Comparative Critical Studies 11.

2–3 (2014): 163–184

Edinburgh University Press
DOI: 10.3366/ccs.2014.0122


C British Comparative Literature Association
www.euppublishing.com/ccs

Writing as a Nomadic Subject

ROSI BRAIDOTTI

I am rooted but I flow

Virginia Woolf, The Waves1

My lifelong engagement in the project of nomadic subjectivity has been

partly motivated by the conviction that, in these globalized times of
accelerating technologically mediated changes, many traditional points
of reference and age-old habits of thought are being re-composed,
albeit in contradictory ways. Paradoxically, old power relations are not
only confirmed but in many ways exacerbated in the new geo-political
context.2 At such a time more conceptual creativity is necessary, and
more theoretical courage is needed in order to bring about the leap
across inertia, nostalgia, aporia and the other forms of critical stasis
induced by our historical condition. It has become like a mantra to
me: we need to learn to think differently about the kind of subjects we
have already become and the processes of deep-seated transformation
we are undergoing. The philosopher in me believes that a new alliance
between philosophy, the arts and science is a crucial building block for
this qualitative shift of perspective.3 The writer in me, on the other hand,
continues to muse about the complex ways in which the imaginary both
propels and resists in-depth transformations.

A MATTER OF STYLE

At the beginning of it all, for my generation, is the commitment to

writing. Presented as a form of political and ethical engagement, it
is essentially a visceral gesture. Writing is an intransitive activity, a
variation on breathing, an end in itself; it is an affective and geometrically
rigorous mode of inscription into life. If we had nothing left to say,
some of us would just copy down random list of words, road signs,

163
164 ROSI BRAIDOTTI
cafeteria menus and even the old-fashioned phone book. Well before
becoming a published writer I had been a consummate ‘grapho-maniac’.4
I have kept a diary since the age of eleven and still write it regularly.
When my students boast of their digital ‘second life’, I feel a touch
of pain in my heart at the thought of the 163 booklets into which
I have replicated my life, without even realizing what a burden of
responsibility this would create in the long run: some ‘virtual reality’
that is! Writing is living intensively and inhabiting language as a site of
multiple others within what we call, out of habit and intellectual laziness,
‘the self’.
Philosophically, the idea of the ‘intransitive’ nature of writing
pertains to one of the axioms of post-structuralism, namely the primacy
of language as the constitutive structure of human subjectivity. In
this perspective, language is not just (or even) an instrument of
communication, but rather an ontological site of constitution of our
shared humanity.5 We are spoken by language, written by it and, as
Humpty Dumpty teaches us, we can never be considered masters of the
process of meaning, no matter how hard we may long for it.
Thinkers of the calibre of Jacques Derrida, Luce Irigaray and Gilles
Deleuze developed a social and political philosophy starting from this
seemingly simple insight. Before them, Jacques Lacan had taken the
primacy of the linguistic signifier – the Law-of-the-Father – as the key
rule of our social-symbolic system. Working on the assumption of a
fundamental isomorphism between the psychic and the social realm,
Lacan has argued that language contains the symbolic rules and as such it
structures the political ontology of our culture. Language functions as the
mediator between the self and both the natural and social environments.
It is like a third party that separates the human subjects from the
conditions that engendered them in the first place, namely the maternal
body. In a patriarchal system the task of splitting the mother-child
unit is fulfilled by the Father. There is no denying the masculinism of
this symbolic system, nor the violence – both physical and symbolic – it
exercises upon women. The symbolic ‘absence’ of women spells their
social destiny, which includes their inscription in the social contract
as legal minors and their exclusion from the public sphere. Much of
twentieth-century feminism took up this issue and turned it into a
battlefield.
Allow me for now to follow through the fundamental theoretical point:
that language is an ontological precondition for the constitution of the
subject and in some ways ‘external’ to it, while at the same times it
 Writing as a Nomadic Subject 165
is constitutive of the subject. What this means is that the relation to
socio-symbolic structures, the relation to others, is the defining feature
of all subjects and of our common humanity. This insight is the point
of no return; from here onwards, the paths diverge in terms of tactics or
strategies as to how to deal with it. ‘Style’ is the name we give to these
tactical choices, which come down to two crucial and often overlapping
options: resistance and ethics.
As to the former: given the coercive power of language, the writer’s
task is to resist the gravitational pull of the master signifier and oppose
it. Out-manoeuvring its powers, the writer tricks (Deleuze’s style),
decodes (Foucault-like), unveils (Derrida) or seduces (Barthes) language
into directions it was not programmed to follow. Writing so as to
make the master signifier falter (Foucault), stutter (Deleuze), expose
its drive to mastery (Derrida), reveal its affective core (Barthes) are all
variations on the theme of loosening the despotic grip of language over
the process of subject formation and of making sense. By extension,
it follows that the real challenge is how to make manifest the powers
of language and discourse such as they are exercised in the very task
of producing subjectivity, knowledge and meanings. Writing enacts the
micro-political, self-reflexive analyses of the power at work in its own
structures and practices. By exposing the compulsive and rather despotic
inclinations of language, the writer thus forces upon the readers a critical
reflection into the workings of power itself. This critique includes the
institutions that uphold and sustain that power, notably the university
structure of departments, institutes, faculties and the whole hierarchical
disciplinary machinery that spreads to specialized journals, citation
indexes and careers management.
Ethics is the other way around the vicious circle of language. It
consists in unveiling this complex and paradoxical political economy and
exploring its complexity and inner contradictions. To the extent that a
text enacts the nexus of power and meaning, power and discourse of
which it is composed, it both exposes and holds them to accountability.
By making manifest such responsibility, a writer acknowledges the
importance of a text’s relationship to others. In this respect, writing is
the visualization of ethical relationality through the in-depth critique of
power. By acknowledging the constitutive presence of otherness within
and all around the self, writing enacts the destitution of unitary visions
of the subject as an autonomous entity. The tactics of resistance and the
ethical approach are not only mutually compatible but also inter-linked.
On both counts, the nomadic writer does not relate to language merely
166 ROSI BRAIDOTTI
as a tool of critical analysis and rational political intervention, but rather
feels inhabited by it as an ‘other within’.6
I owe my acute awareness of the exteriority and primacy of language to
my beloved post-1968 French teachers. They were amazing philosophers
whose legacy I continue to respect and admire: Foucault, Irigaray and
Deleuze especially. They taught me respect for the complexity of a
linguistic structure we inhabit but do not control, and based their critique
of unitary identity upon this insight. This means that I was trained
never to write carelessly or just functionally: style is of the essence. Style
however is no mere rhetorical decoration, but rather the deployment
of fundamental conceptual premises. What those thinkers taught my
generation is never to cater for the doxa, never to flatter our common
sense, never play into the set habits of predictable readers. Writing, even
and especially academic writing, has to challenge and destabilize, intrigue
and empower.
A fundamental hermeneutics of suspicion lies at the core of this
redefinition of style and is connected to the critique of unitary
subjectivity. Foucault’s ‘death of Man’ argument rests on the assumption
that ‘Man’ is neither an ideal nor an objective statistical average
or middle ground.7 It rather spells out a systematized standard of
recognizability – of Sameness – by which all others can be assessed,
regulated and allotted to a designated social and symbolic location.
The human is a normative convention, which does not make it
inherently negative, just highly regulatory and hence instrumental to
practices of exclusion and discrimination. What is presented as a neutral
category – ‘Man as the measure of all things’ – functions by transposing a
specific mode of being human into a generalized standard, which acquires
transcendent value as much by what it excludes as by what it includes in
the category of the human. The progression is from male to masculine and
then onto human as the universalized format of humanity. This standard
is posited as categorically and qualitatively distinct from the sexualized,
racialized, naturalized ‘others’ of this subject and also in opposition to
the technological artefact. Insofar as writing is committed to expose
the structural injustices and constitutive exclusions of this vision of the
subject, writing – as an intransitive activity – is intrinsically political and
explicitly ethical.
The paradoxes of language were driven home quite concretely in my
writing experience. When I started the project of nomadic subjectivity
almost twenty years ago, I had no idea that it would take over
my life. I ended up producing a trilogy of inter-connected and yet
 Writing as a Nomadic Subject 167
self-contained books on the topic. Nomadic Subjects, in 1994, spun off two
other volumes. Metamorphoses, published in 2002, explores the cultural
politics of the nomadic condition and Transpositions, published in 2006,
the ethical implications.8 With the privilege of hindsight, it is tempting
to assert some power of synthesis over this vast project, but that is an
a posteriori and retrospective view. The project of nomadic subjectivity
is quite rhizomatic in itself and it grew organically from a cluster of
central and inter-related ideas. It is as if there is no possible conclusion,
but only more productive proliferations and successive unfolding. The
nomadic subject is my chosen figuration to engage in the task of drawing
a cartographic reading of the present, in terms of cultural, political,
epistemological and ethical concerns. It is my preferred way of expressing
an insatiable and loving curiosity for the world.

