Parallax

ISSN: 1353-4645 (Print) 1460-700X (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/tpar20

Diffraction as a Methodology for Feminist Onto-

Epistemology: On Encountering Chantal Chawaf
and Posthuman Interpellation

Iris van der Tuin

To cite this article: Iris van der Tuin (2014) Diffraction as a Methodology for Feminist Onto-
Epistemology: On Encountering Chantal Chawaf and Posthuman Interpellation, Parallax, 20:3,
231-244, DOI: 10.1080/13534645.2014.927631

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/13534645.2014.927631

Published online: 11 Jul 2014.

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parallax, 2014
Vol. 20, No. 3, 231–244, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13534645.2014.927631

Diffraction as a Methodology for Feminist Onto-Epistemology: On

Encountering Chantal Chawaf and Posthuman Interpellation
Iris van der Tuin

(Received 12 July 2013; accepted 18 October 2013)

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 Whitehead’s answer to ‘minds in a groove’ enlightens C.P. Snow’s
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’). Object-oriented 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. [ . . . ] Bogost’s
speculations on what it means to be a particular object emerge from a sovereign,
enclosed, rational, speculative, mind’.3 Morton answers me that the Anthropo- of
Anthropocene is not to be repaired (humans are responsible for putting carbon in
the earth’s 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

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231
 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, women’s oppression is an actualization of oppression as such. We must
not single out the current, known forms of women’s 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 women’s
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
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 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, Kant’s 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-in-Itself 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 OOO’s 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 Subject-status 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 colleague’s comment.
Before I knew it, new materialism’s 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 materialism’s 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
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 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 Haraway’s irritation with Deleuze, we can gloss via Deleuze
that Haraway wanted ‘[d]ifference [to] be shown differing’.11 Hence, Deleuze’s
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
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234
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).

Barad’s 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.
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 Moving away from (the effects of) the distancing act of ‘reflection’, Barad’s
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 Foucault’s 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-ha’s work on ‘inappropriate/d otherness’, which prevents
diffraction’s 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.24

This call from elsewhere constitutes the event of posthuman interpellation. Just like
Randolph’s 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, Chawaf’s name appears mainly on lists ending with ‘et cetera’.
Encyclopaedias and textbooks mention her as one of the French feminists of e´criture
fe´minine. 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 (Hélène 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
women’s, gender and sexuality studies; e´criture fe´minine 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-)
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236
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 today’s feminist philosophical impetuses.26 Valerie
Hannagan describes how Chawaf strives for ‘independence from any movement
or pigeon-holing’ in an article that demonstrates how Chawaf’s 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,
[Chawaf’s women] are the same woman. [ . . . We must attend to] the possibilities that
the description or rather evocation of such a woman might afford’.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 English-speaking 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 American-centered
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 e´criture
fe´minine. Jane Gallop has claimed that ‘[we American scholars] associate e´criture
fe´minine 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. Écrivains fe´minins 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 materialism’34 as a second-wave French feminism. A materialist rendering of
e´criture fe´minine, diffractively generated, transverses classificatory dualisms and, as a
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 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 materialism’s 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, Chawaf’s text does not come with a title. Covering barely
two pages, the text is under 500 words long and was first published in Nouvelles
litte´raires on May 26, 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 Sartre’s Self-Other dialectic,
an important step for women’s 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 Kirby’s Telling Flesh: The Substance of the Corporeal
to mind. Kirby confirms the cultural status of the shorthand ‘woman as nature’, i.e.
Beauvoir’s 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.

Chawaf’s 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
Beauvoir’s 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 Chawaf’s text.

First of all, Chawaf’s 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
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238
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 writing’s ‘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 Rich’s famous dictum for women’s 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 doesn’t smell of the
earth, it isn’t 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 MacCormack’s mucosal
monsters from 2013 to Cixous’ 1975 writing in white ink (milk), and through Murat
Aydemir’s 2007 exposition of masculinities via male ejaculation to Kristeva’s 1980
study of the abject mother’s body’s 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 Chawaf’s 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 Dis-intellectualization in Chawaf’s understanding is not a dualist
stance that ends up reconfirming science, but rather – I would say – a rewriting à la
Jean-Franc
ois Lyotard.46 Chawaf uses science’s 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,
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 scientific instrument in a manner that does not obey science’s laws (in terms of both
content and procedure) is a move in which I recognize Haraway’s ‘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’.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 bottom-up approach (suggesting a reconfirmation of stifled sexual
difference). In sum, ‘fleshless academicism’53 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 Chawaf’s 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 Chawaf’s 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 be . . . mute.

