrificing individuality for the sake of a universal good. The Knight strives to restore humanity’s true essence and has a higher mission to redeem the corrupt world through action. However, the Knight assumes that the good exists independently and needs to be actualized through virtuous deeds. Hegel writes that the Knight’s activity and struggle become mere bluff,

something which he cannot take seriously because he holds that his real strength consists in the good’s existing in and for itself, i.e., to lie in the good accomplishing itself – it is a bluff which he dare not even allow to become serious. This is so because what he turns against the enemy and which he then both finds turned against himself and which he dares to put at risk of deterioration and damage in himself as well as in the enemy, is not supposed to be the good itself.⁹

The actions of this heroic figure remain abstract and futile. It throws words and virtue into a cruel/wicked world that does not respond. The moral ideal guiding the Knight is ultimately empty, detached from the messy, chaotic fabric of social life. Its struggle becomes a kind of shadowboxing, a performance of heroism that fails to engage with reality. While the “way of the world” is flexible, cunning, and adaptable, the Knight is rigid. It ultimately becomes comic, like a Don Quixote of morality, swinging at windmills in pursuit of a truth that perpetually remains unactualized. It is caught in empty formality. As Donald Verene says, the Knight of Virtue is “a professional protester” who can “simply change causes at will,” for whom “the fight is the thing.”¹⁰

Unlike the Law of the Heart, the Knight acts within the Symbolic, seeking to redeem the corrupted world through virtuous deeds. Unlike the Beautiful Soul, it does not withdraw, but intervenes, only to find its moral project futile. The Knight’s protest is a performance/spectacle of virtue and over-identification. Its failure as the acting moral subject exposes the limits of virtuous intervention and constitutes a necessary dialectical stage.

In Lacanian terms, the Knight does not exhibit a psychotic structure: it neither forecloses the Symbolic nor constructs a delusional universe. Instead, it remains embedded in the Symbolic, aiming to correct it. Thus, the Knight is closer to the hysteric’s position, but it does not embrace the Beautiful Soul’s passive withdrawal. Its position is a shift from demanding answers from the big Other to attempting to transform it.

The Knight is thus a hysteric in action, whose failure reveals the structural limits of the hysteric’s truth. It can name the fault in the Other and fight against it, but it cannot fix it; it only ends up reinforcing it. Its intervention inevitably collapses into complicity. In other words, it cannot ignore the mutual implication of self and Other (enemy) in the very game of truth it seeks to transform. Hegel writes:

Virtue is not merely like the combatant whose sole concern in the fight is to keep his sword shiny; rather, it was in order to preserve its weapons that virtue started the fight. Not merely can it not use its own weapons, it also must preserve intact those of its enemy and protect them against virtue itself, for they are all noble parts of the good on behalf of which it went into the fight in the first place.¹¹

This is an important moment in the dialectic of moral subjectivity, dramatizing the tragicomic limits of the hysteric’s truth in action.

As explained above, Žižek identifies the Law of the Heart as a psychotic structure. But this reading can overlook the figure’s internal instability/transitional nature. Rather than a full psychotic foreclosure, the Law of the Heart mistakes immediacy for universality, projecting subjective conviction as objective necessity without mediation. It is not yet hysteria, which questions endlessly the Symbolic, nor pure psychosis, but a threshold moment where the fusion of inner & outer collapses under contradiction. This is a delusional immediacy that cannot hold.

Hegel does not conclude with the Law of the Heart’s paranoid delusion or jump ahead to the moral withdrawal of the Beautiful Soul. From this structural collapse, a further development arises in the guise of the Knight. The Knight of Virtue is a necessary dialectical mediation that continues the Law of the Heart’s project but moves it into the domain of action. However, this action remains abstract, disconnected from the historical and ethical substance it would need to transform reality. Its moral protest sustains the very order it seeks to challenge. Thus, without the Knight of Virtue, Žižek’s reading bypasses the dialectical passage from delusion to withdrawal, missing the tragicomic structure of moral failure and the collapse of virtuous action (before the emergence of Sittlichkeit).

The Beautiful Soul: Inward Purity and Moral Inaction

Through the figures of the Law of the Heart and the Knight of Virtue, Hegel makes the transition from “Reason” to “Spirit,” where the reconciliation between individuality and universality becomes something possible through the foundation of ethical life (Sittlichkeit), a shared cultural and institutional life where freedom is actualized collectively.

In the “Spirit Certain of Itself: Morality” section of the Phenomenology, Hegel traces the rise and fall of the moral worldview. Following the failures of ethical life, the Enlightenment, and the Reign of Terror, self-consciousness turns inward, grounding duty in internal conviction rather than external authority. Morality now rests on self-imposed duty: the subject sees itself as autonomous, believing that recognizing duty suffices for moral action. To sustain this, it posits a higher reality where morality aligns with happiness, nature, or divine justice. But these assumptions compromise its autonomy, exposing it to external guarantees. What appears as pure duty conceals expectations of reward, and moral striving becomes endless and self-deceptive. Morality collapses into hypocrisy.

This contradiction gives rise to the next stage, Conscience, where morality is re-founded on the self-certainty of personal conviction. The subject believes in the truth of its own inner moral judgment, and this leads to a shift from abstract duty to the immediacy of moral action. But without external criteria, this certainty risks becoming arbitrary; any action may now be justified as “moral”, simply because the subject believes it to be so.

This tension deepens and the subject retreats into purity and isolation, culminating in the figure of the Beautiful Soul: a subject who, fearing moral compromise, refuses to act. It fears that acting will taint its inner purity, so it withdraws from the world and clings stubbornly to a self reduced to pure abstraction. In its refusal to engage with imperfection, it paradoxically undermines morality itself, which can only become real through action. Hegel writes that the Beautiful Soul “lacks the force to relinquish itself, that is, lacks the force to make itself into a thing and to suffer the burden of being.”¹²

The Beautiful Soul remains unable to give itself substance, to turn thought into being or commit itself decisively, and the empty object it produces leaves it acutely aware of its own hollowness. In the end, its “burning embers gradually die out,” and “the beautiful soul vanishes like a shapeless vapor dissolving into thin air.”¹³

As Donald Verene notes, the Beautiful Soul retreats into inwardness, seeking inner illumination over public action. It withdraws from politics, science, and social life, reducing philosophy to solitary revelations devoid of dialogue, irony, or eros.¹⁴ It becomes harmless, ineffectual, and purely self-referential, unintelligible/unchallenging to the practical world. It is very sensitive and profound, waiting for a moment of pure authenticity and understanding. This is the melancholy of the Beautiful Soul. Verene emphasizes how this figure has no sense of humor: “The bacchanalian revel of the forms of the Phenomenology is closed to the philosophy of the beautiful soul because such a soul has not and cannot have a sense of humor. Irony, through which appearances are laid open, is not a meaningful thought for it … The beautiful soul takes itself seriously, so seriously it has left the world for itself.¹⁵

Hegel contrasts the Beautiful Soul with the Judging Consciousness (the “hard heart”) that condemns others while claiming moral superiority. This conflict results in mutual accusations of hypocrisy and evil, as each side perceives the other as impure. This impasse can only be overcome through confession and forgiveness as a speculative act, leading to the stage of Religion.

Verene stresses that the Beautiful Soul is a dangerous stage, a moral and intellectual posture that pretends to the highest truth but, in fact, represents a degeneration of Spirit. It is self-satisfied and stagnant. It claims a pure inward access to the Absolute, bypassing the messy, imperfect reality of social existence, moral struggle, and communal life. Thus, Verene emphasizes that it presents an obstacle to speculative thought by absolutizing the subject’s pure inwardness and offering a form of withdrawal masquerading as profundity. The inaction of the Beautiful Soul follows from the fact that, as it passes from Reason, it knows infinity is within itself: “Reason has shown it that the infinite is just something to cultivate in itself apart from the finitude, the specific activity, of the world. The beautiful soul as such is a personality type. It is a delicate creature that cannot act but can have strong pronouncements in language about what goes on around it. It will judge events, but only in language. It cannot act.”¹⁶ Thus, the Beautiful Soul is not only a failed ethical figure but a philosophical danger, reducing philosophy to poetic solitude rather than speculative movement.¹⁷ Its philosophy is a private, poetic inwardness/dwelling, cut off from the shared and revelatory movement of Spirit in Hegel’s dialectic. It is essentially anti-communal, anti-speculative, locked in monologue.

Action, Delusion, and Withdrawal

Žižek’s critique of the Beautiful Soul unfolds the relation between action, symbolic failure, and the ethics of reconciliation. Beautiful Soul is a model of moral self-deception: a subject who complains about a corrupt world but fails to see their own role in sustaining it. It views itself as a victim of hostile conditions that hinder the realization of good intentions, but this attitude of complaint helps reproduce the world it condemns. Žižek extends this idea to the political dissident under “real socialism,” whose moral identity depends on the continued existence of the totalitarian enemy.¹⁸ The dissident does not desire change but the enemy’s permanence, as it is an external anchor for their righteousness. Referencing Lacan’s Seminar on “The Purloined Letter”, Žižek says that the Beautiful Soul refuses to see that the world’s disorder is a message directed at it: a return of its own position in inverted form. Even when rejected, this message still reaches its target; the world continues to reflect the subject’s truth.¹⁹ Reconciliation can only occur when the individual recognizes themselves in what they oppose, accepting that the negativity they condemn is inseparable from their own way of being.

In The Ticklish Subject, Žižek links the Beautiful Soul to Hegel’s thesis that Substance is Subject (not a harmonious whole but the movement of failed subjective projections).²⁰ The subject attempts to impose a moral vision on reality, only to see it inverted as crime, failure, or hypocrisy. This shared logic partly explains why Lacan’s “mistake” in condensing the Law of the Heart and Beautiful Soul: in both cases, subjective righteousness registers socially as transgression.²¹ The Hegelian “negation of negation” does not restore identity but insists on the necessity of failure. The subject’s critical rejection is answered by the world’s rejection of its illusion of innocence.²²

Reconciliation, for Žižek, does not mean moral purification of the world but recognition of complicity.²³ The Beautiful Soul must accept that the chaos it observes is part of its own being. Evil does not lie in action but in the moralizing gaze that sees only particularity and pathology. Žižek, citing Hegel’s concept of das Ungeschehenmachen, the retroactive redemption of failure, emphasizes that truth emerges not by erasing failure, but by integrating it retroactively into Spirit’s development: “The sinful act is retroactively liberated, through the truth that it made possible through its very failure. … We do not simply cancel the act; rather, we just cancel out its failure … an inversion that Hegel called ‘the cunning of reason.’”²⁴ So, the Beautiful Soul’s refusal to act or forgive positions it as the obstacle to reconciliation and speculative movement.

Even though the Beautiful Soul appears passive, Žižek argues that this passivity is actively sustained. It derives jouissance from its self-sacrifice and moral purity. The truly ethical gesture is not self-sacrifice, but the renunciation of the identity built through sacrifice.²⁵

Perhaps this logic invites a speculative typology: might the Beautiful Soul be viewed as an actively passive hysteric, whose inaction is a concealed activity, and the Knight of Virtue as a passively active hysteric, whose action remains abstract, futile, and ultimately reinforces the symbolic order it desires to redeem?

Verene’s image of the Knight as a protester who changes causes easily, interested more in protest than principle, would strengthen this comparison. Together, Žižek and Verene suggest that both figures entangle activity with passivity, inverting moral action into performance.

The Comedy of Moral Consciousness

While these Hegelian figures are often treated as moments in a tragic dialectic of subjectivity, Zupančič’s reading of Hegel allows us to see them as comic figures, embodying the internal irony and absurdity of moral consciousness. Adopting Zupančič’s lens, it is possible to see how the Beautiful Soul’s refusal/withdrawal, the Law of the Heart’s overreach and delusions, and the Knight of Virtue’s failed action demonstrate what happens when the subject’s relation to the Symbolic collapses from within.

This comedy is the moment in which the contradiction becomes visible, and certainty reveals itself to be slippery and tricky, as the subject’s own symptom. Zupančič writes that it is no coincidence that “comedy ranks high” in the Phenomenology.²⁶ In fact, comedy emerges at the threshold of Absolute Knowing, within the culmination of Revealed Religion. It is the moment when the subject ceases to seek the Absolute in a beyond and recognizes itself as the bearer of truth through comic reversal rather than tragic alienation. Zupančič writes,

could we not say that the entire movement of the Phenomenology of Spirit is surprisingly akin to the comic movement as described by Hegel: different figures of consciousness which follow one upon the other in this gigantic philosophical theater go, one after another, through a twist in the process by which a concrete universal is being produced and self-consciousness constituted—that is, in which substance becomes a subject.²⁷

The comic subject laughs because it knows that the supposed divine Other was always also itself in disguise. Comedy is not just an aesthetic category but a speculative form of truth, the final self-negation of the alienated Spirit before the ultimate reconciliation. Comedy arises through a reflexive act, in which the subject steps back from its predicament with humility and the capacity to forgive. Perhaps, forgiveness is at the core of the comedic/reflexive act.

There is a comic moment in how the Beautiful Soul, with its perfectionist withdrawal and the way it takes itself very seriously, emerges as the inverse of the Knight of Virtue, while the Knight of Virtue is the transitory figure of pure, emptied-out action in the face of the world’s evils. The Law of the Heart has already withdrawn, not like the Beautiful Soul, but in its own fictions/ conspiracies about the world that does not accept its precious gift of the heart. The three figures are comic in their misjudgments, misguided certainties, and tragic attempts to reconcile with the world.

The comic moment of the quixotic Knight of Virtue lies in the formality of its protests, the way it shadowboxes, in its acting within the Symbolic, and in sustaining its illusion of virtue while disavowing complicity. Thus, in the Lacanian and Žižekian formulation, this figure may be viewed as a perverse supplement to the hysteric, as a moral agent whose action (protest) maintains the order it claims to resist, and unwittingly reinforces the structures of evil. In this sense, the Knight of Virtue may also be read as a comedic resolution to the tensions staged by the Law of the Heart and the Beautiful Soul. Unlike the Beautiful Soul (who refuses to act) or the Law of the Heart (who acts from inner madness), the Knight of Virtue acts out morality as a role, an empty, sham protest.

This aligns with Lacanian idea of perversion, a structure in which the subject disavows symbolic castration and finds enjoyment in performing the Law as the agent of the Other’s enjoyment. The Knight rigidly enacts moral law as a personal mission, disavowing its own desire while positioning itself as the agent of a universal good. Like the pervert, the Knight refuses symbolic castration, clinging to moral certainty and denying the contradictions within the social order. It does not act for personal gain but as an instrument of a higher cause, sustaining the Law’s illusion through formal, abstract protest. Its virtue is ultimately a performance/spectacle disconnected from real social reality.