MULTILINGUALISM

What’s the use of roots if you can’t take them with you?
Gertrude Stein
My project of feminist nomadism traces more than an intellectual
itinerary; it also reflects the existential situation as a multi-cultural
individual – or ‘di-vidual’9 – a migrant who turned nomad. The trilogy
that composes my work on nomadism was first conceptualized and,
in some cases, expressed in several different European languages at
once. My first book Patterns of Dissonance was originally drafted in
French and had to be translated, but in the final version I re-wrote it
directly in English.10 By the time it went to press, therefore, it had
become a translation without originals. My work as a thinker has no
mother tongue, only a succession of translations, displacements and
adaptations to changing conditions. Nomadism for me equals multi-
lingualism. Although this entails large doses of lexical contamination and
the occasional syntactical debacle, the real ‘creolisation’ effects11 have
always been, for me, acoustic. Accents are the traces of my multiple
linguistic homes. They spell my own ecology of belonging, my loyalty
to parallel yet divergent lives. I’m always writing with an accent.12
Over the years I seem to have developed a peculiar economy of writing
as a way of negotiating with my many languages, acoustic resonances
and cultural affiliations. Some books now exist exclusively in Italian,
such as Madri, Mostri e Macchine and the co-authored Baby-Boomers, or
French, as with La philosophie, là où on ne l’attend pas, without English
counterpart.13 Meanwhile, several selections of my essays have been
168 ROSI BRAIDOTTI
translated in many languages I do not speak (from Finnish to Korean,
Hungarian, Chinese and Spanish), creating a slight sense of estrangement
from my own brain-children: they are assemblages or combinations that
defy any original. I have accepted their resilient autonomy and have
let them go: nomadic writing is an act of constant dispossession. The
nomadism which I defend as a theoretical option is therefore also an
existential condition which, for me, translates into a style of thinking
and a mode of relation to writing. Style is not decorative, but a complex
strategic operation of positioning.
This approach to writing also alters the terms of the conventional pact
between the writer and his/her readers. As readers and writers in an
intensive mode, we are transformers of intellectual energy, processors
of the ‘insights’ that we are exchanging and co-creators of affective
inter-linkages. These ‘in’-sights, however, are not to be thought of as
plunging us inwards, towards a mythical ‘inner’ reservoir of identity-
bound truth. On the contrary, they are forces that propel us outwards
along the multiple directions of extra-textual collective connections and
experiences. Reading and thinking are ways of living at a higher degree, a
faster pace, a multi-directional manner; thinking occurs in and is a mode
of relation to the extra-textual world. A post-personal writing/reading
mode is consequently created as the appropriate way of doing nomadic
thought, in that it allows for a web of connections to be drawn on the
zig-zagging paths of shared subjectivity and not merely on the tightrope
of identity.
What attracted me to French philosophies of difference such as
Deleuze’s multiple subjects of becoming, or Irigaray’s ‘virtual feminine’
is precisely that they do not stop on the surface of issues of identity
and power, but rather tackle their conceptual roots. In so doing,
they radicalize social constructivist methods and push the psycho-
sociological discussion of identity towards issues of subjectivity, that
is to say, of entitlement and power. It is particularly important not to
confuse the concept of subjectivity with the notion of the individual or
individualism: subjectivity is a socially mediated process of entitlements
to and negotiations with power relations. Consequently, the formation
and emergence of new social subjects is always a collective enterprise,
‘external’ to the individual self while it also mobilizes the self’s in-depth
and singular structures.
In this perspective, ‘subjectivity’ names the process that consists
in stringing the reactive (potestas) and the active instances of power
(potentia) together, under the fictional unity of a grammatical ‘I’.
 Writing as a Nomadic Subject 169
The subject is a process, made of constant shifts and negotiations between
different levels of power and desire, that is to say, entrapment and
empowerment. Whatever semblance of unity there may be is no God-
given essence, but rather the fictional choreography of many levels of
a relational self into one socially operational self, within a monistic
ontology. The implication is that what sustains the entire process of
becoming-subject is the will to-know, the desire to say, the desire to
speak; it is a founding, primary, vital, necessary and therefore original
desire to become (conatus).

