| One of the difficulties that Braidotti seems to have in attempting to theorize the position of nomadic ontology is the overcoming on a dualistic structure intrinsic in a phallogocentric view of sexual relations. Indeed, the very idea of sexual relations suggests a dualistic structure based on male paradigms. Yet Braidotti upholds this distinction as a necessary standpoint in articulating the nomadic ontology of becoming; doing away with this distinction—an error she finds in Deleuze—seems linked with the strategy of the decentered self that posits an unknowable subject making the construction of the feminist subject a mere academic exercise while really upholding a male-dominated structure. The idea of the other—a position that Deleuze sees woman occupying as the supreme representative—is a productive of a phallogocentric structure; this very structure, however, remains the point from within and around which the nomad must operate: a mythic position from which to react. Ostensibly akin to Harraway’s notion of the ironic position and de Certeau’s “tactics,” Braidotti’s nomad works within a system in order to oppose and circumvent the system’s construction of the other position. Here Deleuze and Guattari’s schizophrenic—one who walks freely within the system rather than regulated to a dark corner of the analyst’s couch—seems a likely compatriot of the nomad: a machine, yes, but a machine that is open to views and values because s/he functions creatively on the periphery. Desire endows this creativity with its own affective thought that may challenge and precipitate change and transformation by “inventing new images of thought” (Braidotti 101). Braidotti states that “feminism is about grounding, it is about foundations and about political myths” (105). These myths—myths that I do not see as divergent from or contradictory to present, dualistic myths—provide a foundation from which a new figuration of feminist subjectivity may be formed, like Harraway’s cyborg. This foundation allows for connection-making between dualistic categories that necessarily blurs any distinction between supposed dichotomous constructions. I would argue that the same construction exists, but the way in which the components of the structure are used by the nomad (cyborg, tactician) constructs a new relation to the system. The components are used in creative and therefore subversive ways in order to articulate a new subject. Herein lies the groundwork for a posthuman figuration that does not rely on the traditional phallogocentric dualities. Contradictions here? Perhaps. How can the nomad rely on foundations for a construction of identity? As long as the foundational structure remains open to questions of its structure (a nomadic position), then a new location for feminist figuration may emerge from already established systems. The nomad, like the cyborg, revels in contradictions and border wars that oppose and attack political fictions of social construction. |