The final version of this article has been published as:

Van der Tuin, Iris (2014). Diffraction as a Methodology for Feminist OntoEpistemology: On Encountering Chantal Chawaf and Posthuman Interpellation.
Parallax special issue Diffracted Worlds - Diffractive Readings: Onto-Epistemologies
and the Critical Humanities eds. Birgit M. Kaiser and Kathrin Thiele 20.3: 231-44.

Diffraction as a Methodology for Feminist Onto-Epistemology: On Encountering

Chantal Chawaf and Posthuman Interpellation

Iris van der Tuin

On May 24th, 2013, I appear as a speaker at a symposium in The Hague, the Netherlands,
next to Timothy Morton. The symposium is part of the art exhibition Yes Naturally, curated
by Ine Gevers. Morton talks about the fuzziness of things and the consequential necessity of
leaving behind the law of non-contradiction; I discuss how Alfred North Whiteheads answer
to minds in a groove enlightens C.P. Snows attempt at cutting across the two cultures.
After the speeches, we engage in a short discussion.1 I ask Morton about the notion of the
Anthropocene and its role in object-oriented ontology (also known as OOO). Objectoriented ontologists like Morton find the need to philosophically focus on things or objects
confirmed in climate change (an anthropocenic development that extends beyond humanity),
whereas I find it puzzling that precisely Anthropo-cene is supposed to do justice to the
argument that there is contingent being independent of us, and furthermore, that this

contingent being has no reason to be of a subjective nature.2 To me, as I am working on a

new materialism, living in networked societies and experiencing ecological changes in our
everyday lives revitalizes the question of subjectivity. For example, feminist new materialist
Stacy Alaimo has argued: [a]lthough [Ian] Bogost puts forth an ostensibly posthumanist
ontology, I would contend that he reinstalls a humanist and masculinist sense of a
disembodied subject. [] Bogosts speculations on what it means to be a particular object
emerge from a sovereign, enclosed, rational, speculative, mind [original emphasis].3 Morton
answers me that the Anthropo- of Anthropocene is not to be repaired (humans are responsible
for putting carbon in the earths crust), whereas the origin story about the Industrial
Revolution generated as a result of the notion of Anthropocene, which is about to be
officially added to the Geological Time Scale, must be changed indeed. Such a narrative is
predicated on linear time, whereas temporality, to him, is in fact a series of concentric circles
bounded by catastrophes (the steam engine, the A-bomb). As part of his answer Morton
affirms, to my surprise given the androcentrism of much OOO work, the necessity to keep
French feminist writings on origin and temporality alive in contemporary theoretical debates.
This unforeseen reference to French feminism in general and, in fact, to a short text by
Chantal Chawaf in particular, generates an interference pattern with which I will work in this
article so as to generate methodological insights for feminist theorizing today.

A Parting of Ways

Both new materialisms and object-oriented ontology aim at developing avenues for
productive scholarly engagement with the twenty-first-century ecological, energy and
financial crises, including their (dis-)continuous processes of in- and exclusion. New

materialists and object-oriented ontologists often speak in the same lecture theatres. They
populate the same edited volumes and special issues.4 Evaluating the defining theoretical and
conceptual bifurcations of the twentieth century as inadequate, the work coming out of the
two traditions has far-reaching consequences for the disciplinary ways in which academe is
organized. The vignette given above demonstrates that these young fields are generated by a
similar philosophical impetus, however, they diverge as separate schools of thought. What
are the conceptual building blocks of the Y-crossing divergence I see emerging in
contemporary theory circles?

I wish to conceptualize the shared impetus of new materialisms and OOO as a virtual past.
Gilles Deleuze, in Bergsonism, works with this notion in order to develop a take on the past
that allows for it to remain active; i.e., from a feminist point of view, womens oppression is
an actualization of oppression as such. We must not single out the current, known forms of
womens oppression as the sole forms of sexism. Furthermore, we must not reduce the ways
in which men and women relate to being (the) only relations of oppression. Sexual difference
encompasses more diverse relatings, including unexpected ones (and these may be liberating
or oppressive). The widespread actualization of a particular kind of womens oppression does
not exhaust the phenomena of oppression (of women) or sexual difference, because sexually
differentiated relatings are of our virtual past (they are a potential) that resonates in the
present and for the future. Hence, the virtual past is a past in general that is not the
particular past of a particular present but that is like an ontological element, a past that is
eternal and for all time, the condition of the passage of every particular present. It is the
past in general that makes possible all pasts.5 This ontological element can explain how two
diverging schools develop out of our living present.6

New materialisms and OOO can be theorized as two current actualizations of the desire to
think without presupposing dualist structures such as subject and object, word and world,
nature and culture. In the words of Alaimo:

[Feminist new materialist] models scramble conventional notions of subjectivity that

separate the rational human from an external environment. Instead, the posthuman
being is entangled with the very stuff of the world. [] We could, as [object-oriented
ontologists], wonder what it would be like to be a plastic bag or a plastic bottle cap.
Or, we could consider the networks of chemistry, capitalist consumerism, inland
waterways, ocean currents, and addiction to high fructose corn syrup that have created
the Great Pacific Garbage patch.7

Both traditions strive towards cutting across the Kantian deeming impossible of reaching the
Thing-in-Itself. According to OOOers, Kants mind-dependence must be eliminated in order
to move beyond correlationism. They claim that the Thing-in-Itself possesses its own logic
(hence, the ontological turn). New materialists argue that even rationally intuiting a Thing-inItself is preceded by embodied encounters, so they do not leave the human subject behind,
but speak of the entangled nature of knowing and being (onto-epistemology references the
study of practices of knowing in being).8 It is argued that representationalisms cannot do
justice to this entanglement. Whereas the two actualizations of contemporary theory originate
from the same virtual stem, they are conflictual.

