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Elemental Difference
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 Preface

This was written as a book about how difficult it is to pay attention to the pol-
itics of ecology without recreating the polis. I argue that the polis, the philo-
sophical concept according to which there is one complete human form, is to
blame for an indistinguishably political and ecological crisis. The polis shares
the current complex shape of climate change. A certain perfect body figures
the denial of matter of the polis. The book presents a philosophy of elemental
difference from which to address the polis and also to understand why the
prevailing terms for what is called climate change are so misleading.
As I make my final edits, however, I am thinking just as much about zo-
onosis. In July 2020, the United Nations Environment Programme and
International Livestock Research Institute produced a document entitled
“Preventing the Next Pandemic: Zoonotic Diseases and How to Break the
Chain of Transmission.” It argues that zoonosis is caused by human practices
and is responsible for numerous infectious diseases of recent years, including
Ebola, SARS, the Zika virus, and most recently Covid-​19. The manuscript
for my book was written in 2019, but I am sending the final version to the
press in October 2020, as the Covid-​19 pandemic continues. A zoonotic
disease is by definition one that “came to people by way of animals,” writes
Inger Andersen, executive director of the United Nations Environment
Programme. She also writes, “At the heart of our response to zoonoses and
the other challenges humanity faces should be the simple idea that the health
of humanity depends on the health of the planet and the health of other spe-
cies.” This is both an open identification with the planet and with other spe-
cies, and a partitioning of these from a homogeneous humanity, which I argue
constitutes the polis. Writing this book has taught me to ask the following: if
Covid-​19 came to earth by way of human practices, many of which are also
responsible for climate change, and if climate change itself is responsible for
occurrences of zoonosis, then doesn’t it make more sense to say that Covid-​
19 came to the planet by way of the practices of certain people? Why does the
polis selectively identify as and blame animality, a term too broad even to be
meaningful, for its own problems? Why in this case does the agency of matter
get attributed, while the polis denies its own responsibility? My response to
viii Preface

these is that the polis both understands itself to be one sort of animality (one
species) and also blames animality (for “zoonosis”) at the same time. It seems
to me that the problem in the case of zoonosis as well as climate change is not
so much a lack of agency being attributed to matter, and not so much a lack
of identification with a certain natural condition of “animality,” so much as a
shifting distinction between polis and other agencies. Amid myriad agencies,
the polis disguises and authorizes and congratulates itself. Indeed identifica-
tion with animality can hide the question of humanity.
Many speak in the present of dual pandemics: Covid-​19 and racial injus-
tice. This is a crucial claim. My argument is that these pandemics share a
common cause in the polis. In that sense there are not two pandemics, but
instead one concern, to perceive the ways in which the tradition of the polis
takes shape. Since the completion of this book I have discussed this in more
detail in a piece that is forthcoming in a special issue of the International
Journal of Critical Diversity Studies, edited by Shelley L. Tremain, whom
I thank.
That is where the project is today. It is thanks to so many conversation
partners.
With deep gratitude I would like to thank those who advised, mentored,
and showed the way. This book owes much to the influence of Alia Al-​Saji,
Jane Bennett, Debra B. Bergoffen, Elizabeth M. Bounds, William E. Connolly,
Penelope Deutscher, Pamela DiPesa, Noel Leo Erskine, Christos Evangeliou,
Thomas R. Flynn, Pamela M. Hall, Sara Heinamaa, Alice Hines, Rachel
E. Jones, Philip J. Kain, Hilde Lindemann, Jay McDaniel, John Murungi,
Dorothea E. Olkowski, Parimal G. Patil, Laurie L. Patton, Jo-​Ann Pilardi,
Alexis Shotwell, Margaret Simons, Alison Stone, the late Steven K. Strange,
Michael Sullivan, Gail Weiss, and Shannon Winnubst. A very special thanks
to Lynne Huffer and Cynthia Willett, for reading, encouraging, and chal-
lenging my work over so many years. I am so grateful.
Research for parts of this book were originally presented at meetings of the
California Roundtable on Philosophy and Race, the Canadian Philosophical
Association, the Canadian Society for Women in Philosophy, the
International Association for Environmental Philosophy, the Irigaray Circle,
the Pacific Association for the Continental Tradition, philoSOPHIA: Society
for Continental Feminism, and the Society for Phenomenology and
Existential Philosophy. I also thank California State University–​Stanislaus
for the invitation to present what turned out to be the earliest version of
Chapter 1 to the Department of Philosophy.
 Preface ix

For discussion of the work of Sylvia Wynter I wish to thank many

collaborators. Taryn Jordan and Lynne Huffer organized a workshop enti-
tled “A Philosophical Encounter with and against the Human” that focused
on reading Sylvia Wynter and Michel Foucault in the spring of 2018 during
an annual conference of philoSOPHIA: Society for Continental Feminism.
I thank the organizers of that conference as well as other participants in
that workshop. Discussion at that event helped to shape my understanding
of both Foucault and Wynter. That was the event at which I met Elisabeth
Paquette, whom I thank very much for sending me an electronic version
of Wynter’s unpublished manuscript entitled “Black Metamorphosis: New
Natives In a New World.” Linda Martín Alcoff gave me access to an online
collection of Wynter’s writings. I have been so appreciative to have access
to that. I am so grateful to Susan Stryker, Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality
Distinguished Visiting Professor at Johns Hopkins University in the spring
of 2018, who recommended to me the work of Londa Schiebinger as well as
discussed with me the work of Sylvia Wynter.
In the fall of 2019, the Department of Philosophy at Emory University
hosted a presentation of the first half of this project as the William J. Edwards
Undergraduate Lecture. Conversations during that visit were invalu-
able. I especially thank Lynne Huffer, Marta Jimenez, John Lysaker, Rudolf
A. Makkreel, Falguni Sheth, Michael Sullivan, and Cynthia Willett.
I am beholden to many for reading and discussing various pieces of
the manuscript: Deborah Barer, Wesley N. Barker, Jane Bennett, Sierra
Billingslea, William E. Connolly, John Gillespie, Laura Hengehold, Lynne
Huffer, Ada S. Jaarsma, Rachel E. Jones, Ruthanne Crapo Kim, Morgan
LaRocca, Peter W. Milne, M. D. Murtagh, Romy Opperman, Joshua St. Pierre,
Gokboru Tanyildiz, Nancy Tuana, and two readers for Oxford University
Press. The manuscript has improved greatly thanks to your questions and
reading recommendations.
The manuscript came together during a sabbatical granted by the College
of Liberal Arts at Towson University. I am grateful to Towson University
for travel monies and to the staff of Cook Library for research assistance.
In the final months of the sabbatical, if it had not been for the generosity of
Siavash Saffari, who loaned me his office at Seoul National University during
November and December 2019, it is possible that the manuscript would not
have been completed on time.
 Introduction
Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Difference

The philosophy of performativity understands political differences in race,

sex, gender, ability, class, and sexuality among humans to be matters of human
imposition. It has recently and rightly been criticized by “new materialists,”1
among them political ecologists, who argue that in giving exclusive atten-
tion to this power of human imposition, performativity overestimates the
power of human perception to shape a material world that has powers of its
own. And yet, while political ecological efforts are yielding new avenues of
inquiry in a variety of humanistic disciplines, they do not offer a distinctive
account of political difference other than the performative one. The perfor-
mative philosophy2 of political difference is apparently the only one. This
book gives performativity a conversation partner, a philosophy of elemental

1 “New materialisms” refers to a group of thinkers who advance “rigorous and sustained atten-

tion to global, ahuman forces of ecological change as well as to local spaces of vulnerability and re-
sistance,” in the words of Richard Grusin, ed., Anthropocene Feminism (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2017), ix. See also Rosi Braidotti, Posthuman Knowledge (Medford, MA: Polity,
2019); Diana Coole and Samantha Frost, eds., New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2010); Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman, eds., Material Feminisms
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008). My own approach to “new materialisms” owes much
to Lynne Huffer’s essay “Foucault’s Fossils: Life Itself and the Return to Nature in Feminist Philosophy,”
in Grusin, Anthropocene Feminism, 65–​88. Later I focus my efforts on two new materialists, Karen
Barad and Jane Bennett, both of whom are elaborating political ecologies in Bruno Latour’s sense. See
Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and
Meaning (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007); Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology
of Things (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 5; Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern,
trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993); Bruno Latour, Politics of
Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2004); and Bruno Latour, Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime, trans.
Catherine Porter (Medford, MA: Polity, 2018).
2 By philosophy I mean what Bryan W. Van Norden means: “Philosophy is dialogue about problems

that we agree are important, but don’t agree about the method for solving, where ‘importance’ ulti-
mately gets its sense from the question of the way one should live.” The term “philosophy” is ety-
mologically descended from ancient Greek philosophia, the love of wisdom. As Van Norden argues,
ancient Greek philosophers did not invent wisdom. They had one way of understanding it. Bryan W.
Van Norden, Taking Back Philosophy: A Multicultural Manifesto (New York: Columbia University
Press, 2017), 151. See also Peter K. J. Park, Africa, Asia, and the History of Philosophy: Racism in the
Formation of the Philosophical Canon, 1780–​1830 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2013).

Elemental Difference and the Climate of the Body. Emily Anne Parker, Oxford University Press.
© Oxford University Press 2021. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780197575079.003.0001
2 Introduction

difference that combines the crucial work of performativity with that of po-
litical ecology.
Seeking this new way of understanding political difference is, however, not
the purpose of the project. What I ultimately desire is a way of understanding
bifurcations of the political and the ecological in a time of climate disruption,
characterized by ubiquitous changes on the part of a relational planet: rise
of ocean and sea levels,3 deoxygenation of oceans,4 increased risk of crop
failure,5 global heating,6 “racially driven police brutality, the criminalization
of climate refugees along racial lines, neocolonial tourism, the outsourcing
of toxicity and littering [and] . . . the militarization of practices of resources
extraction.”7 Each of these is an entanglement of the political and the ecolog-
ical. From where did the distinction come?
In a series of works culminating recently in Posthuman Knowledge, Rosi
Braidotti has argued that modernity now gives way to a “posthuman predic-
ament,” the “convergence” of centuries of “critiques of Humanism” with the
“complex challenge of anthropocentrism.”8 She writes, “The former focuses
on the critique of the Humanist ideal of ‘Man’ as the allegedly universal
measure of all things, while the latter criticizes species hierarchy and anthro-
pocentric exceptionalism.”9 But if humanism, as Braidotti so convincingly
argues, was always ever Man-​ism, then wouldn’t it be more to the point to
say that the study of humanities, the question of what it is like to be human,
has so far been thwarted by the study of Man? This is the suggestion of Sylvia
Wynter, and it is the one that I take up in this book.10 I argue that the distinc-
tion between political and ecological is rooted in the concept of the polis,
the ancient Greek term for city, a source of the English word “political.” But

3 Fiona Harvey, “Greenland’s Ice Sheet Melting Seven Times Faster Than in 1990s,” The

Guardian, December 10, 2019, https://​www.theguardian.com/​environment/​2019/​dec/​10/​

greenland-​ice-​sheet-​melting-​seven-​times-​faster-​than-​in-​1990s.
4 Kendra Pierre-​Louis, “World’s Oceans Are Losing Oxygen Rapidly, Study Finds,” New York Times,

December 7, 2019, https://​www.nytimes.com/​2019/​12/​07/​climate/​ocean-​acidification-​climate-​

change.html.
5 Zia Mehrabi, “Food System Collapse,” Nature Climate Change 10 (2019): 16–​17, doi:10.1038/​

s41558-​019-​0643-​1.
6 Yann Chavaillaz, Philippe Roy, Antti-​Ilari Partanen, et al., “Exposure to Excessive Heat and

Impacts on Labour Productivity Linked to Cumulative CO2 Emissions,” Scientific Reports 9 (2019),
article 13711, doi:10.1038/​s41598-​019-​50047-​w.
7 Axelle Karera, “Blackness and the Pitfalls of Anthropocene Ethics,” Critical Philosophy of Race

7.1 (2019): 34.

8 Braidotti, Posthuman Knowledge, especially 2 and 8.
9 Braidotti, Posthuman Knowledge, 2. See also Karera, “Blackness,” 39ff.
10 See especially Sylvia Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/​ Power/​Truth/​
Freedom: Towards the Human, after Man, Its Overrepresentation—​an Argument,” New Centennial
Review 3.3 (Fall 2003): 257–​337.
 Introduction 3

“polis” is no ordinary word. It is a philosophy, one answer emerging in a “di-

alogue about problems that we agree are important, but don’t agree about
the method for solving, where ‘importance’ ultimately gets its sense from the
question of the way one should live.”11 Although in the ancient Greek context
many philosophies of the polis circulated, one seems to have survived: the
leaders of the city, those bodies exemplary of the promise of the polis, were
those capable of disembodied, eternal, immaterial thought. Thus, within the
polis, a discernment among bodies is fundamental. A certain body figures
the denial of matter of the polis. An exposition of the concept of the polis is
in this way the key to understanding events collected currently under the eu-
phemism “climate change.”12 The need for critiques of Man-​ism and anthro-
pocentrism are not convergent events so much as they are the same event
whose shape has yet to be appreciated.
The philosophy of performativity suggests that climate disruption
dramatizes political problems. Climate disruption is understood as the re-
sult of a distinct and disordered politics primarily—​not ecology. In the other
direction the philosophy of political ecology suggests that climate disrup-
tion illustrates the agency of nonhumans—​animal, vegetable, and mineral. It
argues that climate disruption is the result of a naive or absent ecology—​not
politics. The problem according to political ecology is that humans forget
that they, too, are animals. What both sides miss is the bizarre splintering of
these two domains—​the splintering of that which is political from that which
is ecological.
I will argue that elemental difference resides on both sides of the line be-
tween the political and the ecological. It is the inherently relational agency of
elementality. The lack of a philosophy of elemental difference is just one sign
of and result of the splintering of these domains. But the lack of an adequate
account of the event of climate disruption is my ultimate interest. I am in-
terested in the politics of ecology and the ecology of politics. But more than
that: I am interested in the curious divergence of the terms themselves.
Elemental difference refers to singularities of location, movement, living,
aging, dying, valuing, in which humans partake. Elemental difference in the
polis can be appreciated in the fact that empirical bodily nonidentity can be

11 Van Norden, Taking Back Philosophy, 151.

12 The phrase “climate change” was apparently originally suggested by US Republican political
consultant Frank Luntz as an alternative to the more alarming “global warming.” The phrase caught
on. Bruno Latour, Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime, trans. Catherine Porter
(Medford, MA: Polity, 2017), 25.
4 Introduction

called upon to constitute and elevate one group of bodies among the rest. In
the context of the polis and ecological breakdown, differences are too often
taken to be differences from the sole complete human form of Aristotelian
Man. Aristotle, whose philosophy drew from the Chaldean astrological tra-
dition13 and inspired so many naturalists14 in a nevertheless Platonic philo-
sophical tradition, is still the clearest, most consistent advocate of the polis.
He defined the human in this way: as Man, a capacity for nous, for thought,
“which is entirely independent of the body”15 and which disembodied
speech16 conveys.17 This is the definition of agency. “Polis” originally meant
this configuration of a distinct body, and the life of that body, who was evi-
dence of the polis. What is important for me is that the capacity for thought,
that which is by definition not bodily, emerges only in a specific body. This
profoundly influential early biological system has at its apex that which is not
bodily at all. Aristotle calls that body Man. Elemental difference—​difference
that allows Aristotle to locate the thinking body—​is still placed in this way
along a continuum of either more, less, or not-​Man, and discerning among
such elementalities allows Aristotle’s adherents through the ages to identify
the proper rulers of the polis from the oikoi, or households that are only the
beginning of that which is not meant to rule the polis.
This reading of Aristotle is inspired by that of Luce Irigaray.18 The phrase
“elemental difference” grows out of a reading of Luce Irigaray’s philosophy of
sexual difference, though as I will explain, my interest in her work has to do
with everything but her philosophy of sexual difference. For Irigaray, eleva-
tion of one body, Man, is only possible thanks to the denial of all of the many
powers contrasted with Man. Elemental difference is not the differences of

13
Samir Amin, Eurocentrism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2009), 119.
14
For example, Carolus Linnaeus. See Londa Schiebinger, Nature’s Body (New Brunswick,
NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2013), 42. While Linnaeus “abandoned Aristotle’s canonical term,
Quadrupedia,” and invented Mammalia, Linnaeus was nevertheless working in an Aristotelian
mode. I am deeply inspired by Schiebinger’s work. I use this work in order to understand the twists
and turns of the polis tradition. See especially Nature’s Body, 172–​183. However, the literature of
body studies is so far a tradition of performativity and the two-​sex model. See, for example, Londa
Schiebinger, ed., Feminism and the Body (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).
15 David Ross, Aristotle (New York: Routledge, 1995), 151.
16 Joshua St. Pierre, “The Construction of the Disabled Speaker: Locating Stuttering in Disability

Studies,” Canadian Journal of Disability Studies 1.3 (August 2012): 2–​21.