Thus, the Knight demonstrates the comic truth of moral action, where protest becomes a mode of symbolic enjoyment. The condensation of these figures misses this performative excess that distinguishes the Knight from both the Beautiful Soul’s withdrawal and the Law of the Heart’s romantic expressivism. Verene’s description of the Knight as a professional protestor further clarifies this: The Knight does not seek reconciliation or transformation but sustains its identity through perpetual resistance.

Verene’s insight also aligns with Zupančič’s comedic lens: the Knight becomes a figure of moral farce, virtue as a role, a costume, and a perpetual rehearsal rather than conviction. Building on Verene, it may be argued that the Knight is morally mobile, as its cause is contingent, but its structure (action, protest, intervention) is fixed.

Hysteric on Horseback

The Knight of Virtue can be viewed as the hysteric’s double, as it not only speaks truth to the big Other, but attempts to correct it, and becomes entangled in its mechanisms. Following Žižek’s Lacanian reading, unlike the Law of the Heart, the Knight does not foreclose the Symbolic. It does not hallucinate or conspire but acts within the Symbolic. It is not like the withdrawn/melancholic hysteric frustrated with the Other but still believes in its authority. This figure does not merely lament the corruption of the world; it engages it with moral fervor, but in a manner disconnected from ethical substance. His actions remain empty because they are untethered from concrete historical necessity.

This figure illustrates the comedic failure of over-identifying with the universal (a structurally absurd heroic idealism). Including the Knight of Virtue in the analysis of the Hegelian figures of moral consciousness offers a more dialectically complete view of moral subjectivity, where the subject’s insistence on transforming the world from a position of inner certainty, alongside the futility of abstract virtue in a world that no longer demands it, becomes ironic and even absurd.

The Knight projects its private moral certainty onto the world, demanding it conform to its ideal of virtue. In this sense, the Knight is not merely a hysteric or a passive soul avoiding action, but an active agent of moral formalism who refuses to risk the “good” through dialectical engagement and instead imposes it unilaterally. This makes it closer to a perverse figure, as it disregards the mediating structures of the ethical in favor of self-authorized conviction. It is not just inward, like the Beautiful Soul, nor self-legislative, like the Law of the Heart, nor entirely passive or accusatory.

The Knight is a figure of active morality, motivated by abstract universality, yet ultimately and performatively powerless (a structurally comic figure). It neither produces jouissance nor derives pleasure from sacrifice; it fails because it acts out of sync with social reality and not because of narcissistic withdrawal, as in the Beautiful Soul.

This makes the Knight of Virtue a philosophically awkward and structurally transitional moral agent. It faces its comic failure when encountering a world that does not respond. Therefore, it seems like a bridge between tragic moral assertion and hysterical withdrawal.

Link to Footnotes and Bibliography

The post The Vanishing Knight of Virtue: On Žižek’s Reading of Hegelian Moral Consciousness appeared first on The Miskatonian.

At the heart of Irigaray’s intervention is her insistence on sexual difference. She proposes the feminine imaginary and the unconscious as generative sites from which alternative modes of thought and subjectivity can emerge—ones that resist being assimilated into the phallogocentric logic of sameness. Her work does not seek inclusion within dominant frameworks but rather their transformation.

With this essay, I aim to explore Irigaray’s philosophical landscape with an epistemological focus –first outlining her central concepts, then turning to her critique of Western epistemology and her vision of feminine subjectivity. This is followed by an exploration of her subversive readings of canonical male philosophers, especially her reinterpretation of Plato’s allegory of the cave. The final section considers how Irigaray reimagines the Symbolic order and proposes new conditions for the emergence of knowledge rooted in difference, relationality, and embodiment.

 Philosophical Groundwork: Irigaray and the Question of Difference

Luce Irigaray’s work fundamentally analyzes and criticizes how feminine subjectivity has been traditionally assimilated into masculine subjectivity. She is concerned with revealing the absence of the feminine subject within Western philosophical tradition. Thus, the constitution of sexual difference and the feminine subject is central to her project. Esteemed Irigaray scholar Margaret Whitford observes that Irigaray’s work engages with “a single problem, in its multiple aspects: the absence of and exclusion of woman/women from the symbolic/social order, their representation as nature.”¹

Irigaray usually utilizes lyrical, playful, slippery, and sometimes challenging prose and has been famously interpreted as a difficult philosopher to disentangle. In the introduction to her book on Irigaray, Whitford acknowledges that Irigaray captivates her in unexpected ways, even as she finds her work difficult to access. Irigaray’s mode of reasoning is associative rather than systematic, making her writing challenging to interpret—especially given that her critique of rationality runs counter to the foundations of Whitford’s intellectual background. Despite these difficulties, Whitford ultimately recognizes that Irigaray, though approaching it from a different angle, is engaged with universal concerns and ethical questions. As Whitford notes, these dimensions have often been overlooked due to both the complex reception of Irigaray’s work and the dense, unconventional language through which she expresses her ideas.

For Irigaray, Western philosophical tradition has viewed the feminine as passive and associated it with nature. It ascribed the feminine the role of the mother, whereas the masculine has been viewed as an active, full subject. Women have been unrecognized within the socio-cultural system and language while paradoxically serving as the ground on which these structures are built. Their separate subjectivity and contribution to society haven’t been recognized. Irigaray believes that in this order, the mother is sacrificed. This is the masculine economy of the Self-same within which women are alienated and submit-willingly or unwillingly-to the masculine. The only subjectivity that exists in Western culture is male, and women speak with masculine language. So, Irigaray believes that sexual difference does not exist in this culture –if there were sexual difference, there would be a feminine subjectivity. Irigaray engages with the issue of how sexual difference can be established, searching for ways for women to reconfigure their identity, at the same time, far from being didactic or offering clear-cut solutions, stating that the feminine subject should find this new identity herself in her own way. Rather than tracing a path for them, Irigaray leaves space—so that women may name themselves in voices of their own making.

Irigaray utilizes psychoanalytic theory and philosophy in her work, both being influenced by them and simultaneously demonstrating how they exclude and submit women to totalizing views. Their discourses, too, essentially ignore the difference and alterity of women or reduce them to a form of male subjectivity. Western philosophical tradition, which Irigaray views as the master discourse, demonstrates ontological, epistemological, and metaphysical “truths” from a masculine perspective. Psychoanalysis, too, views the feminine as a deformed, lacking, and insufficient form of male subjectivity, even though it provides essential methods that can be utilized to further the agenda of establishing female subjectivity –this is a one-sex model of the self-same. As Cixous and Clément write:

The same masters dominate history from the beginning, inscribing on it the marks of their appropriating economy: history, as a story of phallocentrism, hasn’t moved except to repeat itself … History, history of phallocentrism, history of propriation: a single history. History of an identity: that of man’s becoming recognized by the other (son or woman), reminding him that, as Hegel says, death is his master.²

For Irigaray, women should form separate identities and attain a social existence separate from the role of mother, and cultural stereotypes regarding nature should be transformed. This process also includes men: Women must learn to speak as selves, and men must learn to dwell more fully in their body/flesh; only then can both reimagine themselves as rooted alike in the rhythms of nature and the weave of culture. She argues for transforming language and the Symbolic order and the ethico-political framework, arguing for or utilizing tools and ideas such as mimesis, strategic essentialism, and utopian ideals, transforming the mother/daughter relationship, and employing novel language to change the system. She famously explains:

the issue is not one of elaborating a new theory of which woman would be the subject or the object, but of jamming the theoretical machinery itself, of suspending its pretension to the production of a truth and of a meaning that are excessively univocal. Which presupposes that women do not aspire simply to be men’s equals in knowledge. That they do not claim to be rivaling men in constructing a logic of the feminine that would still take onto-theo-logic as its model, but that they are rather attempting to wrest this question away from the economy of the logos. They should not put it, then, in the form “What is woman?” but rather, repeating/interpreting the way in which, within discourse, the feminine finds itself defined as lack, deficiency, or as imitation and negative image of the subject, they should signify that with respect to this logic a disruptive excess is possible on the feminine side.³

The above quote also explains what Irigaray means by her phrase “jamming the theoretical machinery.” For Irigaray and other l’écriture féminine philosophers and writers, the interplay between nature, maternal, and separate feminine knowledge is a central theme. Irigaray’s work often utilizes feminine morphological language and valorizes the feminine body. But this is viewed as a tool to “deconstruct the phallic organization and ordering of sexuality and the bodies which perform it.”⁴ Phallocentrism shapes both the social fabric and the structure of male desire, casting women not as subjects but as objects—bodies traded between men, whose value is measured by their possession and sexual availability.

Women’s sexualities for Irigaray are multiple, plural –not one. They cannot be constrained by the male libidinal economy. She aims to reveal the feminine as such, to form a disruption within a phallocentric culture, and attempt to challenge the Symbolic.

 Epistemological Difference and the Feminine Subject

The dichotomies of “subjective” and “objective” or “rational” and “irrational” are not determined by a transcendental/absolute knower, a universal position, or a meta-discourse but rather reflect the cultural, political, and philosophical discourses of the masculine that delineate certain positions and ascribe specific roles to the feminine. As Donna Haraway writes, “Feminist critiques challenge assertions of objective knowledge, illuminate the ways in which information and positions become aligned with particular subjectivities that are entangled with gendered binaries or poles.”⁵ As such, language, discourse, and political structures stemming from such grounds exclude or reduce all others, such as women and minorities. Epistemology is shaped by the complex architecture of masculine cultural and political power, along with its embedded ethical assumptions; it is the domain where the Self-same upholds the specific identity of phallocentric thought.

There is phallocentrism. History has never produced or recorded anything else –which does not mean that this form is destinal or natural … men and women are caught up in a web of age-old cultural determinations that are almost unanalyzable in their complexity. One can no more speak of ‘woman’ than of ‘man’ without being trapped within an ideological theater where the proliferation of representations, images, reflections, myths, identifications, transform, deform, constantly change everyone’s Imaginary and invalidate in advance any conceptualization.⁶

The group of French feminists -l’écriture feminine- with which Irigaray is associated mainly problematizes the paternal/patriarchal Symbolic order as the domain of knowledge, the Name-of-the-Father as a transcendental signifier. Irigaray views epistemology, metaphysics, and psychology as reflecting the masculinist paradigm. Concerning epistemology, she questions the theories built on a constituent or foundational divide between the knowing subject and the object of knowledge. Kant formulates the classical paradigm for this knowing subject and roughly views the subject as a unifying force that orders sensory chaos into a coherent experience. Opposing this formulation, Irigaray argues that this transcendental subject, via its assumed distance from an ascribed object, paradoxically loses its foundational (empirical) relation to it. In Speculum of the Other Woman, Irigaray engages with philosophers like Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Kant, and Hegel, exploring the theoretical edifices in which the “formal conditions of knowledge privilege male subjectivity as foundational to the epistemic enterprise.”⁷ For Irigaray, “subject” in these enterprises is very specifically the Western masculine subject that erases or obfuscates the feminine, demonstrating that “the possibility of (masculine) theorizing is feminine silence.”⁸

The main model of Western epistemologies is interlinked with the metaphysical framework that is based on the exclusion or absence of the feminine. Despite resistance from women thinkers, the systematic exclusion of the feminine has continued unabated—perpetuated even by those male-dominated intellectual traditions that, while occasionally nearing the truth, still stop short of fully admitting that women are central to the very structures of thought and consciousness they claim to define.⁹

Traditional Western epistemology is concerned with three main issues about knowing: “source of knowledge, nature or type of knowledge, and the method of corroboration.” In these concerns, rationality plays a significant role. However, the notion of rationality itself displays issues when viewed via the dichotomical lens of Western tradition. As Samajdar explains, within the dominant binary framework, masculinity is culturally aligned with the phallic norm. At the same time, femininity is cast as irrational and incomplete –embodied in a figure marked by lack. Traditional epistemologies, under the guise of disembodied and neutral rationality, obscure this gendered asymmetry while actively sustaining a hierarchy that elevates the male and marginalizes the female. She draws on Rosi Braidotti’s insistence on the embodied nature of thought. She references philosophers like Lovibond, who critique rationalist theories as fantasies premised on the erasure and denial of bodily—and therefore feminine—experience. According to Lovibond, feminist theorists broadly agree that rationalism is in crisis. Many argue that mainstream scientific methods reflect a psychologically masculinist drive for objectivity and control. Lovibond further contends that women’s participation in the sciences could foster a more relational and ethically attuned form of inquiry. This shift might involve introducing moral frameworks informed by feminist critiques of conventional science—such as Lorraine Code’s concept of “epistemic responsibility”—or, in more radical terms, recognizing that reason itself is not neutral but rather part of a discursive structure grounded in male dominance.¹⁰

Whitford views Irigaray’s work as a kind of psychoanalysis of Western reason—an excavation of what lies repressed beneath its fragile order. Irigaray accepts rationality, but reveals it as shaped by a masculine voice that silences the feminine. Her aim is not to dismantle reason but to remake it—rendering it fertile, creative, and open to difference. Recasting the imaginary beyond Lacan, she envisions a rationality born of interplay, not hierarchy. For Irigaray, the erasure of sexual difference is not a side issue but a symptom of a deeper cultural malady—one in which sterility masks itself as logic, and the refusal of the feminine signals a broader crisis of thought.¹¹

Irigaray argues that rationality has been coded as masculine, reflecting a symbolic alignment between bodily form and modes of thought. The body she invokes is not biological but symbolic—its anatomy is metaphorical. A phallic logic shapes masculine reason: it privileges identity, non-contradiction, and binary opposition, relying on boundaries, stable forms, and the ability to isolate and define. This framework renders thought rigid, excluding what cannot be reduced to sameness. The feminine—especially within the imaginary—refuses to be fixed or counted. She is neither singular nor dual but already multiple within herself: fluid, layered, and irreducible. Irigaray associates the feminine not with lack but with an excess that disrupts the masculine economy of knowledge. This overflow resists the closure of identity and opens onto a more complex, subtle relationality. Utilizing morphological language, she questions the solid ground of rationality:

How can I speak to you? You remain in flux, never congealing or solidifying. What will make that current flow into words? It is multiple, devoid of causes, meanings, simple qualities. Yet it cannot be decomposed. These movements cannot be described as the passage from a beginning to an end. These rivers flow into no single, definitive sea. These streams are without fixed banks, this body without fixed boundaries. This unceasing mobility. This life-which will perhaps be called our restlessness, whims, pretenses, or lies. All this remains very strange to anyone claiming to stand on solid ground. Speak, all the same. Between us, “hardness” isn’t necessary.¹²

Irigaray envisions the feminine imaginary as a surplus that defies identity—an amorphous, uncontainable force that slips through the grids of rationalist thought. Unlike systems grounded in form and order, this imaginary resists fixed shape. Whitford draws a parallel to the Pythagorean worldview, where the formless was equated with chaos and inferiority, and links Irigaray’s challenge to reason with pre-Socratic notions of indeterminate being. Responding to critics like Joanna Hodge, who claim Irigaray denies women a place in history, Whitford argues instead that Irigaray reveals how patriarchy has historically cast women as natural, ahistorical, and outside the symbolic. While transforming the Symbolic order is central to Irigaray’s project, it is the feminine imaginary—rooted in elemental life, kinship, and the materiality of birth and death—that forms its hidden ground. This deep current also flows through Irigaray’s elemental writings, where air, earth, fire, and water become vessels for reclaiming embodied, feminine modes of knowing within a logic long governed by form, identity, and mastery.