I worry that OOOs installation of an ontological turn, bereft of human subjectivity, provides
for the capital-S Subject to come back with a vengeance. My question is therefore: Does
OOO repeat the Death of the Man, authoritatively announced in the late 1960s following a

historicizing act? Feminists have highlighted the flip side of this alleged erasure: the Subjectstatus of unmarked philosophers got reconfirmed in their postmodern embrace of the Death
of the Man, while the marked - women, lesbians, gays, black and post-colonial people - had
just reached human- and subject-status following their involvement in social movements.
French feminists in particular affirmed the human and the subject as multiplicitous, not as
either dead or the One. In this light, I could not have expected the bibliographical reference to
French feminist Chantal Chawaf to be made by a scholar working from OOO. However, the
reference had, upon mentioning, already impacted my evaluation of the relation between new
materialisms and OOO, on the one hand, and, on the other, the cartography of theorists and
schools of thought that I was functioning with in order for a feminist new materialism to
come into being.

Interpreting theoretical debates (new materialisms and OOO) and scholarly encounters
(Morton, Van der Tuin and Chawaf) as themselves practices of knowing in being, it must be
affirmed that I was not only affected by my colleagues comment. Before I knew it, new
materialisms cartography was.9 Making sure that new materialisms feature on two,
entangled levels in this article - first, the cartography that I speak from, second, a cartography
that can be spoken about - is a necessary complication. This complication touches upon both
the temporality of theory (virtual past and actualizations) and subjectivity (the new
materialist placing of the scholarly subject; she is never fully fixed and therefore not in full
control). It is such that I wish to carefully unpack new materialisms anti-anthropocentrism,
and account for the aforementioned Y-crossing, the moment of new materialisms and OOO
parting ways. In an attempt to account for ontology (the ontological element of the past in
general) and epistemology (accounting for subjectivity in a framework of societal and
environmental developments that extend beyond human action, reparation and

comprehension, but must not lead to the return of the Subject), I will innovate on interference
patterning or diffraction as a methodology for capturing what I call posthuman
interpellation. This methodology can account for the specific temporality and subjectivity
that I try to bring to the surface in this article; the temporality and subjectivity at work in
practices of knowing in being. There is something about the always/already affected
cartography of, in my case, feminist new materialism, that compels methodological precision.

Diffraction as Methodology

Donna Haraway coined diffraction as a tool for feminist research into the material-semiotic
reality of technoscience in the 1990s. She added diffraction to the existing toolbox of
semiotics (syntax, semantics and pragmatics) in order to affirm how interference
patterns can make a difference in how meanings are made and lived.10 Taking advantage of
the utopian dimension of her earlier work on cyborgs and situated knowledges, and
working with the paintings and expository words of Lynn Randolph, Haraway invented
diffraction as a tool for a past-present-future relationality which would not comply with a
situation of pejorative (sexual) difference. In spite of Haraways irritation with Deleuze, we
can gloss via Deleuze that Haraway wanted [d]ifference [to] be shown differing [original
emphasis].11 Hence, Deleuzes Bergsonist terminologies, used above, speak intimately to
Haraway (and diffraction).

According to Randolph, every woman is situated on a brink that is constantly on the move.
This image of a singular woman, itself made up of multiple selves whilst being one body,
travels through time in a state of being marked by [t]he screened memory of a powerful male

figure. Nevertheless, this screened memory marks a place where change occurs. This
change is a diffraction, disturbance, interruption, occur[ing] at a place at the edge of the
future, before the abyss of the unknown.12 Qualitatively shifting the feminist critique of the
denigrating, sexist gesture of naturalizing woman by making sure that she is and will remain
her body a body that has to live up to social images of beauty a diffractive reading of
bodies no longer renders them as successfully administered by patriarchy, where the powerful
male figure is a mental origin that oppresses woman through sexist imagery and puts her up
as a physical origin that gives birth to and arouses men. Reading diffractively, the body
incorporates images of patriarchy, reproduction and male lust, of feminism, generativity and
female desire as constantly changing with age and psychic transformations.13

In Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and
Meaning, Karen Barad makes such interference patterning precise by zooming in on
diffraction as an object and method of study. Diffraction for her is a physical phenomenon
that lies at the center of some key discussions in physics and the philosophy of physics and
an apt metaphor for describing the methodological approach [] of reading insights through
one another in attending to and responding to the details and specificities of relations of
difference and how they matter;14 thus reworking the concepts that structure what is
diffracted.15 Reading insights diffractively allows for affirming and strengthening dynamic
links between schools of thought (screened memories) or scholars that only apparently work
toward the same goals. These dynamic links are always/already at work (diffraction is also an
object of study), even in classifications that have built fences around certain traditions; we
have seen this in the opening of this article. Generating new concepts or traditions, new
epistemologies and new futures along dynamic lines, without newness being based on
oppositional binarism, these concepts, traditions, epistemologies and futures are always

generated with the texts and projected futures of the past, and in the living present as
always/already moving towards a future (time cannot be pinpointed, because we are too late
when we say now). Futures and pasts are not there and never sit still, just like the
present is not simply here-now.16

