4 :: POSTHUMAN IDENTITY
seeks to interrogate the posthuman condition. In doing so, Braidotti is able to
demonstrate a considerable cosmopolitan range – for example, she consistently
speaks out against xenophobic violence and argues instead for a pluralist
cosmopolitan political practice that recognizes the rights of stateless people and
refugees. Even the most erudite student of modern European thought will find
themselves learning from Braidotti’s encyclopedic knowledge of post-structuralist
and post-modern philosophy, as she travels effortlessly across Spinoza’s monism,
Deleuze’s account of ‘micro-fascisms’, Guatarri’s call for a ‘virtual social ecology’
and Giorgio Agamben’s conceptualization of ‘life/zoe’. Like many post-postmodern
philosophers, she is not necessarily at her clearest when it comes to marshaling the
heavy-duty concepts of contemporary European social theory for the purposes of
social and political analysis, and there are times when her vitalist eco-feminist
critique of ‘multiple belongings’, ‘earth others’ and ‘personal intensities’ sounds
perilously close to a 1960s hippy-collectivism – albeit one updated for theory-savvy
readers. Even so, it is on the theme of subjectivity, and specifically the need to make
sense of the complexities of emergent posthuman forms of identity, that Braidotti has
important things to say. In Braidotti’s view, only a revised critical theory of subjectivity
is capable of adequately addressing the complex phenomena surrounding the advent
of posthuman identities and the postanthropocentric bodies of global capitalism.
Such a standpoint makes Braidotti’s contribution to the debate over posthumanism
uniquely valuable, especially in the context of the dominance of science and
technology studies – and its strong anti-identity position – in the posthuman debate.
By contrast to such anti-subjectivity positions, Braidotti’s conception of posthuman
identity emphasizes the anchoring of identity in internally differentiated, embodied,
embedded and relational configurations as essential components to new posthuman
social transformations. I shall suggest subsequently that the psychic and social
implications of Braidotti’s conception of posthuman identity stretches much further,
and is considerably more complex, than some of her formulations suggest. But for
the moment there are a few further elements in her critique of flexible and multiple
posthuman identities that should be briefly noted.
Braidotti has frequently offered powerful defenses of the centrality of identity in the
frame of our globally networked and technologically mediated societies. Human
subjectivity and identity are currently undergoing a profound series of mutations,
and it is patently absurd, she contends, to suppose that social theory can engage with
such transformations without a critically reflexive and sophisticated account of the
human subject. The chief object of Braidotti’s work is to identify how posthuman
subjects traverse, link and tangle with non-human, techno and ‘earth’ others. As she
writes (2013: 102–103) of the importance of identity in this context: