Filozofski vestnik Letnik/Volume XXIII • Številka/Number 2 • 2002 • 9-26 
BETWEEN THE NO LONGER AND THE NOT YET: 
ON BIOS/ZOE-ETHICS 
Rosi BRAIDOTTI 
I. THE BODY IN POSTMODERNITY 
Even the most convinced social constructivists today agree that the perfor-
mances of bodies cannot be ascribed exclusively to the social codes or to sym-
bolic and imaginary orders - nor can they be read back into the Holy Scrip-
tures of the DNA Scrolls. Both "nature" and "the body" are slippery catego-
ries - that tend to slide towards essentialism; get caught into positivist reduc-
tions - or in their opposite: new-age holistic celebrations of one-ness. In the 
age of the politics of bio-diversity, the inter-dependence of the natural and 
the social, needs to be explored outside classical, dualistic habits of thought. 
I prefer a deeply embedded vision of the embodied subject. In the light of 
contemporary genetics and molecular biology, it is feasible to speak of the 
body as a complex system of self-sustaining forces. The DNA an the cells com-
municate effectively with each other, transferring vital information. In terms 
of bio-diversity, we humans are actively and destructively involved in manipu-
lating our environment. Neuro-sciences have increased our understanding 
of memory and the extent to which the storage and retrieval of information is 
essential to the progress of the self. This is evidence which can no longer be 
ignored by critical, Left-leaning intellectuals. Nor need it be left to the delu-
sions of grandeur of professional scientists and their industrial, financial back-
ers. 
The body has come back in late postmodernity and with a vengeance in 
social practices and discourses as well as in science and bio-technology; in 
contemporary evolutionary theory and under the impact of information tech-
nologies. The body is a bundle of contradictions: it is a zoological entity; a 
genetic data-bank, while it also remains a bio-social entity, that is to say a slab 
of codified, personalized memories. It is part animal, part machine but the 
dualistic opposition of the two, which our culture has adopted since the 18th 
century as the dominant model, is inadequate today. Contemporary science 
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Rosi BRAIDOTTI 
and technology in fact have reached right into the most intimate layers of the 
living organism and the structures of the self, dissolving boundaries that had 
been established by centuries of humanistic thinking. This means that we can 
now think of the body as an entity that inhabits different time-zones simulta-
neously, and is animated by different speeds and a variety of internal and 
external clocks which do not necessarily coincide. 
At both the macro and the micro levels the body is caught in a network of 
power effects mostly induced by technology. This is the driving force of the 
globalization system and the Trans-national economy which engender con-
tinuous constitutive contradictions at the "g-local" level. Whether we take bio-
technologies, or the new information and communication technologies, the 
evidence is overwhelming. Capital-flow undeterred by topological or territo-
rial cons t ra in t s has achieved a d o u b l e goal . I t has s imul taneous ly 
"dematerialised" and re-solidified power differentials. Think for instance of 
media-events such what happened on September 11, or Princess Diana's burial, 
or the Serbs' ethnic cleansing of Kosovo - which are experienced in the rela-
tive quiet of one's living room television set as virtual happenings. But they 
are not of course. The "virtual" reality of the migrants, asylum seekers or refu-
gees is not high tech, but rather comes close to a very low-tech brand of social 
invisibility. Power these days means high-definition visibility, as opposed to 
the over-exposed anonymity of the excluded, the losers. Accordingly the vir-
tual reality of cyber-space is also a highly contested social space, or rather - a 
set of social relations mediated by technological flow of information. 
An implication of this process is that cyberspace and the "cyborg" subjec-
tivity it offers are no longer the stuff fiction is made of. On the contrary, the 
blurring of the boundaries between humans and machines is socially enacted 
at all levels: from medicine, to Tele-/communication, finance and modern 
warfare, cyber-relations define our social framework. The cyborg: an embod-
ied human subject that is structurally inter-connected to technological ele-
ments or apparati. is however, not a unitary subject position. It is rather a 
multi-layered, complex and internally differentiated subject. Cyborgs today 
would include for me as much the under-paid, exploitative labour of women 
and children on off-shore production plants, as the sleek and highly trained 
physiques of jet-fighters war-pilots, who interface with computer technolo-
gies at post-human levels of speed and simultaneity. Both the highly groomed 
body of Princess Diana and the highly disposable bodies of women in war-
to rn , e thn ic -c leans ing lands . Both t he t r i u m p h a n t muscu la r i ty of 
Schwarzenegger's Terminator and the frail bodies of those workers whose bodily 
juices - mostly sweat and blood - fuel the technological revolution. One does 
not stir without the other. 
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BETWEEN THE NO L O N G E R A.ND THE NOT YET: O N B I O S / Z O E - E T H I C S 
Contemporary culture tends to react to the cyber-world according to a 
double-pull: on the one hand the hype and on the other hand the nostalgia, 
I would plea for a more "passionately distant" approach. I think that a form of 
neo-materialist appreciation of the body would be helpful here, to think 
through the kind of techno-monstrous universe we are inhabiting. Rethink-
ing the embodied structure of human subjectivity at such a point in history 
requires an ethics of lucidity, as well as powers of innovation and creativity. I 
wish to avoid references to biological, psychic or genetic essentialism, while 
taking fully into account the fact that bodies have indeed become techno-
cultural constructs immersed in networks of complex, simultaneous and po-
tentially conflicting power-relations. I do not want to fall, however, into ei-
ther moral relativism or the suspension of ethical judgement. 
In late postmodernity, advanced capitalism functions as the great nomad, 
the organizer of the mobility of commodified products. "Free circulation" 
pertains almost exclusively to the domain of goods and commodities. People 
do not circulate nearly as freely. It is therefore crucial to expose the logic of 
economic exploitation that equates nomadic flux with profit-minded circula-
tion of commodities. Moreover, knowing that hardly 20% of households in 
the world have electricity, let alone telephone-lines and modems, will may 
one wonder about the "democratic," let alone the "revolutionary" potential 
of the new electronic frontier. Thus, access and participation to the new high-
tech world is unevenly distributed world-wide, with gender, age and ethnicity 
acting as major axes of negative differentiation. 
On a more philosophical level, in relation to the embodied subject, the 
new technologies make for prosthetic extensions of our bodily functions: 
answering machines, pagers and portable phones multiply our aural and 
memory capacities; microwave ovens and freezers offer timeless food-supply; 
sex can be performed over telephone or modem lines in the fast-growing 
area of "teledildonics;" electrical tooth-brushes and frozen embryos enlarge 
other bodily functions: video and cam-corders, Internet networks and a 
plethora of simulated images open up a field that challenges the Platonic 
notion of "representation" that has been sedimented by centuries of practice. 
The technologies have affected the social space of postmodernity by bringing 
about a dislocation of the space-time continuum. Technologies induce a dis-
location of the subject, allowing not only for deferred or virtual social and 
personal relations, but also for a pervasive social imaginary of ubiquity and 
timelessness. 
In such a hyped-up context it is only inevitable that the body of the "oth-
ers" will strike back. On an everyday sociological level, the body is striking 
back, with a vengeance. And as usual, the female body is the avant-garde. As 
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Rosi BRAIDOTTI 
Camilla Friggers (1997) argues, an estimated 2 million American women have 
silicon breast implants - most of which leak, bounce off during bumpy air-
plane flights, or cause undesirable side-effects. Millions of women through-
out the advanced world are on Prozac or other mood-enhancement drugs. 
The hidden epidemic of anorexia-boulimia continues to strike 1 /3 of the 
females in the opulent world. Killer-diseases today don ' t include only the great 
exterminators, like cancer and AIDS, but also the return of traditional dis-
eases which we thought we had conquered, like malaria and T.B. Our immu-
nity system has re-adjusted to the anti-biotics and we're vulnerable again. There 
is no question that what we still go on calling - somewhat nostalgically - "our 
bodies, ourselves" are abstract technological constructs fully immersed in 
advanced psycho-pharmacology, the chemical industry, bio-science and the 
electronic media. What is equally clear for me is that we need to be vigilant. 
The techno-hype is over and we need to assess more lucidly the price that we 
are paying for being so "high tech." We got our prosthetic promises of per-
fectibility - now, let's hand over our pound of flesh, shall we? 
II. BODIES-IN-TIME 
A body is, spatially speaking, a slice of forces that have specific qualities, 
relations, speed and rates of change. Their common denominator is that they 
are intelligent matter, i.e.: are endowed with the capacity to affect and be 
affected, to inter-relate. Temporally speaking, a body is a portion of living 
memory that endures, that lasts, that goes on - for a while - by undergoing 
constant internal modifications following the encounter with other bodies 
and forces. The key point is the embodied subject's capacity for encounters 
and inter-relation. As such, desire and yearning for inter-connections with 
others lies at the heart of subjectivity. 
This idea of the primacy of desire, however, expresses also as a critique of 
the psychoanalytic reduction of desire to (hetero) sexuality and of both to 
preferably reproductive genital activity. I want to "nomadise" desire so as to 
free it f rom the normative cage within which it was enclosed. Affectivity 
(conatus') is indeed the heart of the subject, but this desire is not internal-
ized, but external. It happens in the encounter between different embodied 
and embedded subjects not all of them human, who are joined in the sameness 
of the forces that propel them. Intensive, affective, external resonances make 
desire into a force that propels forward, but also always remains in front of us, 
as a dynamic, shifting horizon of multiple other encounters, of territorial and 
border-crossings of all kind. 
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BETWEEN THE NO LONGER A.ND THE NOT YET: O N B I O S / Z O E - E T H I C S 
Being-in-time means essentially being or subject of / in memories. Remem-
bering is about repetition and the retrieval of information. In the human 
subject, such information is stored throughout the physical experiential struc-
ture of the embodied self and not only in the "black box" of the psyche. It's 
the whole body that functions as a slab of enfleshed genealogy. 
Re-membering is about composition, selection and dosage. Like a chore-
ography of flows or intensities that require adequate framing in order to com-
pose into a form of their own, memories coalesce through empathy and co-
hesion between their constitutive elements. Memories materialize like a quest 
for temporary moments when an affective balance can be sustained, before 
the forces dissolve again and move on. And on it goes, never equal to itself, 
but faithful enough to itself to endure, and to pass on. 
Memory is fluid and flowing, it opens up unexpected or virtual possibili-
ties and it is transgressive in that it works against the programmes of the domi-
nant memory-system. This continuous memory is however not necessarily or 
inevitably linked to "real" experience. I contest the authority of "experience" 
and the extent to which it both confirms and perpetuates the belief in steady 
and unitary identity, I would rather link memory to the imagination. 
The imaginative, affective force of remembrance — that which returns 
and is re-membered/re-peated - is the propelling force. When your re-mem-
ber in the intensive or minoritarian-mode, in fact, you open up spaces of 
movement - of de-territorialisation - that actualise virtual possibilities which 
had been frozen in the image of the past. 
Bio-centered Egalitarianism 
Being-in-time also refers to the biological clock that is in-built into the 
embodied organism. It is very difficult to find a 21st century word to describe 
adequately, that is to say: lucidly, secularly, fairly and with a sense of social 
justice what is commonly referred to as "life." 