Irigaray challenges the foundational division between subject and object in epistemology, seeing it as the splitting of an original whole into hierarchical opposites. While she acknowledges that language preconstructs these roles for any speaker, she uses this very split to highlight the structural exclusion of the feminine. Through literary strategies like metaphor and metonymy, she maps masculinity onto the knowing subject—the “I” who speaks—and femininity onto the silent, passive object.¹³ In Irigaray’s analysis, the subject of knowledge is conflated with the masculine speaker, such that philosophical discourse itself assumes a male voice. When a woman enters this domain, particularly in the guise of the transcendental subject, she is compelled to speak through masculine codes and uphold a male-centered view of the world. The object of knowledge, by contrast, is feminized—stripped of voice, agency, and interiority, fetishized under the masculine gaze. This subject-object structure is not just philosophical but also political. It reflects and reinforces a one-sided epistemological system in which the male subject dominates and defines, while the feminine is rendered inert and knowable only through external appropriation. Irigaray thus exposes how even ideals like self-consciousness and autonomy are shaped by a masculinist framework—one that turns epistemology into a form of sexual politics, where knowledge becomes a tool of control and the feminine a silent ground for the masculine to assert itself.¹⁴ As Rogowska-Stangret writes, “Presenting the world/nature/object of study as inactive is how power relations enslave, colonize, and dominate. Feminist projects attempt to recognize how power works and acknowledge that they do not rule over or control the world … feminist situated knowledges open themselves for new, unexpected, unthought-of, and surprising forms of knowledge production, which may unfold from interrelated material-semiotic worlds.”¹⁵ Schutte conveys how Irigaray links the repression of the feminine to the way the unconscious is theorized—often through a masculine lens that objectifies and dominates. Though the unconscious holds potential for feminine subjectivity, psychoanalytic discourse, shaped by figures like Freud and Lacan, turns it into a domain to be mastered by the male subject. Irigaray critiques how language itself enforces this hierarchy, making the unconscious a possession of the masculine voice and silencing the feminine within it.¹⁶

The concern with manipulation of the epistemological subject is also seen in her writing around femininity and hysteria. The hysteric feminine subject, who is objectified and dominated under the psychiatric power, essentially reveals an epistemological crisis (approached via the diagnostic indeterminacy concerning the hysteric) and a crisis of language. Irigaray explores the potentiality of resistance of the hysteric as a captured, dominated, and objectified feminine figure when she questions the ambiguous pathology of hysteria and observes its concealed power: “There is always, in hysteria, both a reserve power and a paralyzed power.”¹⁷ The power of the hysteric is repressed “by virtue of the subordination of feminine desire to phallocratism; a power constrained to silence and mimicry, owing to the submission of the ‘perceptible,’ of ‘matter,’ to the intelligible and its discourse … And in hysteria there is … the possibility of another mode of ‘production,’ notably gestural and lingual.”¹⁸ The hysterical feminine patient as the object of psychiatric power-knowledge structure (to borrow a Foucauldian term), and from this perspective, she is manipulated and subjugated via the dispositif of psychiatry, submitted to its experimentations and violence in the name of clear-cut diagnostic explanations.

For Irigaray, the subject of epistemology viewed as such remains within the self-same paradigm and controls meaning-making processes in a way that maintains and protects its continuity, positioning itself as the ultimate point of reference. It is impossible to speak of the Other in this framework, as its specificity in language is already lost and subjugated to categories of the same.

From Cave to Womb: Irigaray on Male Philosophers

In her “elemental works”, which she centers on the four elements (earth, air, fire, water) and also on nature, Irigaray aims to reinterpret, challenge, and form a dialogue with philosophers of Western tradition. In answer to Heidegger’s critique of Western metaphysics as a “forgetting of Being,” Irigaray, in The Forgetting of Air in Martin Heidegger, critiques Heidegger’s emphasis on the element of earth as the ground of life and speech, and his oblivion of air in his existential-ontological account. Her analysis is placed within the broader context of her feminist critique of Western tradition. Air is invisible but crucial as it sustains life. This work has been interpreted as a critique of Heidegger, whereas Irigaray seeks to expand Heidegger’s philosophy to introduce the feminine, saying that she would like to “celebrate the work of Martin Heidegger. To succeed in this gesture implied not appropriating his thought but respecting it in its difference. To pay homage to Martin Heidegger in his relationship to the earth, to the sky, to the divinities, and to the mortals presupposed for me the unveiling and the affirmation of another possible relation to this fourfold.”¹⁹ The forgetting of air in Heidegger’s work symbolizes the exclusion of women in traditional philosophical discourse. Thus, Irigaray explores how traditional philosophy has been built on a patriarchal worldview, prioritizing certain elements and concepts while neglecting others associated with femininity, ephemerality, and fluidity.

In Marine Lover of Nietzsche, Irigaray focuses on the element of water and encounters Nietzsche by addressing him in the second person (in fact, she only mentions Nietzsche’s name towards the end of the book). She touches on certain Nietzschean concepts, like eternal recurrence, the Übermensch, self‐overcoming, etc., and also questions Nietzsche’s relationship with women. Water is the central element here; as for Irigaray, water is the element Nietzsche fears the most. She forms her narrative upon the complex relationship between the feminine and the fluid, engaging in an amorous dialogue with Nietzsche and utilizing lyrical dialogic, intimate prose. With the metaphor of the sea, Irigaray alludes to the fluid and dynamic aspects of the feminine. Water represents the flow of life, the unconscious, and the feminine. Marine Lover embraces fluidity, change, and the interconnectedness of life, challenging the rigid, hierarchical structures. Irigaray critiques Nietzsche’s conceptualization of nature and the body, arguing that he fails to embrace the material, embodied experience of existence, often obfuscated or repressed by philosophies prioritizing the mind.

Lastly, I would like to focus on Irigaray’s engagement with Plato. Irigaray, In Speculum of the Other Woman, analyzes Plato’s epistemological model of the cave. In the well-known allegory, prisoners are confined in a dark cave since birth and can only see the wall before them, and shadowy images are cast against the wall. The shadows on the cave wall represent the world of sensory experience and the realm of appearances. The prisoners watch the shadows on the cave wall as reality; thus, they are deceived by the appearances. When a prisoner goes to the outside world, he is blinded by the sunlight, but then his eyes adjust, and he witnesses the actual reality of the physical world around him. Thus, the allegory of the cave is about the journey from ignorance to enlightenment and to the world of real knowledge. The free prisoner can attain knowledge via reason and understanding of the Forms. Thus, “Plato’s allegory underscores the fundamental difference between knowledge (episteme) and opinion (doxa). In Plato’s view, knowledge is not derived from sensory perceptions alone but from rational insight and understanding of the unchanging and eternal realm of Forms. Forms are the perfect, eternal, and universal ideals that are the foundation of true knowledge. In contrast, opinions are based on the imperfect and changing world of sensory appearances.”²⁰ It can be argued that Plato’s epistemological model reveals the necessity of constraining sensory perception as well as the deceptive nature of opinions formed based on appearances.

Irigaray, in “Plato’s Hystera” (as apparent in the title), uses the word “hystera” (uterus) instead of “cave,” presenting an “allegory inside an allegory”²¹ –hystera is fundamental in that it is the ground: “For if the cave is made in the image of the world, the world is equally made in the image of the cave. In a cave or “world” all is but the image of an image. For this cave is always already an attempt to represent another cave, the hystera, the mold which silently dictates all replicas, all possible forms, all possible relations of forms and between forms, of any replica.”²²

For Plato, categories of being, forms, reality, truth, and wisdom are decidedly outside the cave, which implies natural-maternal-feminine. This view belongs to the phallogocentric framework that deems the masculine as the law, order, logic, structure, truth, reason, etc. In reimagining the allegory of the cave, Irigaray reveals that the absence of the feminine in philosophy is not a sudden omission but a silent inheritance woven into the tradition before it even speaks and carried forward. She writes:

Infinite projection – (the) Idea (of) Being (of the) Father – of the mystery of conception and the hystery where it is (re)produced. Blindness with regard to the original one who must be banished by fixing the eyes on pure light, to the point of not seeing (nothing) anymore – the show, the hole of nothing is back again – to the point at which the power of a mere bodily membrane is exceeded, and the gaze of the soul is rediscovered. A-lētheia.²³

The lover of knowledge must emerge from the dark materiality of the cave/hysteria and simultaneously reject, conceal, and repress it to attain the light of wisdom. He must free himself from the materiality of the womb. Irigaray’s analysis demonstrates and emphasizes the founding masculine-feminine hierarchical imagery. As such, masculine images appear as awakening knowledge, whereas feminine images appear as darkness, obscurity, and lack. As Samajdar conveys, the cave allegory ultimately affirms a visual model of knowledge—an epistemology rooted in sight. This emphasis on vision, shaped by psychoanalytic notions of the body, reinforces a phallic or scopic regime where knowing is framed through distance, objectification, and control. This visual logic underpins scientific rationalism, surveillance systems like the panopticon, and cultural obsessions with visual pleasure, such as in cinema. In contrast, modes of knowing associated with touch—intimate, relational, and plural—are dismissed as unreliable or non-rational. These tactile ways of knowing, often linked to the feminine, are thus excluded from epistemic legitimacy and authority.²⁴

Thus, Irigaray focuses on how the subject of knowledge in Plato’s allegory essentially attempts to transcend nature and the material world to engage with solid and fixed truths (conveyed via masculine imagery) to attain true knowledge. The masculine subject must escape from the cave of ignorance and reach the sunlight of wisdom by repressing the feminine.

 The Feminine and the Transformation of Symbolic Structures

A central question of feminist theories is how feminism can form diverging or new discourses within the current Symbolic order. This question is closely tied with “the reconstructive project of feminist epistemology, which asks how feminist knowledge can effect an epistemological break that produces new ways to know the world.”²⁵ For Irigaray, this kind of epistemological break can be realized by transforming the representational structures that form the edifice of the Symbolic order.

Irigaray criticizes the view that accepts the Symbolic order “as an ontological condition for all subjects at all times.”²⁶ In This Sex Which Is Not One, Irigaray talks about the “hom(m)o- sexual” order of men, where the masculine subject recognizes only the other masculine subjects. This order is built upon the network and structures of material and symbolic exchange among men, particularly on the exchange of women as wives, daughters, sisters, etc. Thus, women in this order have certain exchange values. For Whitford, the Irigarayian notion of the hom(m)o-sexual order is essentially a critique of a patriarchal social contract –the “between-men culture.” Irigaray argues that women cannot gain true self-assurance unless language and representation systems are fundamentally transformed since these structures are tailored to male subjectivity and reinforce a culture centered around male relationships. She refers to this as the “hom(m)o-sexual” order—a sexed symbolic system that underpins male bonding and fraternal social structures. The Symbolic order is a “masculine social order which produces women as social objects.”²⁷ Regarding transforming the Symbolic order, Irigaray mainly relies on ideas like transformative engagement with language, which constructs “a horizontal relation between women.” She calls for a horizontal relationship between women because she believes the Symbolic order represents a horizontal relationship between men. Women must create novel language and systems of representations to change the Symbolic. Thus, Irigaray argues for deconstructing the master philosophical discourse and reconstructing via creating a female imaginary and symbolic. Central to this project is the necessity for the female subject of enunciation to become an epistemological subject. Irigaray argues that women must become knowing subjects.

Feminist academia and intellectual practice are vital to this broader transformative effort. One notable example is the rise of feminist new materialism and posthumanism, which have sought to establish innovative epistemological models grounded in relationality and interaction in recent years. These thinkers aim to move beyond historically entrenched, phallo-anthropocentric, and classifying modes of thought by adopting anti-representationalism, non-hierarchical structures, pluralism, diffractive methodology, decentering, and generational perspectives. Irigaray’s work continues to resonate within these developments, influencing feminist theorists working across both linguistic and materialist traditions. Her legacy remains a generative force, offering conceptual tools adaptable to various contemporary theoretical and practical concerns.

With this essay, I tried to explore Irigaray’s core theoretical concepts through an epistemological lens. At the heart of her project lies the creation of a feminine subjectivity and the reconfiguration of the Symbolic order. Irigaray challenges foundational Western notions such as rationalism and the subject-object binary, proposing the transformative power of the feminine imaginary and the unconscious –dynamic forces capable of reshaping dominant epistemological and ontological paradigms instead. As Whitford notes, the feminist task is to move from speaking to knowing—from enunciation to epistemology. For Irigaray, this requires transforming the Symbolic order to make space for all forms of difference, including sexual difference.

Irigaray asserts that women must gain full access to discourse—to become subjects who articulate cultural, political, and spiritual truths. She critiques how masculine speech has been displaced into the third person, rendering the subject anonymous and veiling the source of meaning. This displacement obscures the speaker behind the universal mask of objectivity, where “he” becomes the silent architect of truth, grammar, and law. Ultimately, even “he” dissolves into the faceless “there is”—another veil drawn over the feminine “I” that seeks to speak.²⁸

To transform the Symbolic order, it is essential to confront how masculine speech has been universalized and rendered totalizing. From Irigaray’s viewpoint, reclaiming language—or, more precisely, experimenting with it and creating new spaces for alternative modes of expression-is vital to reshaping the dominant onto-epistemological frameworks.

Link to Bibliography & Endnotes

The post Hystera’s Rebellion: Shattering the Phallogocentric Cave appeared first on The Miskatonian.

