From Radical Representations to

Corporeal Becomings: The Feminist

Philosophy of Lloyd, Grosz, and Gatens

CLAIRE COLEBROOK

Contrasting the work of Genevieve Lloyd, Elizabeth Grosz, and Moira Gatens
with the poststructuralist philosophy ofJudith Butler, this paper identifiesa distinctive
“Australian” feminism. It argues that while Butler remains trapped by the matter/
representation binary, the Spinozist turn in Lloyd and Gatens, and Grosz’s work on
Bergson and Deleuze, are attempts to think corporeality.

INTRODUCTION

There are two ways (at least) in which we might think of introducing the
body into feminist theory. The first possibility might be understood by reflect-
ing upon the standard schema of the history of feminist thought. While first
wave feminism demanded equality, and second wave feminism demanded dif-
ference, the body emerged in the third wave as a means of deconstructing this
sameness/difference opposition. The appeal to equality assumes that gender
differences are imposed on otherwise equal beings, and thereby precludes the
possibility that different types of bodies might demand different forms of po-
litical recognition. In the second wave assertion of difference and specificity,
the body is still seen as that which precedes social construction. But for fern-
inists of the second wave, different bodies demand different forms of articula-
tion. In the third wave, both these arguments are attacked for having an un-
problematic appeal to the pre-representational body. Women are neither the
same nor essentially different; to decide such an argument one would have to
appeal to a body from which social representation derives or upon which rep-
resentation is imposed. But if we were to argue that the very notion of the pre-
representational body is effected through representation, we would have to

Hypatia vol. 15, no. 2 (Spring 2000)0by Claire Colebrook

 Claire Colebrook 77

move beyond discussions of women’s essential sameness or difference. Broadly

speaking, the first mode of this critique is linguistic in approach, and demon-
strates that any appeal to a body is always already discursive.The “body,”there-
fore, is an intensely political site, not a pre-representational ground, but an
effect of representation that passes itself off as grounding. The second possibil-
ity for thinking the body beyond sameness and difference recognizes that no
simple appeal can be made to the body as some ultimate foundation; neverthe-
less, while the body may only be referred to through discourse or representation,
it possesses a force and being that marks the very character of representation.
My aim in this paper is to think through these two possibilities, exploring the
first through the work of U.S. feminist Judith Butler and the second through
three Australian feminist philosophers: Elizabeth Grosz, Moira Gatens, and
Genevieve Lloyd.
Historically, Anglo-American feminism has its roots in liberal theory with
a sustained attention to rights, emancipation, equality, and autonomy. The
liberal tradition has, accordingly, been less concerned with a given essence or
specificity of nature and has focused more on not allowing any natural or giv-
en cause to dictate what ought to be. Philosophical concern can only, legiti-
mately, be directed to what we say and how we represent the world to ourselves.
Ethically, therefore, liberalism might be aligned with a certain definition of
autonomy: in the absence of any given or natural determination of what it is to
be human the burden falls upon us to legislate for ourselves. Such legislation
must take place, if it is to be rigorous, without consideration for any putative
natural or essential justification. This focus on justification, in the absence of
any given essence or nature, generates an ethics of autonomy, legitimation,
equality, transparency, and non-interference. It follows that if we are to rule
questions of nature and essence out of play, then our attention will be directed
to language, legitimation, representation, and argument. Typically, feminism’s
traditional arguments often held philosophy to task for its residual essential-
ism, for its failure to break free from natural determination. It is not surprising,
then, that a sexlgender distinction was made, a distinction that demanded a
more rigorous exclusion of any given, natural, or pre-linguistic determination.
A n attention to gender would demand that all those questions of women’s
natural limits be abandoned. If men and women are always already cultured
and gendered then it makes no sense to ask about any essential or natural basis
for difference.
At the same time, it is also not surprising that feminism was subsequently
marked by the event of a second wave: an audacious reaction against liberal
constructivism and a foregrounding of difference and nature (Braidotti 1991,
151-73). Here, the sexlgender (or matter/representation) distinction was in-
tensified rather than ignored. A number of Marxist and psychoanalytic femi-
nists undertook an investigation into the specific and natural grounds of sexual
difference. In so doing, the sex/gender distinction was a ground for debate rath-
78 Hypatia

er than being thematized as a question. As Gatens argued, feminists tended to

position themselves on either side of this presupposed divide: either sex was an
ahistorical and determining essence or sex was merely the effect of an entirely
arbitrary and disembodied representation (Gatens 1996,4). Lloyd also diag-
nosed a similar dichotomy in theorizations of gender: “For one approach, the
body exists independently of anything social; for the other, it is itself a product
of mind and its operations with symbols” (Lloyd 1982, 19). The distinction
between sex and gender, therefore, regards the body from the dividing line
between materiality and representation; what is not questioned is the nature
and force of this division. In many ways the work of Butler intensifies this
matter/representation dichotomy, despite the fact that her work is ostensibly a
critique of the sex/gender distinction.