Life is half animal: Zoe (Zoology, zoophilic, zoo), and half discursive: 
bios (bio-logy). Zoe, of course, is the poor half of a couple that foregrounds 
bios defined as intelligent life. Centuries of Christian indoctrination have left 
a deep mark here. The relationship to animal life: to zoe. rather that bios 
constitutes one of those qualitative distinctions upon which Western reason 
erected its empire. Bios is holy, Zoe quite gritty. That they intersect in the 
human body turns the physical self into a contested space, i.e.: a political 
arena. The mind-body dualism has historically functioned as a shortcut 
through the complexities of this in-between contested zone. I believe that 
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Rosi BRAIDOTTI 
one of the most persistent and unhelpful fictions that is being told about 
human "life" is its alleged self-evidence, its implicit worth. Zoe is always sec-
ond best and the idea of life carrying on independently of, even regardless of 
rational control - is the dubious privilege attributed to the non-humans. These 
covers all of the animal kingdoms as well as the classical "others" of meta-
physically based visions of the subject, namely the sexual other (woman) the 
ethnic other (the native). In the old regime, this used to be called "Nature." 
The point here is that, traditionally, the self-reflexive control over life is 
reserved for the humans, whereas the mere unfolding of biological sequences 
is for the non-humans. Given that this concept of "the human" was colonized 
by phallogocentrism, it has come to be identified with male, white, hetero-
sexual, Christian, property owning, standard language speaking citizens. The 
rest, especially since Darwin and evolutionary theory, however, the non-hu-
man, Zoe has grown to encompass increasingly large and central zones. Con-
temporary scientific practices have forced us to touch the bottom of some 
inhumanity that connects to the human precisely in the immanence of its 
bodily materialism. With the collapse of the qualitative divide between the 
human and His (the gender is no coincidence) others, the deep vitality of the 
embodied self has re-surfaced from under the crust of the old metaphysical 
vision of the subject. A meta-morphosis. which is no metaphor - but some-
thing closer to a metabolic mutation. Give fleas a chance. This is the bottom 
line. This obscenity, this life in me, which is intrinsic to my being and yet so 
much "itself," that it is independent of the will, the demands and expecta-
tions of the sovereign consciousness. This Zoe makes me tick and yet escapes 
the control of the supervision of the Self. Zoe carries on relentlessly and gets 
cast out of the holy precinct of the "me" that demands control and fails to 
obtain it. It thus ends up being experienced as an alien other, the monstrous 
other. This potency (potentia) of Life is experienced as "other" by a mind 
that cannot do anything else but fold upon itself in narcissism and paranoia, 
the two pillars on which the West was won. And go on patrolling its own con-
stitutive borders as if it were in charge of them. Life is experienced as in-
human, but only because it is all too human; obscene, because it lives mind-
lessly on off-limits. This scandal, this wonder, this zoe. that is to say an idea of 
Life that is more than bios and supremely indifferent to logos, this piece of 
flesh called my "body," this aching meat called my "self' expresses the abject/ 
divine potency of a Life which consciousness lives in fear of. Nomadic subjec-
tivity is, by contrast, in love with Zoe. It's about the post-human as becoming 
animal/becoming other/becoming insect/becoming imperceptible - trespass-
ing all metaphysically-grounded boundaries. Ultimately, becoming-impercep-
tible and fading, death beingjust another time sequence. 
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BETWEEN THE NO LONGER A.ND THE NOT YET: O N B I O S / Z O E - E T H I C S 
The significant thing about posthuman bodies is not so much that they 
occupy the spaces in between what is between the human the animal and the 
machines, that is to say a dense materiality. Posthuman bodies are also sur-
prisingly generative, in that they stubbornly and relentlessly reproduce them-
selves. The terms of their reproduction are slightly off-beat by good old hu-
man standards in that they involve animal, insect, and inorganic models. In 
fact they represent a whole array of possible alternative morphologies and 
"other" sexual and reproductive systems. The paradigm of cancerous prolif-
eration of cells is an example of this mindless self-duplicating capacity of gen-
erative/life. 
This marks a shift in terms of a new paradigm: we are at the end of the 
post-nuclear model of embodied subjectivity and we have entered the "viral" 
or "parasitic" mode. This is a graphic way of explaining the extent to which 
today's body is immersed in a set of technologically mediated practices of 
prosthetic extension. It expresses in fact the co-extensivity of the body with its 
environment or territory. A body is a portion of forces life-bound and death-
bound to the environment that feeds it. All organisms are collective and in-
ter-dependent. Parasites and viruses are hetero-directed: they need other or-
ganisms. Admittedly, they relate to them as incubators or hosts, releasing their 
genetically encoded message with evident glee. This expresses a selfish cru-
elty that horror movies capture perfectly, but it is a mere detail in a much 
broader picture. The virus/parasite constitutes a model of a symbiotic rela-
tionship that defeat binary oppositions. It is a simulacrum that duplicates 
itself to infinity without any representational pretensions. As such it is an in-
spiring model for a nomadic Eco-philosophy of subjectivity. 
This points to an ancestral continuity between the human and its previ-
ous incarnations at different stages of its evolution. A kind of genetic legacy, 
a trans-species proximity, which bio-technologies bring out and exploit clev-
erly. Exit Heidegger and enter instead the private horror museum depicted 
in Alien TV, where the heroine is able to see the earlier versions of herself, 
dutifully conserved in a bio-technological laboratory which traces her evolu-
tionary history as a perfect clone of herself. A genetic family album. I cannot 
think of a better image for the posthuman predicament than this set of dupli-
cates or simulacra, which have fed upon the original organism, consuming it 
like parasites. Horrific, unholy technologically-mediated monstrous births of 
copies from copies, cells multiplying from cells in a DNA-driven display of life 
as a multiplicity of force that encompass both zoe and bios. But zoe is the driver's 
seat. 
This model of the body is symbiotic inter-dependence. It points to the co-
presence of different elements, from different stages of evolution: like inhab-
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Rosi BRAIDOTTI 
iting different time-zones simultaneously. The human organism is neither 
wholly human, nor just an organism. It's an abstract machine, which cap-
tures, transforms and produces inter-connections. The power of such an or-
ganism, is certainly neither contained nor confined to consciousness. 
What if consciousness were, in fact, a secondary mode of relating to one's 
own environment and to others? What if consciousness were no cognitively or 
morally different from the pathetic howling of wolves in the full moonlight? 
What if, by comparison with the know-how of animals, conscious self-represen-
tation were blighted by narcissistic delusions and consequently blinded by its 
own aspirations to self-transparency? What if consciousness were ultimately in-
capable of finding a remedy to its obscure disease, this life, this zoe. an imper-
sonal force that moves me without asking for my permission to do so? 
For The Love Of Zoe 
What attracts me to zoe is the part of me that has long become disen-
chanted with and disengaged from the anthropocentrism that is built into 
humanistic thought. That in me which no longer identifies under the domi-
nant categories of subjectivity, and which is not yet completely out of the cage 
of identity- that rebellious and impatient part, runs with Zoe. 
This rebellious components of my subject-position, which is dis-identi-
fied from phallogocentric premises - are direcdy related to my being embod-
ied as female. Being female, I am a she-wolf, a breeder, an incubator, a carrier 
of vital and lethal viruses. My gender historically never quite made it into full 
humanity, so my allegiance to that category is negotiable and not to be taken 
for granted. In the political economy of phallogocentrism and of its anthro-
pocentric humanism, which predicates the sovereignty of Sameness, my sex 
fell on the side of Otherness, understood as pejorative difference, or as being 
worth- less- than. 
I make such a statement not as an essentialist position, but rather as the 
acknowledgement of a location, i.e. a starting position of dissymetrical power 
differentials. This location is not only geo-political but also genealogical and 
time-bound. It makes a sedimented layering of meanings and representations 
which are tattooed on my female sexed body and position me in the spatio-
temporal co-ordinates of reality as a socio-symbolic entity vulgarly known as 
"woman." 
In other words, I argue for a bond of empathy or affinity with my fellow 
"others," the animal, the native, the alien, the infantile, the insane, the other. 
Sarah Lefanu (1988), in her analysis of science fiction texts written by women, 
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BETWEEN THE NO LONGER A.ND THE NOT YET: O N B I O S / Z O E - E T H I C S 
remarks how many women writers show explicitly this bond between women 
and various brands of monstrous or alien others. Allied in the struggle against 
a common colonizer. Far closer to zoe than to bios in the materiality of bod-
ies that are mortal and imperfect- feminist-minded women have struck an 
alliance that goes quite far into subverting the sovereignty of the Same. I want 
to re-claim my zoe-philic location and turn it into my advantage, by enlisting 
it in support of the process of undoing anthropocentrism and its natural spin-
off of andro-centrism. I want to unfasten their joint reliance on the phallic 
signifier, i.e. the political economy of Sameness and of its specular, binary 
and constitutive "others." 
I want to run with wolves against the gravitational pull of the humaniza-
tion of all that lives. And celebrate instead the generative power, the immense 
intelligence and the affective intensity of the non-human, the organic and 
inorganic "others" and of the specific vitality which they express. Give me zoe 
and give me death. 
III. THE ETHICS OF SUSTAINABILITY 
This bio-philosophy is an ethics, defined with Spinoza as a topology of 
affects, based on the selection of these passions or forces. This process of 
unfolding affectivity is central to the composition of immanent bodies. The 
selection of the forces is regulated by an ethics of joy and affirmation which 
functions through the transformation of negative into positive passions. These 
imply the repetition of pleasure and the avoidance of sadness and of the rela-
tions that express sadness. The selection of the composite positive passions 
opens up spaces of becoming or corporeal affects. This is essentially a matter 
of affinity: being able to enter a relation with another entity whose elements 
appeal to one is what produces ajoyful encounter. They express one's poten-
tia and increase the subject's capacity to enter into further relations, to grow 
and expand. This expansion is time-bound: the nomadic subject by express-
ing and increasing its positive passions empowers itself to last, to endure, to 
continue through and in time. This makes possible future perspectives it writes 
the pre-history of a fu ture . Entering into relations, or virtual nomadic 
becomings engenders the world by making possible a web of sustainable in-
ter-connections. 
I want to think sustainable subjects. The concept of sustainability is no 
easy matter. I am of the generation that lost so many of its specimen to dead-
end experimentations of the narcotic, political, sexual or technological kind. 
Although it is true that we lost as many if not more of our members to the 
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Rosi BRAIDOTTI 
stultifying inertia of the status quo - a sort of generalized "Stepford wives" 
syndrome - it is nonetheless the case that I have developed an acute aware-
ness of how painful, dangerous and difficult changes are. They need to be 
dosed and timed carefully, according to one's threshold of sustainability. The 
process of becoming is this trip across different fields of perception, different 
spatio-temporal coordinates. It is simultaneously a slowing-down of the rhythm 
of daily frenzy and an acceleration of awareness, self-knowledge and the senses. 
When dosed correctly it can lead to shifts in one's sense and orientation in 
the world - nothing as grandiose as Huxley's drugs-induced hope of throw-
ing open the doors of perception. Rather something more humble, like a 
quickening of one's perception, a being-there with and for other entities, 
forces, beings, so as to be transported fully into the magnificent chaos of life. 