17 See Aristotle, The Complete Works of Aristotle, 2 vols., ed. Jonathan Barnes (Princeton,

NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), Politics 1.1252a1–​1255a1. See also Ross, Aristotle, 151–​157.
18 See especially Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca,

NY: Cornell University Press, 1985); Luce Irigaray, Elemental Passions, trans. Joanne Collie and
Judith Still (London: Athlone Press, 1992); and Luce Irigaray, “There Can Be No Democracy without
a Culture of Difference,” in Under the Sign of Nature: Ecocritical Theory: New European Approaches,
ed. Axel Goodbody and Kate Rigby (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011), 194–​205.
 Introduction 5

Man from all the rest, but what makes it possible for Man to find the polis in
contrast to them. My concern in this book is to try to unpack what is carried
in the gesture of Man in a way that speaks to the concerns of performativity
as well as political ecology. What is responsible for this gesture of Man? It is
the gesture of what I will call “the one of the body,” incomparably exemplary
of one finished state.
I articulate a philosophy of elemental difference in order to decouple
Irigaray’s philosophy of agential and fluid elementality from the philosophy
of sexual difference that hinders the uptake of her otherwise crucial work.
Elemental difference means that, in spite of the fact that each of us elaborates
a shape19 always in process, and thus what it is like20 to be human entails par-
ticipation in the creation of shape, no human created the fact that we partici-
pate in elaborations in the plural. No human invented this. Sexual difference
for Irigaray is not exactly the same thing as sex, and analogously elemental
difference for me is not the same thing as bodily difference. But the notion of
sexual difference in Irigaray is too readily tied to the gesture of fixed, teleo-
logical, oppositionally incommensurable sex.21 So instead I devise a philos-
ophy of elemental difference. I place the emphasis on the multifarious ways
in which Irigaray’s work enables an exposition of the one of the body, the one
complete human form in Aristotle that distinguished proper rulers of the
polis from the larger oikoi and beyond, over and against which these rulers
alone were the exalted thinking part.
Elemental difference affirms the internal heterogeneity of planetary shapes.
Such heterogeneity, whatever shape this takes, is agency that surpasses the
agency of the one of the body, the perfect (in the sense of “completed” or

19 A crucial gesture in the background of the way I use the term “shape” is Irigarayan “morphology,”

a critique of the form-​matter hierarchy in Aristotle. Morphē, or form, according to Aristotle, gives
shape to, and is thus prior to, hylē or matter. For Irigaray, “Matter is neither deadly inertia nor formless
flux, neither passive receptacle nor chaotic excess. Instead [matter] becomes actively self-​shaping in a
fluid giving of forms.” See Rachel Jones, Irigaray: Towards a Sexuate Philosophy (Malden, MA: Polity,
2011), 173–​177.
20 This is an invocation of Sylvia Wynter on whose work I will focus in Chapter 4. See especially

Wynter, “Towards the Sociogenic Principle: Fanon, Identity, and the Puzzle of Conscious Experience,
and What It Is Like to Be ‘Black,’ ” in National Identities and Socio-​political Changes in Latin America,
ed. Mercedes F. Durán-​Cogan and Antonio Gómez-​Moriana (New York: Routledge, 2009); and
Sylvia Wynter, “No Humans Involved: An Open Letter to My Colleagues,” Forum N.H.I.: Knowledge
for the 21st Century 1.1 (Fall 1994): 42–​73.
21 This is of course what Irigaray says it is not. See Lynne Huffer, Are the Lips a Grave? A Queer

Feminist on the Ethics of Sex (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013); and Jones, Irigaray. My ar-
gument is that the recent model of incommensurability, or the “two-​sex model,” requires a confron-
tation that Irigaray does not give it. See also Talia Mae Bettcher, “Full-​Frontal Morality: The Naked
Truth about Gender,” Hypatia 27.2 (2012): 319–​337.
6 Introduction

“finished”) human form of Aristotle’s thinking Man. What it is like to be and

to become human is never homogeneous, no less than any part of earth-​air-​
fire-​water, and this is owed to our very own status as part of that elemental
relationality. We differ as the earth differs, unanticipated, toward no end, for
no reason at all.
Sylvia Wynter has referred to the model of the one, the human, in which
one human body defines humanity itself as “biocentric.” Biocentrism bases
human excellence on bodily features.22 It orders the polis according to a
changing philosophy of bios. This universalizing gesture of the one human
body, biocentric Man, is premised on the assumption that this ideal human
is the completion of all other bodies. Sylvia Wynter argues that first the soul-​
body distinction and later the figure of biocentric Man have occupied the
Platonic tradition, and to this day at least among the footnotes to Plato,23
there has been no adequate account of what it is like to be a co-​participant in
the morphology of humanity.24
Synonymous with this universalizing gesture, I argue, is that of “the body”
and a distancing of this from “bodies.” Whether one speaks of the body or
bodies, this term is rooted in biocentrism.25 I argue that biocentrism is in fact
thought-​centrism. Biocentrism bases human excellence on bodily features
and orders the polis according to bios, but the exalted body is the one that is
the location of a power that is not body. The exalted body is the one that can
think. The exalted matter is that whose form is thinking. This book is, among
other things, an attempt to forward in the context of climate disruption this
amazing Wynterian claim: there hasn’t been a philosophy of internally dif-
ferentiable co-​humanity among what are thought to be the canonical works

22 Two self-​avowed biocentrists are Edward O. Wilson and Paul W. Taylor. See especially Edward

O. Wilson, The Future of Life (New York: Vintage Books, 2002); and Paul W. Taylor, Respect for
Nature: A Theory of Environmental Ethics, Twenty-​Fifth Anniversary ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 2011), 12. The work of biocentric environmental ethics is an explicit articulation in
the present of the long-​standing polis-​oikos split.
23 “Footnotes to Plato” is a line from Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality (New York: Free

Press, 1978), 39.

24 See Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality”; Sylvia Wynter, “The Ceremony Found: Towards

the Autopoetic Turn/​ Overturn, Its Autonomy of Human Agency and Extraterritoriality of
(Self-​)Cognition,” in Black Knowledges /​Black Struggles: Essays in Critical Epistemology,
ed. Jason R. Ambroise and Sabine Broeck (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2015),
184–​ 252; Sylvia Wynter, “1492: A New World View,” in Race, Discourse, and the Origin of
the Americas: A New World View, ed. Vera Lawrence Hyatt and Rex Nettleford (Washington,
DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995), 5–​57; Wynter, “No Humans Involved.”
25 Walter Mignolo advocates engagement in “body-​politics.” I worry that the polis as a concept

is biocentric, and that body politics is in this way tautological. See Walter D. Mignolo, The Darker
Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options (Durham: Duke University Press,
2011), 140.
 Introduction 7

of the philosophical tradition. I argue that what needs tracing is the polis
tradition.
To aid in the effort to address this lack and address simultaneously that
which is parsed as political and ecological, I develop a philosophy of ele-
mental difference as an analysis of the one of the body, the very idea that
there is one culminating and complete human form to which all other bodies
point. Man in Aristotle was and is that very one, “the body.” And Man is “the
body” that thinks. Hereafter I will not repeat the quotation marks. Instead
I will signal that what I mean to do is to question this phrase by reminding
the reader that the one of the body means the one body, the folly that there
is one complete human form, which has most frequently been articulated
as Man. But I will argue that what is problematic about Man is that this ges-
ture is a manifestation of the body, the very notion that there is one complete
body whose decisive feature is not body. The gesture of man is only problem-
atic insofar as it means the body.
While the study of the one of the body is my contribution, I am indebted
to Sylvia Wynter’s naming of biocentric Man. But there is another theme
of Wynter’s work on which I will focus. Wynter laments that recently there
is a complementary biocentric body, a racial and ability and sexuality cat-
egory of “women as the lack of the normal sex, the male,”26 that emerges
alongside Man, subordinate and yet parallel in perfection. There is unfor-
tunately not just one body; now there are two. Not just one completion, but
two completions.27 Like Irigaray, Wynter does conflate female with women.28
However, Wynter’s point is that there is no such thing as either “the normal
sex” or “women” in the generic. She argues that biocentrism is inherently
normalizing, and the science of racial anatomy was the instigation of the
most explicit version of this model of Man. Biocentric Man is constituted of
an ideal pair of mates to which all other mates are compared. This remarkable
historical change from the one of the body to the two of the body forces me to
articulate a philosophy of elemental difference that can pick up from philos-
ophies of feminism such as that of Luce Irigaray that expose the way that the
one of the body seeks to control and incorporate some bodies and to exclude

26 Wynter, “1492,” 42.

27 Bettcher, “Full-​Frontal Morality.”
28 In the case of Irigaray, I will explain in Chapter 1. In the case of Wynter, this can be found in

the otherwise excellent “‘Genital Mutilation’ or ‘Symbolic Birth’? Female Circumcision, Lost
Origins, and the Aculturalism of Feminist/​Western Thought,” Case Western Reserve Law Review 47
(1997): 501–​552.
8 Introduction

and destroy other bodies. For this reason also, I draw on Wynter’s philosophy
of biocentrism.
Wynter’s illustrations of woman as a new racial ideal are consistent with
other work, done primarily in the field of history, on sexual difference.29
Wynter’s account I argue is consistent with what historian Thomas Laqueur
has named the model of incommensurability or the “two-​sex model,” ac-
cording to which a certain body that is definitive of a woman becomes a dis-
tinct type in the eighteenth century, and serves to complement the body of
the one, perfect human. Prior to that historical event, Man alone was the pic-
ture of perfection. Putting Wynter and Laqueur together, I observe that the
one, the body, is now, in a development just as bad, the two. The two, the body
offers a discrete form for the “sex which is not one,”30 even as the one of the
body is still there. The one, the body has shifted in shape but is no less hyp-
ocritically generic: the two-​sex model, no less than the one, is the source of
race, ability, sex, gender, religion, and size meanings. This two-​sex model is
the two of the body. It is now two that are the body, two that are constitutive
parts of the body according to biocentric Man. The bodily but generic defini-
tion of a woman as something distinct from a man still means that there is a
guiding morphology of the one of the body, biocentric Man. The biocentric
woman does not ultimately differ from the biocentric Man in morphology.
There are now two complementary generics, not one, and so there is still the
body, the gesture of there being no body in the polis.
The development of the two of the body, namely the generic modeling of
Man and Woman, hasn’t eliminated the one of the body, namely the generic,
superior body of Man. This is a reading of Sylvia Wynter’s claim that the effort
to distinguish black from the very notion of the human results in a cascade
of sharp delineations based on Man’s empirical readings of bodies, but in fact
entirely shaped around biocentric Man, the one of the body, the only com-
plete human form who isn’t a body (because the decisive feature, thinking,
is not body) and is figured by a very specific body (because Man is identified
by a capacity for thought). I mean to build on that. I understand the one, the

29 See especially Londa Schiebinger, The Mind Has No Sex? Women in the Origins of Modern Science

(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989); and Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and
Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990).
30 This is the title of one of Luce Irigaray’s most famous works, This Sex Which Is Not One, trans.

Catherine Porter and Carolyn Burke (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985). Irigaray’s claim,
I argue, is that what Laqueur calls the two-​sex model is ultimately the historically longer-​standing
one-​sex model. I find that a very helpful claim. However, the very idea of “this sex” as opposed to that
sex is a recent development, historically speaking, and change in the modeling of sex deserves com-
ment that Irigaray does not give it.
 Introduction 9

body to refer to this entire picture, which conveys racial, class, geography,
sexual, sex, gender, ability, religion, size, and nationality meanings in a mu-
tually reinforcing way that serves to distinguish the homogeneous masterful
human from a therefore inert and passive flatly heterogeneous earth.
Homogeneous body, the body, is an oxymoron. It only makes sense be-
cause of the gesture of the one of the body, the complete human form,
which was stabilized as an ideal form in contrast to heterogeneous matter.
To name the plurality of human bodily events in this climate (following
Irigaray, Fanon, and Wynter, I mean this literally), one that fundamentally
subordinates them precisely in their heterogeneity, is extremely risky, for the
body has overdetermined the entire terrain of elemental difference, hiding
the body’s very own elementality and relationality in a scheme that denies
elemental difference. But this is the way to begin to trace the polis tradition.
The notion of elemental difference is bound to seem at first too abstract.
Allow me to offer two glimpses of elemental difference, then, as a way into
this project. The first comes from the work of philosopher and decolonial
psychiatrist Frantz Fanon, a crucial source for the argumentation of this
book, and the second comes from an early essay of poet, essayist, and polit-
ical activist Eli Clare.
First, Fanon: of a train ride in Paris, Fanon writes, “Instead of one seat,
they left me two or three.”31 A white child yells at him. A sycophantic white
person tells him not to get upset. Fanon writes, “Where should I put my-
self from now on? I can feel that familiar rush of blood surge up from the
numerous dispersions of my being.” This is a non-​universal bodily event. It
is not a universal event. It has not happened to everyone. I want to suggest
that it is no coincidence that such events happen in the context of the engen-
dering of what I will call the climate of the body. I will argue that Fanon him-
self suggests this approach.
Second: Eli Clare writes, “Early on I understood that my body was irrevo-
cably different from my neighbors, classmates, playmates, siblings: shaky, off-​
balance, speech hard to understand, a body that moved slow, wrists cocked
at odd angles, muscles knotted with tremors. But really, I am telling a kind
of lie, a half-​truth. Irrevocably different would have meant one thing. Bad,
wrong, broken, in need of repair meant quite another. I heard these every
day as my classmates called retard, monkey, defect; as nearly everyone I met

31 Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press,

2008), 92–​94.
10 Introduction

gawked at me, as my parents grew impatient with my clumsiness.”32 This is a

non-​universal bodily event. It is not a universal event. It has not happened to
everyone. Again, I want to suggest that it is no coincidence that such events
happen in the context of the climate of the body. Interestingly both Fanon
and Clare33 are philosophers of ecology.
The philosophy of performativity searches for the origin of such events
in the socialized gaze projected onto another. Performativity attributes
differences, if there are any at all, to human agency, to human power. What
is important is not the differences, but the way in which differences are per-
ceived. The differences themselves are not significant.34 The philosophy of
political difference of performativity is this: if there are non-​universal human
bodily events, such as those cataloged by Fanon and Clare, these are the re-
sult of projection. Differences among humans are not so much the cause of
these events; differences are caused by these events. What causes the events
is the way in which differences are figured. A white child sees a foreign body,
darkness, blackness. Neighbors, classmates, playmates, siblings see a body
unlike their own; they see animality, in this moment, as something in which
they do not share. Interestingly, in both cases those seeing are not only adults
but kids, children who have already learned how to live. I do agree that in
each case it is crucial to talk about the sociality that overdetermines these
encounters.
While I do agree that paying attention to the specific shaping of these
perceptions is crucial, I make a different emphasis in this book. The ap-
proach that I take is to linger over the curious plainness of the power asym-
metry on display in the white child’s animosity in Fanon’s story and in the
able cisstraight classmates’ animosity in Clare’s. Such asymmetry is as ob-
vious to observe as it is problematic to articulate. I want to ask about that
asymmetry—​of power, of bodily situation. The power and the bodily situ-
ation are inextricable. To say that difference is not there or not important
obscures the role of both denials and affirmations of difference in the making
of the one, the body. To say that difference is not important presupposes

32 Eli Clare, “Body Shame, Body Pride: Lessons from the Disability Rights Movement,” in The

Transgender Studies Reader 2, ed. Susan Stryker and Aren Aizura (New York: Routledge, 2013), 261–​
262. The philosophy of irrevocable difference in this essay has been very helpful.
33 See Eli Clare, Exile and Pride: Disability, Queerness, and Liberation (Durham: Duke University

Press, 2015) and Brilliant Imperfection: Grappling with Cure (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017).
34 This is the position of Ghassan Hage, whose work I discuss in Chapters 4 and 5. See Ghassan

Hage, Is Racism an Environmental Threat? (Malden, MA: Polity, 2017), 98.