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
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240
Randolph’s every woman and Chawaf’s single woman (or French feminism’s
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 generation’58 complexifies Louis Althusser’s 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 Kirby’s work on
causality and communication in lightning, saying that ‘[i]t is as though objects on
the ground are being hailed by the cloud’s interpellative address’.59 Here
interpellation, hence, subjectivity is on the part of non-humans, which may thicken
‘the call from elsewhere’ I ascribed to (Morton’s 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 Althusser’s 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, Haraway’s posthuman or cyborgian reading of the
theory makes Althusser’s 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 causality’s 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’.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
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241
 one) which, however, eventually boils down to a ‘determination [that] is itself
determined, but in the play of the plurality of interpellations’.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, Althusser’s freedom
needs to be reconfigured as technoscience, according to Haraway ‘a form of life, a
practice, a culture, a generative matrix’, in order to open the door to an anti-
anthropocentric interpretation of interpellation.65 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 pond’s 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, past-present-
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 encountered . . . before I knew it.

Acknowledgements
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.

Notes
1
The discussion can be retrieved from: ,http:// Cartographies (Ann Arbor: Open Humanities
ecologywithoutnature.blogspot.co.uk/2013/05/ Press, 2012), p.80.
3
things-are-fuzzy-q.html. [06/06/2013]. Stacy Alaimo, ‘Thinking as the Stuff of the
2 World’, O-Zone: A Journal of Object-Oriented Studies,
Quentin Meillassoux in Rick Dolphijn and Iris
van der Tuin, New Materialism: Interviews and vol. no.1 (2014), p.15.
van der Tuin
242
4 17
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’s appearance in Dolphijn and Van
der Tuin, New Materialism.
5 20
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 Univer-
sity Press, 1994), pp.70–71.
7 22
Stacy Alaimo, ‘Thinking’, p.16, p.19.
8
Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway:
Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and
Meaning (Durham and London: Duke University
Press, 2007), p.185.
9
I do not speak for ‘OOO’s cartography’ in this
article; here, OOO features as one actualization of
the striving for non-dualist thought, an unsuccess-
ful 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, non-atomic
ontology on the market”’. See Nathan Brown,
‘The Nadir of OOO: From Graham Harman’s
Tool-Being to Timothy Morton’s 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_Mil-
lennium.FemaleMan q_Meets_OncoMouse e: Feminism
and Technoscience (London and New York: Routle-
dge, 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, vol.28, no.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.
Bernard Pullmann in Suzanne Guerlac, Think-
ing 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.
Karen Barad, ‘Posthumanist Performativity’,
p.808.
21
Donna Haraway, ‘The Promises of Monsters:
A Regenerative Politics for Inappropriate/d
Others’ [1992], in The Haraway Reader (New York
and London: Routledge, 2004), p.64.
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 Chawaf’s nourricriture (nur-
turing writing). See Trinh T. Minh-ha, Woman,
Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism
(Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana Univer-
sity 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 and 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: Franc
oise Collin, Les
Cahiers du Grif and French Feminism’, Signs:
Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 39:3
(2014), pp.576–626. 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’, in Around 1981:
Academic Feminist Literary Theory (London and 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 24, 2013 – has engaged
with Chawaf’s text too. The engagement can be
found on his blog: ,http://ecologywithoutnature.
blogspot . nl / 2013 / 10 / weird - essentialism - mp3.
html.[05/12/2013]. In this talk, presented on