What is, then, this sustainable subject? 
It is a slice of living, sensible matter activated by a fundamental drive to 
life: a potentia (rather than potestas) - neither by the will of God, nor the 
secret encryption of the genetic code - and yet this subject is embedded in 
the corporeal materiality of the self. The enfleshed intensive or nomadic sub-
ject is an in-between: a folding - in of external influences an d a simultaneous 
unfolding - outwards of affects. A mobile entity - in space and time - an 
enfleshed kind of memory - this subject is in-process, but is also capable of 
lasting through sets of discontinuous variations, while remaining extra - ordi-
narily faithful to itself. 
This "faithfulness to oneself ' is not to be understood in the mode of the 
psychological or sentimental attachment to an "identity" that often is little 
more than a social security number and a set of photo albums. Nor is it the 
mark of authenticity of a self; it is rather the faithfulness of duration, the 
expression of one's continuing attachment to certain dynamic spatio-tempo-
ral co-ordinates. In a philosophy of temporally-inscribed radical immanence, 
subjects differ. But they differ along materially embedded co-ordinates: they 
come in different mileage, temperatures and beats. One can and does change 
gears and move across these co-ordinates, but cannot claim all of them, all of 
the time. There are limits and their threshold is sustainability. 
This sense of limits is extremely important to prevent nihilistic self-de-
struction. To be active, intensive-nomadic, does not mean that one is limit-
less. That would be indeed the kind of delirious expression of megalomania 
that you find a lot in the cyber-freaks of today, ready and willing to: "dissolve 
the bodily self into the matrix." I want to argue instead that to make sense of 
this intensive, materially e m b e d d e d vision of the subject, we need a 
sustainability threshold. The dosage of the threshold of intensity is both cru-
cial and inherent to the process of becoming. 
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What is this threshold of sustainability and how does it get fixed? 
The subject lies at the intersections with external, relational forces. It's 
about assemblages. Encountering them, is almost a matter for geography: it's 
a question of orientations, points of entry and exit, a constant un-folding. In 
this field of transformative forces, sustainability is a very concrete practice -
not the abstract ideal that some of our development and social-planning spe-
cialist often reduce it to: it is a basic concept about the embodied and embed-
ded nature of the subject. The sensibility to and availability for changes or 
transformation are directly proportional to the subject's ability to sustain the 
shifts without cracking. The border, the framing or containing practices are 
crucial to the whole operation - one which aims at affirmative and not dissi-
pative processes of becoming -jovful-becoming - potentia - as a radical force 
of empowerment. 
A radically immanent intensive nomadic body is an assemblage of forces, 
or flows, intensities and passions that solidify - in space - and consolidate - in 
time - within the singular configuration commonly known as an "individual" 
self. This intensive and dynamic entity - it's worth stressing it again - is not an 
inner rationalist essence, nor is it merely the unfolding of genetic informa-
tion. It is rather a portion of forces that is stable enough - spatio-temporally 
speaking - to sustain them and to undergo constant, though, non-destruc-
tive, fluxes of transformation. Mutation, yes - but not into the nihilism of 
some of the narco-philosophers of today, who celebrate "altered states" for 
their own sake. It is a field of transformative affects whose availability for 
changes of intensity depends firstly on its ability to sustain, the encounter 
with and the impact of other forces or affects. 
So how does one know if one has reached the threshold of sustainability? 
- the body tells you by opposing resistance, falling ill, feeling nauseous. Oth-
ers will warn you - here the film Trainspotting or the famous heart-shot in the 
overdose scene of Pulp Fiction of fer graphic representations of being over the 
top. Your own potentia or joyful, affirmative energy will suffer. The room for 
affirmative expression shrinks and negative passions fold in upon the subject, 
diminishing h i m / h e r . These are all powerful indications of the limit. This is 
sort of an ecology of the self. The rhythm, speed and sequencing of the af-
fects as well as the selection of the forces are crucial to the process. 
The concept of a sustainable self aims at endurance. Endurance has a 
temporal dimension: it has to do with lasting in time - hence duration and 
self-perpetuation. But it also has a spatial side to do with the space of the 
body. It means putting up with, tolerating hardship and physical pain. Ulti-
mately, as Irigaray put, it requires a generous belief in the potentialities of a 
virtual future, also known as: "I had a dream." Isn't it paradoxical that one's 
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deepest longing for change, social justice, empowerment for women and a 
better world - all forward-looking activities, get expressed in the mode of the 
past. "I had a dream" translates for me into: "I will have wanted to make a 
difference to the world." The past is only the prelude to future perfect, if not 
to perfect futures. 
Sustainability has to do also with whatever gets you through the day 
The transformation of negative into positive passion is crucial to a non-
normative concept of limit. Affectivity in fact is that which activates an em-
bodied subject, empowering h i m / h e r to interact with others. This accelera-
tion of one's existential speed, or increase of one's affective temperature, is 
the dynamic process of becoming. 
What bodies are capable of doing (or not) is biologically, physically, psy-
chically, historically, sexually and emotionally specific, i.e.: partial. Ultimately, 
the thresholds of sustainable becoming also mark their limits. In this respect: 
"I can't take it anymore" spoken in pain as in pleasure is an ethical statement, 
not the assertion of defeat - it sets the boundary of a subject-in-process who is 
shot through with waves of intensity. To recognize thresholds or limits is thus 
crucial to the process of becoming nomadic. 