 Introduction 11

difference, reifies it, and then obscures the role of its denial in the making of
the one of the body.
By non-​universal events I’m thinking not only about these examples.
I’m also thinking of Linda Martín Alcoff ’s rejection of white racial
eliminativism,35 my own anger at my fellow white people’s insistence that
“All Lives Matter,” Rosemarie Garland-​Thomson’s “Case for Conserving
Disability,”36 the yellow-​ization of the most recent coronavirus.37 This project
also takes shape in response to the fact that, as Axelle Karera puts it, “repres-
sive uses of police force and judicial proceedings like immigration detentions
and criminal trials of migrants (including young children) have become
standard practice both in Europe and the United States.”38 Embroideries of
dissimilarities appear in harmful as well as exhilarating ways, and so the sig-
nificance of their tenor seems to be a separate question. Isn’t it significant
in itself that humans so readily produce departures within and from and by
means of each other? You can say that political differences among humanity
are unjust; I agree. You can say that they are a way of dividing people from
each other; I agree. Doesn’t all of this mean that political differences ought
not to exist? I disagree. It is also the case that certain modes of political injus-
tice operate precisely through insistence on universality.39 Does that mean
that political difference per se is good? Clearly not. It is neither inherently

35 Linda Martín Alcoff, The Future of Whiteness (Malden, MA: Polity, 2015), 149ff.
36 Rosemarie Garland-​ Thomson, “The Case for Conserving Disability,” Bioethical Inquiry 9
(2012): 339–​355. See also Garland-​Thomson, Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in
American Culture and Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 8. Garland-​Thomson
writes, “This neologism names the veiled subject position of cultural self, the figure outlined by
an array of deviant others whose marked bodies shore up the normate’s boundaries.” In “Misfits,”
Garland-​Thomson offers a very helpful reading of Karen Barad’s performativity. See Garland-​
Thomson, “Misfits: A Feminist Materialist Disability Concept,” Hypatia 26.3 (Summer 2011): 591–​
609. I have also found instructive “Forum Introduction: Reflections on Fiftieth Anniversary of Erving
Goffman’s Stigma,” Disability Studies Quarterly 34.1 (2014): 1–​21, in which Garland-​Thomson
credits Erving Goffman’s depiction of her “worst disability nightmares” with suggesting to her the
notion of the normate, the identity that denies disability, as well as a newfound sense of identity for
herself. See Erving Goffman, Stigma: Notes on Spoiled Identity (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1963).
See also Shelley L. Tremain, Foucault and Feminist Philosophy of Disability (Ann Arbor: University
of Michigan Press, 2017), 122–​128. Tremain argues that the impairment-​social construction dis-
tinction is itself constructed, and she compares this with the sex-​gender distinction. While I find
Tremain’s work convincing, I am troubled by the use of analogy. Also, as with the work of Butler, there
is still an argument to be made regarding the philosophy of political difference in Tremain.
37 This book was written in the summer and fall of 2019, and the Covid-​19 pandemic emerged in

the spring of 2020. I have written something about the ways this book has led me to think about the
pandemic in a more recent article, “Zoonosis and the Polis: COVID-​19 and Frantz Fanon’s Critique
of the Modern Colony,” forthcoming in a special issue of The International Journal of Critical Diversity
Studies, edited by Shelley L. Tremain.
38 Karera, “Blackness,” 53 n. 8.
39 Kathryn Sophia Belle [formerly Kathryn T. Gines], “Fanon and Sartre 50 Years Later: To Retain

or Reject the Concept of Race,” Sartre Studies International 9.2 (2003): 55–​67.
12 Introduction

good nor inherently bad. Beneath all of this, there is one question that re-​
emerges for me again and again: if differences among humanity are superfi-
cial, why does the polis exclude them?
In order to think such asymmetries and discontinuities as human at all, in
order to begin to ruminate over elemental difference and its role in climate
disruption, a critique of the one of the body, the lone perfection of the one
human is crucial. This is neither a benign nor a context-​free gesture, the one,
the body. It is simultaneously a racial statement, a settler statement, an ability
statement, a sex-​gender statement. In other words it is an ecological state-
ment. It is a statement of one who both owns the earth and despises those it
associates with earth. The exaltation of thinking as disembodied is of course
a denial of the powers of water, fire, earth, air. The one of the body defines
politics and allows politics to be distinguishable from all things ecological,
relational, blatantly comparable. The one of the body forces a hierarchy of
bodies. When one speaks of “bodies,” for example, one has already somehow
exited the zone of the straightforwardly political. A planet is a body; a fish is
a body. But only in relation to the one of the body is anyone considered to be
human. This body-​bodies hierarchy is a key to appreciating the complexity
of the body’s responsibility for climate disruption: an inability to value ele-
mental difference and therefore relationality, an earth of which I am a part
but of which I am not the whole.

I.1. Putting Together Performativity and

Political Ecology

The arguments of the book put together performativity and political ecology.
This book is an extension of the tradition of performativity, which in the work
of Judith Butler involves a fundamental revision of social construction.40
However I take issue with the account of political difference embedded
in performativity. I am at the same time inspired by new materialists and

40 I will stick to naming the gesture at issue “social construction” rather than “construction” in

order to underscore what is at stake conceptually. Naming this notion only “construction” makes it
all too easy to underestimate the role of sociality in the making. There is always the risk of thinking of
construction as if it were an individual endeavor and/​or an ahistorical one. Construction or building
is too bare a metaphor for taking measure of human relational power and its abuse. As Linda Martín
Alcoff suggests, the key to understanding social construction is in attending to the complexities of
sociality (The Future of Whiteness, 46). I want to keep this at the forefront.
 Introduction 13

especially political ecologists’ critiques of performativity,41 and yet I find that

political ecologists offer no distinct account of political difference.
While I side with neither political ecology nor performativity, the project
understands these as crucial parts of a larger picture of the one of the body,
the finished human form and the way that it forces people into one side or the
other—​the one of the polis or the depoliticized bodies of the ecological. My con-
cern is that both philosophers of performativity and political ecology ultimately
dissociate what is considered political from what is considered ecological. An
unintended outcome of this pattern is the unilateral shift from understanding
differences among humans as strictly empirical in the eighteenth to nineteenth
centuries to understanding differences among humans as strictly political in the
present.
I do not take issue with performativity, but rather with its philosophy of
political difference. Consider the fact that in eighteenth-​century Europe, in-
cluding the “frightening proportions” of the second Europe that is the United
States, as Fanon writes,42 differences among human bodies were understood
to be matters of scientific classification. The dispassionate scientist discov-
ered and studied such categories as race, sex, ability, poverty, sexuality. The
one of the body studied everything but itself. According to the one of the
body to this day, bodies differ from each other empirically. At the height of
scientific acceptance, it was unthinkable that race or sex or diagnosis or indi-
gence were inventions. They were the inherent truth of the bodies in question.
Performativity is the philosophical intervention into this way of thinking.
The work of Saidiya Hartman, discussed in Chapter 2, demonstrates the im-
possibility of jettisoning performativity in the present insofar as this legacy
continues, trapping all in the complete Aristotelian definition of Man. Social
construction, and performativity along with it, represents a paradigm change
in human self-​understanding that it would be catastrophic to abandon.43
Social constructionist philosophical accounts rightly understand differences
in race, sex, ability, class, and sexuality to be collaboratively created, not

41 See note 1 for my understanding of new materialisms. I find that this phrase is too general since

so many concepts are associated with it. The far reach of the phrase is an indication of the deep need
for new ways of appreciating what Jane Bennett has named “thing-​power.” In this book I focus on one
corner of the new materialist literature, those writers engaged in “political ecology.”
42 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press, 2004),

236–​237.
43 Karera, “Blackness.”
14 Introduction

“discovered.”44 I take the most systematic and thoroughgoing social construc-

tionist account to be that of Judith Butler, whose concept of performativity
provides both a trenchant critique and a revision of social constructionism.45
Performativity takes political difference to be a presupposition that creates
uneven distributions of precarity on a global level.46 As Frank Wilderson has
pointed out,47 Hartman registers a subtle doubt in performativity. I cast this
as Hartman’s performative concern with the philosophy of performativity,
to which her work is rightly committed. Performativity allows biologists
such as Anne Fausto-​Sterling to study how narratives carve out sharply dif-
ferential experiences of health, for example. In her landmark work Sexing
the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality48 as well as more
recent writing, including an October 2018 opinion piece in the New York
Times,49 Fausto-​Sterling argues that discrete races and binarily defined and
oppositionally defined sexes are the narrative engines of the dubious con-
struction of differential bone densities in racial groups and coerced surgeries

44 Alcoff, The Future of Whiteness, 39. For more on Alcoff see Chapter 1. I regard Alcoff ’s philos-

ophy of identity as a source of wisdom regarding elemental difference, though I take it she is (rightly,
for political reasons) wary of political ecology. Consider The Future of Whiteness, 48–​52.
45 Butler’s work seeks to articulate the “limits of constructivism” as much as to rewrite its crucial

contributions. Performativity is not the same thing as social construction. Judith Butler, Bodies That
Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993), 4, 15.
46 Judith Butler, Notes toward a Performative Theory of Assembly (Cambridge, MA: Harvard

University Press, 2015), 119. Indeed performativity offers a distinct way of thinking about climate
crisis, as I will explain later. This can be seen not only in Butler’s most recent work, but also in the
elaboration of performativity in Sylvia Wynter’s writings and in the subtle gestures throughout the
oeuvre of Saidiya Hartman to the “Anthropocene.” See, for example, Hartman’s critique of disem-
bodied universality in Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-​Making in
Nineteenth-​Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 21, 153–​154; the attention
to the politics of “things,” water, and electricity in Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother: Journey along
the Atlantic Slave Route (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007), 173; and the explicit gestures
to climate politics in Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of
Social Upheaval (New York: Norton, 2019), 270, 347.
47 Frank B. Wilderson III, Red, White, and Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms

(Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 311–​313.

48 Anne Fausto-​Sterling, Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality, updated

ed. (New York: Basic Books, 2020). While I have found Fausto-​Sterling’s research, especially her work
on the multiplicity of sex, indispensable for my own, in Chapter 1 I argue that the sex-​gender distinc-
tion is the form-​matter distinction. Fausto-​Sterling writes that “second-​wave feminists of the 1970s
also argued that sex is distinct from gender” and “did not question the realm of physical sex” (4) as
they should have done. I agree. However, Fausto-​Sterling’s project, as I read it, is to expand the con-
cept of gender to include sex, so that sex becomes understood as the practice of gender in a Butlerian
mode: “Our bodies are too complex to provide clear-​cut answers about sexual difference. The more
we look for a simple physical basis for ‘sex,’ the more it becomes clear that ‘sex’ is not a pure physical
category. What bodily signals and functions we define as male or female come already entangled in
our ideas about gender” (5). Fausto-​Sterling argues that sex and gender should not be dualistically
understood, and she works to understand them in relation, but what concerns me is that the dualistic
gesture of apolitical sex versus political gender remains in her work.
49 Anne Fausto-​Sterling, “Why Sex Is Not Binary,” New York Times, October 25, 2018, https://​www.

nytimes.com/​2018/​10/​25/​opinion/​sex-​biology-​binary.html.
 Introduction 15

on intersex infants. Human bodies are too complex to locate sex as a “pure
physical category.”50 The classifications of the eighteenth century are now un-
derstood even by biologists such as Fausto-​Sterling as identities that are po-
litical and humanistic in origin.
It is thus not performativity per se with which I take issue. I take issue
with the philosophy of political difference embedded in it. In Judith Butler’s
more recent work, and especially in Sylvia Wynter’s work on performativity,
one can see that performativity does offer a critique of the current political
ecological formation of climate disruption. However it cannot offer a way
of making sense of the generation of differences among humans because it
takes these to be caused by norms. This book is in large part motivated by a
search for a way of holding onto the tradition of performativity while put-
ting it together with political ecology. If there is a difference between two
groups in quality of life or life expectancy, philosophies of performativity
rightly guide one to examine the human practices, the phobias, the hierar-
chies that produce the disparate outcomes. The aim is rightly to eliminate the
unjust political difference in question. For me the question is not whether
the one of the body performatively produces political differences. Certainly
this genre is responsible for political difference in some sense. The question
is why the one of the body is performatively produced at all. I argue that the
one and the two of the body are performative productions in response to the
fact that no human created participation in elaborations that are heteroge-
neous. The body bases all meanings of all bodies on its own. Difference, by
which I mean that there is heterogeneity making the political possible at all,
is ultimately owed to elementality. The body seeks sameness as a retreat from
this elementality. The body is a seeking of sameness in denial of an earth of
which I am a part, each is a part, but which is largely not me, which is largely
not any one of us.
The philosophy of political difference embedded in performativity
is so well established as to confront no currently viable alternatives.
Even Karen Barad, as I will explain in Chapter 2, subscribes to it, though
her work is one of the most important political-​ecological critiques of
performativity. Performativity alone currently offers a way of explaining
the origin of classifications that continue to structure the life of biocen-
tric Man, even among political ecologists who either reject or depart in
some way from performativity. Right now political difference has only one

50 Fausto-​Sterling, Sexing the Body, 5.

16 Introduction

philosophy: performativity. While I am critical of the philosophy of political

difference of performativity, I don’t think there is enough appreciation yet of
the extent of the reliance even of political ecologists—​its fiercest critics—​on
performativity.
Karen Barad, as I will discuss in Chapter 2, argues that the trouble with
performativity is that it does not appreciate the agency of matter. Barad’s
work then addresses this problem and extends performativity to the
agency of matter. However, I argue that the trouble with performativity is
not only that it does not appreciate the agency of matter. The trouble with
performativity is also that as a philosophy of political difference it leaves in
place the long-​standing Aristotelian hoped-​for homogeneity of the human,
or in Aristotelian terms Man. This is an aspect of performativity that is not
remarked upon in Barad’s revision of performativity. Performativists,51
Barad included, rightly lament political difference insofar as political dif-
ference is a sign of domination, but political difference is not always a sign
of domination. Sometimes it is a sign of morphological hope and challenge.
And so ultimately this work seeks a new way of understanding political dif-
ference, one that is not performative in this respect.
While the account of difference embedded in performativity confronts no
currently viable alternatives, political ecologists have called performativity
into question more broadly.52 Political ecologists argue that social practices
have been given far too much attention and that performativity thinkers and
social constructionists more generally overestimate the power of humans to
shape a material world that has its own powers.
Political ecologists tend to embrace ecological difference insofar as ecolog-
ical difference is inherent in matter. Indeed this is the meaning of the “new”
of new materialists: political ecologists and new materialists more generally
affirm the human as part of ecological systems. The human itself is a part of
the materiality that humans seek to understand.53 And yet this gesture to “the
human,” together with the flip-​side gesture of “nonhuman” that explicitly
accompanies it, leaves open the question of the significance of elemental dif-
ference in politics and the significance of the one of the body that looms over
and is the external studier of ecology. In this way political ecology, in spite of

51 Interestingly, this is a neologism. I would argue that this is precisely because until now there has

been no rival of performativity for thinking about political difference. Because so far nearly everyone
has been a performativist, the word itself has been unnecessary.
52 See especially Karen Barad, “Getting Real: Technoscientific Practices and the Materialization of

Reality,” in Meeting the Universe Halfway, 189–​222, and Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 17.
53 Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, 26, 67.
 Introduction 17

its inroads into human hubris, can nevertheless maintain the intuitive feel of
a political-​ecological hierarchy.
Such political ecological concerns have centered on two interventions.
The first is the work of physicist Karen Barad, who argues that an “agential
realist ontology” and a “new materialism” are necessary to unseat anthro-
pocentrism.54 While performativity isolates human narratives and studies
how these alone structure the material world, for Barad it is necessary to
look further than human agencies, to the agencies of necessary technological
equipment, such as ultrasound technology, as critical components without
which certain human practices would not be possible. The tools that humans
create often surprise them and become indispensable working partners in
the elaborations of new worlds both political and ecological. This aspect of
Barad’s work is crucial for my own: the significance of technology for human
morphologies is undeniable.
The second inspiration for political ecologists who are critical of
performativity and social construction more generally is the work of po-
litical scientist Jane Bennett, who develops a concept of “thing-​power” for
the agency, as opposed to the mechanism, of materiality. Bennett advocates
affirmation of the collaborations with matter and articulates with Bruno
Latour a thoroughgoing rejection of “environmentalism,” which contrasts
humans with their “environs.”55 While the field of political science largely
continues to regard agency as a power to act that is characteristically and
uniquely human, Bennett argues that thing-​power is no more mechanical
than human behaviors. Humans are also acted upon—​by caffeine, lead, elec-
tricity, cocaine, radiation, birth control, carbon dioxide, fentanyl. Humans
participate in networks of agency that exceed them. Bennett writes, “If
environmentalists are selves who live on earth, vital materialists are selves
who live as earth.”56 To speak of a human body is in fact a remarkable ab-
straction from what is going on just in an elbow, where the genes of the bac-
teria, the “microbiome,” outnumber by at least one hundred times the genes
of that elbow’s genome. To this Bennett replies that—​with respect just to
an elbow—​“the its outnumber the mes.”57 At this microscopic level these
terms, “me” for example, begin to unwind. For this reason Bennett rejects the

54 Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, 137.

