Nature's Queer Negativity: Between Barad and Deleuze

Abstract

This essay offers a critique of the vitalist turn in queer and ecological theory, here represented by the work of Karen Barad. Whereas Barad advances an image of life geared towards meaningful connection with others, human and nonhuman, Deleuze advances an asignifying ontology of self-dismissal. The point of this essay isn't to separate their two views, but to draw out the consequences of their entanglement. Insofar as Barad's work conceptualizes life (and art) as a vitalizing encounter, it cannot, this essay argues, account for the queer negativity at play in environmental politics, including the politics of climate change. Animism taken to its final conclusion … is not only a perspectivism but an "enemyism."-Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Cannibal Metaphysics To love one's neighbor may be the cruelest of choices.-Jacques Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis In Cosmopolitics I, Isabelle Stengers identifies two forms of ecological relation: first, ecologies of practice, which enmesh the human subject in ecological networks beyond the human; and second, ecologies of capture, which resolve entanglements of self and other into discrete representational figures through different forms of commodification and objectification (36-37). Capture, for Stengers, is what happens when nature actualizes into identity, and when the problematics of practice give rise to divisions of subject/object, nature/culture, and so on.