CRITIQUE AS CREATIVITY

If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it

would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s
heartbeat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other
side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk out well wadded
with stupidity.
George Eliot14

To announce blandly that nomadic subjectivity requires a monistic

ontology may be a bit of a mouthful, but all those who ever identified
with Dorothea in Middlemarch or Maggie in The Mill on the Floss may not
be cognitively aware of the fact that s/he actually moved into a monistic
universe of intersecting affective relations that simply make the world go
round. George Eliot, alias Mary Evans, was a woman of many talents and
not the least of them was linguistic. A polyglot and a formidable thinker,
George Eliot also translated Spinoza into English. She was acutely aware
of the continuum between the natural, even the cosmic or planetary
factors (floods, wars, lunar eclipses), and the social and cultural ones.
They work as a whole, in a continuum. Were we able to acknowledge
this, we would indeed be able to ‘hear the grass grow and the squirrel’s
heartbeat’. As it is, the comforting platitudes of accepted common sense
(doxa) have us walking around well wadded with stupidity indeed.15
The roar which lies on the other side of silence is the Spinozist
indicator of the raw cosmic energy that lies within, beneath and alongside
the subjects and underscores the making of their cultures, civilizations
and societies. Monism is the premise for vitalist materialism and as a
concept it helps us make sense of that external dimension of subjectivity,
which in fact enfolds within the subject. The self as the internalized score
of cosmic vibrations16 is indeed such stuff as dreams are made of.
170 ROSI BRAIDOTTI
A ‘monistic universe’ refers to Spinoza’s central concept that matter,
the world and humans are not dualistic entities structured according to
principles of internal or external opposition. This is a way of undoing
Descartes’s famous mind-body distinction, but for Spinoza the concept
goes even further: matter is one, driven by the desire for self-expression
and ontologically free. It aims at enacting its desire (conatus) which is the
expression of the subject’s essential freedom of becoming. The absence
of any reference to negativity and to violent dialectical oppositions
caused intense criticism of Spinoza on the part of Hegel and the
Marxist-Hegelians. Spinoza’s monistic worldview was seen as politically
ineffective and holistic at heart.
This interpretation changed dramatically in the 1970s in France, when
a new wave of scholars rehabilitated Spinozist monism precisely as an
antidote to some of the contradictions of Marxism and as a way of
clarifying Hegel’s relationship to Marx.17 The main idea is to overcome
dialectical oppositions, engendering non-dialectical understandings of
materialism itself,18 as an alternative to the Hegelian scheme. The
‘Spinozist legacy’ therefore consists in a very active concept of monism,
which allowed these modern French philosophers to define matter as
vital and self-organizing, thereby producing the staggering combination
of ‘vitalist materialism’. Because this approach rejects all forms of
transcendentalism, it is also known as ‘radical immanence’. Monism
results in relocating difference outside the dialectical scheme, as a
complex process of differing which is framed by both internal and
external forces and is based on the centrality of the relation to multiple
others. Because it is self-organizing, matter is vital, smart and, in the
third millennium, technologically mediated, through bio-technologies
and information technologies. This doubly mediated structure alters
also the terms of interaction between humans and non-humans. It has
consequently engendered a notion of ‘matter-realism’19 as an auto-poietic
notion that replaces more static definitions of ‘materialism’.