The question of the limit can also be discussed in terms of mathematical 
approximation, as that which can hardly ever be reached. It can also be ren-
dered, however, in terms of addiction. For instance reminiscing on his own 
early alcoholism, Deleuze notes that the limit, or frame for the kind of alter-
ations that are induced by alcohol is to be set with reference not so much to 
the last glass; because that is the glass that is going to kill you. What matters 
instead is the "second-last" glass - the one that is going to allow you to survive, 
to last, to endure - and consequently also to go on drinking again. A true 
addict always stops at the second-last glass, at the one - removed - from the 
fatal sip, or shot. A death-bound entity, however, usually shoots straight for 
the last one. This is no expression of a desire to start again tomorrow - or to 
repeat that "last shot." In fact, there is no sense of a possible tomorrow: time 
folds in upon itself and excavates a black hole into which the subject dis-
solves. 
I would speak out clearly against the unsustainable flows of transformation 
induced by drug-consumption. Though I'm not against "mind-expansion" and 
"mood-enhancement" drugs. What I am against is that which tips over the thresh-
old of tolerance of the organism. Addiction is not an opening up, but a narrow-
ing-down of the field of possible becomings. It locks the subject up in a black 
20 
BETWEEN THE NO L O N G E R A.ND THE NOT YET: O N B I O S / Z O E - E T H I C S 
hole of inner fragmentation without encounters with others. The black hole is 
the point beyond which the subject implodes and disintegrates. 
I am saying this because I want to attempt to strike an ethical position 
that would contest standard morality and coincide neither with the "laissez-
faire" ideology, nor with repression and moralism. In stressing the notion of 
sustainability, I want to re-focus the debate around the need for embodied 
and embedded perspectives - i.e.: not the fantasy of boundlessness. I also 
want to re-iterate the importance and positivity of transformative experimen-
tations, which construct differences without going too far. Vitality and trans-
gression, but without self-destruction. 
I also argue against the Christian-based belief in the alleged self-evidence 
and implicit worth of "life." This belief system has confined into the con-
tainer-category of "sin," or "nihilism" phenomena which are of daily signifi-
cance to my culture and society: dis-affection of all kinds; addictions of the 
legal (coffee; cigarettes; alcohol; over-work; achievement) and of the illegal 
kind; suicide, especially youth-suicide; birth-control, abortion, and the choice 
of sexual practices and sexual identities; the agony of long-term diseases; life-
supporting systems in hospitals and outside; depression and burn-out syn-
dromes. In contrast with the mixture of apathy and hypocrisy that marks the 
habits of thought that sacralize "life," I would like to cross-refer to a some-
what more "darker," but more lucid tradition of thought that does not start 
from the assumption of the inherent, self-evident and intrinsic worth of "life." 
I think that one has to "jump-start" into life each and every day, the electro-
magnetic charge needs to be renewed constantly: there is nothing natural or 
given about it. As a consequence, I find that the non-evidence of "getting on 
with it" generates another relevant ethical question that is: "what is the point?" 
I do not mean this in the plaintive or narcissistic mode, but rather as the 
necessary moment of stasis that precedes action. It is the question mark that 
both prefaces and frames the possibility of ethical agency. When Primo Levi, 
who asked that question ah his life, and struggled to answer it all his life -
actually failed to find the motivation for raising the question once more, sui-
cide followed. That gesture, however, was not the sign of moral defeat, or a 
lowering of one's standards. On the contrary, it expresses one's determina-
tion not to accept life at an impoverished or diminished level of intensity. 
Commenting on Primo Levi's and Virginia Woolf s suicides Deleuze -
who will choose himself this way to terminate his own existence - put it very 
clearly: you can suppress your own life, in its specific and radically immanent 
form and still affirm the potency of life, especially in cases where deteriorat-
ing health or social conditions may seriously hinder your power to affirm and 
to joyfully endure. This is no Christian affirmation of Life, nor transcenden-
21 
Rosi BRAIDOTTI 
tal delegation of the meaning and value system to categories higher than the 
embodied self. Quite on the contrary, it is the intelligence of radically imma-
nent flesh that states with every single breath that the life in you is not marked 
by any signifier and it most certainly does not bear your name. Death is just 
another interval. A long one. 
Because of this ethics of affirmation and positivity, "whatever gets you 
through the day," whatever life-support, mood-enhancement system one is 
dependent on, is not to be the object of moral indictment, but rather a neu-
tral term of reference: a prop along the way. 
Whatever facilitates the release of adrenaline, including high levels of 
physical exercise; work-alcoholism or the standard assemblage: "writing/ 
books/the friendly purr of the PC/e-mails/music/concentration/think think." 
We all have the patterns of dependency that we deserve. Most mood-enhance-
ment systems are minor and quite legal. Even the standard line of assemblage 
described above, however, can take hell-bent deviations, towards excessive 
snacks (anorexia/bulimia variable); or drinks (alcoholism variable) or any 
other "fix" (the narcotics variable). The boundaries between these and the 
other, "normalised" life-support systems, however, is merely one of degrees, 
not of kind. If life is not a self-evident category, in fact; if "what's the point?" is 
an ethically viable question, then whatever gets you through the day is an 
equally viable option. 
The subject-in-becoming is the one for whom "what's the point?" is an 
all-important question. A high-intensity subject is also animated by unparal-
leled levels of vulnerability. With nomadic patterns comes also a fundamental 
fragility. You are just as human as the others, only slightly more mortal. Pro-
cesses without foundations need to be handled with care; potentia requires 
great levels of containment in the mode of sustainable framing. Sustainability 
assumes the idea of continuity - it does assume faith in a future, and also a 
sense of responsibility for "passing on" to future generations a world that is 
liveable and worth living in. A present that endures is a sustainable model of 
the future. 
You play you win you play you lose, you play. 
Hence the importance of stopping at the second last dr ink/smoke/shot . 