In this essay, I aim to present a comparison of Jacques Lacan’s and Julia Kristeva’s accounts of the subject’s entrance into the Symbolic order, mainly focusing on Lacan’s concept of the mirror stage and Kristeva’s distinction between the Semiotic and the Symbolic. I elaborate on the Kristevan theoretical framework, structured around her pivotal concepts of abjection, the chora, and the thetic phase. I argue that Kristeva deviates from Lacan by emphasizing the chaotic and subversive potentiality of the Semiotic chora and contend that the Kristevan approach provides what can be viewed as an intermediary space. It introduces a continuity (Grosz), and problematizes the clear-cut, abrupt movement into the Symbolic encountered in the Lacanian account. From a Kristevan perspective, the Symbolic as the paternal discursive structure is built on the raw dynamism and motility of the maternal Semiotic. For both Kristeva and Lacan, entering the Symbolic is only possible via the subject’s repression of the maternal. The speaking subject is a split, barred subject who permanently lacks. However, Kristeva emphasizes the repression of the maternal Semiotic and maternal body. Thus, Kristeva reworks the Lacanian edifice by shifting the focus to the maternal and introducing an intermediary space and a continuity via the concepts of the Semiotic chora, the abject, and the thetic phase.

Lacanian Three Orders and The Mirror Stage

In Lacanian theory, the mirror stage is associated with the Imaginary. Before focusing on the mirror stage, I will elaborate on the Lacanian three orders or registers. The Real, the Symbolic, and the Imaginary. Lacan describes the three orders as “an unholy trinity whose members could as easily be called [respectively] Fraud, Absence and Impossibility.”¹ They are all present simultaneously within the subject’s psyche and in his psychoanalytic journey, are interdependent and interlinked.

The Real

The Real is undifferentiated, outside language, and resists symbolization. It is associated with a primal, unstructured, amorphous materiality that cannot be communicated or known and is opposed to and mediated by the Imaginary and the Symbolic. It has been compared to the Freudian The Thing and the Kantian thing-in-itself. In the Lacanian psychosexual development of the subject, the Real is the earliest stage (0-6 months of age), where the infant is a bundle of chaotic perceptions, feelings, and needs. He can’t distinguish himself from people and his surroundings and experiences his body as fragmented zones, as the mother pays special attention to them –the “territorialization” of the body, denoting the formation of boundaries and the beginning of socialization. The Real is also associated with “identification with those things perceived as fulfilling your lack: the mother’s breast, her voice, her gaze.”² None of these objects can perfectly fulfill the child’s lack, so he begins forming the psychic conflict of fantasy vs. lack that “continues all his life.”³

The Imaginary

The Imaginary is narcissistic. The subject moves from primal need to unsatisfiable demand. This leads to the formation of the specular ego in the mirror stage (6-18 months of age), where the infant finds the means to escape its condition of fragmentation and loss (lacking the primal dyadic relation with the mother) by identifying with his specular image. This stage is marked by identification: “the transformation that takes place in the subject when he assumes an image –an image that is seemingly predestined to have an effect at this phase, as witnessed by the use in analytic theory of antiquity’s term, ‘imago.’”⁴ The mirror stage is “the watershed between the imaginary and the symbolic.”⁵

The child perceives an idealized version of himself when he views his reflection, misrecognizing his fragmented bodily experience as a unified self. This reflection serves as a fantasy image, shaping his ego through identification with it. As a result, this stage is marked by both alienation and narcissism. The Imaginary order fosters a misleading sense of wholeness and autonomy, with the ‘Ideal I’ representing a complete and coherent self. According to Lacan, within the symbolic framework, “the I” emerges in an initial form before it becomes shaped through identification with others and before language assigns it the role of a subject. At this stage, the ego’s agency is directed toward a fictional ideal, which remains unattainable in its entirety. No matter how well one integrates conflicting aspects of identity, the subject can never fully resolve the gap between their idealized self and lived experience. The mirror stage thus becomes the moment when the distinction between the self and the other arises, and the individual begins to recognize themselves as an entity within the external world.

The primordial tension and discord between me in the mirror and the reality of my body is formative of me as a subject. Lacan explains: “The mirror stage is a drama whose internal thrust is precipitated from insufficiency to anticipation –and which manufactures for the subject, caught up in the lure of spatial identification, the succession of phantasies that extends from a fragmented body-image to a form of its totality that I shall call ‘orthopaedic’– and, lastly, to the assumption of the armor of an alienating identity, which will mark with its rigid structure the subject’s entire mental development.”⁶ For Lacan, the conscious ego’s authority as such is impossible due to the split subject of the Imaginary. The conscious ego always struggles to protect its illusory unity via its narcissism, as it is always under the threat of fragmentation. At the conclusion of the mirror stage, the dynamic relationship between the “I” and the social world is established. However, Lacan cautions against viewing the ego as merely rooted in perception and consciousness or structured by the “reality principle.” Instead, he emphasizes that the ego is fundamentally shaped by méconnaissance⁷—a state of misrecognition, ignorance, or a lack of true self-knowledge—which underlies all of its defensive mechanisms.

The Symbolic

When the subject enters the Symbolic, it is separated from the mother, and its imaginary ego dissolves. This results in the emergence of the split subject who lacks. The Symbolic, in the psychosexual development of the child, corresponds to 18 months to 4 years of age and is marked by the entrance into language and culture. It is the linguistic realm as well as the register of radical alterity, “the Other.” “The symbolic is the realm of the Law which regulates desire in the Oedipus complex. It is the realm of culture as opposed to the imaginary order of nature. Whereas the imaginary is characterized by dual relations, the symbolic is characterized by triadic structures because the intersubjective relationship is always ‘mediated’ by a third term, the big Other. The symbolic order is also the realm of death, of absence, and of lack.”⁸ The big Other is the objective spirit, the Symbolic as it exists for an individual subject socio-linguistically.

The Symbolic has a totalizing and universalizing character. For Lacan, when the Symbolic arrives, it is universal, and one doesn’t enter it gradually, as it has always been present. The Lacanian subject is barred within it, as it is castrated due to its division by language. The barred subject ($) is divided due to the tension between primitive need and demand, and it is forever conflicted.

Kristeva’s Theoretical Edifice

First, I will present the Kristevan approach to the Lacanian three orders. In Kristeva’s theory, the chora corresponds to the Lacanian Real (0-6 months of age). In this stage, the infant is a chaotic bundle of perceptions, feelings, and needs. He is not yet separated from the mother and is without any idea of boundaries. He is “closest to the pure materiality of existence … purely dominated by drives.”⁹ A key concept of Kristeva, “abjection” (in 4-8 months of age) refers to the beginning of separation and the formation of boundaries between self and other prior entry into language. I will elaborate on this concept in a further section, but as a preliminary definition, this stage can be described as a breaking away from the mother. It is “a violent, clumsy breaking away, with the constant risk of falling back into the pre-linguistic stage of the Chora, which means giving up all the linguistic structures by which we order our social world of meaning. Kristeva sees the stage of abjection as a precondition of narcissism.”¹⁰ As such, Lacanian Imaginary order and the mirror stage (6-18 months of age) is complicated by the abject. From 18 months to 4 years of age, the child enters the differential system of language –the world as we know it takes shape, and perceptions stabilize, and the intrusion of the Real’s materiality becomes a ‘traumatic event.’

The Semiotic and the Symbolic

In Kristeva’s theory, the dyad of Semiotic and the Symbolic is central and deeply connected to abjection, chora, and the thetic phase. First, I will elaborate on the Semiotic and the Symbolic.

For Kristeva, the signifying process (significance) is formed by the Semiotic and the Symbolic as interlinked modalities forming the process of the speaking subject: “Without the symbolic, speech would disintegrate into babbling madness; without the semiotic, it would shrivel up in its dryness into a brittle emptiness.”¹¹

The (paternal) symbolic modality is about taking a position that is concerned with meaning, grammar, and syntax. The (maternal) Semiotic is about the subject’s feelings and drives rather than proper grammatical and syntactic rules. (Additionally, we can view the concept of mental speech as well as onomatopoetic speech as belonging to the Semiotic. As such, Kristeva describes Joyce’s writing as the incursions of the Imaginary into the Symbolic.¹²

With regard to the psychosexual development of the subject, “the semiotic is articulated by flow and marks: facilitation, energy transfers, the cutting up of the corporeal and social continuum as well as that of signifying material, the establishment of a distinctiveness and its ordering in a pulsating chora, in a rhythmic but nonexpressive totality.”¹³ For Kristeva, it is “the operation that logically and chronologically precedes the establishment of the symbolic and its subject.”¹⁴ She distinguishes it from the realm of signification. The Semiotic is pre-thetic; it precedes the positing of the subject. The paternal Symbolic is marked by the masculine law and structure, whereas the maternal Semiotic is the realm of crisis, motility, rupture, rhythms, and raw materials: “the semiotic is the locus of the subject-to-be, the constitutive ground of ego-formation. It predates the mirror stage’s identificatory dialectic of self and other.”¹⁵ The Semiotic essentially belongs to the mother-child union, thus, has the character of corporeality, whereas the entry into the paternal Symbolic is marked by a break with the mirror stage.

The Semiotic and the Symbolic also determine Kristeva’s notion of ‘subject in process’ (one of her departures from Lacan), and she suggests that after entering the Symbolic, the subject oscillates between the Semiotic and the Symbolic. His identity is never fixed but always in process.

The Chora

Kristeva adapted Plato’s chora, defining it as “a nonexpressive totality formed by the drives and their stasis in a motility that is as full of movement as it is regulated.”¹⁶ The child in the Chora (0 to 6 months) is a chaotic mix of perceptions, feelings, and needs –the womb and the world is blended. This stage is closest to the Real.¹⁷ The Semiotic is often used together with the chora or sometimes as a replacement. The chora is also “the ‘space’ of the Semiotic.”¹⁸

For Kristeva, like Lacan, the Symbolic is marked by word and discourse –it is the realm of the Father’s Law, whereas the Semiotic Chora is associated with rupture; it “precedes evidence, verisimilitude, spatiality, and temporality.”¹⁹

Kristeva suggests that the mother’s body mediates between the Semiotic chora and the Symbolic. The mother exists within the Symbolic and simultaneously has a primal bond with the infant. Her body is “what mediates the symbolic law organizing social relations and becomes the ordering principle of the semiotic chora.”²⁰ The chora can also be understood as Kristeva’s way of highlighting a transitional space that mediates between the biological and the social before the disruptive rupture caused by language. This space functions both as a container and a separator, existing neither within the mother nor the infant but as an in-between, forming a “third” entity. It serves as an intermediary realm—dynamic rather than static or void, generating meaning and transformation. Conceptually, it is closely tied to the notion of “beginning,” which is not a singular event but something continually revisited and redefined.²¹

The Abject

In the mirror stage, the child distinguishes between self and other, and enters the Symbolic, becoming a speaking subject and forming an identity separate from the mother. In Kristevan’s theory, this act of separation is marked by abjection, where the child separates himself from and rejects the mother to enter language and culture.

Kristeva describes the abject as something (not definable) radically opposed to the subject that is threatened with breaking down meaning and which causes horror and disgust. It is “the jettisoned object, is radically excluded and draws me toward the place where meaning collapses.”²² The abject threatens with dissolving meaning, as the distinction between subject and object or between self and other, preserving “what existed in the archaism of pre-objectal relationship, in the immemorial violence with which a body becomes separated from another body in order to be.”²³

In psychosexual development, the abject is situated before the subject enters the Symbolic, defining the moment I separate myself from the mother, realizing a boundary between her and me. The abject serves as a necessary precursor to the narcissism of the mirror stage, emerging only after we establish fundamental distinctions between self and other. It simultaneously signifies the potential collapse of meaning and our response to this threat—a reinstatement of our earliest repression. The abject disrupts identity, structure, and order, challenging established boundaries. Kristeva also links it to the sudden intrusion of the Real into our experience, emphasizing that our reaction to abject material is essentially a reactivation of a pre-linguistic response.²⁴

In the psychoanalytic framework, abjection is directed at what one excludes: the mother. Abjection of the maternal is necessary for the ego and identity to be formed.

The Thetic Phase

The ‘thetic’ is the positing of the subject, described by Kristeva as the “deepest structure of the possibility of enunciation.”²⁵ Kristeva distinguishes the semiotic (drives and their articulations) from the realm of signification, which is a realm of proposition or judgment. This positionality … is structured as a break in the signifying process, establishing the identification of the subject and its object as preconditions of propositionality.”²⁶ Kristeva calls the break that produces the positing of signification ‘the thetic phase.’ All enunciation is thetic. Prior to entry into the Symbolic, the thetic is “the threshold of language.”²⁷ Kristeva describes the thetic phase as the stage in which the imago is established, castration is recognized, and semiotic motility is structured—positioning it as the space of the Other and a necessary condition for meaning-making. In other words, it serves as a prerequisite for the emergence of language. This phase represents a transition between the Semiotic and the Symbolic. The Symbolic realm incorporates aspects of the Semiotic, however their separation for Kristeva is marked by the fundamental division between the signifier and the signified.²⁸

The thetic phase is similar to Lacan’s mirror stage as it is the dialectical relationship of self and other and is marked by the infant’s libidinal investment in his own image. Kristeva follows Lacan’s account, as the theory of the thetic, like the mirror stage, emphasizes ego-formation and the tension between subject, object, and language. Kristeva diverges from Lacan with regard to the thetic signification, which according to her “constitutes the subject without being reduced to his process precisely because it is the threshold of language.”²⁹ The Lacanian emphasis is more on the identification with the image and the transition from the pre-Oedipal to the formation of the ego, whereas the Kristevan emphasis is more on the transition from the Semiotic into language. Kristeva emphasizes or introduces the thetic as an intermediary process or function: “the semiotic exceeds the limits of the symbolic: it reaches beyond the threshold of the sign. By conceiving the thetic phase as a ‘threshold’ -an intermediary determining the relation between the semiotic and the symbolic- Kristeva is able to supplement Lacan’s account of subjectivation with a renewed emphasis on the corporeal.”³⁰ Kristevan’s thetic is about the separation from the maternal, whereas Lacan’s mirror stage deals with the formation of the ego through visual identification.

*

The maternal body is an intermediary space, belonging to both the Semiotic and the Symbolic. With this, Kristeva diverges from Freud and Lacan, maintaining that the entry into the Symbolic order is also a maternal function. It does not originate solely in the ‘violent break’ of the Oedipal stage but rather begins in the pre-Oedipal stage.³¹ With her focus on Semiotic chora, Kristeva distances herself from Lacan in two ways: “she extends the history of the subject back beyond Lacan’s imaginary ego … and she recognizes the chora as already social since it is a link with others.”³² With this move, she recognizes the subject as already socialized.