NOMADIC BECOMING

Creativity is a ‘matter-realist’ nomadic process in that it entails the

active displacement of dominant formations of identity, memory and
identification so as to open them up to that roar that lies on the other side
of silence. Becoming nomadic as a variation on the theme of becoming-
minoritarian is neither the swinging of the pendulum of dialectical
opposition, nor is it the unfolding of an essence in a teleologically
 Writing as a Nomadic Subject 171
20
ordained process supervised by a transcendent consciousness. Nomadic
becomings are rather the process of affirmation of the unalterably
positive structure of difference, unhinged from the binary system that
traditionally opposed it to Sameness. Difference as positivity at the heart
of the subject entails a multiple process of transformation, a play of
complexity that expresses the principle of not-One. Accordingly, the
thinking subject is not the deployment of in-depth interiority, nor is it
the enactment of transcendental models of reflexive consciousness. It is
a collective assemblage, a relay-point for a web of complex relations that
displace the centrality of ego-indexed notions of identity.
Building on Foucault, Deleuze argues that, considering the de-
territorializing force of processes of becoming, they gather force
from some energetic core, or vibrating hub, of activity which is
the creative pole of power as potentia. As I argued earlier, this is
opposed to the restrictive pole of institutionalized power as potestas,
which can only replicate and perpetuate it. Only potential or joyful
affirmation has the power to generate qualitative shifts in the processes
of becoming, hence the axiom that there is becoming other than
minoritarian/nomadic/woman/animal/other. According to Gatens and
Lloyd this nomadic becoming is an ethology, that is to say a process of
expression, composition, selection, and incorporation of forces aimed at
positive transformation of the subject.21 As such it is also crucial to the
project of a creative redefinition of philosophical reason and of its relation
to conceptual creativity, imagination and affectivity.
Becoming has to do with emptying out the self, opening it out to
possible encounters with the ‘outside’. Virgina Woolf’s intensive genre
is exemplary here, in that the artist’s ‘eye’ captures the outside world by
making itself receptive to the totality of perception. What gets activated
is a seemingly absent-minded floating attention or a fluid sensibility that
is porous to the outside and which our culture has coded as ‘feminine’.
This sensibility is central to the creative process. It combines the
accuracy of the cartographer with the hyper-sensitivity of the sensualist
in apprehending the precise quality of an assemblage of elements, like
the shade of the light at dusk, or the curve of the wind just before the
rain falls. In those moments of floating awareness when rational control
releases its hold, ‘Life’ rushes on towards the sensorial/perceptive
apparatus with exceptional vigour and higher degrees of definition.
This onrush of data, information, affectivity, is the relational bond that
simultaneously propels the self out of the black hole of its atomized
isolation and disperses it into a myriad of bits and pieces of data
172 ROSI BRAIDOTTI
imprinting or impressions. Conceptualized by Deleuze as the folding in
and out of perception, it also confirms the singularity of that particular
entity which both receives and recomposes itself around the onrush of
data and affects.
One needs to be able to sustain the impact with the onrushing
affectivity, to ‘hold’ it, without being completely overwhelmed by it.
But ‘holding’ it or capturing it does not occur on the paranoid or
rapacious model of a dominant, dialectically driven consciousness. It
rather takes the form of a sustainable model of relational interconnections
by an affective and highly receptive subject which quite simply is not
one, not there, not that – it is always becoming. The singularity of this
nomadic, floating subjectivity rests on the meta-stability of thresholds of
sustainability. These involve the spatio-temporal co-ordinates that make
it possible for subjects to coincide temporarily with and be synchronized
with the degrees, levels, expansion and extension of the head-on rush of
the ‘outside’ folding inwards. Whether the outside is a roar of cosmic
energy or the unspectacular and barely perceptible heartbeat of a squirrel
is just a matter of degrees. What is mobilized is one’s capacity to feel,
sense, process and sustain the impact with the complex materiality of
that ‘outside’.
In terms of writing practices, the processes and flows of becoming,
and the heightened states of perception and receptivity which they both
assume and engender defy the canonical genre classifications and instal a
sort of parallelism between the arts, sciences and conceptual thinking.
The point of convergence is the quest for creativity, in the form of
experimenting with the immersion of one’s sensibility in the field of
forces – formatted as by music, colour, sound, light, speed, temperature,
intensity. Deleuze and Guattari argue for instance that writers speak the
unsayable; painters make visible forces that previously were not, much
as composers make us hear sounds that were unheard of.22 Similarly,
philosophers can make thinkable concepts that did not exist before.
Artistic genres are variables co-existing along a continuum. It comes
down again to the question of style, where style is a navigational tool. It
negotiates our path across sets of material (‘matter-real’) coordinates that,
assembled and composed in a sustainable and enduring manner, allow for
the qualitative transformation of the affects and the forces involved. They
thus trigger the process of becoming.
The imagination plays a crucial role in enabling the whole process
of becoming-minoritarian and hence of conceptual creativity and ethical
empowerment. It is connected to memory: the affective force of
 Writing as a Nomadic Subject 173
remembrance propels the process of becoming-intensive. When you
remember in the intensive or minority-mode, however, you defeat
linearity, to open up spaces of movement and of de-territorialization that
actualize the virtual possibilities which have been frozen in the image of
the past. Opening up these virtual spaces is a creative effort. When you
remember to become what you are – a subject-in-becoming – you actually
reinvent yourself on the basis of what you hope you could become, with
a little help from your friends.
It is crucial in fact to see to what extent processes of becoming are
collective, intersubjective and not individual or isolated: it is always a
matter of blocks of becoming. ‘Others’ are the integral element of one’s
successive becomings. A Deleuzian approach favours the destitution of
the liberal notion of the sovereign subject and consequently overcomes
the dualism Self/Other, Sameness/Difference, which is intrinsic to that
vision of the subject. Subjects are collective assemblages, that is to say
they are dynamic, but framed: fields of forces that aim at duration and
affirmative self-realization. In order to fulfil them, they need to be drawn
together along a line of composition. This is rather like pitching a musical
tone.

WHAT VIRGINIA WOOLF KNOWS

Remembering in this nomadic mode is a key element of this process.