"Enough," or "not going too far" expresses the necessity of framing, not the 
common-sense morality of the mainstream cultural orthodoxy. "Enough" 
designs a cartography of sustainability. "Whatever gets you through the day" 
need not be the manifesto for self-destruction that is often made to be. It can 
merely help us frame a threshold of sustainable patterns of transformative 
changes, of becomings as modes and moods of empowerment. 
I would like to develop this notion of sustainability into an ethics of dif-
22 
BETWEEN THE NO LONGER A.ND THE NOT YET: O N B I O S / Z O E - E T H I C S 
ferential sustainable subjects. I would like to propose a public discussion on 
these issues right across some of the problematic social issues of today: drugs; 
addictions of all kind; youth suicide; AIDS prevention and sex education; 
euthanasia; anorexia/boulimia; abortion; the burn-out and stress related to 
post-industrial life-styles. I would like this agenda to be taken seriously. As 
important at this stage is for me to challenge any chain by any conceptual, 
theoretical or philosophical school to the monopoly over issues of ethics and 
moral values. Whether in the neo-liberal brand of cosmopolitanism defended 
by Nussbaum, or in the neo-Kantian mode that is so prevalent in feminist 
theory today, and is best exemplified by Benhabib, or the classical ethics of 
sexual difference. Such claims to moral superiority or rectitude are simply 
untenable, as well as internally contradictory. 
I want to plead instead for a less moralistic and conceptually more rigor-
ous agenda that combines a broader approach with a serious commitment to 
think alongside contemporary culture and not against its grain. "Whatever 
gets you through the day" as the melancholy refrain of "fin-de siècle" covers 
the depression of suburban opulence, as much as the despair of homeless life 
in the streets. Both the centre and the periphery are shot through by pro-
foundly de-stabilizing, perverse power-relations which engender equally som-
bre social relations. It seems to me that a critical agenda for the next millen-
nium, both in feminist theory and in the mainstream, cannot fail to address 
these issues. We need to talk about the simultaneity of opposite social and 
cultural effects, and to address them in a non-moralistic manner. What is at 
stake, ultimately, is an acceleration that would allow us to j ump over the high 
fence of the ruins of metaphysics. Not in a Utopian mode, but in a very em-
bodied and embedded way, actualized in the here and now. We need a pro-
cess by which "Being" gets dislodged from its fundamentalist pedestal, starts 
whirling off its logocentric base - and gets a beat. Losing its dogmatic author-
ity, "Being" can expose at last the multiple "differences within" - exposing 
also its function as the great pretender, stitching together the different mo-
ments it enacts and which it does not encompass into a unity that "Being" 
allegedly supervises. 
As in Gertrude Stein's operatic prose, a swift exhilaration emanates from 
texts which are clearly indexed on the potentia empowerment of life. Some-
thing that puts wings on our feet and infusesjoyfulness. 
If it doesn't have the right beat, it will not work - but if it blasts off our 
minds with excessive intensity, it will not be much good either. Let us just 
choose for the staggering intelligence of "just a life." Just a life in its radical 
immanence , in a f f i rmat ion and sets of discontinuous but sustainable 
becomings. It may be a way of returning the subject to the specific complexity 
23 
Rosi BRAIDOTTI 
of one's singularity - and returning the activity of "thinking" to a lightness of 
touch, a speed which many of us passionately aspire to. The rest, of course, is 
silence. 
References 
Deleuze, Gilles (1953) Empirisme et subjectivité, Paris: Presses Universitaires de 
France. English translation: (1991) Empirism and Subjectivity. An Essay on 
Hume's Theory of Human Nature, New York: Columbia University Press; 
translation by C.V. Boundas. 
Deleuze, Gilles (1962) Nietzsche et la philosophie, Paris: Presses Universitaires 
de France. English translation: (1983) Nietzsche and Philosophy, New York: 
Columbia University Press; translation by Hugh Thomlinson and Bar-
bara Habbeijam. 
Deleuze, Gilles (1964) Proust et les signes, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. 
English translation: (1972) Proust and Signs, New York: G. Braziller; trans-
lation by R. Howard. 
Deleuze, Gilles (1966) Te bergsonisme, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. 
English translation: (1988) Bergsonism New York: Zone Books. 
Deleuze, Gilles (1968) Différence et Répétition, Paris: Presses Universitaires de 
France. English translation: (1968) Difference and Repetition, London: 
Athlone. 
Deleuze, Gilles (1968b) Spinoza et le problème de l'expression, Paris: Minuit. En-
glish translation: (1990) Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza, New York: 
Zone Books; translation by M. Joughin. 
Deleuze, Gilles (1969) Logique du sens, Paris: Minuit. English translation: (1990) 
The Logic of Sense, New York: Columbia University Press; translation by M. 
Lester and C. Stivale. 
Deleuze, Gilles (1972) Un nouvel archiviste, Paris: Fata Morgana. English trans-
lation: "A new Archivist," in: Peter Botsman (ed.) (1982) Theoretical Strat-
egies, Sydney: Local Consumption. 
Deleuze, Gilles (1973a) La pensée nomade, Paris: Union Générale d'Edition. 
Deleuze, Gilles (1973b) "La Pensée nomade," in: Nietzsche Aujourd'hui, vol-
ume 1, Paris: Union Generale d'Edition, pp. 159174. English translation: 
(1985) "Nomad thought," in: David B. Allison (ed.), The New Nietzsche: 
Contemporary Styles of Interpretation, Cambridge Mass.: MIT Press. 
Deleuze, Gilles and Claire Parnet (1977) Dialogues, Paris: Flammarion. En-
glish translation: (1987a) Dialogues, New York: Columbia University Press; 
translation by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habbeijam. 