55 Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 110–​111. Karen Barad similarly rejects “environmentalism,” Meeting
the Universe Halfway, 170. See also Bruno Latour’s critique of nature in We Have Never Been Modern
and Politics of Nature.
56 Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 111.
57 Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 112.
18 Introduction

notion that any human is “embodied” and says instead that each is “an array
of bodies, many different kinds of them in a nested set of microbiomes.”58 All
of this is the case regardless of what humans think or say about themselves
and each other.
This contribution of political ecology has not yet gotten enough attention.
Many scholars seem to conflate ecology with environmentalism, often using
these terms interchangeably. This threatens to undermine the crucial con-
ceptual intervention of political ecology, which is to affirm the “its [who] out-
number the mes,”59 without which there would be no humanity, no what it is
like to become human at all.
Despite their helpful rejections of environmentalism and illustrations of
the limits of performativity, I will argue that political ecologists offer no dis-
tinct account of the political differences among humans to converse with
this crucial offering of performativity, its philosophy of political difference.
Indeed, because of its nearly by-​design potential for dehumanization insofar
as it flattens the agencies of all into a continuous web of influence,60 political
ecologists have a complicated relationship to political difference. At times
they speak of humans as if there were no important differences among them
at all, and at times they speak of differences in terms of performativity. In
other words political ecologists in practice ascribe to the performative ac-
count when it comes to the status of human differences, precisely because
no new account of difference has appeared. Either way, political ecologists
reinforce the sense of difference as political-​as-​opposed-​to-​ecological, and
in this sense they concur with performativity. Political ecologists are rightly
interested in debunking the anthropocentrism of the concept of agency.
However, when it comes to human relationality and political identities, po-
litical ecologists must revert to the performative account of difference as uni-
laterally political, humanistic-​agential in origin, in order not to renaturalize
the polis and its inherent hierarchy.
Attempting a broader approach and appreciating the insights of both
performativity and political ecologists, this book devises a philosophy
of elemental difference primarily by rereading the work of Bruno Latour
(a recognized political ecologist) and Frantz Fanon (a recognized social

58 Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 112–​113.

59 Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 112.
60 Alfred J. López, “Contesting the Material Turn; or the Persistence of Agency,” Cambridge Journal
of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry 5.3 (September 2018): 371–​386; John Gillespie, “Protected: Black
Power as Thing Power: The Limits of Bennett’s Eco-​philosophy,” unpublished manuscript, September
4, 2018, Microsoft Word file.
 Introduction 19

constructionist) to understand the political-​ecological as a conceptual for-

mation. Both Latour and Fanon cross this divide in ways that have not yet
been appreciated sufficiently. By exploring the crossing over of these two, it
is possible to begin to explore the implications of what is as difficult to artic-
ulate as it is easy to observe: there are non-​universal bodily events currently
denied, barred from political life.
The denial of non-​universal bodily events is as fundamental to the cur-
rent sense of the political as the affirmation of empirical, fixed-​in-​difference,
bodies are fundamental to the current sense of the ecological. The political, a
paradigm of homogeneity, gets its sense from a mutual contrast with the eco-
logical, a paradigm of relationality. The political and the ecological are defined
through this contrast. For this reason the political readily becomes the ex-
clusion of the ecological. To accomplish this exclusion, non-​universal bodily
events must get excluded too. In this context the affirmation of difference
all too quickly becomes the conflation of elemental difference with bodies
alone, and eliminates the possibility of engaging in humanities,61 a question
about what it is like to be-​become human as terrestrials whose practices are
still plagued by what Frantz Fanon called “delirious Manichaeanism,” the ab-
solute distinction between the political, that which is of the polis and the one
complete human form that serves as the “fate” of all other bodies,62 and the
ecological, that which is relationality.

I.2. Outline of the Book

The book begins with what should be the go-​to philosophy of elemental dif-
ference, the work of Luce Irigaray. Chapter 1 attempts to learn from the work
of Luce Irigaray without taking on her philosophy of sexual difference. For
Irigaray, no human invented the fact that human bodies are not all alike and
cannot share a generic morphology. I seek to rewrite this claim in terms of
elemental difference, as opposed to sexual or sexuate difference. The denial
of the elementality of difference anchors a divide between concepts of form
and matter, polis and its matter, oikos, and thus anchors matter’s politics, the

61 Following Édouard Glissant’s poetics and philosophy of relation, I seek to understand what

is meant by “humanities” and plural practices of humanity. Manthia Diawara, “One World in
Relation: Édouard Glissant in Conversation with Manthia Diawara,” Nka: Journal of Contemporary
African Art 28 (2011): 15.
62 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, xiv, 160, and 160 n. 48.
20 Introduction

relationalities that flow from assumption of these concepts. The denial of

elemental difference also anchors a divide between two gestures closely re-
lated to these: the body and bodies. Ultimately I will argue that it is not so
much Man that has been at the apex of this framework, pace both Irigaray
and Wynter, but the one of the body. Man is a manifestation of the body.
Explaining my concerns with the philosophy of sexual difference and begin-
ning to articulate a philosophy of elemental difference is the aim of the first
chapter.
Having begun to articulate this philosophy of elemental difference, in
the second chapter I back up to consider a pertinent pair of traditions that
are currently distinguishable. I consider the work of Karen Barad, placing
her account of the need for a concept of agential realism beside the perfor-
mative account of racial difference in the work of Saidiya Hartman. I take
Karen Barad’s Meeting the Universe Halfway to be a crucial political ecology
text. Barad’s book is a powerful illustration of the limits of performativity,
achieved through an extension of the work of Judith Butler. I argue that this
text sidelines the philosophical question of political difference because of
the need to direct attention away from politics in the usual anthropocen-
tric sense. There is a need to think from a specific sense of the “nonhuman.”
When differences among humans do come up, specifically differences in
ability, Barad employs the performative approach that gives all credit and
blame for non-​universal experiences among humans to humans them-
selves. For Barad, the key articulation of performativity is that of Judith
Butler, whose concept of performativity does not take into account the
agencies of material technologies or physical particles. Barad articulates
the project of Meeting the Universe Halfway as a broadening of Butlerian
performativity. Saidiya Hartman expresses an entirely separate frustration
with performativity: its considerable powers cannot explain the depth and
dynamics of the animosity toward racialized bodies. There is in Hartman
thus also a need to think in terms of a distinct “nonhuman” that is obscured
and arguably trivialized by political ecologists’ use of this word. Chapter 2
shows that there are not one but two concerns with performativity: (1) a po-
litical ecology concern about the lack of attention to “nonhuman” agency in
the sense of technology, in the work of Barad, and (2) a performativity con-
cern about whether performativity can contain the intensity of the bodily
conscription that whiteness requires, in the work of Hartman. Performativity
has drawbacks not only in the direction illustrated by political ecology, but
also in the work of Hartman, who I will argue is a performative thinker
 Introduction 21

whose work articulates something of a political ecology in the sense of a poli-

tics of, as she puts it, a “disavowed geography of the world.”63
The third chapter looks to the work of Bruno Latour and Frantz Fanon,
each of whom offers a way of bridging the concerns of Barad and Hartman.
Latour and Fanon are often read as primary sources in political ecology and
performativity respectively. And yet political ecology and social construc-
tion each represent a polarization explored in different ways by Latour and
Fanon themselves. For Latour, the modern scientific practice of biological
classification was thought to be a practice of nature classification by those
who distinguished absolutely between biology and politics.64 For this reason,
Latour rejects the very notion of nature. Latour’s efforts focus instead on
bringing the actantcy of ecological “nonhumans” into a politics from which
they have been alienated, a project that is necessary due to a modern dis-
tinction between the political and the ecological. I trace the disappearance
of content of the term “human” in Latour’s crucial work. I argue that Latour’s
work does not confront the polis, and thus his concerns with the modern
cannot address another tendency that accompanies it, ecological fascism,
or ecofascism, as it is called by Janet Biehl and Peter Staudenmaier. I argue
that Fanon’s exposition offers a better framework. Although Fanon’s work
concurs with Latour that that which is biological is polarized with respect
to the political, Fanon suggests that the biological is not understood to be
without agency so much as it is problematically agential. This point allows
me to revise Irigaray’s philosophy of elemental difference, and that revision is
the final section of Chapter 3.
The final two chapters of the book explore the implications of this phi-
losophy of elemental difference. Chapter 4 is a reading of what I take to
be the most successful oeuvre for understanding the disastrous role of the
form-​matter distinction and the politics of the one of the body, that of Sylvia
Wynter. Wynter’s work extends that of Fanon into a philosophy of genre.
Wynter argues that the inspiration for the sciences of sex, madness, illness,
indigence, and sexuality classification of the seventeenth to nineteenth cen-
turies in Western Europe is the science of racial anatomy. A fear of black as
the very sign of material fluidity and contagion inspires efforts to chart scien-
tific subjects who are the subject matter of biocentric Man. All other modes
of biologically defined difference from the biocentric Man follow from this

63 Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, 347.

64 Latour, We Have Never Been Modern.
22 Introduction

one. For Wynter this targeting of black is the original modern gesture of
“the biological” as something of which biocentric Man is the epitome, the
completion, the culmination. All the bodies point to the natural superiority
of this one. This genre of biocentric Man is for Wynter the genre of climate
crisis, the climate of biocentric Man, constituted by these performativities.
However, this account remains a performative one, I argue, because Wynter
does not take up the rejection of Manichaeanism in Fanon, which requires
an affirmation of the powers of soil and subsoil and a rejection of dualism in
the study of cortico-​viscerality. Wynter does not maintain Fanon’s point that
the biological is primarily a gesture of praise for the nonbodily and disdain
for that which is bodily. Wynter argues that biocentric Man is in fact biocen-
tric, centering on a specific body as natural pinnacle. Instead of a rejection
of the very gesture of the biological in Fanon, which I argue is a rejection of
the very gesture of matter that is in Irigaray, Wynter argues that biocentric
Man is a selective affirmation of a hierarchized biological. She reads Fanon
and Butler as consistent in her account of political difference and the devel-
opment of the climate of Man. Wynter recommends affirming hybridity,65
an embrace of a surprisingly Aristotelian distinction between humanity and
the rest of earth. My own understanding, following the work of Fanon, is that
biocentric Man, especially the body that is the gesture responsible for bio-
centric Man, is a denunciation of the biological. While I am in this way crit-
ical of the gesture of hybridity in the work of both Bruno Latour and Sylvia
Wynter, I take Wynter’s work ultimately to point the way to a non-​hybrid
philosophy of genre, in which hybridity can be questioned in the way that
Fanon questioned it.
In Chapter 5 I argue that subtle features of Fanon’s approach as well as
the affirmation of elemental difference at which I arrived at the end of Part
I serve to fill out Wynter’s critique of the climate of biocentric Man. I advo-
cate re-​engagement, following Wynter, with the question of what it is like
to be human. This is an indistinguishably ecological and political question.
I want to suggest that this question is not just productive but necessary.
The Manichaean project of biocentric Man is best understood as a problem
of the one of the body, the lone perfect human form. I point out that both

65 I will use the term “hybridity” throughout the book, and I use it exclusively in the way that

Wynter and Latour do, to mean mixing the political with something else, the biological (Wynter) or
the ecological (Latour). I am interested in what makes the boundary between the political and these
others. I argue that what makes the boundary is the identity of the polis with the capacity for nous,
which is uncaused. On the concept of nous, see Emanuela Bianchi, The Feminine Symptom: Aleatory
Matter in the Aristotelian Cosmos (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014), 171–​173.
 Introduction 23

performativists and political ecologists agree on the problematic character of

this gesture, though for different reasons. For philosopher of performativity
Judith Butler, the human is unjustly a denial of dependence and a denial of
the irreducible negotiations of each “living creature among creatures and in
the midst of forms of living that exceed us.”66 For Bruno Latour, the human
is a denial of actantcy. Latour advocates subduing traditionally humanistic
inquiry in the face of climate disruption, while performativists advocate
(Wynter and Preciado are important exceptions) doubling down on human-
istic inquiry in at best an environmental mode. The claim of Chapter 5 is
this: that this seems to be a choice at all is a reappearance of the distinction
between polis and oikos, politics and ecology. Performativity takes the part
of the polis, and political ecology takes the part of the rest of earth. That this
seems to be a choice at all is an indication of the sway of the politics of matter,
the matter that politics or the study of the polis presupposes in its exclusion
of oikos, or the sciences of ecology. Although both sides reject the one of the
body, in some way neither one can fully appreciate the other, precisely be-
cause of the polis-​oikos distinction that structures the sides. Each is char-
acteristic of a split that is the climate of the one of the body. I end the book
with affirmation of the question of what it is like to be-​become human amid
the morphology of the polis, offering a beginning of an answer by rereading
the gesture of genre in Sylvia Wynter and by looking more closely at some
passages in Irigaray and Fanon. In this way it is possible to combine both
political ecology and performativity, both of which raise crucial concerns.
I want to suggest that what it is like to be human is to play a part in the erup-
tion and negotiation of elemental difference, neither form nor matter, nei-
ther body nor mind, neither what nor who. We should affirm those elements
that we ourselves are.

66 Butler, Notes, 43.

 1
A Revised Irigarayan Study of the
Hierarchy of Form and Matter, This Time
without Sexual Difference

This chapter learns from the work of Luce Irigaray without endorsing her
philosophy of sexual difference. For Irigaray, no human invented the fact
that human bodies are not all alike and cannot share a generic morphology.
For Irigaray, a certain body figures the negation of matter to which the polis
aspires. I seek to rewrite this claim in terms of elemental difference, as op-
posed to sexual or sexuate difference. The very gesture of the one of the
body, however this emerges, figures the negation of matter to which the polis
aspires.
The denial of the elementality of difference anchors a divide between
concepts of form and matter, polis and its matter, oikos, and thus anchors
matter’s politics, the relationalities that flow from assumption of these
concepts. Matter and nature are indications of the relationship of the tradi-
tion of the polis to the planet. The denial of elemental difference also anchors
a divide between two gestures closely related to these: the body and bodies. It
is not so much Man that has been at the apex of this framework, but Man in-
sofar as that has been the word for what I will call “the one of the body.” Man
is a manifestation of the body. The one, the body—​this generic affirmation
of one body as the human—​is and has been in some way for the whole of the
legacy of the polis, as this has been passed down from Aristotle, a denial of
elemental difference. And more recently the very notion of a homogeneous
“the two of the body” comes to accompany this longer standing one body, so
that in the modern context the one, the body is defined by an equally natural-
ized “two-​sex model.” At the same time not all men are the one of the body,
the perfect or complete human form, as Frantz Fanon insists. Many men are
not the body. In contrast to plurality, the very gesture of bodies in the plural,
the one, the body can pretend to be generic. It is the genericness and bizarre
absence of relationality that is the point.

Elemental Difference and the Climate of the Body. Emily Anne Parker, Oxford University Press.
© Oxford University Press 2021. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780197575079.003.0002
28 A Philosophy of Elemental Difference

Irigaray’s work opens up this way of thinking. As I have argued in ear-

lier work, sexual difference in Irigaray is already an ecologically-​motivated
insistence on the persistent plurality of bodies that currently relate via the
gesture of the homogeneous one.1 Irigaray explicitly rejects environmen-
talism in exactly the way that political ecologists do.2 What is crucial for
my own work is that Irigaray holds this gesture together with readings of
the creations of political hierarchy that emerge precisely when differences
and thus relationalities are denied. Irigaray gives no distinct attention to the
ever-​renewing contexts in which the pretension to a racially generic body
emerges, such that there can be white people. Irigaray misses that the “black
is not a man.”3 She also does not argue that the discourse of biocentric Man as
Sylvia Wynter explains is a racial and colonial fabric, built in response to the
attempt to distinguish human from blackness and darkness.4 Nevertheless
Irigaray’s work makes three indispensable points that inform a philosophy of
elemental difference.
In the later part of the chapter I will articulate in greater detail the philos-
ophy of elemental difference that Irigaray’s philosophy of sexual difference
both opens up and obscures. For now I will state briefly the three helpful
points regarding Irigaray’s philosophy of sexual difference.
First, Irigaray argues that the very notion of political equality is indica-
tive of a certain shape: This shape defines thinking as an immaterial agency
unique to the polis and identifies this as a form that guides matter. Matter
according to this definition is not agential in and of itself. It is not capable

1 Emily Anne Parker, “Precarity and Elemental Difference,” Political Theory 45.3 (2017):

319–​341. See also Helen Fielding, “Questioning Nature: Irigaray, Heidegger, and the Potentiality of
Matter,” Continental Philosophy Review 36 (2003): 1–​26; Alison Stone, Luce Irigaray and the Philosophy
of Sexual Difference (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006); and Astrida Neimanis, Bodies of
Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology (New York: Bloomsbury, 2017), especially Chapter 2,
“Posthuman Gestationality: Luce Irigaray and Water’s Queer Repetitions.”
2 Luce Irigaray, “Starting from Ourselves as Living Beings,” Journal of the British Society for

Phenomenology 46.2 (2015): 101.

