Opening the Floodgates
In Patterns of Dissonance (1991), Rosi Braidottiís feminist
philosophy uses Deleuze to her advantage and connects with
Levinasian ethics when she argues: ëfundamental traits of the patri-
archal theoretical system become manifest: its chronic inability to
recognize a state of flow, fluidity, incompleteness, inconclusiveness,
and the relational bond to the other.í^57 As Deleuze and Guattari argue:
It is, of course, indispensable for women to conduct a molar politics, with a
view to winning back their own organism, their own history, their own
subjectivity [Ö] But it is dangerous to confine oneself to such a subject, which
does not function without drying up a spring or stopping a flow [Ö] It is thus
necessary to conceive of a molecular womenís politics that slips into molar
confrontation, and passes under or through them.^58Braidotti attacks patriarchal philosophy in ways comparable with
Deleuze and Guattari as they attempt to think otherwize. Like Deleuze
and Guattari in ëRhizomeí (1983), she calls for fluid conceptions of
identity and inconclusiveness: ëWhat is emerging in feminist writingí
is ëthe concept of a multiple, shifting and often self contradictory
identity, a subject that is not divided in, but rather at odds with
language.í^59 This is what emerges in Berkeleyís poem but also in the
male (as distinct from masculinist) theorists, Deleuze and Guattari.
What the poetry and the theory attack on both sides of the gender
divide are the dividing and delimited philosophies that have
57 Rosi Braidotti, Patterns of Dissonance: A Study of Women in Contemporary
Philosophy, trans., Elizabeth Guild (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), p.140.
58 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus (London: Athlone,
1988), p.276. Cf. Elizabeth Grosz’s essay on the uses of Deleuze and Guattari’s
theorization of deterritorialization for feminists entitled ‘A Thousand Tiny
Sexes: Feminism and Rhizomatics’, Gilles Deleuze and the Theatre of
Philosophy, ed., Boundas, pp.127–212. Here she argues via Rosi Braidotti and
Luce Irigaray that while Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of the body without
organs is problematic for feminists, rhizomatics provides scope for feminist
analysis and discussion.
59 Ibid., p.281.