Kristeva, following Lacan, maintains that the relationship to the mother must be repressed for the subject to enter the Symbolic. However, she diverges from him with her focus on the chora as ever-present under the mask of the Symbolic subject. As Grosz writes, “Where Lacan insists on a definitive break between the imaginary and the symbolic, which are separated by the rupture caused by castration, the intervention of the third term, and the repression of oedipal/pre-oedipal desires, Kristeva posits more of a continuity.”³³ Due to this continuity of the prelinguistic within the Symbolic, the Semiotic goes through a transformation in the Symbolic. In “madness, holiness, and poetry” we see moments where “the semiotic overflows its symbolic boundaries.”³⁴ For Kristeva, especially poetry represents the return of the Semiotic in its transymbolic form.

Kristeva also diverges from Lacan by emphasizing the primary narcissism as a stage of an ego-fragility before the formation of the ego as such. In this sense, she emphasizes the destructive aspect of the threatening Lacanian Real before subject and object is differentiated during mirror stage. She utilizes her concepts of maternal chora, the Semiotic, the abject, and the thetic within this framework.

Kristeva’s account of the subject’s entrance into language diverges from Lacan’s, primarily due to her emphasis on the maternal process and function, which Kristeva conveys via the subversive power of the Semiotic chora, the process of abjection, and the thetic phase. In the Lacanian edifice, the transition from the prelinguistic to the Symbolic is more abrupt, whereas Kristeva presents intermediary spaces and continuity. I concur with the perspective that the Kristevan theoretical sphere introduces continuity in terms of the entrance into the Symbolic.

The Kristevan emphasis on the maternal is demonstrated in her view of the Symbolic and the Semiotic: The Symbolic, captured as the patriarchal/paternal discursive register of socio- cultural structures is built upon the chaotic and raw dynamicism of the maternal Semiotic. The Symbolic both presupposes the Semiotic as its condition and simultaneously attempts to repress and tame it as the primal threat directed at its consistency. The Semiotic preserves its corporeal excess that forever eludes signification. The Semiotic as the chaotic maternal always threatens to permeate the Symbolic order.

For both Kristeva and Lacan, entering the Symbolic is only possible by the repression concerning the child’s primary attachment to the maternal body. The speaking subject is a split, divided, barred subject who lacks. However, it is important to note that for Kristeva, the repression of the Semiotic amounts to “a sacrifice of the chora.”³⁵ The chora destabilizes the ego and is deeply connected with the maternal body. The maternal function is demonstrated by Kristeva, again, with the mother’s body viewed as mediating the symbolic sociality.

From a Kristevan perspective, any representation of the relation to the Semiotic has the potential to be subversive as it can harness the power of negativity that challenges the masculine Symbolic. There is always the negating threat of the Semiotic within the Symbolic. As such, the subject carries the Semiotic excess forever as his integration into the Symbolic is never properly achieved. The Kristevan concept of the thetic also introduces continuity, as it does not simply divide the Semiotic and Symbolic into two different orders of the corporeal and the discursive. It is a threshold.

For both Lacan and Kristeva, the subject is ambiguous, split, barred, and is closely connected with the idea of crisis and impossibility. However, on the matter of the subject’s entry into the Symbolic, Kristeva distances herself from the Lacanian edifice with an emphasis on the maternal Semiotic, as well as by favoring an account of continuity.

Bibliography & Footnotes

The post Mirror Threshold and Semiotic Force: How the Chora Realm Redefines Symbolic appeared first on The Miskatonian.

Michel Serres, Atlas

“There are no fixtures in nature. The universe is fluid and volatile. Permanence is but a word of degrees.

Our globe seen by God is a transparent law, not a mass of facts.

The law dissolves the fact and holds it fluid.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Circles”

“Wonder and grief together have their ground in matter and material-corporeal perception.

Through the senses, I perceive both the wonderous beauty of the Reef and its fragility.”

Anne Elvey, Reading With Earth”

This essay explores “fragility” as a central concept in Michel Serres’s work and key feminist new materialist perspectives on human and nonhuman agency. The concept of fragility encourages us to engage with notions of potentiality, indeterminacy, fluidity, and vulnerability while recognizing the co-constitution and mutual entanglement of human and nonhuman agents. It resonates powerfully with ethico-political perspectives in the context of the Anthropocene. A prominent theme in both Serres’s work and feminist new materialist thought is the critique of humanity’s ecocidal-parasitic tendencies and the recognition of fragilities, alongside a strong emphasis on the interconnectedness of human and nonhuman agents. Their delicate connections are always on the verge of transformation and reconfiguration, forming part of an ongoing onto-epistemological process of co-creation –what Haraway describes as a “making-with.” This is, by nature, a fragile process—open to both discord and harmony, continually reshaped by past and future practices and narratives.

In this co-agential existence and interconnected web of life, Serres suggests that humans, as parasites, live within and alongside flora and fauna, parasitizing each other while coexisting with the parasites that make up their environment –humans also live within the “black box”, as the collective or society in the form of an animal (Leviathan): “We are certainly within something bestial … Our host? I don’t know. But I do know that we are within.”[1] Serres suggests that we are deeply embedded within something vast and bestial, though we may not fully understand our host. The host is what we create and what creates us.

Our “nature cultures” (Haraway) are comprised of the inseparable blend of nature (as the stage) and history/culture (as the play). There is no exit from this twofold existence; our stories and actions take place entirely within these intertwined realms, with no absolute external position. Reinforcing the idea that there is no direct, unproblematic separation between the natural and the cultural, Karen Barad writes that “There are only ‘acts of nature.’” Similarly, Vicki Kirby’s revision of Derrida’s “There is no outside of text” to “There is no outside of nature” does not privilege nature but acknowledges that “there is no outside, no remainder that is not already involved and evolving as text.”[2] Being eternally within, we are responsible for our actions and connections; and this highlights the dimension of our accountability as ethical modalities. In this context, being accountable entails acknowledging how and through which acts we leave “marks on bodies.”[3] This entails a deliberate recognition or adoption of a fragile subject position, or more precisely, a conscious openness to the material realities of both human and more-than-human life, as well as to the consequences of our choices and actions.

The Fragile Being

Serres affirms the fragile in the face of everything solid, rigid, archaic, and frozen.[4] Fragility is the readiness to change or disappear. Life and thought are marked by fragility, as they “live in closest proximity to nothingness.”[5] Humanity, “the mother of all weakness,”[6] is fragile. The fragile being is weak, frail, and exposed. Yet, it is potent and productive, it can mix, confuse, and evolve: “Any evolution can only be born of fragility,” writes Serres.[7] This potentiality is a persistent memory that flows with time rather than resisting it.

The fragile being is strong precisely because it is ready to cease existing as such, in that form, in that sense, in that moment: It is closeness to be otherwise, always on the edge of becoming something else. Whether it is human, animal, or plant, the fragile being is a “memory-thing”[8] carrying the essence of transformation. It bears traces and marks of histories of entanglements. It is a form shifter, an implication of a certain past and a certain future. It represents newness, like that of infancy and growth—an immanence unfolding within nature, which is inherently fragile and vulnerable, “ready to fade away with the first breath of wind. Ready to vanish, to return to nothingness. Nature is born, is going to be born, gets ready to be born, like a fragile infant.”[9] Fragility is also a striking feature of Serres’s philosophical practice which encompasses elements of frailty, sensitivity, and fluidity. When Latour asks whether he is seeking “a synthesis of fragility,” Serres responds,

What I seek to form, to compose, to promote –I can’t quite find the right word– is a syrrhèse, a confluence not a system, a mobile confluence of fluxes … An assembly of relations … Once again, the flames’ dance. The living body dances like that, and all life. Weakness and fragility mark the spot of their most precious secret. I seek to assist the birth of an infant.[10]

This can be described as “a construction at the limits of fragility”[11] –a gentle philosophy of connecting, confusing, mixing, bending that recognizes spaces of material relations and “spaces of non-law, where nature can get through.”[12] It views limits and boundaries as fluid, indistinct, and open.

Fragility is inherent in rigidity, as even the most rigid structures are always fragile—yet fragility transcends conceptual rigidity. It embraces an irreducible ontological excess, challenging dominant discourses with its bold closeness to nothingness.

Fragile States of Subject and Object

Serres, in Natural Contract, acknowledges the fragility of human agency and mastery, proposing an anti-reductionist treatment of nature, which “behaves as a subject.”[13] The social contract theory, brutally transitioning from nature to culture, led to the world’s disappearance while “self-important men are left with their history and their reason.”[14] Nature encompasses all conditions of human nature, providing shelter and food, but it reacts and takes them away when we abuse them; and  behaving as a subject, it “speaks to us in terms of forces, bonds, and interactions.”[15] Following Vicki Kirby, we can describe this “Subject Nature” as a “literate, numerate and social” nature within which “the exceptional status and identity of the human is one of quantum dis/location.”[16] This view of Subject Nature highlights the mutual implication and entanglement of humans and nonhumans and helps to problematize what Sloterdijk calls “the old ecology of stage and play”[17] –the view of nature as an absolute, mute, passive supplier of resources, which belongs to the Cartesian/modernist anthropocentric imaginary. Sloterdijk associates fragility with historicity, which, for civilizations, means mortality.[18] In the Anthropocene, nature as the old stage or background of human action has shed its traditional role as the backdrop for human activity, revealing its fragility and demanding recognition of its limits.[19] Serres’s idea of a Natural Contract recognizes this fragility, appearing as what we humans owe to nature, a legal subjectivity, a ground for reciprocity and symbiosis: “a gift that could allow nonhuman lives to flourish by simply being allowed to be without subjugation,”[20] as Patricia MacCormack explains.

Serres’s problematization of subject-object positions reveals the abrasiveness of the discursive culture of Anthropos that repeats practices of human mastery and sameness: “the parasite takes all and gives nothing; the host gives all and takes nothing. Rights of mastery and property come down to parasitism.”[21] The view of human agency as “an umbilical, non-metaphorical yardstick of all other claims to agency,”[22]  maintained the violent dichotomy of active subject-passive object. This is the discourse of the Selfsame which is a “history of an identity,” of “phallocentrism and propriation.”[23]

Identity, however, is not static; it is fluid, evolving, queer and multifaceted. For Karen Barad, identity is not an isolated concept but a phenomenal matter, inherently multiple and constantly shifting within itself –it is a process of “diffraction / différance / differing / deferring / differentiating,” where an atom’s identity is always subject to reworkings, shaped by both past and future interactions.[24] Michel Serres shares a similar view. As David Webb explains, Serres sees material order as the formation of a code where atoms do not follow predetermined laws but rather form their own codes as they combine.[25] This perspective highlights the relational and dynamic nature of identity, viewing it as an ongoing process of differentiation.

The ambiguity of subject-object positions exposes the fragility of the boundaries that shape identity and divide agencies. As such, beyond the context of the one-directional, parasitic relationship between subject and object, human agency can be viewed as just one form of agency that involves “receiving, storing, processing and emitting information.”[26] The isomorphic participation of both humans and nonhumans in these processes highlights that agency is not exclusive to humans.

Fragility and Indeterminacy

The substitution and interchangeability of subject-object positions demonstrate the operation of indeterminacy. Exploring indeterminacy through Barad’s agential realist account can be productive. In agential realism, indeterminacy marks the basic ontological mode. Phenomena are “ontologically primitive relations” and “the ontological inseparability / entanglement of intra-acting ‘agencies.’”[27] Unlike a Cartesian cut (subject and object), an intra-action (rather than an “interaction” which assumes pre-given relata) forms an agential cut and “enacts a resolution within the phenomenon of the inherent ontological (and semantic) indeterminacy.”[28] Agential separability takes place as “the local condition of exteriority-within-phenomena”[29] –thus, “differentiating is not a relation of radical exteriority, but of agential separability, of exteriority-within.”[30] With the agential realist understanding of agency, Barad challenges the “classical ontological condition of exteriority between observer and observed.”[31] This classical ontological condition, which is replaced by agential separability, can be viewed as the old onto-epistemological mode of what Serres calls “the old agency of the ‘I’” which, encountering the multiple voices of the universe, shatters like a “fragile vase,” with its explosion leading to the formation of “an exterior with any interior”:

The universal flood of noise –sounds, music, and discourse mixed together, presto e fortissimo, erasing the silence– destroys the old agency of the “I,” the way a thin and fragile vase would explode by dint of vibrations, to the profit of transparency thrown towards the perpetual present, forming an exterior with any interior, weaving relations without reserving any substance for itself, sparkling multiplicities without any nucleus. Formerly a dense seed or dark bit of gravel, single and hard, the self becomes multiple, criss-crossed, mosaic, and shimmering.[32]

All forms of agency participate and intra-act within the material-discursive continuum, the spacetimemattering. In the inseparable, co-constitutive relationship of space, time, and matter—emerging through ongoing intra-actions—agency is understood as a process of “doing” or “being,” reflecting the continuous reconfigurations of the world.[33] This onto-epistemological perspective challenges the traditional subject-object binary. As Jane Bennett suggests, entities are neither strictly subject nor object but rather a “mode” of what Spinoza referred to as “Deus sive Natura” (God or Nature).[34] Bennett views the agency as collaborative and distributed: no single actant operates in isolation. She emphasizes that agency changes when nonhuman entities are recognized not as mere social constructs but as actors in their own right and when humans are understood not as autonomous beings but as vital materialities.[35] The agency is dynamic, relational, and process-driven, composed of delicate entanglements that require creative exploration. (As Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman note, we must develop ways to grasp the agency, significance, and transformative power of the world.[36]) A non-hierarchical view of agency calls for moving beyond reductive thinking that privileges human agency, instead engaging with responsible material-discursive practices that reflect a commitment to understanding how the boundaries and divisions we create hold meaning –a commitment “to understand how different cuts matter.”[37] This view of agency aligns with Rosi Braidotti’s notion of ethico-political subjectivity which she focuses on in her critical posthumanist framework. According to Braidotti, agency is not the sole privilege of Anthropos, and the knowing subject is not just Man but a complex assemblage that transcends the boundaries between self and other: “subjects are embodied and embedded, relational and affective collaborative entities, activated by relational ethics.”[38] This perspective, where agents intra-act through fluid assemblages, suggests a fluid subject position. As Iris Van Der Tuin points out, such a position challenges the dominant discourses of malestream society and identity-based feminisms.[39]

The fluidity of subject-object positions does not imply ambiguous ethical positions, but rather, indeterminacy acquires a founding ethical gesture pertaining to material reality. As Barad writes, “The existence of indeterminacies does not mean that there are no facts, no histories, no bleeding –on the contrary, indeterminacies are constitutive of the very materiality of being.”[40] In this context, indeterminacy can be seen as the ethico-onto-epistemological characteristic of fragile agency, perpetually open to reconfigurations and transformations, operating within fluid and shifting boundaries.