3 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, xii. See also Calvin L. Warren, Ontological Terror: Blackness,

Nihilism and Emancipation (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018), especially 26–​61; Simone
Browne, Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015), spe-
cifically 99. I read Browne’s project as implicitly a political ecology that is also a critique of the polis.
4 Hortense J. Spillers, Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003); Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments;
Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí, The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender
Discourses (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997); Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí, What Gender
Is Motherhood? Changing Yorùbá Ideals of Power, Procreation, and Identity in the Age of Modernity
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016); María Lugones, “Toward a Decolonial Feminism,” Hypatia
25.4 (Fall 2010): 742–​759; María Lugones, “The Coloniality of Gender,” in Globalization and the
Decolonial Option, ed. Walter D. Mignolo and Arturo Escobar (New York: Routledge, 2010), 369–​
390; Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider (New York: Penguin Random House, 2007).
 A Revised Irigarayan Study of the Hierarchy 29

of acting by definition. This is what matter means. The polis is the site of
thinking; it is where and when the uncaused, thinking, happens. The oikos
or households are component parts of the polis, and this is a zone indicated
by the bodies that are explicitly incapable of guiding the polis: women, slaves,
children, property.5 This differentiation between polis on the whole and
oikos as a part,6 Irigaray suggests, while it is unifying of an organic picture
in which all is ultimately the polis, nevertheless is appropriately governed by
the thinking one, the ideal human form. For Irigaray the polis is in this way
most basically a rejection of sexual difference. Bodies falling short of the one,
the ideal human form mark a certain distance from an ideal. In Irigaray’s
terms, the feminine, that which pertains to the bodies of the ones who are not
the one, is suppressed and named matter and subordinated to form, which is
considered to be both a certain body and at the same time abodily precisely
because of this distinction between form (thinking) and matter (bodies). The
very gestures of polis and body are united in Aristotle, for whom “equality is
for equals”7 and the equal body of Man is actually governed by its immaterial
aspect. Political equality, politics as a practice of relating as equals who must
also be the Same, the one, the complete human form, then requires bodily
identity with the idealized body precisely because the distinction between
this body and matter is premised on the absolute power of that body (spe-
cifically the capacity for an encased thinking) over matter. What Irigaray
suggests is that the desire for the Same, the desire for absolute continuity in
the form of political equality, is both a desire for a very specific bodily form
of Man and a desire for disembodiment, the desire not to be bodily at all, that
projects the passive role of matter onto others. In other words, the desire for
the Same is a desire for the body that figures thinking, such that it is not a
body at all.
A second crucial aspect of Irigaray’s philosophy of sexual difference is that
no human invented relationality, even the relationality of the polis. There
would be no polis without contrasts between bodies. Not only bodies in a ge-
neral sense but also human bodies are not all alike and cannot share a generic
morphology. Generic morphology—​having some form—​is an oxymoron.
Aristotle, along with the many in the polis tradition that renews over and
over again, can only elevate one body among all relatively comparable bodies

5 See Aristotle, Complete Works of Aristotle, Politics 3.1253b1–​1253b13.

6 See Irigaray, “There Can Be No Democracy, 194.
7 Aristotle, Politics 3.280a12–​14.
30 A Philosophy of Elemental Difference

precisely because of a ranking of their features. The polis tradition exploits

features and defines people exclusively in terms of these features as they are
understood by others. For Irigaray, the desire for all bodies to be the Same,
the Same as a formal and empty One, is the flip side of the animosity directed
at matter because it is not this privileged gesture of shape. Man is an effort to
install unilateral influence8 in a world of relationality.
Third and finally, Irigaray’s philosophy of sexual difference suggests that
identity politics is only an oxymoron because of this bodied-​yet-​disembodied
structure of the polis. In the polis the study of identity is suppressed insofar
as there is meant to be no identity at all. Obviously Man is an identity. But this
study is denied and suppressed. The polis is a denial of any shape according
to which one understands one’s bodied self, because the shape by which Man
is able to relate to another Man must be denied in order to preserve the struc-
ture of the polis as nature.
I will say more about each of these points in the final section of this chapter.
Through each of these three points, Irigaray’s philosophy of sexual differ-
ence refuses to analogize the ecological and the political. She is interested in
the distinction itself. These gestures in Irigaray—​the desire for equality and
the desire for a very specific body and at the same time release from bodied
relationality—​are ultimately all the same gesture, figured by Man. And this
gesture is the polis. Man, for Irigaray, is the polis. Irigaray rejects political
equality as the endgame of women’s activism (this is her interest) insofar as
it is an inherently disembodied value established “among men and between
men.”9 Sexual difference as a philosophical claim insists that the subordina-
tion of matter is owed not to a perception of difference that should be elimi-
nated, but to the suppression of sexual difference per se.10 The subordination
of women is owed to the relegation of matter to the outside of politics. Denial
of sexual difference for Irigaray is a desire for unilateral influence. It is a de-
nial that structures contemporary relations that exceed the confines of who
and what is considered properly political.11
Irigaray’s philosophy of sexual difference is in this sense consistent with
political ecology, by which I mean a rejection of environmentalism.12

8 See the “Zeusian model of action” in Jane Bennett, Influx and Efflux: Writing Up with Walt

Whitman (Durham: Duke University Press, 2020), 116.

9 Irigaray, “There Can Be No Democracy.”
10 Shaireen Rasheed, “Islam, Sexuality, and the War on Terror: Luce Irigaray’s Post-​colonial Ethics

of Difference,” American Journal of Islamic Studies 31.1 (2014): 1–​15.

11 Rachel Jones, “Vital Matters and Generative Materiality: Between Bennett and Irigaray,” Journal

of the British Society for Phenomenology 46.2 (2015): 156–​172.

12 Neimanis, Bodies of Water, 65–​107.
 A Revised Irigarayan Study of the Hierarchy 31

Environmentalism philosophically speaking draws attention to an environ-

ment, a previously invisible background of Man. Political ecology, as I will
discuss at greater length subsequently, argues that there is no background.
All act, and all are acted upon. Irigaray shares this appreciation of the powers
of elementality, including the elementality that we ourselves are.
In this respect Irigaray follows in the legacy of Frantz Fanon. Both Irigaray
and Fanon, whom I introduce in what follows and then discuss at length in
Chapter 3, are as committed to the question of what it is like to be-​become
human as they are committed to appreciating this in the context of an agen-
tial, relational planet. Neither of them explicitly articulates an exposition of
the gesture of the one of the body or the fate of this concept in the present.
The point is rather that they both reject environmentalism on indistinguish-
ably ecological-​political grounds. Their work defies this distinction and
makes them delightfully difficult to place. Environmentalism is critiqued as
matter in Irigaray and as the biological and zoological in Fanon. These terms
function politically to subordinate specific bodies as well as to devalue the
agency of earth-​air-​fire-​water. To my knowledge these accounts so far have
not been read together in this way.13
I want to explore the three preceding claims in Irigaray’s philosophy of
sexual difference and begin to rewrite them in the final section of this chapter
as the beginning of a philosophy of elemental difference. A full articulation
of this philosophy of elemental difference appears at the end of Chapter 3,
after I have had the chance to discuss the work of Frantz Fanon. But first
I want to discuss my holdup in fully embracing Irigaray’s work, what I will
call Irigaray’s own biocentrism.

13 I am aware of only two other readings of Irigaray and Fanon together, apart from Wilderson, Red,

White, and Black, 86–​87. The two I’m thinking of are the work of practicing psychoanalyst Yukari
Yanagino, “Disintegration, Bisexuality, and Transgender Women of Color: Luce Irigaray and Frantz
Fanon on Gender Transition,” Undecidable Unconscious 4 (2017): 93–​110; and Penelope Ingram,
The Signifying Body: Toward an Ethics of Sexual and Racial Difference (Albany: State University of
New York Press, 2008). Yanagino’s essay underestimates, in my view, the lack of attention to modern,
biomedical sex in Irigaray, and it’s not clear what Fanon and Irigaray have in common beyond their
quite distinct departures from Freudian psychoanalysis. Ingraham’s study is an important one. I dis-
agree with her reading of Fanon as a philosopher of performativity exclusively, and I depart from
her endorsement of Irigarayan sexual difference and sex, which I argue are indistinguishable. Why
should a performative account take race to be entirely performative and sex irreducible? This is an
interesting polarization. I would argue that both race and sex are denials of elemental difference. As
Fanon argues, it is negrophobia, distinguishing this from Man, that inspires the biological and the
zoological as that from which the political must be protected.
32 A Philosophy of Elemental Difference

1.1. The Problem: Irigaray’s Biocentrism

As I have explained in the introduction, I borrow the concern with bio-

centrism as well as the term itself from the work of Sylvia Wynter. Wynter
understands biocentrism to be defining human excellence with reference
to bodily features. Talia Mae Bettcher describes biocentrism well when she
writes, “Moral resources are differentially distributed on the basis of norma-
tively selected bodies.”14 In this section I argue that Irigaray’s work is biocen-
tric, first, insofar as there is a presupposition of ahistorical sex in her work,
and, second, insofar as her work focuses almost exclusively on the problems
with what Thomas Laqueur has named the one-​sex model. Irigaray’s philos-
ophy does not take into consideration a modern reshaping of the polis in
which a two-​sex model has come to define the body.
Irigaray’s work has been rightly criticized for many years for its hetero
and cis15 normativity and ethnocentrism.16 Cynthia Willett, thinking more
broadly about Irigaray’s philosophy, has argued convincingly that Irigaray
“shares the failure of the Platonic and Hegelian philosophies of human de-
sire to develop democratic conceptions of work and power.”17 Penelope
Deutscher has argued that neither cultural difference nor the history or pre-
sent of colonization appears in Irigaray’s oeuvre.18 More could be written
on the way in which Irigaray’s philosophy might be questioned for its
idealizations of ability and health,19 as well as on the way in which the image
of blackness is discussed without reference to racialization.20
I add to this that Irigaray’s work is characterized by a lack of apprecia-
tion of what Achille Mbembe describes as the age of security. In the age of

14 Bettcher, “Full-​Frontal Morality,” 325.

15 For understanding the term “cis,” see Talia Mae Bettcher, “Trapped in the Wrong
Theory: Rethinking Trans Oppression and Resistance,” Signs 39.2 (2013): 386.
16 See Shannon Winnubst, Queering Freedom (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006),

104–​107; and Mary Beth Mader, “All Too Familiar: Luce Irigaray’s Recent Thought on Sexuation and
Generation,” Continental Philosophy Review 36 (2003): 367–​390.
17 Cynthia Willett, The Soul of Justice: Social Bonds and Racial Hubris (Ithaca, NY: Cornell

University Press, 2001), 148–​151.

18 Penelope Deutscher, “Conditionalities, Exclusions, Occlusions,” in Rewriting Difference: Luce

Irigaray and “The Greeks”, ed. Elena Tzelepis and Athena Athanasiou (Albany: State University of
New York Press, 2010), 247–​258; Penelope Deutscher, “Between East and West and the Politics of
‘Cultural Ingénuité,’” Theory, Culture & Society 20.3 (2003): 65–​75; Penelope Deutscher, A Politics of
Impossible Difference: The Later Work of Luce Irigaray (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002).
19 A helpful text in that direction is Rachel Jones’s critique of Irigaray’s “emphasis on harmony”

in “Philosophical Métissage and the Decolonization of Difference: Luce Irigaray, Daniel Maximin,
and the Elemental Sublime,” Journal of Aesthetics and Phenomenology 5.2 (2018): 148. See also Jones,
“Vital Matters,” 164–​165.
20 Irigaray, Speculum, 66.
 A Revised Irigarayan Study of the Hierarchy 33

security, race is best understood as the cataloging of appearances of bodies

for use as a “security device.”21 Race is “a more or less coded way of dividing
and organizing a multiplicity, fixing and distributing it according to a hi-
erarchy.”22 Race is an appearance that is made real, that “makes it possible
to identify and define population groups in a way that makes each of them
carriers of differentiated and more or less shifting risk.”23 Mbembe argues
that because “the Other is at once difference and similarity, united,” then
“what we must imagine is a politics of humanity that is fundamentally a poli-
tics of the similar, but in a context in which what we all share from the begin-
ning is difference. It is our differences that, paradoxically, we must share.”24
Mbembe’s articulation is, in my estimation, exactly right and reintroduces a
gesture of similarity characteristic of the polis. Mbembe himself argues this,
at least with respect to “liberal democracy.”25 Moreover, because difference
has been and still is (as I will explain over the course of the book) so squarely
on the side of a dehumanizing ecological, a side that is defined against an
absolute similarity-​in-​complementarity of the polis, that which is political,
even gestures to difference, is problematic, so overdetermined is racial dif-
ference, as again Mbembe himself suggests. I do believe I live in the age of
security as Mbembe articulates this, an age in which racial difference marks
a human as presumptively innocent or guilty, and I am certain that my own
distinctive and white relation to the one of the body needs spelling out. How
is the “politics of humanity” overdetermined as “a politics of the similar”? Is
it a coincidence that the age of security is “the Anthropocene”?26 Can it be
a coincidence that privatized prisons and immigration “detention” centers
constitute the politics of the Anthropocene? What is it like to be Black and
DeafBlind in the age of security? How do the two-​sex model (to be explained

21 Achille Mbembe, Critique of Black Reason, trans. Laurent Dubois (Durham: Duke University

Press, 2017), 35.

22 Mbembe, Critique of Black Reason, 35.
23 Mbembe, Critique of Black Reason, 35. See also Falguni A. Sheth, Toward a Political Philosophy of

Race (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2009); and Browne, Dark Matters.
24 Mbembe, Critique of Black Reason, 178.
25 Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics, trans. Steven Corcoran (Durham: Duke University Press,

2019), 162.
26 With Rachel Jones, I have previously written about this gesture of “the Anthropocene.” See Rachel

Jones and Emily Anne Parker, “The Anthropocene and Elemental Multiplicity,” English Language
Notes 55.1–​2 (Fall 2017): 61–​69; and Parker, “Precarity and Elemental Difference.” See also the invo-
cation of “weather,” “the totality of our environments,” in Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness
and Being (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016). See also Selamawit Terrefe, “What Exceeds the
Hold? An Interview with Christina Sharpe,” Rhizomes 29 (2016): 1–​17. See also Mbembe’s articula-
tion of the Anthropocene in “Africa in the New Century,” Massachusetts Review 57.1 (2016): 103; and
“ecocide” in Mbembe, Necropolitics, 100.
34 A Philosophy of Elemental Difference

below) and the figuring of queer, trans, and intersex as “unnatural” figure
in the age of security? How do these all of these morphologies relate to each
other? In “Africa in the New Century,” Mbembe argues that the “proper
name for democracy” is “humankind ruling in common on behalf of a larger
commons, which includes nonhumans.”27 I worry that putting it this way
reintroduces the polis, with its characteristic human-​nonhuman distinction,
as I will argue in Chapter 3. What makes similarity so attractive? I hope to
understand the overdetermination of this way of thinking about humanity,
in which it is contrasted to an ecology where the differences reside.
Mbembe’s work illustrates in many respects the naivete of Luce Irigaray’s
neglect of colonizations and racializations and the phenomenon of white
people, including especially white women, in that history. Irigaray’s work
does not explicitly contemplate the age of security that Mbembe articulates.
The “contraction, containment, and enclosure . . . [the] matrix of rules mostly
designed for those human bodies deemed either in excess, unwanted, il-
legal, dispensable, or superfluous”28—​Irigaray does not locate her critique of
“equality is for equals”29 here.
Even though Irigaray does not locate her critique of the polis equality in a
critique of the Anthropocene as the age of security, that is where it belongs.
If Irigaray were thinking about this age of race-​ability-​class-​sex-​gender-​
hierarchizing “security” (above all the question for Mbembe is, “Whose
security?”), she might argue that it is one dedicated to the Masculine. The
feminine, she argues, is not yet understood as having the solidity that body
connotes, and in this way the feminine is at present nothing more than the
mirror image, the opposite of Man, of military might, of fossil fuel extrac-
tion, all of which secures the power of the Masculine. Woman, insofar as
there are women, is a mirror image of Man, a complementary aspect of Man’s
shape. This might be Irigaray’s philosophy of sexual difference as a way of un-
derstanding the Anthropocene-​age-​of-​security.
And yet there is so much more that needs to be said about this Masculine.
Sylvia Wynter’s reading of Irigaray has not received the attention that it
deserves. Novelist, dramatist, cultural critic, Caribbean studies scholar, and
philosopher, Wynter has suggested in a reading of Irigaray that in moder-
nity this Masculine-​not-​feminine that had been the “symbolic template of

27 Mbembe, “Africa in the New Century,”103. Mbembe revisits his philosophy of democracy in

Necropolitics. See especially 15–​32 and 161–​166.

