4 :: POSTHUMAN IDENTITY
One needs at least some subject position: this need not be either
unitary or exclusively anthropocentric, but it must be the site for
political and ethical accountability, for collective imaginaries and
shared aspirations. Philosophical investigations of alternative ways
of accounting for the embedded and embodied nature of the
subject are relevant to develop an approach to subjectivity worthy
of the complexities of our age.... Both kinship and ethical
accountability need to be redefined in such a way as to rethink links
of affectivity and responsibility not only for non-anthropomorphic
organic others, but also for those technologically mediated, newly
patented creatures we are sharing our planet with.In short, Braidotti takes seriously the challenges posed by the advent of bio-medical
scientific advances and global technological transformations as they impact on
networks of human and non-human actors. But she is insistent that the critical
challenge is a reformulated theory of subjectivity which reinscribes posthuman
identity into ‘radical relationality, including webs of power relations at the social,
psychic, ecological and micro-biological or cellular levels’ (2013: 102).
Whilst not reliant on psychoanalysis as a critical method for the reinterpretation of
subjectivity, Braidotti appears at times broadly sympathetic to certain central themes
in European-inspired post- Freudian thought. She writes, for example, of the
posthuman subject as ‘internally differentiated’. In The Posthuman (2013: 189), she
casts nomadic subjectivity in terms of the ‘psyche – with its affective, fantasy-ridden,
desire-driven complications’. Indeed in some respect, there are certain overall –
albeit admittedly distant – similarities between the views of Braidotti and Lacan.
Braidotti’s belief that the notion of ‘man’ is an upshot of European culture, a notion
which has subsequently atrophied, has some similarities to Lacan’s attempt to break
with traditional notions of consciousness of self through a ‘decentring of the subject’.
Elsewhere, she invokes Lacan’s account of the ‘Real’ – along with Freud’s ‘uncanny’
and Kristeva’s ‘abjection’ – for thinking the productive forces of monadic subjectivity.
But this is where any similarities end. Braidotti’s nomadic subject is not that of
Lacan, and nor will she have much truck with his notions of the imaginary and
symbolic as essential to the constitution of identity. ‘The posthuman subject’, she
proposes (2013: 188),
is not post-structuralist, because it does not function within the
linguistic turn or other forms of deconstruction. Not being framed by
the ineluctable powers of signification, it is consequently not