As a physical phenomenon, diffraction features in classical and quantum understandings,

immediately entangled with the shortage of words that characterized the turmoil in physics
and the divergence of the two in the early twentieth century.17 The current intellectual
landscape, which features Barad as a prominent player, is likewise on a cusp, searching for
alternatives, most pertinently alternatives to the reductive effects of dualism in realist and
social-constructivist theorizing. Barad states that diffraction attends to the relational nature
of difference.18 Difference as a relation or, rather, as relatings, has nothing to do with
essences (Being), but it does not shy away from understand[ing] diffraction patterns as
patterns of difference that make a difference to be the fundamental constituents that make
up the world.19 Diffraction is at the very heart of onto-epistemology, which affirms that
ontology changes with epistemology (boiling down to the Kuhnianism of seeing the world as
changed with changes in paradigm-bound conceptual tools), just as much as epistemology is
obliged to attend very closely to the windings of reality. Basing herself in the quantum
understanding of diffraction, which, moving away from classical physics, has been developed
on the basis of the research finding that, under certain circumstances, particles, and even
single particles, can produce diffraction patterns (and classical physics lack of recognizing
this is the shortage of words mentioned above), Barad embraces the key role of a physical
research set-up in experimentation. Consequentially, the correspondence theory of truth (that
the researcher is positioned outside of her research object and the instrument is a neutral
mediator) is being reworked along the lines of a co-responding theory which acknowledges

the researcher, instrument and researched to be active and entangled agents. As such,
diffraction adds to a posthuman understanding of scholarship and the world at large.
Network theories of distributed agency (administered by human subjects) are no longer
sufficient. A posthuman understanding neither places the Subject in the centre nor attempts to
remove him like OOO does, but rather opts for a proper placing of subject, object and
instrument in an agential and material-discursive environment (an assemblage, to speak
with Deleuze).

Barads posthumanism wishes to call[] into question the givenness of the differential
categories of human and nonhuman, examining the practices through which these
differential boundaries are stabilized and destabilized.20 Diffraction is a tool that makes
explicit the destabilization of the dis-embodied and dis-embedded subject position of the
scientist and critical student of science alike. Her posthumanism is anti-anthropocentric as the
blurred (Morton would say fuzzy) human subject affects its not-so-central role in
knowledge production. Moving away from (the effects of) the distancing act of reflection,
Barads diffraction acts in accordance with the rule that Haraway already phrased for optical
instruments, namely that they are subject-shifters.21 Here we do not encounter Michel
Foucaults more rationalist approach to diffraction, which is a determining from a distance
and records clear-cut equivalence or incompatibility amongst object and enunciation in
discursive formations.22 Rather, Haraway advances Trinh T. Minh-has work on
inappropriate/d otherness, which prevents diffractions concept of difference from
following the dualist line (while making provision for an analysis of pejoration). In a
situation of subject-shifting, a dialectic of One and Other cannot be upheld a priori. The
visionary potential of diffraction makes a mapping of interference, not of replication,

reflection, or reproduction.23 Diffractive mappings are not rationally made, because the
productivity of diffraction comes from elsewhere:

[] to be an inappropriate/d other means to be in critical, deconstructive

relationality, in a diffracting rather than reflecting (ratio)nality - as the means of
making potent connection that exceeds domination. To be inappropriate/d is not to fit
in the taxon, to be dislocated from the available maps specifying kinds of actors and
kinds of narratives, not to be originally fixed by difference. To be inappropriate/d is to
be neither modern nor postmodern, but to insist on the amodern [original emphasis].24

This call from elsewhere constitutes the event of posthuman interpellation. Just like
Randolphs every woman, Haraway takes advantage of the fact that [w]hat boundaries
provisionally contain remains generative, productive of meanings and bodies.25 Indeed,
diffraction enables showing difference differing in the material-semiotically entangled reality
of the living present.

French Feminism Classified

Let us go back to the symposium in The Hague and the calling of Chantal Chawaf.
Nowadays, Chawafs name appears mainly on lists ending with et cetera. Encyclopaedias
and textbooks mention her as one of the French feminists of criture fminine. Her writing
style is said to be of the body, which is to say that she writes, just like the famous inhabitants
of this location (Hlne Cixous, Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva), against the grain of the Law of
the Father. This seemingly foundational Law can be cut-across by writing differently; the