Virginia Woolf’s work reflects admirably the dual structure of time:
the linear one – Chronos – and the undifferentiated one – Aion. Being and
Becoming confront each other in an unsteady balance. Aion is the
‘pure empty form of time’, free of content, which is shot through
with vibrations of becoming. If this be chaos, it is not chaotic, but
generative.23 It produces assemblages that organize space and time
around them. The ‘haecceity’, or individuated aggregate, is the specific
and highly contingent actualization of a field of forces stable enough and
consolidated by their structural affinity, so as to be able to constitute a
plane of immanence.
Remembering in the nomadic mode is the active reinvention of a self
that is joyfully discontinuous, as opposed to being mournfully consistent,
as programmed by phallogocentric culture. It destabilizes the sanctity of
the past and the authority of experience. The tense that best expresses
the power of the imagination is the future perfect: ‘I will have been
free.’ Quoting Virginia Woolf, Deleuze also says: ‘This will be childhood,
but it must not be my childhood’,24 shifting away from the reassuring
174 ROSI BRAIDOTTI
certainties of the past to the openings hinted at by the future perfect.
This is the tense of a virtual sense of potential. Memories need the
imagination to empower the actualization of virtual possibilities in the
subject. They allow the subject to differ from oneself as much as possible
while remaining faithful to oneself, or in other words: enduring.
This is the ‘plane of immanence’ which composes and sustains
the actualization of processes of becoming as relational, external and
collective. This process of composition and assemblage of forces is
what desire (conatus) is all about, as an ontological layer of affinity and
sympathy between different enfleshed subjects. This intensive approach
to the processes of becoming does not pursue a Hegelian project of
recognition of consciousness and hence does not posit desire as Lack,
as is the case in the Lacanian equation. Nor is desire linked to the violent
struggle for individual autonomy, as argued by Jessica Benjamin in her
psychoanalytic work on desire and domination.25 Desire as plenitude
rather challenges the matrix of having and/or lacking access to the
dialects of recognition by Self and Other. Becoming is molecular, in
that it requires singular overthrowing of the internalized simulacra of
the self, consolidated by habits and flat repetitions. The dynamic vision
of the subject as assemblage is central to a vitalist, yet anti-essentialist
theory of desire, which also prompts a new practice of sustainable
ethics.
Desire is the propelling and compelling force that is driven by self-
affirmation or the transformation of negative into positive passions. This
is a desire not to preserve, but to change: it is a deep yearning for
transformation or a process of affirmation. Empathy and compassion
are key features of this nomadic yearning for in-depth transformation.
The space of becoming is a space of affinity and correlation of elements,
among compatible and mutually attractive forces and the constitutive
elements of the process. Proximity, attraction or intellectual sympathy
is both a topological and qualitative notion: it is a question of ethical
temperature. It is an affective framing for the becoming of subjects as
sensible or intelligent matter. The affectivity of the imagination is the
motor for these encounters and of the conceptual creativity they trigger
off. It is a transformative force that propels multiple, heterogeneous
‘becomings’ of the subject.
The sheer genius of Virginia Woolf illuminates this process, notably
her ability to present her life as a gesture of passing through, i.e. of
writing ‘as if already gone’, in a vitalist and productive relationship
to mortality. In The Waves, for instance, Woolf captures the concrete
 Writing as a Nomadic Subject 175
multiplicity – as well as the shimmering intensity – of becoming. She is
the writer of multiple and intransitive becomings, in-between ages, sexes,
elements, characters. Woolf’s texts enact a flow of positions, a crossing of
boundaries, and an overflowing into a plenitude of affects where life is
asserted to its highest degree. She is an intensive multiplier of affects.
Woolf also provides Deleuze with a model for the ‘plane of immanence’,
where different elements can encounter one another, producing those
assemblages of forces, without which there is no becoming. She expresses
with stark intensity the pain involved in trying to synchronize the
heterogeneity of life as zoe, as positive vitality.
Although Deleuze recognizes the extraordinary position of Woolf as
a conveyor or relay point for this passionate process of becoming in
both Dialogues and A Thousand Plateaus he is very careful to disengage
Woolf’s work from her being-a-woman, and even more from the
‘écriture féminine’ style made popular by sexual difference feminism
in the 1980s. Woolf’s language expresses the free indirect speech
that is central to the nomadic vision of the subject as heterogeneous
assemblage. Yet, something in what feminists of sexual difference call
the ‘feminine libidinal economy’ of excess without self-destruction and
desire as plenitude without lack, is central to the whole Deleuzian
project of becoming.26 This is why he positions the ‘becoming-woman’ so
prominently as a necessary moment of transition in his scheme of things,
not only in his philosophy of the subject, but also in the related theories of
aesthetics and art. Nonetheless, as I argued at length elsewhere, Deleuze
cannot resolve his ambivalence towards it.27
Woolf’s intensive genre and her flair for affirming positive passions
provide not only a significant illustration of the functions of writing
and desire, but also for the project of an ethics of sustainability. The
intensive text is an experimental site, a laboratory for the new in the
sense of the actualizations of experiments in becoming. The literary
text as an experiment in sustainable models of change is grounded
in accurate knowledge and subjected to the same rigorous rules of
verification as science or philosophy. This fundamental parallelism
cuts across different areas, disciplines and textual genres. Life, science
and art are equally enlisted to the project of experimenting with
transformations. The author, writer or agent is a complex multiplicity,
a factor of empowerment of potentia, that is to say multiplier of virtual
possibilities, through the rigorous application of the rules of composition
of assemblages. Intensive writing is cosmic, or rather: ‘chaosmic’28 and
vitalist in essence.
176 ROSI BRAIDOTTI
GLOBAL HYBRIDITY OR: THE PERVERSE NOMADISM OF ADVANCED
CAPITALISM