It could be argued that the absence of fixed boundaries suggests a “negative” space of indeterminacy, perceived as emptiness or ambiguity, which can be understood through Serres’s parasitical paradigm:

It might be dangerous not to decide who is the host and who is the guest, who gives and who receives, who is the parasite and who is the table d’hôte, who has the gift and who has the loss, and where hostility begins within hospitality. Who hasn’t trembled with fear in a shady hotel? Shady, obscure, badly lit.[41]

It is important to note that Barad’s account on indeterminacy highlights the ethical implications of boundary-making practices that allocate status, position, or identity. This approach steers clear of the shady, obscure, and fear-inducing aspects of negative indeterminacy described by Serres.

Fragile Sympoiesis

Agency is a matter of “making–with”[42] the earth of Cthulucene. Harawayian sympoiesis accommodates entanglements, complexities, and multiplicities. “Nothing makes itself. Nothing is really autopoietic or self–organizing … earthlings are never alone … Sympoiesis is a word proper to complex, dynamic, responsive, situated, historical systems. It is a word for worlding-with, in company.”[43] As Anne Elvey writes, forest systems, fungi, trees, and animals engage in material entanglements as co-agents, beyond species hierarchy, with an act of sympoiesis, where creatures co-create one another and their environment.[44]

Serresian agency can be described as sympoietic, a soft and dynamic web of entanglements. The “chain of life,”[45] the dance of agents, human and nonhuman, is fragile: a “soft chain, easily cut, fragments easily replaced, a chain almost always broken.”[46] The agential chain is potent and productive within the intricate web of mattering. Understanding agency as a relational and processual making-with leads to the onto-epistemological decentralization of the human agent. Serres calls to “forget the word environment … It assumes that we humans are at the center of a system of nature. This idea recalls a bygone era when the Earth… reflected our narcissism, the humanism that makes of us the exact midpoint or excellent culmination of all things.”[47] Decentralization of the human agent does not mean its dismissal or elimination. This engagement rather draws attention to how ethico-onto-epistemological boundaries are produced and maintained. In this regard, Barad’s focus on a starting point for an analysis of agency is insightful, as its focus is “the practices of differentiating,”[48] –the cuts that divide human and nonhuman.

For Serres, the view of “active subject–passive object” ironically passivizes humans, turning them into slaves in their passion for dominance –thus, we must aim towards a philosophy of nature that “restores the dignity of these memory-things, which we always forget.”[49] The dynamic relationality of agencies reveals the need for knowledge production that does not objectify or reduce, reminding that “the act of knowledge doesn’t link an active subject-pole to an other, a passive object, but rather both participate together in this act in which the games are shared.”[50] The act in which the games are shared is an agential making-with. The subject and object, material and semiotic, natural and social, are never separate.

In the context of the natural and the social, this relationality can be understood through Nancy Tuana’s concept of “viscous porosity.” Exploring how a natural phenomenon occurs with the interactional web of human social structures and practices, Tuana describes Hurricane Katrina as a phenomenon that demonstrates the viscous porosity between the social and the natural.

Material agency in its heterogeneous forms, including irreducibly diverse forms of distinctively human agency, interact in complex ways. Agency in all these instances emerges out of such interactions; it is not antecedent to them. Our epistemic practices must thus be attuned to this manifold agency and emergent interplay, which means we cannot be epistemically responsible and divide the humanities from the sciences or the study of culture from the study of nature.[51]

Tuana emphasizes how natural and social, human and more-than-human are entangled within complex material-semiotic networks, arguing for “interactionism” as a metaphysics that recognizes and acknowledges entangled agencies, while also highlighting the need for making distinctions for distributive justice.

Fragility and Material Vulnerability

 Like Barad, who echoes Levinasian ethics in their practice of ethico-onto-epistemology, Anne Elvey—also drawing on Levinasian philosophy through an ecological feminist materialist hermeneutics—emphasizes the material vulnerability that “shares the character of the ‘face’ that calls.”[52] We witness the shared vulnerability of humans and more-than-human on the “animals left as roadkill, mountains leveled for coal, forests razed for paper products and bodies subject to nuclear fallout”[53], and this witnessing entails “compassionate action as an ethical response.”[54] An act of compassion involves “cross-species and material agencies at work … its fleshy solidarities and resistances.”[55] Formed by senses and the body, compassion implies the body as ground: Elvey refers to the etymological links (in Hebrew and koine Greek) between compassion, maternal, and the corporeal.[56] This emphasis on the materiality of compassion opens space for recognizing human and nonhuman fragilities and for gentle hermeneutics. Via accepting fragilities of all agents, subjects acknowledge and accept their own fragilities. This acceptance is an act of gentleness – “a higher degree of compassion,”[57] as Anne Dufourmantelle puts it, a power of “secret life-giving transformation linked to what the ancients called ‘potentiality’ [puissance]”[58] and “an intelligence, one that carries life, that saves and enhances it.”[59] Only with gentleness is there the possibility for life to grow and transform. This generative, life-giving gentleness as potentiality is similar to Serres’s conception of fragility as a force that makes evolution possible.

In material ethics, as Alaimo and Hekman explain, the emphasis is on ethical practices rather than ethical principles. These practices involve an “openness to the needs, the significance, and the liveliness of the more-than-human world.”[60] Ethical actions arise from material realities, taking place within the relationality of material existence and recognizing the shared impact of co-agency. As human subjects, only by recognizing our fragility and willfully occupying a fragile subject position can we engage in a form of knowing and ethical practice that sees the limitations, boundaries, and constraints that shape our co-agential relationships. This can allow us to confront the inhuman within ourselves and move forward with compassion toward all beings.

The most vital aspect of existence is the fragile. It is the delicate tissue that Serres celebrates: “Here is the living: tissues, young and aged, bent, fused together.”[61] The tissue is “hesitated between fluid and solid,”[62] an intermediate material, fragile and supple, “pliable, tearable, stretchable … topological.”[63] Tissue is fluid and solid, thick and thin, opaque and transparent, participating in multiple states and modes simultaneously. It is connective as placenta which is described by Braidotti as “a state of pacifist cooperation and co-creation between organisms, in a specific relational frame that facilitates their co-existence, interaction and growth.”[64] Placenta politics emphasizes our co-existence and shared materiality. There is a moment of pacifist encounter implied by the materiality of the placenta. It is a space and state of compassion, facilitating co-subjectivity that traverses intersubjectivity. According to Elvey, compassion isn’t just about a direct connection between two individuals, like an injured animal and me in a moment; instead, compassion arises from and reinforces the interconnectedness of all life, emphasizing our shared ethical responsibility as part of the larger fabric of the world.[65] The placenta emerges from the very materiality of ethical reality that posits the human as an agential part of material-discursive becoming as we participate in the differentiating of the world. Ethical practices take place within; they are co-agential, a sympoiesis, and the making-with of agents. As Barad puts it,

Ethics cannot be about responding to the other as if the other is the radical outside to the self. Ethics is not a geometrical calculation; “others” are never very far from “us”; “they” and “we” are co-constituted and entangled through the very cuts “we” help to enact. Intra-actions cut “things” together and apart. Cuts are not enacted from the outside, nor are they ever enacted once and for all.[66]

For Barad, objectivity is “about being accountable and responsible to what is real.”[67] The “real,” in this sense, amounts to what Elvey defines as “the reality of a material givenness that encompasses not only bodies … but also the relatedness that is an ethical reality.”[68] According to Elvey, an ecological feminism shaped around this reality provides the ground for practices of compassion understood as shared vulnerability that allows us “to feel in our bodies the structures of oppression that rely on the dead bodies of animals, including humans, structures for which trauma is constitutive rather than accidental.”[69]

The stories of our agential cuts capture the cumulative narratives shaped by choices and actions. Agential cuts form the boundaries and meanings and require being accountable for the apparatuses that determine them. Haraway’s multispecies storytelling embodies and conveys “complex histories that are as full of dying as living, as full of endings, even genocides, as beginnings.”[70]

As we produce, participate in, or suffer from eco-political devastation, traumatic events, violent discourses, and the political spectacle of false antagonisms, human existence can feel like the shady, obscure, badly lit hotel room Serres describes. Yet, perhaps escape may be possible through a willingness and openness that allow us to perceive openings—perhaps the “spaces of non-law” Serres speaks of, where nature can seep through. These openings, as well as our willingness, are marked by the kind of porosity Serres associates with audacity –a defining quality of the frail.

To inhabit fragility, or a fragile position, is to forge subversive connections that challenge the status quo—provoking, unsettling, and complicating, all while confronting the risk of death. Yet, for the fragile, the ever-looming shadow of death is a familiar companion, making it most alive precisely because it is always ready to fade away, disappear, and return to nothingness.

The most alive is the fragile.

Bibliography

Alaimo, Stacy and Susan Hekman. “Introduction: Emerging Models of Materiality in Feminist Theory,” Material Feminisms edited by Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008.

Barad, Karen. “Diffracting Diffraction: Cutting Together–Apart.” Parallax 20, no. 3 (2014): 168–87. doi:10.1080/13534645.2014.927623.

Barad, Karen. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning, Durham: Duke University Press, 2007.

Barad, Karen. “Nature’s Queer Performativity,” Kvinder, Køn & Forskning, (1–2), 2012, https://doi.org/10.7146/kkf.v0i1–2.28067

Barad, Karen. “On Touching – The Inhuman That Therefore I Am,” 2012, https://www.academia.edu/7375696/On_Touching_–_The_Inhuman_That_Therefore_I_Am_v1.1_

Barad, Karen. “Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter”, Signs, Vol. 28, No. 3, Gender and Science: New Issues (Spring 2003), pp. 801–831, The University of Chicago Press, 2003. https://doi.org/10.1086/345321

Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, Duke University Press, 2010.

Braidotti, Rosi. “Placenta Politics”, Posthuman Glossary, edited by Rosi Braidotti and Maria Hlavajova, Bloomsbury Academic, 2018.

Braidotti, Rosi. Posthuman Knowledge, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2019.

Cixous, Hélène and Catherine Clément. The Newly Born Woman, translated by Betsy Wing, University of Minnesota Press, 1986.

Colman, Felicity J. “Agency”, New Materialism. Accessed April 6, 2024. https://newmaterialism.eu/almanac/a/agency.html

Dufourmantelle, Anne. Power of Gentleness, Meditations on the Risk of Living, translated by Katherine Payne and Vincent Sallé, New York: Fordham University Press, 2018.

Elvey, Anne. Reading With Earth, Contributions of the New Materialism to an Ecological Feminist Hermeneutics, Bloomsbury, 2022.

Geerts, Evelien and Iris van der Tuin (2021), “Diffraction & Reading Diffractively.” Accessed February 5, 2024. Doi: 10.1344/jnmr.v2i1.33380

Haraway, Donna. Staying with the Trouble – Making Kin in the Chthulucene, Duke University Press, 2016.

Juelskjær, Malou & Nete Schwennesen. “Intra–active Entanglements – An Interview with Karen Barad,” Kvinder, Køn & Forskning (2012). https://doi.org/10.7146/kkf.v0i1–2.28068

Kleinman, Adam. “Intra–actions, An Interview with Karen Barad,” Mousse 34, https://www.academia.edu/1857617/_Intra_actions_Interview_of_Karen_Barad_by_Adam_Kleinmann_

Kirby, Vicki. “Matter out of Place: ‘New Materialism’ in Review,” What if Culture was Nature all Along?, edited by Vicki Kirby, Edinburgh University Press, 2017.

MacCormack, Patricia. “The Grace of Extinction,” Michel Serres and The Crises of the Contemporary, edited by Rick Dolphijn, Bloomsbury Academic, 2020.

Serres, Michel. Atlas, unpublished manuscript, translated by Randolph Burks and Anthony Uhlmann, 2021, https://www.academia.edu/44930768/Atlas_by_Michel_Serres_Translated_by_Randolph_Burks_and_Anthony_Uhlmann

Serres, Michel. Conversations On Science, Culture, and Time – Michel Serres with Bruno Latour, translated by Roxanne Lapidus, The University of Michigan Press, 1995.

Serres, Michel. Genesis, translated by Genevieve James and James Nielson, University of Michigan Press, 1995.

Serres, Michel. Hominescence, translated by Randolph Burks, Bloomsbury Academic, 2019.

Serres, Michel. The Five Senses: A Philosophy of Mingled Bodies, translated by Margaret Sankey and Peter Cowley, Bloomsbury Academic, 2016.

Serres, Michel. The Incandescent, translated by Randolph Burks, Bloomsbury Academic, 2018.

Serres, Michel. The Natural Contract, translated by Elizabeth MacArthur and William Paulson, The University of Michigan Press, 1998.

Serres, Michel. The Parasite, translated by Lawrence R. Schehr, University of Minnesota, 2007.

Sloterdijk, Peter. After God, translated by Ian Alexander Moore, Polity Press, 2020.

Sloterdijk, Peter. Infinite Mobilization, Towards a Critique of Political Kinetics, translated by Sandra Berjan, Polity Press, 2020.

Sloterdijk, Peter. What Happened in the Twentieth Century?, translated by Christopher Turner, Polity Press, 2018.

Tuana, Nancy. “Viscous Porosity: Witnessing Katrina,” Material Feminisms edited by Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman, Indiana University Press, 2008.

Van der Tuin, Iris. New Materialist Introduction to a Generative Approach, Lexington Books, 2014.

Van der Tuin, Iris. Generational Feminism, New Materialist Introduction to a Generative Approach, Lexington Books, 2015.

Watkin, Christopher. Michel Serres, Figures of Thought, Edinburgh University Press, 2020.

Webb, David. “The Virtue of Sensibility,” Michel Serres and The Crises of The Contemporary, edited by Rick Dolphijn, Bloomsbury Academic, 2020.

[1] Michel Serres, The Parasite, trans. Lawrence R. Schehr (University of Minnesota, 2007), 10.

[2] Vicki Kirby, “Matter out of Place: ‘New Materialism’ in Review,” What if Culture was Nature all Along?, ed. Vicki Kirby (Edinburgh University Press, 2017), p. ix.

[3] Karen Barad, “Nature’s Queer Performativity”, Kvinder, Køn & Forskning, (1-2), 2012, 47, https://doi.org/10.7146/kkf.v0i1-2.28067.

[4] Michel Serres and Bruno Latour, Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time – Michel Serres with Bruno Latour, trans. Roxanne Lapidus (The University of Michigan Press, 1995), 122.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Michel Serres, The Natural Contract, trans. Elizabeth MacArthur and William Paulson (University of Michigan Press, 1998), 70.

[8] Michel Serres, The Incandescent, trans. Randolph Burks (Bloomsbury Academic, 2018), 33.