parallax
243
 October 5, 2013 during PostNatural (the SLSA Bliss: Ejaculation, Masculinity, Meaning (Minnea-
2013 conference) at Notre Dame University, polis and London: University of Minnesota Press,
Chawaf’s text is recapped as a text on ‘the ecology 2007); Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on
of the sign’, a position about which Morton claims Abjection [1980], trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New
to have thought, as a grad student at Oxford York: Columbia University Press, 1982).
45
University, ‘That’s me!’ This unambiguous state- Chantal Chawaf, p.177.
ment confirms Alaimo’s and Brown’s worries about 46
Jean-Franc
ois Lyotard, The Inhuman: Reflections
the Subject of OOO. Morton mutes (essentializes!) on Time [1988], trans. Geoffrey Bennington and
Chawaf’s position on signification which is one of Rachel Bowlby (Stanford: Stanford University
an active, transformative articulation, and the Press, 1991).
47
possibility of transference or transposition between Chantal Chawaf, p.177.
48
Chawaf’s text and Morton is foreclosed because Chantal Chawaf, p.177.
49
Morton assumes an ‘I’ for himself. As part of the Chantal Chawaf, p.177.
50
same argument, new materialisms are discredited Chantal Chawaf, p.178.
51
as ‘correlationist’, which, to me, proves the point of Claire Colebrook, ‘Postmodernism is a Human-
OOO’s non-cartographical manner of doing ism: Deleuze and Equivocity’, Women: A Cultural
theory. In sum, Morton follows a logic of Review, 15:3 (2004), p.286.
52
recognition and reflection. Chantal Chawaf, p.177.
36 53
Karen Vintges, Philosophy as Passion: The Chantal Chawaf, p.178.
54
Thinking of Simone de Beauvoir [1992], trans. Anne Chantal Chawaf, p.177.
55
Lavelle (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana Donna Haraway, ‘Promises of Monsters’, p.70.
56
University Press, 1996). Donna Haraway, ‘Promises of Monsters’, p.117
37
Vicki Kirby, Telling Flesh: The Substance of the n.18.
57
Corporeal (London and New York: Routledge, Donna Haraway, ‘Promises of Monsters’, p.112.
58
1997), pp.67–69. Donna Haraway, ‘Promises of Monsters’, p.89.
38 59
Chantal Chawaf, No title [1976], New French Karen Barad, ‘Nature’s Queer Performativity’,
Feminisms: An Anthology, eds. Elaine Marks and Kvinder, Køn og Forskning, 1– 2 (2012), p.35.
60
Isabelle de Courtivron (New York: Schocken Vicki Kirby, Judith Butler: Live Theory (London
Books, 1981), p.178. and New York: Continuum, 2006), p.78.
39 61
Chantal Chawaf, p.177. Vicki Kirby, Judith Butler, p.162, n.1.
40 62
Chantal Chawaf, p.177. Cf. Sara Ahmed, Differences that Matter: Feminist
41
Chantal Chawaf, p.177. Theory and Postmodernism (Cambridge: Cambridge
42
Adrienne Rich, ‘Notes Towards a Politics of University Press, 1998), pp.113–118.
63
Location’, in Blood, Bread and Poetry (London: Louis Althusser, ‘Correspondence about “Phil-
Virago, 1987), pp.213–214. osophy and Marxism”’ [1993/1994], in Philosophy
43
Chantal Chawaf, p.178. of the Encounter: Later Writings, 1978–1987 (London
44
Patricia MacCormack, ‘Mucosal Monsters’, in and New York: Verso, 2006), p.241.
64
Carnal Aesthetics: Transgressive Imaginary and Feminist Louis Althusser, ‘Correspondence’, p.241.
65
Politics, eds. Bettina Papenburg and Marta Donna Haraway, Modest_Witness, p.50.
66
Zarzycka (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will: An Essay on
2013), pp.226–237; Hélène Cixous, ‘The Laugh of the Immediate Data of Consciousness [1889], trans. F.L.
the Medusa’ [1975], trans. Keith Cohen and Paula Pogson (London: George Allen, 1913), p.168.
67
Cohen, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Donna Haraway, ‘Promises of Monsters’, p.117
1:4 (1976), pp.875–893; Murat Aydemir, Images of n.18.

Iris van der Tuin is associate professor of Gender Studies and Philosophy of Science
at Utrecht University, the Netherlands. She edited Doing Gender in Media, Art and
Culture (Routledge, 2009) with Rosemarie Buikema and authored New Materialism:
Interviews & Cartographies with Rick Dolphijn (Open Humanities Press, 2012). Her
work on feminist new materialism has appeared in Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist
Philosophy, Australian Feminist Studies, Women: A Cultural Review, European Journal of
Women’s Studies and Women’s Studies International Forum. She is currently finishing the
NWO-VENI project ‘The Material Turn in the Humanities’ (2011 –2014). Email:
I.vanderTuin@uu.nl

van der Tuin

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