A few years ago my American publisher asked me to re-write Nomadic

Subjects, fifteen years after its original publication. This was not just an
update, but a thorough re-write of the entire manuscript (published in
2011). The thinking behind was that both the nomadic predicament and
its multiple contradictions had truly come of age. At the start of the third
millennium a diffuse sort of nomadism has become a relevant condition
for a great deal of world denizens. Furthermore, after thirty years of post-
structuralist, post-colonial and feminist debates for, against or undecided
on the issue of the ‘non-unitary’ – split, in-process, knotted, rhizomatic,
transitional, nomadic – subject, issues of fragmentation, complexity and
multiplicity have become household names in critical theory.
The ubiquitous nature of these notions, however, and the radical-chic
appeal of the terminology does not make for consensus about the issues
at stake, namely what exactly are the implications of the loss of unity
of the subject. In other words the ‘so what?’ part of the discussion on
nomadic subjectivity is more open than ever, while the contradictions
and the paradoxes of our historical condition multiply all around us. The
questions that motivate the project of nomadic subjects consequently
are: what exactly are the political and ethical conditions that structure
nomadic subjectivity today?
This philosophical line of enquiry is not to suggest, however, that
the nomadic subject should ever be taken as a new metaphor for the
human condition. Such generalizations are not helpful in times of fast
changes and economic and social transformations. Following the method
of the politics of location, what we need instead is higher degrees of
accuracy in accounting for both the external factors and the internal
complexity of nomadic subjectivity. The different modes and forms of
mobility in advanced capitalism complicate the task of the social and
cultural critic. They require more historically grounded, socio-economic
references and subtler degrees of differentiation. Thus nomadic thought
amounts to a politically invested cartography of the present condition
of mobility in a globalized world. This project stresses the fundamental
power differential among categories of human and non-human travellers
or movers. It also sustains the effort to develop suitable figurations for
the different kinds of mobility they embody and engender.
As I argued earlier, the figuration of the nomad renders an image
of the subject in terms of a non-unitary and multi–layered vision, as a
 Writing as a Nomadic Subject 177
dynamic and changing entity. The perverse hybridization induced by
advanced capitalism translates in socio-economic terms in the state of so-
called ‘flexibility’ of a large proportion of the working force. Interim, un-
tenured, part-time, sub-standard, underpaid work has become the norm
in most advanced liberal economies. The universities and the research
world are far from immune from this fragmentation and exploitative
approach. This negative and exploitative brand of capitalist flexibility
induces the fracture of life-long careers or professions, offering little
compensation in return.
Political theorists have addressed this pseudo-nomadism as a feature
of advanced capitalism, notably Hardt and Negri, Virno and the group
gathered round the journal Multitudes.29 My nomadic subject is part
of the same theoretical tradition, though genealogically it plunges its
roots in feminist theory and anti-racist politics. A world economy,
linked by a thick web of transnational flows of capital and labour,
functions by internal and external flows of migration and mobility.
The so-called flexibility or precariousness of actual work conditions
makes for social instability, transitory citizens and impermanent
settlements. Globalization is about the mobilization of differences and
the deterritorialization of social identity; it simultaneously challenges the
hegemony of nation states and their claim to exclusive citizenship30 and it
strengthens their hold over territory, cultural identity and social control.
It also produces a global political economy of ‘scattered hegemonies’.31
Advanced capitalism is a surveillance society, a system of a centre-less
but constant security which pervades the entire social fabric. It instals a
complex political economy of fear and consumerist comfort that operates
not only between the geopolitical blocks that have emerged after the end
of the Cold War, but also within them. Post-industrial or information
societies actively induce a qualitative proliferation of differences, for the
sake of consumeristic consumption.
Firmly grounded and centred in world-cities that function as
organizing principles in the stratification and distribution of wealth,
the globalized network society practises a perverse force of nomadism.
Goods, commodities and data circulate much more freely than human
subjects or, in some cases, the less-than-human subjects who constitute
the bulk of asylum-seekers and illegal inhabitants of the world.32
A commodified form of pluralism is the capitalist brand of opportunistic
nomadism that proliferates today. The dense materiality of bodies
caught in the very concrete conditions of advanced global societies flatly
contradicts advanced capitalism’s claims to being ‘immaterial’, ‘flowing’
178 ROSI BRAIDOTTI
or virtual. Expressed with Deleuze, these differences are not qualitative,
but rather quantitative and as such they do not alter the reactive power
of the majority as the phallo-Euro-centric master-code. The centres
proliferate in a fragmented manner, but lose none of their powers of
domination. The conclusion is clear: it is important to resist the uncritical
reproduction of sameness on a planetary scale.
The ‘disposable’ bodies of women, youth and others who are
racialized or marked off by age, gender, sexuality and income and
reduced to marginality, come to be inscribed with particular violence
in this regime of power. They experience dispossession of their
embodied and embedded selves in a political economy of repeated
and structurally enforced eviction.33 Translated in the language of
philosophical nomadism, the global city and the refugee camps are
not dialectical or moral opposites: they are two sides of the same
global coin, as Giorgio Agamben reminds us.34 They express the
schizoid political economy of our times. Massive concentrations of
infrastructures exist alongside complex, worldwide dissemination of
goods. The technologically driven advanced culture that prides itself
in being called the ‘information society’ is in reality a concrete,
material infrastructure that is concentrated on the sedentary global city.
The contrast between an ideology of free mobility and the reality of
disposable others brings out the schizophrenic character of advanced
capitalism – namely, the paradox of high levels of mobility of capital
flows in some sectors of the economic elites and also high levels of
centralization and greater immobility for most of the population. As
Vandana Shiva points out, within globalization we must distinguish
between different modes of mobility: ‘One group is mobile on a world
scale, with no country, no home, but the whole world as its property, the
other has lost even the mobility within rootedness, lives in refugee camps,
resettlement colonies and reserves.’35
Zygmunt Bauman echoes these concerns in his ethical mapping of
different postmodern ethical subjectivities.36 He specifically criticizes
the consumeristic focus of mobility embodied in the tourist and praises
instead the pilgrim as a subject that combines loyalty with itinerant
life-patterns. Bauman also expresses deep concern for the vulnerable,
disposable bodies that constitute the human waste of the globalized
world. Given the fluid, internally contradictory and ferocious nature
of advanced capitalism, the social and cultural critic needs to innovate
on the very tools of analysis. A trans-disciplinary approach that cuts
across the established methods and conventions of many disciplines is
 Writing as a Nomadic Subject 179
best suited to the task of providing an adequate cartography of the
shifting lines of segmentation and racialization of the globalized labour
market. This process cannot be kept separate from the genderization
and sexualization of the same market. The point of nomadic subjectivity
is to identify lines of flight, that is to say a creative alternative space
of becoming that would fall not between the mobile/immobile, the
resident/the foreigner distinction, but within all these categories. The
point is neither to dismiss nor to glorify the status of marginal, alien
others, but to find a more accurate, complex location for a transformation
of the very terms of their specification and of our political interaction.