28 Mbembe, Necropolitics, 96.
29 Aristotle, Politics 3.1280a.12–​14.
 A Revised Irigarayan Study of the Hierarchy 35

all traditional and religiously based human orders” prior to the secular turn
of European cultures becomes secondary in modernity to a difference be-
tween “ ‘men’ and ‘natives’ ” as a way of orienting political hierarchy.30 In this
modern schema the absence of a place for what Wynter calls “the native’s”
“physiognomically complementary mate” plays a constitutive role. It is no
coincidence that there is no native woman; the absence of a native woman
anchors the hierarchy. The moral authority of modernity requires the ab-
sence of what Kimberlé Crenshaw has famously called the “intersection”31 of
these values—​Masculine (who is not feminine) and Man (who is not native).
How do these dynamics interact? How do they as idealizations bolster the
modern gesture of biocentric Man?
In this crucial reading of Irigaray, Sylvia Wynter argues that Shakespeare’s
The Tempest is literary evidence of the drawbacks of Irigaray’s philosophy of
sexual difference. The play demonstrates a “mutational shift” from a model
in which the “patriarchal discourse” is entirely determined to deny sexual
difference to one in which biocentric Man who is not a native emerges and
shifts the terrain:

. . . If, before the sixteenth century, what Irigaray terms as “patriarchal dis-
course” had erected itself on the “silenced ground” of women, from then
on, the new primarily silenced ground . . . would be that of the majority
population-​groups of the globe . . . with [Shakespeare’s] Miranda be-
coming . . . a co-​participant, if to a lesser derived extent, in the power and
privileges generated by the empirical supremacy of her own population.32

For Wynter a decisive feature of that which aspires to be modern is the cen-
trality and rigidity of the Man-​native divide and its effects on a preexisting
and ongoing Masculine-​as-​not-​feminine divide. That this set of idealizations
has no place for the vastness of political life, the vastness of the politics of

30 Sylvia Wynter, “Beyond Miranda’s Meanings: Un/​ silencing the ‘Demonic Ground’ of
Caliban’s ‘Woman,’ ” in The Routledge Reader in Caribbean Literature, ed. Alison Donnell and
Sarah Lawson Welch (New York: Routledge, 1996), 478; and Sylvia Wynter, “Afterword: Beyond
Miranda’s Meanings: Un/​silencing the ‘Demonic Ground’ of Caliban’s ‘Woman,’” in Out of the
Kumbla: Caribbean Women and Literature, ed. Carole Boyce Davies and Elaine Savory Fido (Trenton,
NJ: African World Press, 1990), 355–​372. See also Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, “‘Theorizing in a
Void’: Sublimity, Matter, and Physics in Black Feminist Poetics,” South Atlantic Quarterly 117.3
(2018): 620.
31 Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: Black Feminist Critique

of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory, and Antiracist Politics,” University of Chicago Legal
Forum 139 (1989): 139–​152.
32 Wynter, “Beyond Miranda’s Meanings,” 478–​479; emphasis mine.
36 A Philosophy of Elemental Difference

identity, as the Combahee River Collective33 once put it, is not incidental.
That it neglects to have a morphological place for so many bodies is not inci-
dental. Most of the bodies, in fact. The Man-​native divide and the Masculine-​
as-​not-​feminine divide are Man’s own dimensions.
Wynter helpfully suggests that Irigaray participates in the modern defined
against that which is native precisely by giving attention only to one vector
of Man’s identity, the masculine-​as-​not-​feminine one. In doing so Irigaray
gives no place to the “physiognomically complementary mate” of the “na-
tive.” She also gives no attention to the imperative of the Same that shows
up among women. In Irigaray there is only the feminine or “women” as a
homogenizing, idealizing figure. Irigaray’s work is in this way deeply com-
mitted to the modern and to its imperial project, especially insofar as she
focuses attention exclusively on the continuities of the age of security with
the ancient Greek context. Irigaray does not say anything about the figure
of the barbarian in Aristotle, the one whose speech is indecipherable, in that
ancient context.
Others have taken similar note. Judith Butler argues that Irigaray “fails to
follow through the metonymic link between women and . . . other Others,
idealizing and appropriating the ‘elsewhere’ as the feminine. But what is the
‘elsewhere’ of Irigaray’s ‘elsewhere’?”34 In other words, Irigaray fails to ap-
preciate the full proportions of the negations for which the masculine is re-
sponsible. Alia Al-​Saji has elaborated on this point more recently, suggesting
that racialized head covering plays “a constitutive role in many patriarchal
narratives in the West,”35 even as head covering is practiced throughout the
world by people demonstrating a wide variety of political stances as well as
religious traditions. The “image of the Muslim woman forms a kind of ‘con-
stitutive outside’ (to use . . . Butler’s term)” and thereby assists a certain mode
of the purportedly secular other-​ed feminine in becoming “visible.”36 For Al-​
Saji, the hypervisiblity of the headscarf in European contexts is a produc-
tion of secular space, and the suggestion that modern societies have achieved
gender equality anchors the space.37

33 Combahee River Collective, “A Black Feminist Statement,” in How We Get Free: Black Feminism

and the Combahee River Collective, ed. Keeanga-​Yamahtta Taylor (Chicago: Haymarket Books,
2017), 15–​27. More on the Combahee River Collective and identity later.
34 Butler, Bodies That Matter, 49.
35 Alia Al-​ Saji, “The Racialization of Muslim Veils: A Philosophical Analysis,” Philosophy and
Social Criticism 36.8 (2010): 877.
36 Al-​Saji, “Racialization of Muslim Veils,” 877.
37 Al-​Saji, “Racialization of Muslim Veils,” 879.
 A Revised Irigarayan Study of the Hierarchy 37

An Irigarayan response to this specific invocation of feminism would of

course reject the very idea that European culture is at all interested in eman-
cipating the feminine. As I have mentioned previously and will discuss at
greater length later, she considers equality to be a sign of the polis.38 Indeed,
Irigaray makes this case in such a way that it becomes part of the problem: for
Irigaray, what is problematic about European culture is its denial of sexual
difference. As if that’s it. But what Wynter, Butler, and Al-​Saji make very clear
is that this is not the whole of what is problematic about modernity and the
longer tradition in which it emerges.
These critiques point to the fact that exclusive attention to sexual dif-
ference can in fact play a role in the elaboration of imperial power. Many
feminists make this plain in seeking protection from misogyny by appeal to
state power. A crucial concern with Irigaray’s philosophy of sexual difference
is that she does not explore whether and how affirmation of sexual difference
by any definition, without a critique of the role of some figuring of sexual dif-
ference as the only problem of modernity, could indeed become a practice of
the age of security. What is it about sexual difference as Irigaray understands
it that makes this possible?
An additional aspect of the philosophy of sexual difference in the age of
security is just as troubling. Yes, some can occupy a proximity to Man, can
marginally become a co-​participant in the polis, without quite being Man.
But crucially, Irigaray herself idealizes what Man means. Not only the fem-
inine, but also the masculine in Irigaray is conveyed in purportedly nonra-
cial terms. Consider what William A. Smith in 2010 has articulated as “Black
racial misandry,” “an exaggerated pathological aversion toward Black boys
and men, created and strengthened in societal, institutional, and individual
ideologies and practices.”39 There does seem to be in the age of security a fear
of muscles, scruffy or full-​on facial hair, tall height, large size—​when these
are aspects of anyone Black or brown, and even when these are aspects of
someone white who evidences what Man takes to be natural impairment or
natural indigence.40 As part of no matter whose body is in question, muscles,

38 Irigaray, “There Can Be No Democracy.”

39 William A. Smith, “Toward an Understanding of Misandric Microaggressions and Racial
Battle Fatigue among African Americans in Historically White Institutions,” in The State of the
African American Male, ed. Eboni M. Zamani-​Gallaher and Vernon C. Polite, 265–​277 (East
Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2010), 267. See also William A. Smith, Jalil Bishop
Mustaffa, Chantal M. Jones, Tommy J. Curry, and Walter R. Allen, “You Make Me Wanna Holler and
Throw Up Both My Hands! Campus Culture, Black Misandric Microaggressions, and Racial Battle
Fatigue,” International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 29.9 (2016): 2.
40 Tremain, Foucault.
38 A Philosophy of Elemental Difference

facial hair, height, size (and I am sure other features I am missing), as features
of no matter whose body is in question, these are boxes checked in the
column of masculinity. How can muscles, facial hair, tall height, large size,
all boxes checked in the column of “masculinity,” make someone so distinctly
vulnerable? For Smith, to try to articulate the distinct patterns of misandry is
not to deny Black misogyny,41 what Moira Bailey has named misognynoir,42
but it is to apply intersectionality43 to the vilifications of the race-​gender of
men who are Black. Smith argues that anti-​blackness, vilifications of le nègre,
as Fanon explains, is never experienced as a generic hatred. In other words it
is not racism alone. It is hatred of men.
Defenders of Irigaray’s philosophy of sexual difference will rightly argue
that what Irigaray laments is that the feminine is whatever demonstrates the
limits of Man: strength, individuality, discreteness, power, ability, fitness.
Man is a natural bodily superiority and thus is a racial concept. In this respect
Irigaray is not complacent about racialization and suppression of cultural
difference. But there is a lack of distinct terms for such hierarchies and their
interactions with the figuring of the bodies of women deemed appropriately
part of and subordinated within the morphology of biocentric Man. And this
lack leaves so many questions open. Is there no political difference between
men who are figured as feminine in Irigaray’s terms and women who are
figured as feminine? The Irigarayan terms lack a capacity for exploring the
complexity of differentiations.
There is a point being made by William A. Smith and his coauthors to
which Irigaray’s work is fundamentally resistant and problematically so.
I think we have to ask whose fear and hatred—​and of what exactly—​inspires
the global security industry to build its prisons, jails, and detention centers?
This industry is a denial of differences named race, and it must be theorized

41 Smith, “Toward an Understanding,” 267–​268.

42 Moya Bailey and Trudy, “On Misogynoir: Citation, Erasure, and Plagiarism,” Feminist Media
Studies 18.4 (2018): 762–​768.
43 “Intersectionality” is a term created by Kimberlé Crenshaw. Crenshaw’s earliest articulations of

intersectionality were critiques of US anti-​discrimination law, which unlike the anti-​discrimination

legislation of other state formations, does not allow a person even to present a legal claim to be dis-
criminated against on the basis of more than one dimension of oppression at a time. Regardless of
whether or not a legal system has this problem, I appreciate Emi Koyama’s claim: “At minimum, I be-
lieve, an intersectional analysis would require us to start from the acknowledgement that the state is
a problematic institution, a source of violence against women of color and many others, that cannot
be intrinsically relied on.” The state is one example of the polis that I am trying to understand. See
Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection”; Emi Koyama, “Silencing and Intimidation of Women
of Color at ‘Men against Sexism’ Conference,” accessed October 15, 2019, http://​www.shakesville.
com/​2013/​08/​silencing-​and-​intimidation-​of-​women-​of.html.
 A Revised Irigarayan Study of the Hierarchy 39

intersectionally. What Smith, Mustaffa, Jones, Curry, and Allen suggest is that
in the age of security it happens that there is grave danger posed, not gener-
ically by that which is feminine, but in numerous modes, part of which can
only be named masculine. It just cannot be that the threat to the masculine
is the feminine per se as Irigaray would have it. Again there is a fear of mus-
cles, five o’clock shadow or full beard, tall height, large size, broad shoulders.
It doesn’t matter who is under classification here; these are all boxes checked
in the column of masculinity, that which is supposed to pertain only to Man.
Contra Irigaray, so often in the age of security it is precisely these that draw
agitated attentions, regardless of any other features of a person, wealth and
secularism included. Even elements that are Man’s very own can become the
impetus for security. And the concern for this sort of security all too often
cleanly overrides any concern for what could be called safety: instead of
addressing climate change, a society builds a prison. Instead of being con-
cerned about what a society is adding to its water, a society develops new
identification methods and surveillance technology. The security-​inspiring
bodies in such cases are often explicitly themselves compared with matter,
with monstrous power that must be suppressed precisely because they are
human agency with features that are not human.
Afro-​pessimism necessitates my concerns with Irigaray’s philosophy of
sexual difference. Ultimately my hope is to connect the Afro-​pessimist’s po-
litical reading of Fanon with the ecological aspects of his work. Let me say a
bit here now about the centrality of the Afro-​pessimistic reading of Fanon in
the development specifically of my worries about the philosophy of sexual
difference in Irigaray’s oeuvre. I argue that elemental difference is there in
Irigaray, opening up the possibility of perceiving the political-​ecological dis-
tinction according to the body, but Irigaray’s philosophy of sexual difference
has so far obscured this possibility. Afro-​pessimism, specifically the reading
of Fanon in this literature, has necessitated my need to disentangle elemental
difference from sexual difference and an adherence to the gesture of ahistor-
ical sex in Irigaray.
Frank Wilderson articulates Afro-​pessimism at least partly as a reading
of Frantz Fanon,44 who will enter this project in earnest in Chapter 3. Fanon
writes that he is “the slave not of an idea others have of me but of my own
appearance.”45 As Wilderson notes, Fanon writes that between an idea and

44 See especially Wilderson, Red, White, and Black; and Saidiya Hartman and Frank B. Wilderson

III, “The Position of the Unthought,” Qui Parle 13.2 (Spring–​Summer 2003): 183–​201.
45 Wilderson, Red, White, and Black, 37. See Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 95.
40 A Philosophy of Elemental Difference

an appearance, and in his text he himself places “idea” in quotation marks.

Wilderson underscores this claim in Fanon and takes Fanon’s point to be
that his body does not become constitutive of the slave owing to an idea that
others have of it, but owing to the way in which this specific body appears, a
sensation of some other body that perceives him. Fanon further argues that
“the body of the black man hinders the closure of the white man’s postural
schema at the very moment when the black man emerges into the white man’s
phenomenal world.”46 The way in which he himself appears is determined for
him, externally, and in a way that ascribes the meanings of his body without
him. I will return to this claim in Chapters 3 and 5.
Fanon is saying, according to Wilderson, that “the visual field, ‘my own ap-
pearance,’ is the cut, the mechanism that elaborates the division between the
nonn*ggerness and slavery, the difference between the living and the dead.
Whereas Humans exist on some plane of being and thus can become existen-
tially present through some struggle for, of, or through recognition, Blacks
cannot reach this plane.”47 Wilderson argues that Fanon, Hortense Spillers,
and Saidiya Hartman collectively “maintain that the violence that continu-
ally repositions the Black as a void of historical movement is without analog
in the suffering dynamics of the ontologically alive.”48 Jared Sexton has put
the point this way: “ ‘Afro-​pessimism’ . . . [is] a disposition that posits a po-
litical ontology dividing the Slave from the world of the Human in a consti-
tutive way.”49 As we saw earlier, Smith’s articulation of Black racial misandry
demonstrates a direct counterexample for Irigaray’s philosophy of the mas-
culine. But Afro-​pessimism deepens the point: the Irigarayan gesture of the
feminine is oblivious to another defining feature of the one of the body, the
human, namely, a mode of the masculine. In other words, the masculine is
in denial of, at least partly, the masculine. This is exactly the tangle to which
Irigaray’s work, I argue, leads.
And then I remember, prompted by Wilderson’s reading, what Hortense
Spillers has argued about the significance of the sex-​gender distinction, a
further distinction that Irigaray’s work makes difficult to place: as Spillers
argues, in the American Grammar Book, a deep preconscious of identities
is a pattern of assigning humanity and animality, body, and flesh. Spillers

46 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 138. I will alter this translation in Chapters 3 and 5.
47 Wilderson, Red, White, and Black, 37–​38; asterisk mine. Also see 314.
48 Wilderson, Red, White, and Black, 38.
49 Jared Sexton, “The Social Life of Social Death: On Afro-​ Pessimism and Black Optimism,”
Tensions Journal 5 (Fall–​Winter 2011): 23.
 A Revised Irigarayan Study of the Hierarchy 41

writes: “I would suggest that ‘gendering’ takes place within the confines of the
domestic, an essential metaphor that then spreads its tentacles for male and
female subjects over a wider ground of human and social purposes.”50 Slave
ships were assigned gender when slaves were/​are not.51 In the nineteenth
century Frederick Douglass writes of his envy of ships that can come and go
from the shores of Maryland while he cannot.52
How to get out of this tangle?
In reading together Hortense Spillers, C. Riley Snorton, Thomas Laqueur,
Judith Butler, Paul B. Preciado, and Talia Mae Bettcher, I understand natural
sex as tautological. Sex is a philosophy of matter that demarcates the polis.
It is thought to be prior to the political. Especially C. Riley Snorton’s recent
book Black on Both Sides suggests that natural sex and cultural gender as an
absolute dichotomy is a white gesture in which “black gender becomes fun-
gible.”53 All of these for various reasons undermine the very gesture of nature
as “sex,” of “sex” as matter. What I wish to do here is to use these critiques of
natural/​sex in such a way as to question the one of the body as well as the two
of the body.
I take the gesture of natural sex to be synonymous with matter, a desig-
nation that pretends to be culture-​free. Natural sex is synonymous with
both (1) the anti-​feminist notion of “proper gender roles” that conflates
these terms and (2) feminist construals of the sex-​gender distinction ac-
cording to which gender must be eliminated and “genitalia are the essential
determinants of sex.”54 In fact this gesture of sex, the very idea of natural sex,
needs cultural gender, conceptually speaking. This gesture of natural sex—​
whether it is conflated with or considered to be polarized with respect to
gender—​signals a belief in the practice and monitoring and policing of that
naturalized sex designation.55 But a crucial point is the necessity of flesh for
the knowledge of incommensurable sexual difference.

50 Hortense J. Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” in Black,

White, and in Color, 214.

51 Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe,” 214.
52 Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: An American Slave

(New York: Signet Classics), 75.

53 C. Riley Snorton, Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity (Minneapolis: University

of Minnesota Press, 2017), 126.