Real is reachable when the underdetermined nature of syntax, semantics and pragmatics is
taken advantage of. (Hence, Haraway could add diffraction to this toolbox of semiotics,
which therefore appears to be a virtual past.) Chawaf does not appear in syllabi of womens,
gender and sexuality studies; criture fminine classes, should there be any, feature only the
Holy Trinity of French feminism: Cixous, Irigaray and Kristeva. Combined with its
classificatory rendering, which runs the risk of reducing French feminist work, must we
assume that the work has been relegated to the past and that Chawaf is lost for contemporary
and future academics? An affirmative answer to this question would surely be reductivizing,
because Chawaf still publishes (auto-)fictional work and her complexifying argument about a
writing that is neither feminine nor feminist but rather affective or nurturing in the ecocritical
register complies with many of todays feminist philosophical impetuses.26 Valerie Hannagan
describes how Chawaf strives for independence from any movement or pigeon-holing in an
article that demonstrates how Chawafs work can engender three (generational) responses in
one reader (Hannagan herself).27 This feminist literary scholar wants to be (with) Chawaf, is
negatively critical of her, and concludes by affirming that [d]espite the fact they are given
different names, [Chawafs women] are the same woman. [ We must attend to] the
possibilities that the description or rather evocation of such a woman might afford [original
emphasis].28 Referring back to my introduction, I must acknowledge that Chawaf is an active
force on the map of contemporary feminist theory, even her older work.

Back in May 2013, Morton referred to a text by Chawaf published in the volume New French
Feminisms: An Anthology. This book, edited by Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron,
saw the light of day in 1980 and coined the term French feminism. New French Feminisms
had a huge impact in Anglo-American (feminist) theory circles, yet it was mostly contested in
France. Morton stated that he had read the collection as a student of English literature,

performing and confirming its influence. The publication of this collection of feminist texts
translated from the French by a US publisher generated a massive response from Englishspeaking graduate students working in Paris. The students critiqued the presumed
unlocatedness of the editors; their choices pertaining to the selection of authors and the
coining of French feminism per se were revealed as being informed by an Americancentered objectifying act.29 The students provided a reading of the creation of French
feminism in which the Franco-American Dis-Connection is key.30 The economically more
powerful American camp was, on the one hand, discredited for generating a unifying label
about the French for self-serving purposes. The multiplicitous French feminists (born in
countries like Algeria, Belgium and Bulgaria, which complexified national belongings) were
said to provide the Americans with a theory that could be used and disseminated. On the
other hand, the Americans were ridiculed for being epistemologically disadvantaged as the
camp was said to fail to reflect back upon itself.31

What generally goes unmentioned in the Anglo-American translation and adaptation of

French feminism is the material side of the textual practice of criture fminine. Jane Gallop
has claimed that [we American scholars] associate criture fminine with the body, but we
do not often associate it with what [Virginia] Woolf calls the body of the people, with the
body of women.32 This, she claims, is a misreading. crivains fminins have not wanted to
generate individualist High Theory (abstractly textual) since this would involve a
masculinizing gesture. But they have not wanted to become token feminists either, because
[r]ather than vying for token status, trying to be recognized as good as men (and thus
different from most other women) French feminism claim[s] that Everywoman already
could produce the high culturally privileged writing.33 Caught up in the web of dichotomous
charting, most discussants from the 1980s onwards have failed to notice bodily

materialism34 as a second-wave French feminism. A materialist rendering of criture

fminine, diffractively generated, transverses classificatory dualisms and, as a consequence,
questions the disciplinary nature of body politic(s) (social sciences) and writing (humanities),
and the national indexing of thought.35

Reading Chawaf Diffractively

The above historiographical rendering takes note of a series of distancing acts that cannot do
justice to the ripples on the surface of my cartography of materialisms, ripples resulting from
hearing the name of Chawaf. Trying to reach this abyssal moment, pointing towards the
future, the unknown, in order to capture it, one must take a plunge into thinking in
movement. After I had heard the call of Chawaf, I have re-read her text published in New
French Feminisms in order to grapple with new materialisms cartography as always/already
informed by French bodily materialism. Indeed, I found it to be part of (my take on) feminist
new materialism, changing it simultaneously. Let me try to convey what has happened on a
posthuman level, after which I will discuss posthuman interpellation itself.

In New French Feminisms, Chawafs text does not come with a title. Covering barely two
pages, the text is under 500 words long and was first published in Nouvelles littraires on the
May 26th, 1976. Its French title - La chair linguistique - reminds me of Simone de Beauvoir,
in whose work chair or flesh plays an important role. It is through the flesh that Beauvoir
circumvents Jean-Paul Sartres Self-Other dialectic, an important step for womens liberation
since the hierarchical relation implicit in the Self-Other dialectic is, historically, a dialectic of
sex. The Self-Other hierarchy is cut across when two lovers meet each other carnally in the

(hetero)sexual act.36 Flesh, however, is linguistic in Chawaf. This does not mean that its
transformative potential is therefore undone, or that flesh (matter) is no longer bodily. The
linguisticality of flesh brings Vicki Kirbys Telling Flesh: The Substance of the Corporeal to
mind. Kirby confirms the cultural status of the shorthand woman as nature, i.e. Beauvoirs
main target, but moves beyond Beauvoir and asks on the basis of the transforming nature of
history and culture whether a reversal of the apparent direction of its original critique is now
[today] needed? and, more importantly, whether we [can] always be sure of just what it is
that our vigilance would defend or deny?37 Kirby points at the necessity to keep our thought
away from taxonomy. Our thought must move.