[9] Serres and Latour, Conversations, 122.

[10] Ibid.

[11] Ibid., 120.

[12] Serres, Natural Contract, 70.

[13] Ibid., 36.

[14] Ibid., 35.

[15] Ibid., 39.

[16] Kirby, “Matter out of Place”, ix.

[17] Sloterdijk, Infinite Mobilization, Towards a Critique of Political Kinetics, trans. Sandra Berjan (Polity Press, 2020), 143.

[18] Peter Sloterdijk, After God, trans. Ian Alexander Moore (Polity Press, 2020), 2.

[19] Sloterdijk, Infinite Mobilization, 143.

[20] Patricia MacCormack, “The Grace of Extinction,” Michel Serres and The Crises of The Contemporary, ed. Rick Dolphijn (Bloomsbury Academic, 2020), 166.

[21] Serres, Natural Contract, 38.

[22] Christopher Watkin, Michel Serres, Figures of Thought (Edinburgh University Press, 2020), 311.

[23] Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clément, The Newly Born Woman, trans. Betsy Wing (University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 79.

[24] Barad, “Nature’s Queer Performativity,” 32.

[25] David Webb, “The Virtue of Sensibility,” Michel Serres and The Crises of the Contemporary, edited by Rick Dolphijn (Bloomsbury Academic, 2020), 21.

[26] Watkin, Figures of Thought, 391.

[27] Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, 139.

[28] Ibid., 140.

[29] Barad, “Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter,” Signs, Vol. 28, No. 3, Gender and Science: New Issues (Spring 2003): 801-831, https://doi.org/10.1086/345321815, 815.

[30] Barad, “Nature’s Queer Performativity,” 815.

[31] Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, 140.

[32] Michel Serres, Hominescence, trans. Randolph Burks (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019), 266.

[33] Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, 178.

[34] Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Duke University Press, 2010), 22.

[35] Ibid., 21.

[36] Stacey Alaimo and Susan Hekman, “Introduction: Emerging Models of Materiality in Feminist Theory,” Material Feminisms, ed. Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman (Indiana University Press, 2008), 5.

[37] Barad, “Nature’s Queer Performativity,” 46.

[38] Rosi Braidotti, Posthuman Knowledge (Polity Press, 2019), chap 2, Epub, 98.

[39] Iris van der Tuin, Generational Feminism, New Materialist Introduction to a Generative Approach (Lexington Books, 2015), 7.

[40] Karen Barad, “Diffracting Diffraction: Cutting Together-Apart,” July 2014, Parallax Vol. 20, No. 3, https://doi.org/10.1080/13534645.2014.927623

[41] Michel Serres, The Parasite, trans. Lawrence R. Schehr (University of Minnesota, 2007), 15-6.

[42] Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble – Making Kin in the Chthulucene, (Duke University Press, 2016), 58.

[43] Ibid.

[44] Anne Elvey, Reading With Earth, Contributions of the New Materialism to an Ecological Feminist Hermeneutics (Bloomsbury, 2022), 151.

[45] Michel Serres, Genesis, trans. Genevieve James and James Nielson (University of Michigan Press, 1995), 72.

[46] Ibid.

[47] Serres, The Natural Contract, 33.

[48] Barad, “Nature’s Queer Peformativity,” 31.

[49] Serres, The Incandescent, 33.

[50] Ibid.

[51] Nancy Tuana, “Viscous Porosity: Witnessing Katrina,” Material Feminisms, eds. Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman (Indiana University Press, 2008), 196.

[52] Elvey, Reading With Earth, 141.

[53] Ibid.

[54] Ibid.

[55] Ibid., 153.

[56] Ibid., 147.

[57] Anne Dufourmantelle, Power of Gentleness, Meditations on the Risk of Living, trans. Katherine Payne and Vincent Sallé (New York: Fordham University Press, 2018), 13.

[58] Dufourmantelle, Power of Gentleness, 6.

[59] Ibid., 14.

[60] Alaimo and Hekman, “Introduction: Emerging Models of Materiality in Feminist Theory,” 8.

[61] Michel Serres, Atlas, unpublished manuscript, trans. Randolph Burks and Anthony Uhlmann, 2021, 22, https://www.academia.edu/44930768/Atlas_by_Michel_Serres_Translated_by_Randolph_Burks_and_Anthony_Uhlmann

[62] Ibid., 21.

[63] Ibid.

[64] Rosi Braidotti, “Placenta Politics,” Posthuman Glossary, eds. Rosi Braidotti and Maria Hlavajova (Bloomsbury Academic, 2018), 316.

[65] Elvey, Reading with Earth, 147.

[66] Barad, Meeting The Universe Halfway, 178-9.

[67] Ibid., 340.

[68] Elvey, Reading with Earth, 149.

[69] Ibid.

[70] Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, 10.

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Our Spaceship Earth and the Inevitable Apocalypticism of the Anthropocene

 The term “Anthropocene,” as Sloterdijk states, carries an urgent moral-political message under the guise of scientific neutrality, as it points at humanity as the responsible agent for the habitation and management of the planet. It tells us that humanity is no longer seamlessly integrated with the planet. As the Anthropocene has a responsible agent, it bears the content of an accusation. Sloterdijk contemplates on it via an imagery of a judicial setting: as “When we speak of an ‘Anthropocene,’ … we are taking part in a court case –in a preliminary hearing before the main trial, to be more precise– in which, as a first step, the accused’s culpability is supposed to be settled … This preliminary hearing is concerned with the question of whether it makes any sense at all to try the offender in question, given that the latter is not of age.”[1] The accused is not of age, and in some respects, it is insignificant, even weightless. Referencing Stanislaw Lem on the ineffectiveness and insignificance of humanity in terms of biomass, Sloterdijk questions “the point of putting on trial a species that pales in comparison to the material dimensions of the Gaia-system, the hydrosphere.”[2] Of course, the answer is that humanity’s biomass is not the sole determinant of its impact, and a weightless humanity can impact its environment in significant ways. “If humanity is supposed to be put on trial, this is mainly because it epitomizes a meta-biological agency that is able to exert quite a bit more influence on the environment, by virtue of its capacity for action, than we would assume on the basis of its relative physical weightlessness.”[3]

The agent “humanity” implies all human beings as the collective that is responsible for the destructive consequences of the Anthropocene. However, within the context of the radical technological advancements of the modern age, “humanity” refers to the European civilization and the technocratic elite.[4] Sloterdijk writes that starting from the 17^th and 18^th centuries, the European technocratic elite, with the use of coal and petroleum in machinery, transformed the global scene, and the discovery and technical mastery of electricity led to “a new universal” in terms of energy. As such, “The collective that is characterized these days by expressions such as ‘humanity’ mainly consists of agents who within less than a century have acquired technologies developed in Europe. When Crutzen speaks of an ‘Anthropocene,’ this is a gesture of Dutch courtesy – or avoidance of conflict. In fact, talk of a ‘Eurocene’ or a technocene initiated by Europeans would be more fitting.”[5] (Thus, Sloterdijk adds another suggestion to the list of alternative names for the Anthropocene, such as Plantationocene, Capitalocene, Anthrobscene, Misanthropocene, and Chthulucene).

For Sloterdijk, the concept of “Anthropocene” reflects the 19th-century epistemological obsession of contemporary geology of historicizing and organizing historical fields into eons, ages, or epochs.[6] The emergence and proliferation of the concept of the Anthropocene is linked with the triumph of historicism, which itself is linked to the idea of evolution. Behind the triumph of historicism, Sloterdijk particularly elaborates on Marx and Engels, who viewed human history as a special case of natural history as humans must secure their own existence through production –the history of relations of production is a continuation of natural history in a different form. The Marxist image of the world (the operation of relations of production shaping and determining the stages of society’s evolution from hunter-gatherers to slave-holding societies, feudalism, capitalism, and finally to communism) has replaced older doctrines in terms of the segmentation of the ages of the world. In this context, with the Anthropocene, which belongs to another pragmatic theory on the ages of the world, the responsibility of “weightless” humanity is revealed as an ethico-political project in which humanity must go through a test of transforming “emission” into a “mission”:

The concept of ‘emission’ helps us to recognize that the kind of influence we are concerned with here has until now taken place in the mode of a ‘side effect’ – otherwise, we would be talking about a ‘mission’ or a ‘project.’ The ‘e’ in ‘emission’ reveals the involuntary character of the anthropogenic impact on the exo-human dimension. Thus, the concept of the ‘Anthropocene’ includes nothing less than the task of testing out whether the agency of ‘humanity’ is capable of transforming something ejected into a project or of transforming an emission into a mission.[7]

A central component of Sloterdijk’s account is concerned with the temporal/historical character of the anthropocenic standpoint, which he links with the apocalyptic logic: since “effective histories can only be organized from their end points backwards, the anthropocenic standpoint amounts to a narrative with a stark moral choice.”[8] In the past, this narrative was dominantly in the form of apocalyptic literature in the West, as the apocalyptic approach evaluates the world from its end and is a cosmic moral procedure of sorting good (worthy of survival) from evil (not worthy of survival).[9] Sloterdijk writes,

Everything thus suggests conceiving of the ‘Anthropocene’ as a term that is only meaningful within the framework of apocalyptic logic. Apocalypticism signifies evidence from the end. Since, as a collective, we cannot be all the way to the end yet but always have to somehow carry on for a while longer, and human intelligence cannot definitively review its own history. It can only try different versions out in diverse forms of anticipation – a fact testified to by an illustrious series of simulations, sacred and profane, from the Egyptian Book of the Dead to the first report of the Club of Rome.[10]

The indispensable apocalyptic logic highlights the mythological character of the narratives we form on the Anthropocene, as the specific temporality of human beings drops its shadow over the stories we produce. In terms of humanity’s relation to nature, Sloterdijk views the Heideggerian insight of conceiving being as time as essentially correct but missing a significant aspect: We notice time when its flow is disrupted.[11] For Sloterdijk, we see this disruption as a delay in the basic form of tragedy, and in current times, humanity must deal with constant delays with regard to our environmental policies. But modern humans, as Sloterdijk emphasizes, notice time as time mostly through accelerations: “Accelerating as fast as possible on one’s trajectory is what drives apocalypse as a temporo-logical form.”[12] The “logic of self-reinforcing sphere of activity that feeds back upon itself” determines the modern era: Humanity has witnessed the emergence of devastating circuli virtuosi, but certain important events led to the circulus virtuous emerge in the modern era, their effects leading to a new perception of time.[13] Sloterdijk specifies six self-reinforcing circular and interwoven processes that have emerged until now: fine arts, banking, engineering, the state, scientific research, and law.[14] The formulation of the concept of Anthropocene inevitably follows the apocalyptic logic because it indicates that the cosmic insouciance that was the basis for historical forms of human being-in-the-world has come to an end. In conventional terms, we could describe ‘the human place in the cosmos’ – to recall Scheler’s treatise – as a kind of scenery-ontology: on this view, the human being, as a dramatic animal, performs before the massif of nature that can never be anything other than a placid background for human operations. Such scenic ontological thought remained predominant for quite a while, even after the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, although nature-as-background is nowadays construed as an integral storehouse of resources and as a universal landfill.[15]

The apocalyptic framework reveals the binary of foreground-background or stage-play ontology of the old ecology. As Sloterdijk states, in the 19^th century, the traditional scenery-ontology was starting to be supplanted by an ecological logic, and the scenery-ontology, the old divide of foreground and background, the old ecology of stage and play have lost their ground.

What currently creates epochs is the revenge of the former background on the depicted figures and frameworks: the background has emerged from its inconspicuousness and quit its assigned position as the supplier of self-evident things. The old ecology of stage and play is out of joint. It is now no longer possible to place ruthlessly risky cultural figures on endlessly resilient natural slides. The slide itself demands that its previously overlooked improbability be entered into the figures it carries and considered in them. It might even seem that nature took revenge on history by having its own fragility suddenly surpass the riskiness of the historical structure. Thus, the due de-dramatization of history gives a prelude to the rediscovery of a dramatic nature. If humanity were to awaken from its historical narcissism, it would discover that it no longer has a mission other than to make the concern of an overly finite nature its own.[16]

Nature as the “supplier of self-evident things” belongs to the Cartesian/modernist anthropocentric imaginary. Sloterdijk views historicity as a fragility, as it means mortality for civilizations.[17] The Anthropocene reveals how the old stage/background Nature discarded its assumed role and demonstrated its excess fragility, calling for the recognition of its limits. This view resonates with the feminist new materialist maxim, “There is no outside Nature.” Or, following Donna Haraway, we are always already within nature cultures (within what has been viewed as “stage” (nature) and “play” (history/culture).  There is no exit from the stage or play, no absolute exteriority. For Karen Barad, “There are only ‘acts of nature.’” For Vicki Kirby, who revised Derrida’s “No outside of text” as “No outside nature”, this is not privileging nature because “there is no outside, no remainder that is not already involved and evolving as text.”[18] As there is no outside, we as humans are viewed as ethical modalities. The idea of being inside forever reveals our responsibility to take care of the “inside,” highlighting the dimension of our accountability: “Taking account entails being accountable, for all ac/countings are from within, not without. There is no pure external position, only agential separability, differences within, différance.”[19]

I contend that the maxim “No outside” is closely connected to Sloterdijk’s reworking of the imagery of the Spaceship Earth, as “Spaceship Earth does not have any exits, neither for emergencies nor for normal situations.”[20] Sloterdijk, referring to Buckminster Fuller’s Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (1968), writes that Fuller’s imagery “consisted in the truly prodigious redefinition of our home planet: from this critical moment on, the good old-fashioned Earth may no longer be envisaged in terms of natural dimensions, but is rather to be conceived of as a colossal work of art. It was no longer a foundation but instead a construct; it was no longer a basis but instead a vessel.”[21] The fundamental implication of living in a spaceship Earth is that “its crew must in fact have a vital interest in the maintenance of livable relations within the interior of the vessel.”[22] For Fuller, the most important condition for humans to stay in spaceship Earth was that there was no operating manual, so the passengers were supposed to learn and understand how things were by themselves. In the past, humans made some ignorant mistakes, which the system was designed to bear for a remarkable amount of time. However, as the passengers start to understand their situation and seize control over their environment, the system does not indulge in ignorance as it did before.