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BETWEEN THE NO LONGER A.ND THE NOT YET: O N B I O S / Z O E - E T H I C S 
Deleuze, Gilles (1978) "Philosophie et minorité," in: Critique, nr. 369, Paris, 
pp. 154155. 
Deleuze, Gilles (1981) Francis Bacon: Logique de la sensation 1, Paris: Editions 
de la différence. 
Deleuze, Gilles (1983) Cinéma I: L'Image-Nouvement, Paris: Minuit. English trans-
lation: (1986) Cinema I: The Movement-Image, Minneapolis: University of 
Minnesota Press; translation by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habbeijam. 
Deleuze, Gilles (1985) Cinéma II: Limage-Temps, Paris: Minuit. English trans-
lation: (1989) Cinema II: The Time-Image, Minneapolis: University of Min-
nesota Press; translation by Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta. 
Deleuze, Gilles (1986) Foucault, Paris: Minuit. English translation: (1988) Fou-
cault, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press; translation by Sean 
Hand. 
Deleuze, Gilles (1988a) Le pli, Paris: Minuit. English translation: (1992) The 
Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 
Deleuze, Gilles (1988b) Péricles et Verdi: Le Philosophy de François Châtelet, Paris: 
Minuit. 
Deleuze, Gilles (1989) "Qu'est-ce qu 'un dispositif?," in: Michel Foucault 
Philosophe, Paris: Seuil, pp. 185195. 
Deleuze, Gilles (1995) "L'immanence: une vie..." Philosophie, nr. 47, pp. 3-7. 
Deleuze, Gilles (1972) "Les Intellectuels et le pouvoir. Entretien Michel Fou-
cault, " in: L'arc, nr. 49, pp. 3-10. English translation: (1973) "Intellectu-
als and Power," in: D. Bouchard (éd.), Language, Counter-memory, Practice, 
pp. 205-17, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press; translation by D. 
Boudiano. 
Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari (1972a) L'Anti Oedipe. Capitalism et 
Schizophrénie, Paris: Minuit. English translation: (1977) Anti-Oedipus. Capi-
talism and Schizophrénie, New York: Viking Press/ Richard Seaver; transla-
tion by R. Hurley, M. Seem and H. R. Lane. 
Deleuze Gilles and Felix Guattari (1972b) "Capitalisme énurgumène," in: 
Critique, nr. 306, Nov. 1972. 
Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari (1975) Kafka: pour une literature mineure, 
Paris: Minuit. English translation: (1986) Kafka: Toward a Minor Litera-
ture, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press; translation by Dana 
Polan. 
Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari (1976) Rhizome, Paris: Minuit. English trans-
lation: "Rhizome," in: Ideology and Consciousness, nr. 8, spring 1981, pp. 
49-71; translation by Paul Foss and Paul Patton. 
Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari (1980) Mille Plateaux. Capitalism et 
Schizophrénie II, Paris: Minuit. English translation: (1987b) A Thousand 
25 
Rosi BRAIDOTTI 
Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Minneapolis: University of Minne-
sota Press; translation by Brian Massumi. 
Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari (1986) Nomadology, New York: Semiotexte; 
translation by Brain Massumi. 
Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari (1991) Qu'est-ce que la philosophie'?, Paris: 
Minuit. English translation: (1992) What is Philosophy?, New York: Colum-
bia University. 
Griggers, Camilla (1997) Becoming-Woman, Minneapolis: University of Minne-
sota Press. 
Irigaray, Luce (1974) Spéculum de l'autre femme, Paris: Minuit. English transla-
tion: (1985) Speculum of the Other Woman, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University 
Press; translation by Gillian Gill. 
Irigaray, Luce (1977) Ce Sexe Qui N'en Est Pas Un, Paris: Minuit. English trans-
lation: (1985) This Sex which is not One, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University 
Press; translation by Catherine Porter. 
Irigaray, Luce (1980) Amante Marine. De Friedrich Nietzsche, Paris: Minuit. 
Irigaray, Luce (1983) L'Oubli de l'chez Martin Heidegger, Paris: Minuit. 
Irigaray, Luce (1984) L'éthique de la différence sexuelle, Paris: Minuit. English 
translation: (1993) An Ethics of Sexual Difference, Ithaca, NY: Cornell Uni-
versity Press; translation by Carolyn Burke & Gillian Gill. 
Irigaray, Luce (1987a) Sexes et parentés, Paris: Minuit. 
Irigaray, Luce (1989) Le Temps de la Différence. Pour Une Révolution Pacifique, 
Paris: Hachette. 
Irigaray, Luce (1990) Je, Tu, Nous, Pour une Culture de la Différence, Paris: Grasset. 
English translation: (1993) Je, Tu, Nous. Towards a Culture of Difference, 
New York/London: Routledge; translation by Alison Martin. 
Irigaray, Luce (1994) Thinking the Difference. For a Peaceful Revolution, London: 
Athlone Press; translation by Karin Montin. 
Irigaray, Luce (1987) "Egales à Qui?," in: Critique. Revue Générale des Publica-
tions Françaised et étrangères, vol.43, 480, pp. 420-437. English translation: 
(1988) "Equal to whom," in: differences, A Journal of Feminist Cultural Stud-
ies, vol. 1, no 2, pp. 59-76. 
Irigaray, Luce (1991) "Love between us," in: E. Cadava, P. Connor, J.L. Nancy 
(eds.), Who Comes After the Subject?, New York and London: Routledge, pp. 
167-177. 
Lefanu, Sarah (1988) In the Chinks of the World Machine. Feminism àf Science 
Fiction London: The Women's Press. 
26