Chawafs text draws a most complex cartography of concepts such as life, earth, matter,
book, words, body, pleasure, that both leap into the unknown (Kirby) and back to the feminist
futures of the past (Beauvoir). In addition, reminiscing Beauvoirs bodily materialism (in
spite of its canonization as social constructivism), and leaping to Kirby are not the only
instances of the text reaching out to written work in bibliographies of past and future
materialisms. The entangled conceptual in(ter)ventions and the textual leaps can detail my
encounter with Chawafs text.

First of all, Chawafs short text is not representational in that its writing is not about
something that is allegedly out there. Acting as a subject-shifter in its own right, a distancing
act is performed only when the conclusive, political programme of the text is formulated:
Feminine language must, by its very nature, work on life passionately, scientifically,
poetically, politically in order to make it invulnerable.38 Only here, feminine language
appears as something other than of the text itself. Chawaf opens her text in a questioning
mode and practices the writing - the sensual juxtaposition of words - so as to liberate a

living paste, to liberate matter.39 This performative mode allows for a transgression of
representationalism. A representationalist mode of writing invites for God-speak and its
consequential repression of linguistic flesh (above, I called this a Kuhnianism). This is an
objectifying move, says Chawaf about the novel in particular: The novel and its traditional
narrative style summarizes, it is a yardstick for measuring distance.40 In order not to repress
linguistic flesh, Chawaf seems to make an anthropomorphizing move by affirming words
must die[; t]hey have a sensorial quality. However, by moving closer to writings original
sources: the body and the earth and therefore making a transversal move instead, one may
develop consciousness and knowledge by liberating our unconscious as well as to bring back
hope.41 To me this close attending to the environment (mentioned above as a quintessentially
new materialist move) makes clear how Chawaf complies with what later became Adrienne
Richs famous dictum for womens writing:

Begin, though, not with a continent or a country or a house, but with the geography
closest in - the body. Here I know at least I exist [] Theory - the seeing of patterns,
showing the forest as well as the trees - theory can be a dew that rises from the earth
and collects in the rain cloud and returns to earth over and over. But if it doesnt smell
of the earth, it isnt good for the earth.42

In accordance with Rich (and thereby traversing the Franco-American Dis-Connection),

Chawaf claims that this (ecological) writing allows her to feel the political fecundity of
mucus, milk, sperm, secretions which gush out to liberate energies and give them back to the
world.43 This materialist and non-linear cadencing of bodily fluids leaps me through Patricia
MacCormacks mucosal monsters from 2013 to Cixous 1975 writing in white ink (milk),
and through Murat Aydemirs 2007 exposition of masculinities via male ejaculation to

Kristevas 1980 study of the abject mothers bodys discharge of blood and milk.44 Other
readers may encounter a different diffraction pattern(ing), the consistency of the diffractions
being that they are sexually differing in and of themselves.

An important element of Chawafs critical creativity pertains to her argumentative style, a

style that is not dismissively negative and prepares for the liberation of the unconscious or
leaping of the reader. Let me give two examples. First, Chawaf aims to disintellectualize
writing [i]n order to reconnect the book with the body and with pleasure.45 Disintellectualization in Chawafs understanding is not a dualist stance that ends up reconfirming
science, but rather - I would say - a rewriting la Jean-Franois Lyotard.46 Chawaf uses
sciences tool of the close-up lens, claiming to use it so as to magnify the word and
examine it at close range: it has its own way of being granulated, ruffled, wrinkled, gnarled,
iridescent, sticky.47 Stumbling upon these sensorial qualities of the word, Chawaf treats
words like materials, in artisanal manner: I offer [words] so that they may be touched and
eaten.48 Using an optical, scientific instrument in a manner that does not obey sciences laws
(in terms of both content and procedure) is a move in which I recognize Haraways Situated
Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective
(1988). Haraway argues that even technoscientific apparatuses, allowing scholars to set in
motion a gaze from nowhere, are used from an embodied location. After all, we can ask what
seemingly dis-embodied locations have to assume in order to do their work. Chawaf uses a
similar strategy, which, secondly, allows her to make the seemingly contradictory statement:
The corporeality of language stirs up our sensuality, wakes it up, pulls it away from
indifferent inertia.49 This statement is contradictory, should we decide to read it along the
known parameters of reflection. According to the latter, matter is mute and language active
(and immaterial). Chawaf has managed to make language corporeal and consequentially

active, whereas inertia becomes indifferent, suggesting that allusions to disembodiment do

not generate something social, vital.50 Here the homosociality of academic knowledge
production is rewritten, and vitality becomes the living force about which Claire Colebrook
has argued that [o]ne can only have signifiers a system of ordered relations if there is
already a potential in life for the perceived to refer beyond itself [original emphasis].51
Indeed, Chawaf argues [t]oo often GOD was written instead of LIFE,52 which Colebrook
makes explicit as a gesture more complicated than the exchange of a top-down for a bottomup approach (suggesting a reconfirmation of stifled sexual difference). In sum, fleshless
academicism53 looses all of its theoretical and political viability; here is the aforementioned
hope.