THE CRITIQUE OF THE CENTRE FROM THE CENTRE

Both politically and epistemically, nomadic subjectivity provokes and

sustains a critique of dominant visions of the subject, identity and
knowledge, from within one of the many ‘centres’ that structure the
contemporary globalized world. In this respect my nomadic subject
project constitutes an act of resistance against methodological nationalism
and a critique of Euro-centrism from within. The methodology that
sustains it is derived from the feminist politics of location and figurations.
The work on power, difference and the politics of location offered by
postcolonial and anti-racist feminist thinkers like Gayatri Spivak, Stuart
Hall, Paul Gilroy, Avtar Brah, Helma Lutz, Philomena Essed, Gloria
Wekker, Nira Yuval-Davis and many others who are familiar with the
European situation is especially important for my nomadic project.
A figuration is a living map, a transformative account of the self; it’s
no metaphor. Figurations are not figurative ways of thinking, but rather
materialistic mappings of situated, i.e. embedded and embodied, social
positions. Being nomadic is not a glamorous state of jet setting, integral
to and complicitous with advanced capitalism.37 It points to the decline
of unitary subjects and the destabilization of the space-time continuum
of the traditional vision of the subject. Being homeless; a migrant; an
exile; a refugee; a tourist; a rape-in-war victim; an itinerant migrant; an
illegal immigrant; an expatriate; a mail-order bride; a foreign caretaker of
the young or the elderly of the economically developed world; a high-
flying professional; a global venture financial expert; a humanitarian
relief worker in the UN global system; a citizen of a country that
no longer exists (Yugoslavia; Czechoslovakia; the Soviet Union) – these
are no metaphors. Having no passport or having too many of them
is neither equivalent nor is it merely metaphorical. These are highly
180 ROSI BRAIDOTTI
specific geo–political and historical locations – it’s history and belonging
tattooed on your body. One may be empowered or beautified by it, or be
scarred, hurt and wounded by it. Learning to tell the difference among
different forms of non-unitary, multilayered or diasporic subjectivity
is therefore a key ethical but also methodological issue. Figurations
attempt to draw a cartography of the power–relations that define these
respective and diverging positions. They don’t aim to embellish or
metaphorize: they just express different socio–economic and symbolic
locations.
In late postmodernity Europe shares with the rest of the world the
phenomenon of trans-culturality, or cultures clashing in a pluri-ethnic,
poly-lingual and multi-cultural social space. World-migration, a huge
movement of population from periphery to centre, has challenged the
claim to the alleged cultural homogeneity of European nation-states
and of the incipient European Union. Present-day Europe is struggling
with multi-culturalism at a time of increasing racism and technophobia.
The paradoxes, power-dissymetries and fragmentations of the present
historical contest rather require that we shift the political debates from
the issue of differences between cultures, to differences within each
culture. In other words, one of the features of our present historical
condition is the shifting grounds on which periphery and centre confront
each other, with a new level of complexity which defies dualistic or
oppositional thinking.
Black, post-colonial and feminist critics have emphasized and
criticized the extent of these paradoxes as well as the rather
perverse division of labour that has emerged: thinkers located at the
centre of past or present empires are actively deconstructing the
power of the centre – thus contributing to the discursive proliferation
and consumption of former ‘negative’ others. Those same others,
however, – especially in post-colonial, but also in post-fascist and post-
communist societies – are rather more keen to reassert their identity,
than to deconstruct it. The irony of this situation is not lost on any
of the interlocutors: think, for instance, of the feminist philosophers
saying: ‘how can we undo a subjectivity we have not even historically
been entitled to yet?’38 Or the black and post-colonial subjects who argue
that it is now their historical turn to be self-assertive. And if the white,
masculine, ethnocentric subject wants to ‘deconstruct’ himself and enter
a terminal crisis, then – so be it! The point remains that ‘difference’
emerges as a central – albeit contested and paradoxical – notion and
practice. Which means that a confrontation with different locations is
 Writing as a Nomadic Subject 181
historically inevitable, as we are historically condemned to our history.
Accounting for them through adequate cartographies consequently
remains a crucial priority.
My nomadic subject pursues the same critique of power as black and
postcolonial theories, not in spite, but because of the fact that it is located
somewhere else. Philosophical nomadism addresses in both a critical
and creative manner the role of the former ‘centre’ in redefining power
relations. Margins and centre shift and destabilize each other in parallel,
albeit dissymmetrical, movements. I want to resist the identification of
the centre as inertia and self-perpetuation and to the aporetic repetition
of Sameness. The challenge is to destabilize dogmatic, hegemonic,
exclusionary power structures at the very heart of the identity structures
of the dominant subject through nomadic interventions. If we are to move
beyond the sociology of travel and the breast-beating of critical thinkers
squashed by white guilt, we need to enact a vision of the subject that
encompasses changes at the in-depth structures.
The point is not just mere deconstruction, but the relocation of
identities on new grounds that account for multiple belongings, ie:
a non-unitary vision of a subject. This subject actively yearns for
and constructs itself in complex and internally contradictory webs of
social relations. To account for these we need to look at the internal
forms of thought that privilege processes rather than essences and
transformations, rather than counter-claims to identity. The sociological
intersectional variables (gender, class, race and ethnicity, age, health)
need to be supplemented by a theory of the subject that calls into question
the inner fibres of the self. These include the desire, the ability and the
courage to sustain multiple belongings in a context, which celebrates and
rewards Sameness, cultural essentialism and one-way thinking. Nomadic
Subjects is my contribution as a European nomadic subject moving across
the variegated landscape of whiteness, to a debate which black, anti-
racists, post-colonial and other critical thinkers have put on the map.
There is something about a claustrophobic self-referential Euro-centred
philosophical thought that is not living up to the challenges of diversity
multiculturalism and the kind of mediated societies which we have
already become. We need more planetary dimensions.