54 Talia Mae Bettcher, “Evil Deceivers and Make-​ Believers: On Transphobic Violence and the
Politics of Illusion,” Hypatia 22.3 (2007): 51.
55 Paul B. Preciado, TestoJunkie: Sex, Drugs and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era

(New York: Feminist Press, 2013), 100; and Paul B. Preciado, Countersexual Manifesto, trans. Kevin
Gerry Dunn (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018).
Another random document with
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 Heti jo naimisen ensi vuonna lahjoitti vaimo hänelle kaksoiset, ja
Aleksander kirjoitti meille tämän tapauksen johdosta ihastusta
uhkuvan kirjeen, josta selvästi näkyi, kuinka ylenmäärin onnellinen
hän oli.

Nyt minä tapasin Aleksander Dmitrijevitshin, sittenkuin me emme

olleet nähneet toisiamme puoleentoista vuoteen. Sitä ennen olin
kohdannut häntä pari kertaa Moskovassa hänen sisarensa talossa,
jossa minä seurustelin ja jonne hän usein tuli käymään tilaltansa.
Minusta hän ei ollut, ei ainoastaan vanhentunut, vaan hän myöskin
näytti reippaammalta ja nuoremmalta kuin ennen. Hän oli ajattanut
poskipartansa, ja hänen hyväntahtoisissa pyöreissä kasvoissaan,
joita kaunisti tiheät viikset, ilmeni rauha ja tyytyväisyys.

Kaksi päivää kohtauksemme jälkeen olimme jo hänen

maatilallansa, joka sijaitsi T:n kuvernementin kaukaisimmassa
sopessa.

Minä hurmaannuin heti maan hiljaisuudesta, josta en ollut saanut

nauttia kahteen kuukauteen. Oli loppupuoli lokakuuta. Sää oli tyyni ja
kirkas. Päivän heleä valo kirjasi koko luonnon; viheriät niityt,
kellertävät metsät ja sinertävä taivas… kaikki oli ihanaa.

Kun me ajoimme pihalle ja astuimme yksikerroksiseen

harmaaseen taloon, tuli iloiten meitä vastaan Aleksanderin koko
perhe. Ainoastaan jo tuosta vastaanotosta, lasten riemuhuudoista,
jotka kaikki heti häntä syleilivät ja melusta, minä ymmärsin millainen
isä hän oli.

Aleksander Dmitrijevitsh esitti minut vaimollensa. Ljudmila

Ivanovna oli mielestäni hyvin kaunis.
 "Tässä on", sanoi hän vaimolleen osoittaen minua, "Semjon
Petrovitshin poika, josta minä usein olen puhunut sinulle. Hän tahtoo
koota meillä voimia, me pidämme hänestä hyvän huolen, lähetämme
hänet metsästämään ja pidämme luonamme niin kauvan kuin
suinkin; nuori mies ehkä käy iloisemmaksi."

"Minua ilahuttaa, minua ilahuttaa, meidän on niin ikävä, täällä

maalla", sanoi Ljudmila Ivanovna, löi kättä ja vähän punastui.

Minä ihmettelin heti hänen puhettansa. Hän käytti samaa

puheenpartta kuin palvelustytöt. Minä tiesin kyllä, että Aleksanderin
vaimo ei kuulunut hienoimpaan seurapiiriin; mutta kuitenkin en olisi
luullut, että hän tervehtisi minua tuohon jokapäiväiseen, liian nöyrään
tapaan.

Minä vietiin pieneen, aivan yksinäiseen Aleksander Dmitrijevitshin

työhuoneen vieressä olevaan huoneeseen. Minusta pidettiin heti
huolta eikä unhoitettu vähäpätöisimpiäkään seikkoja, ja minä tunsin
itseni kohta ensimmäisenä päivänä niin tyytyväiseksi, että minusta jo
näytti, kuin minun epätietoisa synkkämielisyyteni ja luuloteltu
sairauteni olisi täysin kadonnut.
III.

Täällä minä alotin nyt viettää varsin säännöllistä ja terveellistä

elämää.

Kohta aamulla teetä juotuani lähdin pyssy olalla ja koira mukana

ampumaan kyntölintuja, joita sielläpäin oli runsaasti, myöhäisestä
syksystä huolimatta. Kello kolmatta käydessä palasin minä kotia.
Koko iltapäivän vietin Aleksander Dmitrijevitshin ja hänen perheensä
seurassa.

Me kävimme kartanon laveilla mailla, tarkastimme maanviljelystä

ja illoin istuimme kaikin yhdessä ruokahuoneessa. Me puhuimme
monista asioista, luimme ääneen tahi pelasimme shakkia, minä ja
Aleksander Dmitrijevitsh.

Ljudmila Ivanovna istui sillä aikaa pöydän ääressä, usein hän

myöskin soitti piaanoa ja säestäen lauloi puoliääneen romansseja.
Silloin tällöin säestin minäkin hänen lauluansa. Illan tultua menivät
lapset, tavallisesti Dunjashkan kanssa lastenkamariin. Vasta
kahdeksan tienoissa tulivat he ruokasaliin ehtoollista syömään.
Vanhimmat — kaksoiset, tyttö ja poika, jotka olivat laihat ja kalpeat
— olivat äitinsä näköiset ja saamattomia sekä harvapuheiset, jota
vastoin nuorin tytär, kolmivuotias Tanja, oli vallan toista ja sai kaikki
ihmettelemään vilkkauttaan ja hilpeyttään. Aleksander Dmitrijevitsh
rakasti häntä kiihkeästi. Hän otti hänet syliinsä ja leikki ja jutteli
hänen kanssaan, vaikka hän hyvin vähän välitti toisista lapsistaan.
Näytti siltä kuin Tanjakin olisi rakastanut isäänsä enemmän kuin
toisia ja hyväili häntä erityisellä lempeydellä.

"No, Tanja kulta, juokse kilpaa minun kanssani", sanoi Aleksander

Dmitrijevitsh, kehoittaen tytärtänsä leikkimään.

"Kohta, kohta", vastasi Tanja sukkelaan, mutta sensijaan että hän

olisi juossut kilpaa isänsä kanssa, juoksi hän liverrellen pois hänen
luotaan.

"Sinähän juokset pois luotani".

"Sinä et saa minua kiinni, sinä et saa", huusi Tanja, juoksi pöydän
taakse, taputti käsiään ja hyppäsi iloisena samalla paikalla.

"Ah, sinä rakas tyttöni", sanoi Aleksander Dmitrijevitsh lempeästi,

kiiruhti hänen luoksensa, nosti hänet käsivarrelleen ja rupesi
suutelemaan häntä.

"Isä, isä kulta". Lapsi toisti lukemattomia kertoja nämä

hyväilynimet, kääntäen pois päätänsä, "isä kulta, kulta isä!"

Tämä pikku Tanja oli todellakin hurmaava, iloinen ja rakastettava

olento. Hänen sointuva äänensä, hänen aina hymyilevät kasvonsa
pienine, mustine silmineen, hänen kiehkurapäänsä ja tuo pieni vireä
ja solakka vartalonsa viehättivät myöskin minut kokonaan. Ei voinut
olla ilolla katselematta tuota lasta.
 Hän tottui pian myöskin minuun, ja minä sain, niinkuin toisetkin,
ottaa häntä syliini ja leikkiä hänen kanssansa. Varsinkin kuuntelin
minä suureksi mielihyväkseni, kuinka hän kutsui isäänsä. Kun isä oli
huoneessa, puhui Tanja ainoastaan hänen kanssansa ja toisti yhtä
mittaa tuota hyväilevää "isä, isä kulta, kulta isä!"

Tuo "isä kulta" kuului erittäin ihanalta ja kujeelliselta. Ellei Tanjan

ääntä kuulunut talossa, voi olla varma, että hän nukkui.

Aleksander Dmitrijevitsh näytti hyvin onnelliselta. Sittenkuin hänen

oli täytynyt elää niin monta vuotta sairaan, lapsettoman vaimonsa
kanssa, oli hän nyt saanut täyden perheen, johon hän oli kiintynyt
sydämensä pohjasta. Hän sai nauttia iloja, joista hän ennen ei ollut
uneksinutkaan.

Hän rakasti hellästi myöskin kaksoisiaan. Teetä juodessa meni

hän usein heidän luoksensa, kumartui heidän yli, syleili heitä
molempia samalla kertaa — he istuivat aina vieritysten — puhui
heille helliä sanoja ja suuteli heitä.

Mutta hän virkkoi tavallisesti: "no, no, älkää olko noin synkän
näköisiä, kyllä kaikki vielä hyvin käy" — ja silloin hänen äänessään
kuului surumielisyyden vivahdus, sillä häntä suretti, etteivät hänen
vanhimmat lapsensa olleet oikein niinkuin toiset lapset.

Silloin kaksoiset hymyilivät arasti ja kävivät iloisemmiksi.

Aleksander Dmitrijevitsh rakasti vaimoansa yli kaiken. Hän

jumaloitsi häntä sokeasti, eikä siinä ollut tarpeeksi, että hän olisi
huomannut vaimonsa virheitä, mutta hän ei uskaltanut ajatellakaan
sitä mahdollisuutta, että niitä olisi voinut olla hänessäkin.
 Minä muistan selvästi kuinka se minua ihmetytti.

Minä en olisi koskaan uskonut, että rakkaus voisi ulottua niin

pitkälle. Hän seurasi vaimonsa joka askeletta ja jokainen
pikkuseikka, joka koski Ljudmila Ivanovnaa, huoletti häntä.

"Mene kävelemään, kultani, sää on niin kaunis, muuten sinä nukut

taas levottomasti", toisti hän joka aamu, kun oli juotu teetä.

"Ole kaikin muodoin syömättä kaalia, aarteeni, minä pelkään…

sinähän valitit eilen", sanoi Aleksander hänelle päivällistä
syödessämme.

"Sinä näytät niin kalpealta tänään, iapsukaiseni, tee minulle se

palvelus, että menet levolle, sinä olet väsynyt", sanoi hän
vaimollensa illalla.

Ja Ljndmila Ivanovna rypisti joka hänen sanallensa otsaansa,

vaikk'ei hän vastannut mitään. Minä huomasin sen, mutta
Aleksander Dmitrijevitsh ei ajatellut lainkaan sitä, että hänen
rakkautensa kävisi hänen vaimollensa joskus vastukselliseksi. Joka
kerta, kun Ljudmila Ivanovna soitti pianoa ja lauloi, innostui
Aleksander Dmitrijevits sanomattomasti. Hän huomautti erittäin
äänen puhtaasta soinnusta ja esittämisen sydämellisyydestä, ja
tästä minunkin täytyi häntä kehua. Muutoin hän ei suinkaan laulanut
huonosti.

"Laula tuo laulu, sinä tiedät, aarteeni", oli Aleksander

Dmitrijevitshillä tapana sanoa joka ilta, "Oi armas enkelini, halaa
minua. Se on minun lempiromanssini".

Ja Ljudmila lauloi miehensä lempiromanssin.

 "Kuule", sanoi hän sitten, kääntyen minun puoleeni, "eikö se ole
hurmaava?"

"Oi armas enkelini, halaa minua", lauloi hän tunteellisesta

"Jos sinä vaan tietäisit, kuinka hurmaavan kiltti ja lahjakas minun

vaimoni on; ja hän on todellinen kaunotar — minun Ljudmilani —
eikö totta?"

Mutta kaikkea tuota minä en voinut tietää. Minä en havainnut

Ljudmilassa kaikkia näitä ominaisuuksia. Hän oli kyllä jokseenkin
kaunis, mutta että hän olisi ollut viisas, hyvä ja lahjakas, sitä minä en
voinut parhaimmallakaan tahdollani tunnustaa. Ljudmila Ivanovna
muistutti minulle käytöksellään aina kissaa.

Lyhytkasvuinen, ryhti eteenpäin kallistunut, enemmän lihava kuin

laiha, viheriäiset, viekkaat silmät, joissa aina piili jotakin kaksimielistä
ja ilkeätä, oli Ljudmila. Hänellä oli punainen tiheä taaksepäin
kammattu tukka. Hän liikkui hiljaa ja kuulumattomin askelin
väljällänsä olevassa mustassa puvussaan. Jos hän puhui jonkun
kanssa ystävällisesti, ei tietänyt, oliko hänen sanoillansa vilpitön
tarkoitus, vai oliko ystävyyden osoitus pelkkää teeskentelyä. Jos hän
oli sitten kenen kanssa tahansa yhdessä… lastensa tahi miehensä
kanssa, niin ei olisi voinut päättää, oliko hän hyvä äiti ja vaimo, vai
oliko hän ylipäänsä hyvä nainen vai ei. Minä en tullut sen
viisaammaksi siinä suhteessa, rakastiko hän miestänsä ja lapsiansa.

Hän oli 24 vuoden vanha eikä ollut nauttinut erityistä sivistystä,

lukuunottamatta sitä, että hän oli viettänyt kuukauden
kasvatuskoulussa. Kotona vanhan, hyvin niukan sivistyksen saaneen
tilanomistajattaren luona, joka eli yksinäisyydessä, oli vallan
mahdoton täyttää hänen laiminlyötyä kasvatustansa; hän ei oppinut
muuta kuin suolaamaan sieniä ja ruokkimaan kalkkunoita.

Mutta omasta mielestään oli Ljudmila hyvin sivistynyt ja

maailmanviisas. Hän oli tietävinänsä Pietari Suuresta; hän näytti,
että hänellä oli jotakin käsitystä nihilisteistä ja intelligenssistä ja että
hän vielä tiesi sanoa, missä Ruotsi ja Norja ovat; hän osasi lausua
nopeasti "charmant", hän lauloi ja soitti pianota. Huolimatta näistä
kaikista ominaisuuksistaan, minun on suoraan tunnustaminen, että
sydäntäni oikein kirveli ajatellessani, että Aleksander Dmitrijevitsh oli
vaimokseen sattunut saamaan sellaisen naisen, joka ei lainkaan
sopinut hänelle hienotunteiselle miehelle. Minusta hän olisi voinut
valita itselleen sopivamman vaimon, mutta nähdessäni taas kuinka
onnelliselta hän näytti kodissaan, luulottelin minä päättäneeni väärin.

"Miks'ei Ljudmila olisi sopiva vaimo Aleksander Dmitrijevitshille?

Senkötähden ett'ei hän osaa puhua niin kauniisti ja että hän
hymyilee niin kummallisesti? Siinä minä tuomitsen väärin."
IV.

Neljä päivää oli jo kulunut minun tulostani Aleksander Dmitrijevitsh

oli erittäin hyvä ja hellä minua kohtaan. Hän arvasi kaikki minun
toivomukseni, ennenkuin minä ehdin niitä ilmoittaakkaan. Hän otti
selvän minun lempiruoistani ja piti huolen siitä, että minulle niitä
tarjottiin.

Minä olin hänelle rakkaana vieraana, sillä hän oli tuntenut minun
vanhempani niin kauan ja rakasti meidän kotiamme niinkuin
omaansa. Sitä enemmän tahtoi hän olla minulle hyödyksi. Myöskin
Ljudmila Ivanovna oli kohtelias ja hyvä minulle, vaikka hänen
ystävyytensä näytti minusta teeskenneltyltä ja teki sentähden
luonnollisesti minuun ikävän vaikutuksen.

Kun me eräänä iltana istuimme teepöydän ääressä, kysyi häneltä

Aleksander Dmitrijevitsh, joka tapansa mukaan huolehti hänestä,
minkätähden hän oli niin surullinen.

"En minä ole surullinen", vastasi Ljudmila Ivanovna äreästi.

"Älä nyt suutu, armaani, en minä tarkoittanut loukata sinua", sanoi

Aleksander Dmitrijevitsh, kummastuen ja murheellisena.
 "Ethän sinä loukkaa minua, mutta minä olen todellakin väsynyt
sinun ijankaikkisiin kysymyksiisi; milloin minä olen kalpea, milloin
surullinen, väliin yhtä, väliin toista…"

"Mutta kultani, kuinka sinä voit sanoa niin", sanoi Aleksander

Dmitrijevitsh nuhdellen.

Häntä näytti Ljudmilan tuo hänelle vallan odottamaton käytös

suuresti hämmästyttävän. Surun ja kärsimyksen ilme painui hänen
kasvoillensa. He olivat kumpikin vaiti. Minä katsahdin Ljudmila
Ivanovnaan.

"Nyt vasta näkee mikä ihminen hän on", ajattelin minä. Äkkiä
lähetti hän minulle tuskin näkyvän hymyn ja katsoi minuun
viheriäisillä silmillänsä. Minä huomasin niissä pahan hohteen.
Vaitiolo kävi tuskalliseksi.

Silloin juosta karkasivat lapset meluten huoneestansa ja

tauvottivat hiljaisuuden.

"Isä, isä kulta, me rakennamme huoneita, pieniä kivihuoneita",

huusi
Tanja.