The potential of non-representationalist writing and reading comes to the fore especially in
relation to Chawafs subject-shifting towards a linguisticality that is corporeal and therefore
active. We encounter a specifically feminist potential that works through the dialectic
inherent to exchanging subject and object (of research): women are not only objects of a male
(academic) gaze and subjects of (critical) feminist movement, because feminist movement
itself (ontology, temporality) has the potential to individuate (epistemology, subjectivity).
This is to say: first feminist movement, then criticality or taking a stand. This individuation
has no need to follow the human parameters of clocktime but is as much a liberation of a
living paste as it is a liberation of our unconscious in order to develop consciousness and
knowledge [] as well as to bring back hope.54 Chawafs text performs a writing that defies
anthropocentric God-speak and the disembodied subject, because any fleshless academicism
(for instance OOO, and Chawaf mentions classicism and rationalism) is demonstrated to
bemute.

Diffraction as Posthuman Interpellation

Haraway states that in technoscience, even inappropriate/d others seem to be interpellated called through interruption - into a particular location that I have learned to call a cyborg
subject position.55 This recapitulates the productive momentum of diffraction, of the call
from elsewhere, of not fitting in the taxon. After all, cyborg subjects, like the genetically
modified lab-animal OncoMouseTM, or the racially-Othered and feminized cleaners of labs,
are produced through and productive of interruption, diffraction, reinvention.56 Cyborgs,
who, like Randolphs every woman and Chawafs single woman (or French feminisms
Everywoman), are made up of multiple selves whilst being one body, are virtual[;
g]enerated, along with other cyborgs, by the collapse into each other of the technical, organic,
mythic, textual, and political, s/he is constituted by articulations of critical differences within
and without each figure.57 Conceptualizing such articulation as the potential for
generation58 complexifies Louis Althussers famous theory of interpellation which initially
suggests a subject-object binary, albeit that he, as we will see below, also introduced
complexifications in his later writings and affirmed a non-linear temporal patterning from the
word go. Haraway mentions interpellation in her diffractive theory; how does interpellation,
and the constitutive role of diffractions for the coming into being of an interpellation, do
justice to the methodological potential of posthuman subjectivity for the feminist materialist
scholar? Note, though, that interpellation extends beyond reconfigured human subjectivity.
Barad exemplifies this point by referencing Kirbys work on causality and communication in
lightning, saying that [i]t is as though objects on the ground are being hailed by the clouds
interpellative address.59 Here interpellation, hence, subjectivity is on the part of non-humans,
which may thicken the call from elsewhere I ascribed to (Mortons mentioning of) Chawaf.

Although Haraway does not fully substantiate her references to Althusser in the context of
diffraction, there are two reasons for doing so. First, as mentioned, interpellation installs a
counterintuitive temporality. The important point of Althussers work is that the subject who
is supposedly hailed into existence following the exemplary interpellation of the police man
(Hey, you there!) responds before the interpellation is cognitively processed. Second,
Haraways posthuman or cyborgian reading of the theory makes Althussers antihumanism
precise. Referencing the first point, Kirby has claimed that with the post-1968 linguistic turn,
the idea began to be entertained that language brings into being or real-izes an original
reality. And whereas the idea of real-ization reverses the logic of causality[, it] does not
contest causalitys discrete, linear discriminations, nor the how of causality.60 Thus, she
states, like many other new materialists, the linguistic turn has simply reversed the
correspondence theory of truth based in reflection, according to which language is led by an
original reality out there. Kirby breaks through this continuity by claiming that the
Derridian always/already shifts causal linearity and fleshing this out, she references
Althusser, whose interpellation suggests that individuals are always/already subjects instead
of being progressively hailed into subjecthood.61 After all, one responds before one is according to modern theories of human subjectivity - thought to be in the position to respond.

In Correspondence about Philosophy and Marxism, Althusser, addressing the Mexican

Marxist philosopher Fernanda Navarro, explains that interpellation is more fluid than the
exemplary case of ideological hailing suggests. It involves what feminist theorists nowadays
call an intersectional affair.62 But does he allow for diffractive leaps into the future
(complicating causality) and posthumanism (complicating [anti-]humanism)? In a letter dated
April 8th, 1986, Althusser writes that interpellation is realized not on the basis of a single

ideology, but of several ideologies at once, under which the individual lives and acts [agit]
his practice [original emphasis].63 This multiplicity explains the free development of the
positions adopted by the subject-individual (the individual can develop his or her position, or
even choose a specific one) which, however, eventually boils down to a determination [that]
is itself determined, but in the play of the plurality of interpellations [original emphasis].64
Ultimately, interpellation - the making of a subject who is always/already a subject - allows
for ideological choices and play, but determined by the grid of intersecting positions (e.g. the
worker-becoming-anarchist, the bourgeois-intellectual-becoming-worker). Extending beyond
the realm of this humanist antihumanism, Althussers freedom needs to be reconfigured as
technoscience, according to Haraway a form of life, a practice, a culture, a generative
matrix,65 in order to open the door to an anti-anthropocentric interpretation of interpellation.
So, and this is the second reason, this interpretation can do justice to my experience and
knowledge-producing practice of being hailed into Chawaf, which was itself a diffraction and
has produced the diffractive patterning discussed in this article. I did not choose between, or
play consciously with, French feminism, the Franco-American Dis-Connection, bodily
materialism, and so on. Rather, interpellation demonstrates how diffraction is always/already
at work when one reads, writes and converses, in a scholarly manner and otherwise. The
subject-shifting role of the optical, scientific instrument, featured in both Haraway and
Chawaf and, in my case, as Chawaf, challenges the boundaries of a humanist interpretation of
hailing. Subjectivity as it comes into being with/in diffraction follows from what Henri
Bergson has called a disturb[ance of] my whole consciousness like a stone which falls into
the water of a pond.66 This stone generates a sudden interference pattern on the ponds
surface. But the stone only apparently sets the still water into motion (does water - the
physical H2O cycle - ever sit still?), which suggests that human consciousness must also be
ever in motion. After all, I was not an automaton during my conversation with Morton:

affected by the name-dropping, I was interrupted in a researcher-instrument-researched, pastpresent-future entanglement, which has been key in this play on Althusser.67