Human being-in-the-world, of which twentieth-century philosophy spoke, is thus revealed as being on board a cosmic vessel that is susceptible to failure. Some time ago, I suggested the concept of ‘monogeism’ to characterize the human being’s appropriate cognitive relation to this vessel – a term that designates the minimum, as it were, of a non-ignorant contemporary relation to the paramount importance of the Earth. It likewise forms the axiom for a political ontology of nature.[23]

Thus, “No outside nature” means “No outside Spaceship Earth.” As such, Sloterdijk sees “the true conception of the conditio humana” as “life-and-death autodidacticism.”[24] As the passengers of the spaceship, we must use our own minds, make our own decisions, and essentially learn how to travel in space all on our own. In terms of our eco-political issues, Sloterdijk questions the timing of our “knowing” as it seems to always come too late. However, there is also “a prognostic intelligence that proves itself precisely in the gap between ‘late’ and ‘too late.’”[25] For Sloterdijk, until now, humanity has accepted the principle of learning from mistakes, but prognostic intelligence tells us that we must learn before making mistakes. In order to figure things out, the kinetic expressionism of the last century must be disposed of or radically modified. Sloterdijk defines kinetic expressionism as “modernity’s mode of existence, which was primarily made possible by the ready availability of fossil fuel.”[26] The availability of such materials led to the specific economic, political, and cultural climate and impacted our sense of identity, as well as our understanding of personal freedoms: “We can no longer imagine a freedom that does not always also include the freedom to rev our engines and accelerate, the freedom to move to the most distant destinations, the freedom to exaggerate, the freedom to waste, indeed, lastly, even the freedom to detonate explosives and destroy ourselves.”[27] Sloterdijk believes that we must fundamentally change our thinking as the expressionistic character of current lifestyles in affluent societies demonstrates that nature has not been and is not indifferent to human activities and that there are indeed limits to expression, emission, and the indulgence of ignorance. The 21^st century will go down in history as a carnival of redemptive vanities, at the end of which human beings will long for redemption from redemption and salvation from saviors. At the same time, it heralds an era of hypocrisy and the double standard. Nevertheless, beyond vanity, panic, and hypocritical rhetoric, this age will continually confront the question of whether to set up something like a stabilizing regime on board the spaceship Earth. It should be borne in mind that, from the outset, we must have modest expectations regarding the concept of stabilization. Cultural evolution knows no stable equilibrium. At best, it can segue from one livable state of disequilibrium to the next.[28]

Sloterdijk points out that the current struggle is essentially between expansionism and minimalism. There is a “gigantomachy” in which the idealistic party as a side argues for a new modesty and for reducing all kinetic expressionism to an eco-political minimum:  reduction instead of increase, minimization instead of maximization, and self-circumspection instead of self-liberation. For Sloterdijk, “it seems as though ecological puritanism might be the only reasonable morality on board the spaceship Earth … We realize that we are obligated to cultivate a modus vivendi that corresponds to the ecological-cosmopolitan insights of our civilization.”[29] However, he thinks that a global ethics of moderation is not realistic, due to the link between self-preservation and self-advancement. In affluent societies, people view their wealth as “the irrevocable spoils of conquest”[30] and they will not accept parameters of moderation or negative growth. The argument of modesty maintains these rich societies will ultimately have to accept the ecological facts that their consumption habits are not sustainable in the long run and that there is only one Earth. Sloterdijk finds this argument of the Earth as “an irreplaceable singularity” undeniable at first but questions the monadological interpretation of the Earth. There is the aspect of the technosphere, as such, we do not yet know what will happen “if the geosphere and biosphere are further developed by an intelligent technosphere and noosphere. It is not impossible a priori that such further developments will lead to effects that amount to a multiplication of the Earth … technology has not yet spoken its final word.”[31]

In the end, for Sloterdijk, the Anthropocene implies care for the cohabitation of all human and nonhuman agents and is a call to build “a network of simple and more advanced settings in which the agents of the current world will create their existence in the mode of co-immunity.”[32] Addressing the challenges posed by the Anthropocene requires a radical rethinking of human cultures, lifestyles, and economic systems, and the processes of moving away from kinetic expressionism and unlimited growth towards greater moderation and sustainability must be evaluated in unconventional perspectives for plausible change. Additionally, Sloterdijk underlines the need for a new politics for the Earth that can address the challenges posed by climate change and environmental degradation. This will require a fundamental transformation of human civilization and its relationship with the planet.

The Subject-Object Myth and the Metamorphic Zone

Latour echoes Sloterdijk’s engagement with the modern subject’s ontological and temporal constraints when he contemplates the cold scientific statement: “The maximum permissible CO2 limit was crossed just before 1990,” and questioning how we can “swallow the news that our very recent development has modified a state of affairs that is vastly older that the very existence of the human race … but we also have to absorb the disturbing fact that the drama has been completed and that the main revolutionary event is behind us since we have already crossed a few of the nine ‘planetary boundaries’ considered by some scientists as the ultimate barrier not to overstep!”[33] This predicament resonates with the inevitable apocalyptic logic conveyed in Sloterdijk’s account. We are not able to deal with the vast scale of events mentally or emotionally while simultaneously taking on agential responsibility for everything: “How can we simultaneously be part of such a long history, have such an important influence, and yet be so late in realizing what has happened and so utterly impotent in our attempts to fix it?”[34] For Latour, we are unable to simply read such scientific statements as objective facts and maintain our distance, as “There is no distant place anymore. And along with distance, objectivity is gone as well; or at least, an older notion of objectivity that was unable to take into account the active subject of history.”[35] The current issue concerns understanding the role of human agent “not only in the construction of facts but also in the very existence of the phenomena those facts are trying to document.”[36]

The problem of rethinking agency is deeply connected to Latour’s conception on the Earth as a full-fledged actor of what he calls “our common geostory.”[37] He emphasizes that the ways of telling our common geostory is the problem of philosophy, science and literature. Viewing the Earth or all nonhuman or more-than-human agents as full-fledged actors imply abandoning the view of human agency within the framework of the active subject-passive object binary. From a new materialist lens, human agency can be viewed as another mode of agency “receiving, storing, processing and emitting information.”[38] Humans and nonhumans engaging in these operations isomorphically reveal the non-exclusivity of human agency. In a similar vein, for Latour, “One of the main puzzles of Western history is not that ‘there are people who still believe in animism’, but the rather naive belief that many still have in a de-animated world of mere stuff; just at the moment when they themselves multiply the agencies with which they are more deeply entangled every day. The more we move in geostory, the more this belief seems difficult to understand.”[39] Latour does not understand the accusation of “anthropomorphism” (or attributing agency) often directed at novelists or scientists as well. He believes that every entity they deal with “are all born out of the same witches’ caldron because, literally, that is where all of the shape-changers reside.”[40]

This resonates with the agential realist account of Karen Barad, for whom agency is simply a “‘doing’ or ‘being’ in its intra-activity”[41] and “the ongoing reconfigurings of the world.”[42] All agencies, human and nonhuman, participate and intra-act within the material-discursive continuum, the spacetimemattering. In this framework, human or human agency is viewed as an ethical modality, as being accountable means acknowledging how and through which acts we leave “marks on bodies.”[43] A nonhierarchic understanding of agency is a matter of engaging with responsible “cutting practices” –“an ethico-onto-epistemological commitment to understand how different cuts matter.”[44] It is about engaging with responsible material-discursive practices that acknowledge and take into account the materiality of all beings.

Thus, Latour’s view of agency can be understood within the framework of the new materialist framework to which he belongs and which problematizes the constituent subject-object divide of the modernist tradition. Being a ‘subject’ is not to act in front of a background but “to share agency with other subjects that have also lost their autonomy. It is because we are now confronted with those subjects –or rather quasi-subjects– that we have to shift away from dreams of mastery as well as from the threat of being fully naturalized.”[45] Thus, in the Latourian relational framework, “Gaia is another subject altogether –maybe also a different sovereign.”[46] Latour’s account echoes Sloterdijk’s, particularly in terms of the problematization of nature as passive and human as active (the old ecology of stage and play), as he observes an ironic twist in the subject-object poles of our traditional understanding: Human societies ironically have become “the dumb object” whereas nature has taken the role of the active subject.

The co-existence of agents is obfuscated by the scientific worldview, which led to the material world in which the agency of all the entities has been made to vanish: Latour calls this “a zombie atmosphere” in which “nothing happens anymore since the agent is supposed to be ‘simply caused’ by its predecessor. All the action has been put in the antecedent … The consequent could just as well not be there at all … their eventfulness has disappeared.”[47] But storytelling is common for human and nonhuman, rather than being a property of human language –it is a result of being thrown in a “fully articulated and active”[48] world. Latour believes that we must form a common geo-story with the Gaia. The idea is not succession or causality but rather relationality and (a Harawayian) making-with or sympoiesis.

Latour proposes an approach that embraces a common source of agency: a metamorphic zone “where we are able to detect actants before they become actors; where ‘metaphors’ precede the two sets of connotations that will be connected; where ‘metamorphosis’ is taken as a phenomenon that is antecedent to all the shapes that will be given to agents.”[49] Detecting this metamorphic zone is crucial politically as well, as what is needed in politics is “a common world that has to be progressively composed.”[50] What we should compose cannot be divided into animate (having agency) and inanimate (not having agency) or else, such a process of composition is made impossible. The old divide of nature and culture is problematic, as well as the efforts to combine or reconcile the two as distinct domains. As with other new materialist thinkers, Latour rather maintains the idea of a nature-culture or material-semiotic continuum.

The point of living in the epoch of the Anthropocene is that all agents share the same shape-changing destiny. A destiny that cannot be followed, documented, told, and represented by using any of the older traits associated with subjectivity or objectivity. Far from trying to “reconcile” or “combine” nature and society, the task, the crucial political task, is, on the contrary, to distribute agency as far and in as differentiated a way as possible — until that is, we have thoroughly lost any relation between those two concepts of object and subject that are of no interest any more except patrimonial.[51]

With the return to the metamorphic zone, the Earthbound will “articulate their speech in a way that will be compatible with the articulation of Gaia.”[52] According to Latour, there should be a new way of creating global geopolitics that does not involve expanding politics towards nature or naturalizing the human sphere. Thus, we need to distribute agency more radically, widely, and far away and traverse the worn-out binaries of subject-object and nature-culture. What he means is our political theory, and ecological thought must be open to addressing the intricate interactions of human and nonhuman actants, of people and things, of animate and inanimate entities alike, by recognizing their mutual dependence and relationality.

In both Sloterdijk’s and Latour’s accounts, the Anthropocene is viewed as a shift from a view of nature as an objective backdrop to human activities to the recognition that human actions are now profoundly shaping the Earth’s systems. Anthropocene implies a new moral and political responsibility for humanity to relate with the Earth. In Sloterdijk’s account, the Anthropocene is understood within an apocalyptic framework, evaluating the world from the end, bringing both the potential for catastrophic outcomes and for redemptive possibilities. Addressing the challenges of the Anthropocene requires a radical rethinking of our traditional onto-epistemological frameworks as well as our cultural and economic systems -like the issue and implications of breaking from the modus operandi of kinetic expressionism and unlimited growth towards greater moderation and sustainability. Latour focuses on agency in the context of the Anthropocene, arguing that traditional binaries and dichotomies of subject-object, nature-society, and animate-inanimate are no longer sustainable or tenable in this new era. Like Sloterdijk, he maintains that the Earth must be viewed as an active agent that is being transformed by human actions rather than an objective backdrop. The more we engage with the geostory of the Earth and with the interconnected agents that compose it, the more we see the dysfunction of our old views and systems. Latour proposes a different ontological approach, a common source of agency which he calls a “metamorphic zone,” arguing that we must distribute agency as far and in as differentiated ways as possible. This shift in perspective is necessary to understand and re-evaluate the complex challenges posed by the Anthropocene.

Bibliography

Barad, Karen. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning, Durham: Duke University Press, 2007.

Barad, Karen. “Nature’s Queer Performativity,” Kvinder, Køn & Forskning, (1–2), 2012, https://doi.org/10.7146/kkf.v0i1–2.28067

Latour, Bruno. “Agency at the Time of the Anthropocene,” New Literary History, Vol. 45, No. 1, (Winter 2014). DOI: 10.1353/nlh.2014.0003

Kirby, Vicki. “Matter out of Place: ‘New Materialism’ in Review,” What if Culture was Nature all Along?, edited by Vicki Kirby, Edinburgh University Press, 2017.

Sloterdijk, Peter. Infinite Mobilization, Towards a Critique of Political Kinetics, translated by Sandra Berjan, Polity Press, 2020.

Sloterdijk, Peter. What Happened in the Twentieth Century?, translated by Christopher Turner, Polity Press, 2018.

Watkin, Christopher. Michel Serres, Figures of Thought, Edinburgh University Press, 2020.

[1] Peter Sloterdijk, What Happened in the Twentieth Century?, trans. Christopher Turner (Polity Press, 2018), 8.

[2] Ibid., 9.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid., 10.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Ibid., 12.

[7] Ibid, 14.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Ibid.

[10] Ibid.

[11] Ibid., 15.

[12] Ibid.

[13] Ibid.

[14] Ibid., 16.

[15] Ibid., 21.

[16] Sloterdijk, Infinite Mobilization, Towards a Critique of Political Kinetics, trans. Sandra Berjan (Polity Press, 2020), 143-144.

[17] Ibid.

[18] Vicki Kirby, “Matter out of Place: ‘New Materialism’ in Review,” What if Culture was Nature all Along?, ed. Vicki Kirby (Edinburgh University Press, 2017), p. ix.

[19] Karen Barad, “Nature’s Queer Performativity”, Kvinder, Køn & Forskning, (1-2), 2012, 47, https://doi.org/10.7146/kkf.v0i1-2.28067

[20] Sloterdijk, What Happened in the 20th Century?, 25.

[21] Ibid., 24.

[22] Ibid.

[23] Ibid., 25.

[24] Ibid., 26.

[25] Ibid.

[26] Ibid., 27.

[27] Ibid.

[28] Ibid., 32.

[29] Ibid., 35.

[30] Ibid., 36.

[31] Ibid., 38.

[32] Ibid., 43.

[33] Bruno Latour, “Agency in the Anthropocene,” New Literary History, Vol. 45, No. 1 (Winter 2014), Johns Hopkins University Press, https://doi.org/10.1353/nlh.2014.0003, 1.

[34] Ibid., 2.

[35] Ibid.

[36] Ibid.

[37] Ibid., 3.

[38] Christopher Watkin, Michel Serres, Figures of Thought (Edinburgh University Press, 2020), 314.

[39] Latour, Agency, 8.

[40] Ibid., 13.

[41] Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Duke University Press, 2007), 178.

[42] Ibid., 141.

[43] Barad, “Nature’s Queer Performativity,” 47.

[44] Ibid., 46.

[45] Latour, Agency, 5.

[46] Ibid., 6.

[47] Ibid., 14.

[48] Ibid.

[49] Ibid., 15.

[50] Ibid., 16.

[51] Ibid., 17.

[52] Ibid.

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