Aleksander Dmitrijevitsh otti hänet syliinsä ja käveli hänen

kanssaan hiljaa edes takaisin. Ljudmila Ivanovna seurasi heitä
katseillaan.

"Se on todellakin sietämätöntä", rupesi hän valittamaan, kun

Aleksander Tanja selässänsä oli poistunut huoneesta. "Aleksander
Dmitrijevitsh (hän kutsui miestänsä aina niin, aivan kuin tunnustaen
hänen henkistä etevämmyyttänsä) on toimissaan kaiket päivät, ja
minä olen aina yksin, alinomaa yksin, ilman seuraa, ilman huvituksia.
Minä iloitsen suuresti teidän käynnistänne luonamme. Ei kukaan ole
tähän asti tullut tänne; rauhantuomari vaan silloin tällöin poikkeaa
meille, mutta hänkin on jo vanha. Sitä paitsi Aleksander Dmitrijevitsh
saattaa itsellensä liian paljon vaivaa minun tähteni, väliin minä väsyn
kauheasti häneen…"

"Hänkin jo vanha…" minä toistin mielessäni Ljudmilan sanat — ne

olivat törkeitä eikä suinkaan kauniita.

Hän istui teekeittiön luona ja tarjosi teetä.

"Aina minun täytyy jäädä kotia", jatkoi hän, "ainoastaan kerran

olen minä ollut tanssiaisissa klubissa, siellä oli niin hauskaa… Ah,
kuinka minun oli hauskaa! Siellä oli niin paljon upseeria… Pidättekö
te tanssista?"

"Kyllä, joskus", vastasin minä vastahakoisesti.

Minä yhä vielä näin silmissäni Aleksander Dmitrijevitshin

hyvänsuovat, surulliset kasvot.

Mutta eriskummallista kyllä, vaikka Ljudmila Ivanovnan valitukset

ja hänen käytöksensä olivat minulle vastenmielisiä ja hänen raaka
puheensa pahasti loukkasi minua, oli hänessä tällä hetkellä jotakin
puoleensa vetävää, vieläpä viehättävääkin. Hän keskusteli nyt niin
avosydämmisesti ja vilpittömästi minun kanssani, että minä oikein
otin osaa hänen suruunsa ja minun tuli häntä sääli, hänen miehensä
kun tarjosi hänelle niin vähän huvituksia.

"Miksi te ette pyydä Aleksander Dmitrijevitshiä käymään

kanssanne paikassa ja toisessa; sitä hän ei varmaankaan kieltäisi
teiltä", sanoin minä yhä enemmän osaa-ottavaisesti.

Minä rupesin ihailemaan hänen pientä ja pehmeätä kättänsä,

jonka suonet näkyivät hyvin pirteästi ja jossa hän piti hopealusikkaa.

"Ah, en, minä en tahdo pyytää häntä siihen, minä tiedän, ettei hän
mielellänsä käy minun kanssani vieraissa, ja mitä se
hyödyttäisikään…
Nythän te olette tullut tänne meidän luoksemme, ja minua
ilahuttaa…"
Hän veti suunsa vinoon ja hymyili ainoastaan yhdellä suunkulmalla.

Minä katselin häntä. Meidän katseemme kohtasivat toisensa, ja

nämät jokseenkin pitkälliset ja tutkivaiset katseet merkitsivät sekä
hänellä että minulla jotakin epärehellistä. Minä tunsin, että minun
sydämmeni kuohui. Täytymys, joka tähän asti oli leimannut
seurusteluamme, oli tällä hetkellä täydelleen haihtunut ja antoi
arvaamatonta sijaa molemminpuoliseen lähestymiseen.

Myöhemmin illalla, kun lapset olivat menneet, levolle, istuimme

minä ja Aleksander shakkipöydän ääressä: mutta hän ei ollut iloinen
eikä laskenut leikkiä niinkuin ennen. Ljudmila Ivanovna oli taas
päinvastoin niin vilkas ettei koskaan ennen, hän lauloi paljon ja soitti
valssin "Mennyt aika". Hänen poskiansa punotti ja hän puhui
taukoamatta. Minä vastasin hänen yksinkertaisiin kokkapuheisiinsa,
mutta minä huomasin, että vaikka Aleksander Dmitrijevitsh nauroi,
häntä ei kuitenkaan miellyttänyt, että hänen vaimonsa laski leikkiä
minun kanssani. Hän luotti kuitenkin minuun ja vaimoonsa, niin että
ainoastaan nuo Ljudmilan edellisellä hetkellä lausutut sanat
pahoittivat hänen mieltänsä ja ne, ne nyt turmelivat koko hänen
iltansa. Sitä paitsi oli Aleksander Dmitrijevitsh sekä hengellisesti että
ruumiillisesti likinäköinen eikä hän sentähden huomannut sitä, minkä
minä äkkiä keksin ja minkä jokainen tulokas olisi heti huomannut,
Niissä katseissa, joilla Ljudmila tarkasteli miestänsä, oli jotakin
halveksivaa ja pahaa.

Kun me illalla erosimme toisistamme, piti Ljudmila minun kättäni

omassa kädessään kauvemmin kuin muutoin ja hän puristi sitä
kovemmin kuin ennen. Taas hän katsoi minuun niin kummallisesti,
niinkuin ensin teepöydän ääressä, ja tuo katse sai minut
rauhattomaksi. Aleksander Dmitrijevits sanoi surumielisenä minulle
hyvää yötä, ja minä lähdin huoneeseeni.

Maata pantuani tunsin minä itseni rikolliseksi. Minun omatuntoni ei

ollut puhdas ja rauhallinen. Minä olin näkevinäni edessäni tänä iltana
kiihoittuneen Ljudmilan hänen viheriäisine, vetistyneine silmineen ja
hänen rinnallaan Aleksander Dmitrijevitshin suuren hyväntahtoisen
muodon ja murheelliset kasvot.

"Mutta millä ja ketä vastaan olen minä rikkonut?" ajattelin. "Hän

vaan keikailee minun edessäni — siinä kaikki."

Mitään muuta ei voinutkaan tulla kysymykseen, ja minä koetin

rauhoittaa itseäni sillä ajatuksella.

Mutta tietämättäni olin taas tuntevinani hänen valkoisen ja

pehmeän kätensä minun kädessäni ja näkevinäni hänen kostean
katseensa tähystävän minua.

"Niin, hänen käytöksensä minua kohtaan on todellakin muuttunut",

ajattelin minä. "Ensi päivinä oli hän maltillinen, enkä minä käsittänyt
häntä; nyt on vallan toista. Hän ei rakasta miestänsä, joka
päinvastoin on hänelle vastenmielinen. Mutta kuinka hän on
kaunis!… Mitä tyhmyyksiä tämä on?" ajattelin jälleen, "vai olenko
minä tullut hulluksi? Hänhän on Aleksander Dmitrijevitshin vaimo!…"

Kun minä seuraavana aamuna astuin ruokahuoneeseen, olivat jo

kaikki siellä koossa, ja kaikki näyttivät olevan parhaimmalla tuulella.
Puolisot olivat rakentaneet rauhan. Aleksander Dmitrijevitsh oli
jälleen iloisella ja hyvällä mielellään. Ljudmila Ivanovna taas oli
kainona ja maltillisena. Hyväillen hän puhui miehensä kanssa ja oli
minulle tyly. Mutta minä näin kyllä, että hän teeskenteli. Hän oli vaan
näön vuoksi hellä miehellensä, mutta antoi minulle niinkuin
edellisenäkin päivänä, salaisia silmäyksiä. Aleksander Dmitrijevitsh
ei huomannut mitään.

Sinä päivänä piti hänen matkustaman kaupunkiin virkatoimissaan.

Kun me olimme juoneet teetä, jätti hän meidät. Ljudmila Ivanovna
painoi suutelon hänen sileäksi ajetulle poskelle.

"Ehkä minun täytyy jäädä kaupunkiin yöksi", sanoi Aleksander

Dmitrijevitsh istuen vaunuissa, "minä kyllä en sitä luule, mutta pidä
huoli, armaani, siitä ettei meidän ystävämme ole ikävä. No, minä
palaan kotia jo illalla."

Rauhallisena ja tyytyväisenä jätti hän meidät.

Heti kun hän oli lähtenyt, menin minäkin kotoa niinkuin minulla oli
joka päivä tapana tehdä, metsään ampumaan lintuja. Tänä päivänä
se oli minusta erittäin mieleistä, melkeimpä välttämätöntä. Minä
tahdoin päästä selville siitä, mikä minua kiusasi. Minä kuljin kauan
pensastossa ja tiheän metsän rinteellä ja ammuin joitakuita
kyntölintuja.
 Mutta minä en voinut pitää ajatuksiani koossa, oliko siihen sitten
syynä se, että minä olin väsynyt vaiko jotain muuta. Minä tunsin taas
tuota entistä tahdonheikkoutta ja minä antauduin hiomisille
ajatuksille, niille ajatuksille, joista jo olin kärsinyt Moskovassa. Minä
ymmärsin, ett'ei itseänsä voi minnekään paeta.

Minä olin täydelleen Ljudmila Ivanovnan ja hänen viheliäisten

silmiensä ja polttavien käsiensä vallassa.

Voi tuntua kummalliselta, mutta hänen kuvansa oli painunut niin

syvälle minun mielikuvitukseeni, että minä en voinut ainoastaan
vapautua siitä, vaan minä myös en nähnyt enkä ajatellutkaan mitään
muuta. Minä koetin vakuuttaa itselleni, että Aleksander Dmitrijevitsh
oli minun vanha ystäväni, ett'ei minulla ollut oikeutta ajatella hänen
vaimoansa sillä tavoin, että minä olin paatunut ja turmeltunut olento,
jos voisin antautua moisten ajatusten valtaan… mutta mikään ei
auttanut. Minä tiesin, mitä naisia hän oli. Minä käsitin nyt hänen
käytöksensä minua kohtaan, mutta minulta jo puuttui voimia ajatella
hänestä toisella tavoin.

"Mutta hänhän on Aleksander Dmitrijevitshin vaimo, tuon hyvän ja

rakastettavan miehen, joka on kantanut minua ja minun veljiäni
käsillänsä", toistin minä rauhoittuakseni.

"Sehän on halpamaista ja inhoittavaa", sanoin minä itsekseni, ja

sitä seuraa omantunnon vaivat ja tuskat".

"Tietenkin… niinkin… mutta… hän on niin hurmaava! …"

Ja jälleen jouduin riettaiden ajatusten ja himojen valtaan.

 Sillä tapaa minä kiusaamistani kiusasin itseäni kuleskellen ympäri
metsässä. Eläin oli minussa herännyt ja se kärsi hirveästi. Minä
tahdoin ajaa pois itsestäni sen, mikä minua kiusasi, mutta voimat
puuttuivat minulta. Ljudmilan ja minun välilläni oli solmittu näkymätön
sähkövirta, enkä minä enää jaksanut sitä katkaista.
V

Kun olin menossa kotia, kello kahden vaiheilla päivällä, tuli Ljudmila
Ivanovna minua vastaan kartanon läheisyydessä. Hänen kanssansa
olivat hänen kaksoisensa, hän oli ilman hattua, mutta hän oli
heittänyt päällensä mustan lämpöisen viitan.

"Oletteko te väsynyt?" kysyi hän minulta. "Me päätimme tulla teitä

vastaan. Teidän ystävänne Tanja ei tahtonut tulla mukaan; vaan
mieluummin jäädä kotia lapsentytön kanssa; hänen on ikävä, kun
hänen isänsä on poissa. Miten ihana on ilma tänä päivänä!"

"Kyllä", sanoin minä ja tunsin, kuinka hänen odottamaton tulonsa

hermostutti minua.

"Minä olen ajatellut teitä koko päivän", sanoin minä; nuo sanat
pääsivät suustani huomaamattani.

"Vai niin? Ja minä teitä. Se on totta. Tulkaa nyt kotia, niin me

syömme päivällistä."

Me kävimme toistemme rinnalla. Hän uhkui verevyyttä ja

nuoruutta. Tuoksu hänen ruumiistaan ja haju kuihtuneista
koivunlehdistä ja kosteasta maasta yhteisesti myrkyttivät hermojani
ja riistivät minun tahdonvoimani viimeisenkin jäännöksen. Kaksoiset
juoksivat edellämme, suuret kummikalossit pienissä ohutsäärisissä
jaloissaan.

"Tiedättekö, minulla on kerrottavana teille uutinen", sanoi Ljudmila

Ivanovna hetkisen oltuamme vaiti, kääntäen päänsä minua kohden
ja katsoen minua suoraan silmiin.

"Mikä uutinen?"

"Arvatkaa!"

"Koskeekohan se Aleksander Dmitrijevitshiä?"

"Aivan niin, ja mitä luulette sen tietävän?"

"Eikö hän tule tänään kaupungista kotia?"

"Te olette arvannut oikein. Vaunut palasivat äsken, ja kuski toi

minulle kirjeen, mieheni kirjoittaa, että hänellä on tärkeitä asioita
kaupungissa toimitettavana ja tulee sentähden kotia vasta
huomenna."

"Mahdotonta", huudahdin minä epäillen.

"Totta se on, minä vakuutan…" kuinka minä osasinkaan arvata

uutisen jonka hän tahtoi ilmoittaa minulle. Luultavasti hänen
keikailemisensa ja sen salaperäisyyden tähden, jolla hän siitä puhui.
Olihan sitä paitse itse Aleksander Dmitrijevitsh lähtiessään sanonut
tulevansa kotia ehkä vasta seuraavana päivänä.

Tultuamme kotia, söimme päivällistä ja sitten kävelimme lasten

kanssa puutarhassa. Kello 5 joimme teetä. Illalla istuin salissa hänen
kanssaan kahden. Minä luin sanomalehteä ja hän kirjaili korko-
ompelua.

"Ei, minun täytyy matkustaa jo tänä päivänä iltajunassa", päätin

minä ja yhä vaan luin, ymmärtämättä mitä luin. "Sehän on kauheata,
hänhän antaa minun selvästi ymmärtää… Aleksander Dmitrijevitsh
parka… ja minäkin… mutta kauheinta tässä on se, ettei hän näe
mitään; senpä tähden kaikki näyttää niin yksinkertaiselta".

"Aikanne kuluu teiltä Moskovassa kai hyvin hauskasti?" kysyi

Ljudmila
Ivanovna ja hänen silmistään loisti samalla kummallinen valo.

"Oh niin, tavallansa", vastasin minä.

"Ja minun on täällä niin ikävä", jatkoi hän, nostamatta silmiänsä

työstään. "Aleksander Dmitrijevitsh on kaikessa tapauksessa jo
vanha… minä kyllä kunnioitan häntä suuresti, mutta kuitenkin…
hänhän voisi minulle olla isänä. — —"

"Jo vanha… voisi olla isänä…" toistin minä mielessäni, "en, minä
en erehdy."

Samassa hän näytti minusta vastenmieliseltä. Kun hän erityisellä

äänenpainolla lausui sanan "vanha" ja useamman kerran toisti
saman sanan, oli hän minusta inhottava. Minä ponnistin viimeiset
voimani ja nousin seisoalleni.

"Tiedättekö", sanoin hänelle päättäväisenä, "minä matkustan heti;

olen vallan unhoittanut, että olen siihen pakoitettu. Minä kyllä lupasin
Aleksander Dmitrijevitshille viipyä täällä vielä pari päivää, mutta sitä
en kuitenkaan nyt voi."
 Hän katseli minua hämmästyneenä.

"Mutta kaikin mokomin, se ei käy päinsä. Mitä Aleksandnr

Dmitrijevitsh ajattelisi. Jääkää, minä pyydän."

Hän kävi levottomaksi.

"Ei, minun täytyy lähteä. Minun täytyy pyytää teitä heti käskemään
valjastamaan hevoset vaunujen eteen", toistin minä vakavasti.

"Mikä teidän on?" kysyi hän mielitellen ja tarkoittavaisesti,

päästyään hämmästyksestään.

Hän nousi sohvasta, lähestyi minua, tuli viereeni ja tarjosi minulle

kätensä. Hänen silmänsä tummenivat, ja hän veti silmäluomensa
hiukan yhteen.

Lastenkamarista kaikui korvissamme Tanjan heleä ääni.

"Ei, sehän ei käy päinsä", sanoin minä hänelle, tarttuen hänen

käteensä ja puristaen sitä, "se ei saa tapahtua, se ei saa tapahtua!"

Huolimatta vastustuksestani halusin tuona hetkenä sulkea hänet

syliini; hän tunsi laitani ja kuiskasi:

"Rakkahin ystäväni, se saa tapahtua, se saa…"

Hän laski olkapäilleni kätensä, joka hänellä oli vapaana, ja lähenti

kasvonsa puoleksi avonaisine huulineen minun kasvoihini. Jotkut
pitkät, pehmeät hiukset, jotka peittivät hänen otsaansa, koskettivat
silmiäni.

"Illemmalla", kuiskasi hän, yhdellä hyppäyksellä, kuin kissa,

vetäytyen luotani.