CONCLUSION

The nomadic subject is a myth, or a political fiction, that allows me

to think through and move across established categories and levels of
182 ROSI BRAIDOTTI
experience. Implicit in my choice of this figuration is the belief in the
potency and relevance of the imagination, of myth-making, as an element
fuelling our creativity. Political fictions may be more effective, here and
now, than theoretical systems. The nomadism in question here refers to
the kind of critical consciousness that resists settling into socially coded
modes of thought and behaviour. Not all nomads are world travellers;
some of the greatest trips can take place without physically moving
from one’s habitat. It is the subversion of set conventions and the
consciousness-raising that defines the nomadic state, not the literal act
of travelling.
Attention to embodiment and the politics of locations produces
a visionary epistemology.39 The need for more creativity or new
figurations rests on the awareness that there is a noticeable gap
between how we live – in emancipated or post-feminist, multi-ethnic
globalized societies, with advanced technologies and high-speed
telecommunication, allegedly free borders and increased border controls
and security measures – and how we represent to ourselves this lived
existence in theoretical terms and discourses. The systems of theoretical
representation we have inherited from critical theory in the past are
simply inadequate to the task. This imaginative deficit can be read as the
‘jet-lag’ problem of being behind one’s time, or inhabiting simultaneously
different time-zones, in the schizophrenic mode that is characteristic of
the historical era of postmodernity. Filling in this gap with adequate
figurations is therefore one of the greatest challenges of the present, one
which enlists the resources of the imagination as much as conceptual
tools.
Nomadic becoming is neither a reproduction nor just an imitation,
but rather emphatic proximity, intensive inter-connectedness. Nomadic
shifts enact a creative sort of becoming; they are a performative gesture
that allows for otherwise unlikely encounters and unsuspected sources of
interaction, experience and knowledge. They urge us to reflect upon the
affects and ethics of our own writing practices and the potency of our own
figures of speech, so as to fully assess their potential for empowerment.
Critique and creativity are informed by this joyful nomadic force and can
be seen as the self-styling of different modes of resistance. I see nomadic
subjectivity as both an analytic tool and a creative project aimed at a
qualitative shift of consciousness that is attuned to the spirit of our age.
So as to be worthy of our times, while resisting them, we need to go on
becoming.
 Writing as a Nomadic Subject 183
NOTES

1 Virginia Woolf, The Waves (London: Grafton Books, 1977), p. 80.

2 See Rosi Braidotti, Transpositions: On Nomadic Ethics (Cambridge: Polity Press,
2006).
3 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Qu’est-ce que la Philosophie? (Paris: Minuit, 1991).
English translation: What is Philosophy?, translated by Graham Burchell and Hugh
Tomlinson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994).
4 Neologism of my invention to describe people, mostly women for whom writing is a
life-giving mediating factor.
5 See Rosi Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in
Contemporary Feminist Theory, second edition (New York: Columbia University
Press, 2011).
6 Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991).
7 Michel Foucault, Les Mots et les Choses (Paris: Gallimard, 1966). English translation:
The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Pantheon
Books, 1970).
8 Rosi Braidotti, Metamorphoses. Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming (Cambridge:
Polity Press, 2002).
9 In nomadic thought: a singularity bounded by its own powers to endure intensities
and relations to others.
10 Rosi Braidotti, Patterns of Dissonance (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991).
11 Edouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,
1997).
12 This is the title I gave to my memorial article for Françoise Collin, see Rosi
Braidotti, ‘Thinking with an Accent: Françoise Collin, Les cahiers du Grif, and
French Feminism’, Signs, 39. 3 (2014), 597–626.
13 Rosi Braidotti, Madri, Mostri e Macchine (Rome: Manifesto Libri, 1996); Rosi
Braidotti, La philosophie, là où on ne l’attend pas (Paris: Larousse, 2009); Rosi
Braidotti, Baby Boomers: Vite parallele dagli anni Cinquanta ai cinquant’anni
(Florence: Giunti, 2003).
14 George Eliot, Middlemarch (London: Penguin Books, 1973), p. 226.
15 Ibid.
16 Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1992); Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?
17 The group around Althusser started the debate in the mid-1960s; Deleuze’s path-
breaking study of Spinoza dates from 1968 (English in 1990); Macherey’s Hegel-
Spinoza analysis came out in 1979 (English in 2011); Negri’s work on the imagination
in Spinoza in 1981 (English in 1991).
18 Rosi Braidotti, Patterns of Dissonance; Pheng Cheah, ‘Nondialectical Materialism’,
Diacritics, 38.1 (2008), 143–157.
19 Mariam Fraser, Sarah Kember and Celia Lury, Inventive Life. Approaches to the New
Vitalism (London: Sage, 2006).
20 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Mille Plateaux: Capitalisme et Schizophrénie
(Paris: Minuit, 1980). English translation: A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987).
184 ROSI BRAIDOTTI
21 Moira Gatens and Genevieve Lloyd, Collective Imaginings: Spinoza, Past and Present
(London and New York: Routledge, 1999).
22 Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?
23 Keith Ansell Pearson, Germinal Life. The Difference and Repetition of Deleuze
(London and New York: Routledge, 1999).
24 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 294.
25 Jessica Benjamin, The Bonds of Love. Psychoanalysis, Feminism and the Problem of
Domination (New York: Pantheon Books, 1988).
26 Claire Colebrook, ‘Is sexual difference a problem?’, in Deleuze and Feminist Theory,
edited by Ian Buchanan and Claire Colebrook (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
Press, 2000), pp. 110–127.
27 See Patterns of Dissonance; Metamorphoses. Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming;
and Transpositions.
28 Félix Guattari, Chaosmosis. An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm (Sydney: Power
Publications, 1995).
29 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2000); Paolo Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude (New York: Semiotext(e),
2000).
30 Robin Cohen, Global Diasporas, an Introduction (London: University College London
Press, 1997).
31 Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and Transnational Feminist Practices, edited by
Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1994).
32 Etienne Balibar, We, the People of Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship
(Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2004); Braidotti, Transpositions;
Paul Gilroy, Against Race. Imagining Political Culture Beyond the Colour Line
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000).
33 Saskia Sassen, Losing Control. Sovereignty in an Age of Globalisation (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1995).
34 Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer. Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1998).
35 Vandana Shiva, ‘Homeless in the ‘Global Village’, in Maria Mies and Vandana Shiva,
Ecofeminism (London: Zed Books, 1993), pp. 98–106 (p. 98).
36 Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Times: Living in an Age of Uncertainty (Cambridge: Polity
Press, 2006).
37 Linda Alcoff, Visible Identities (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).
38 Rosi Braidotti, Metamorphoses, p. 15.
39 Patricia Yaeger, Honey-Mad Women. Emancipatory Strategies in Women’s Writing
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1988).