Significantly, this article has tried to be more than just a play on Althusser. Using an actual
scholarly encounter in order to work out the feminist methodological strengths of diffraction,
I have meditated on the current state of affairs in contemporary theory circles, where new
materialisms and OOO are parting ways. In order not to meditate from a disembodied
location and fall into the trap of reflection, new materialisms and OOO have been sought
with/in my body, where posthuman forces rule and a generative text of Chawaf was
encounteredbefore I knew it.

Notes

I wish to thank the editors of this special issue - Birgit M. Kaiser and Kathrin Thiele - for
their thoughtful editing and the two anonymous reviewers for their constructive feedback on
an earlier version of this article. I would like to extend my thanks to Alex Hebing and Gregg
Lambert for their generous engagement with my work.

The discussion can be retrieved from:

<http://ecologywithoutnature.blogspot.co.uk/2013/05/things-are-fuzzy-q.html> [06/06/2013].
2

Meillassoux in Rick Dolphijn and Iris van der Tuin, New Materialism: Interviews and

Cartographies (Ann Arbor: Open Humanities Press, 2012), p.80.

Stacy Alaimo, Thinking as the Stuff of the World, O-Zone: A Journal of Object-Oriented

Studies, 1:1 (2014), p.15.

4

Think of the inclusion of Isabelle Stengers in Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek and Graham

Harman, eds, The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism (Melbourne:
re.press, 2011) and Meillassoux appearance in Dolphijn and Van der Tuin, New
Materialism.
5

Gilles Deleuze, Bergsonism [1966], trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (New

York: Zone Books, 1991), pp.56-57.

6

Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition [1968], trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia

University Press, 1994), pp.70-71.

7

Stacy Alaimo, Thinking, p. 16, 19.

Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of

Matter and Meaning (Durham/London: Duke University Press, 2007), p.185.

9

I do not speak for OOOs cartography in this article; here, OOO features as one

actualization of the striving for non-dualist thought, an unsuccessful one, in fact. Nathan
Brown has clearly laid out why the philosophical impetus of OOO does not comply with the
gesture of virtual-actual coupling that this article tries to make. Brown argues that [i]n order
to stake its claim to originality and supremacy, OOO has to fulminate against what it sees
as a threatening field [of] materialists, purveyors of scientism, process philosophers,
Deleuzians, and system theorists. It has to establish itself as the only non-reductionist, nonatomic ontology on the market. See Nathan Brown, The Nadir of OOO: From Graham
Harmans Tool-Being to Timothy Mortons Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality,
Parrhesia: A Journal of Critical Philosophy, 17 (2013), p.68. Brown explains that strategy of
divide and concur (which is not a cartographical strategy) is attempted to be accomplished by
obscurantism.

10

Donna Haraway, Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan_Meets

_OncoMouse: Feminism and Technoscience (London/New York: Routledge, 1997), p.14.

11

Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p.56. Haraway on Deleuze: Donna Haraway,

When Species Meet (Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 2008), pp.27-35.
12

In Donna Haraway, Modest_Witness, p.273.

13

Donna Haraway, Modest_Witness, p.273.

14

Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, p.71.

15

Karen Barad, Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter

Comes to Matter, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 28:3 (2003), p.811.
16

Karen Barad, Quantum Entanglements and Hauntological Relations of Inheritance:

Dis/continuities, SpaceTime Enfoldings, and Justice-to-Come, Derrida Today, 3:2 (2010),

p.244.
17

Bernard Pullmann in Suzanne Guerlac, Thinking in Time: An Introduction to Henri

Bergson (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2006), p.40; cf. Barad, Quantum
Entanglements, p.252.
18

Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, p.72.

19

Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, p.72.

20

Karen Barad, Posthumanist Performativity, p.808.

21

Donna Haraway, The Promises of Monsters: A Regenerative Politics for Inappropriate/d

Others [1992], The Haraway Reader (New York/London: Routledge, 2004), p.64.
22

Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge [1969] (London/New York: Routledge,

1972), pp.65-66.
23

Donna Haraway, Promises of Monsters, p.70.

24

Donna Haraway, Promises of Monsters, pp.69-70.

25

Donna Haraway, Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the

Privilege of Partial Perspective, Feminist Studies, 14:3 (1988), p.594.

26

Minh-ha refers to Chawafs nourricriture (nurturing writing). See Trinh T. Minh-ha,

Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism (Bloomington/Indianapolis:

Indiana University Press, 1989), p.33.
27

Valerie Hannagan, Reading as a Daughter: Chantal Chawaf revisited, in Contemporary

French Fiction by Women: Feminist Perspectives, eds Margaret Atack and Phil Powrie
(Manchester/New York: Manchester University Press, 1980), p.177.
28

Valerie Hannagan, Reading, p.185.

