4 :: POSTHUMAN IDENTITY
cultural predicament. ‘The work of post-colonial and race theorists’, Braidotti remarks,
‘displays a situated cosmopolitan posthumanism that is supported as much by the
European tradition as by non-Western sources of moral and intellectual inspiration’
(2013: 46). Culture, in the sense of the European ideal of the Enlightenment, has been
intricately interwoven with violent domination, structural injustice and barbarism.
Braidotti finds in postcolonial theory a powerful attempt to think through the Western
failure to realize the ideals of the humanist Enlightenment, and especially to critique
such political and ethical failings, without succumbing to cultural relativism or moral
nihilism. Here she finds inspiration from, and frequently cites, the work of Edward Said
on the colonial experience and its entanglement with Enlightenment-based secular
humanism, as well as the more recent ideas of Paul Gilroy on the spread of a ‘planetary
cosmopolitanism’. In particular, she underscores the importance of postcolonial
theory for conceptualizing the powers of cultural hybridity, mixture, difference and
cosmopolitanism, and asserts the crucial significance of subaltern secular spaces for
contemporary reconfigurations of critical posthumanism.
The second contemporary cultural influence on Braidotti’s critical posthumanism is
that of eco-feminism. In her work The Posthuman, Braidotti tries to integrate what
she calls a ‘nomadic’ viewpoint of the human subject with a critical posthumanism
that draws from environmentalism, ecological theory and feminism. In this
connection, she references the environmental theory of Shiva and Mies on new
ecological values and feminist spiritualities, especially the centrality of the
sacredness of life and human concern for everything that lives. In conceptualizing
this fusing of new ecological and feminist values, Braidotti writes (2013: 49):
I define the critical posthuman subject within an eco-philosophy
of multiple belongings, as a relational subject constituted in and
by multiplicity, that is to say a subject that works across
differences and is also internally differentiated, but still grounded
and accountable.... A posthuman ethics for a non-unitary subject
proposes an enlarged sense of inter-connection between self and
others, including the non-human or “earth” others, by removing
the obstacle of self-centred individualism.Braidotti thus argues it is useful to conceive of posthuman relationality between
nomadic subjects and non-human or ‘earth’ others. The concept of the conscious,
acting subject she sees as a redundant one.
It is through this integration of post-modern social theory (specifically, the work of
Deleuze and Guatarri), feminist, environmental and postcolonial theory that Braidotti