29

For a list of the students, see Rosi Braidotti, Thinking with an Accent: Franoise Collin,

Les Cahiers du Grif and French Feminism, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society,
39:3 (2014), pp. 597-626. For their original responses, see Hecate, 6:2 (1980).
30

Domna C. Stanton, Language and Revolution: The Franco-American Dis-Connection, in

The Future of Difference, eds Hester Eisenstein and Alice Jardine (Boston: G.K. Hall, 1980),
pp.75-87.
31

Rosi Braidotti and Jane Weinstock, Herstory as Recourse, Hecate, 6:2 (1980), p.25.

32

Jane Gallop, French Feminism, Around 1981: Academic Feminist Literary Theory

(London/New York: Routledge, 1992), p.46.

33

Jane Gallop, French Feminism, p.46.

34

Rosi Braidotti, Patterns of Dissonance: A Study of Women and Contemporary Philosophy

(Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991).

35

Morton after May 24th, 2013 has engaged with Chawafs text too. The engagement can

be found on his blog: <http://ecologywithoutnature.blogspot.nl/2013/10/weird-essentialismmp3.html>[05/12/2013]. In this talk, presented on October 5th, 2013 during PostNatural (the
SLSA 2013 conference) at Notre Dame University, Chawafs text is recapped as a text on

the ecology of the sign, a position about which Morton claims to have thought, as a grad
student at Oxford University, Thats me! This unambiguous statement confirms Alaimos
and Browns worries about the Subject of OOO. Morton mutes (essentializes!) Chawafs
position on signification which is one of an active, transformative articulation, and the
possibility of transference or transposition between Chawafs text and Morton is foreclosed
because Morton assumes an I for himself. As part of the same argument, new materialisms
are discredited as correlationist, which, to me, proves the point of OOOs noncartographical manner of doing theory. In sum, Morton follows a logic of recognition and
reflection.
36

Karen Vintges, Philosophy as Passion: The Thinking of Simone de Beauvoir [1992], trans.

Anne Lavelle (Bloomington/Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1996).

37

Vicki Kirby, Telling Flesh: The Substance of the Corporeal (London/New York:

Routledge, 1997), pp.67-69.

38

Chantal Chawaf, No title [1976], New French Feminisms: An Anthology, eds Elaine Marks

and Isabelle de Courtivron (New York: Schocken Books, 1981), p.178.

39

Chantal Chawaf, p.177.

40

Chantal Chawaf, p.177.

41

Chantal Chawaf, p.177.

42

Adrienne Rich, Notes Towards a Politics of Location, Blood, Bread and Poetry (London:

Virago, 1987), pp.213-214.

43

Chantal Chawaf, p.178.

44

Patricia MacCormack, Mucosal Monsters, in Carnal Aesthetics: Transgressive Imaginary

and Feminist Politics, eds Bettina Papenburg and Marta Zarzycka (London and New York:
I.B.Tauris, 2013), pp.226-237; Hlne Cixous, The Laugh of the Medusa [1975], trans.
Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 1:4 (1976),

pp.875-893; Murat Aydemir, Images of Bliss: Ejaculation, Masculinity, Meaning

(Minneapolis/London: University of Minnesota Press, 2007); Julia Kristeva, Powers of
Horror: An Essay on Abjection [1980], trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1982).
45

Chantal Chawaf, p.177.

46

Jean-Franois Lyotard, The Inhuman: Reflections on Time [1988], trans. Geoffrey

Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991).

47

Chantal Chawaf, p.177.

48

Chantal Chawaf, p.177.

49

Chantal Chawaf, p.177.

50

Chantal Chawaf, p.178.

51

Claire Colebrook, Postmodernism is a Humanism: Deleuze and Equivocity, Women: A

Cultural Review, 15:3 (2004), p.286.

52

Chantal Chawaf, p.177.

53

Chantal Chawaf, p.178.

54

Chantal Chawaf, p.177.

55

Donna Haraway, Promises of Monsters, p.70.

56

Donna Haraway, Promises of Monsters, p.117 n. 18.

57

Donna Haraway, Promises of Monsters, p.112.

58

Donna Haraway, Promises of Monsters, p.89.

59

Karen Barad, Natures Queer Performativity, Kvinder, Kn og Forskning, 1-2 (2012),

p.35.
60

Vicki Kirby, Judith Butler: Live Theory (London/New York: Continuum, 2006), p.78.

61

Vicki Kirby, Judith Butler, p.162, n.1.

62

Cf. Sara Ahmed, Differences that Matter: Feminist Theory and Postmodernism

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp.113-118.

63

Louis Althusser, Correspondence about Philosophy and Marxism [1993/1994], in

Philosophy of the Encounter: Later Writings, 1978-1987 (London/New York: Verso, 2006),
p.241.
64

Louis Althusser, Correspondence, p.241.

65

Donna Haraway, Modest_Witness, p.50.

66

Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness

[1889], trans. F.L. Pogson (London: George Allen, 1913), p.168.

67

Donna Haraway, Promises of Monsters, p.117 n.18.