THEPOSTSTRUCTURALIST FEMINISM
OF JUDITH BUTLER

Much of the feminist mobilization of poststructuralism in the United States

sustained the critical linguisticism of Anglo-American philosophy. The ques-
tion of sexual essence, the body in itself, or, indeed, any ontological speculation
regarding the being and emergence of linguistic structure was suspended in
favor of pulling apart the system of representation from within.
Butler’s Bodies That Matter (1993) recognizes that matter is only thinkable
as matter, and hence as already discursive, effected as discourse’s other. Two
features characterize Butler’s theory of matter. Firstly, she depends heavily on
a Hegelian theory of the constitutive power of positing. Accordingly, discourse
only works by positing an outside, but this “outside” is always the outside of
discourse. For Butler, “[tlo posit a materiality outside of language is still to posit
that materiality, and that materiality so posited will retain that positing as its
constitutive condition” (1993,67-68). The “sexed” body is only seenas sexed,
through discourse. At the same time, the discourse of gender legitimates itself
by positing this sex as its ground. The logic is retroactive and is very much n
logic. To think of the pre-discursive demands that discourse be in place, but the
place of discourse is only secured through this very thought. We might argue,
then, that Butler’s account (like Hegel’s Logic) conflates the being of a thing
with the mode in which that thing is known. The body is, it is true, only thought
after the event of discourse. But does this render the body itself an effect of that
event?According to Butler, “If the body signified as prior to signification is an
effect of signification, then the mimetic or representational status of language,
which claims that signs follow bodies as their necessary mirrors, is not mimetic
at all. O n the contrary, it is productive, constitutive, one might even argue
performative, inasmuch as this signifying act delimits and contours the body
that it then claims to find prior to any and all signification” (1993,30).
Of course, Butler’s own account is clearly uneasy with the notion of the
body as effect. The purpose of BodiesThat Matter (1993) as a response to her
 Claire Colebrook 79

earlier Gender Trouble (1990) was precisely to address materiality. But Butler
sustains her Hegelian logic: the body is not an effect of discourse but its status
as non-discursive is an effect of positing. Secondly, Butler’s emphasis on dis-
course, constitutive outsides, or the limits of discourse sustains the idea of dis-
course as an ideal system of signs or representations. That is, discourse, in being
radically other than the real, in being the locus of a logical positing, is defined
as an ideal power. But this idea of discourse ignores two problems or possi-
bilities. How does discourse emerge as ideal? Butler argues that discourse is
material but only perceived as material through discourse: “materiality is con-
stituted in and through iterability” (1993, 70). Doesn’t this sustain a radical
opposition between materiality and discourse, whereby “materiality” is that
inevitable but radically receding effect of the ideal positing of the material?
Butler accepts the relation between materiality and its ideal sense to be one
of discursive positing, and then radicalizes this logic through a theory of it-
eration, performatives, citation, mimesis, and quotation-a linguistic logic in
which discourse’s “outside” is re-figured through discourse itself. Secondly,
alongside the Hegelian logic of the constitutive power of positing, Butler (like
so many other Anglo-American theorists of the body) sees discourse as signi-
fication, as a system of signs, conflated with a broad sense of language.
Butler’s linguistic emphasis is also evidenced in her interpretation of Mi-
chel Foucault’s notion of discourse and power. Butler quite explicitly criticizes
Foucault on two accounts. The first is his failure to consider an outside of pow-
er and discourse.’ The second (and connected criticism) is Foucault’sfailure to
account for the psychic origin of power (Butler 1997, 18). In order to make
these criticisms of Foucault, Butler needs to exclude a way of reading Foucault
that has been crucial to the work of both Grosz and Gatens. Butler reads Fou-
cault’s notion of discourse alongside the Lacanian notion of Law and also de-
fines power as discursive exclusion (1997,205). There are two problems with
such a reading. The first is that Foucault’snotion of power is immanent.z Power
is neither repressive nor exclusive; power does not only act as law (through
prohibition and exclusion) but also has a productive dimen~ion.~ Power is
more than a negative act of exclusion. Power occurs as a multiplicity of differ-
ing forces. This is why resistance for Foucault is also a mode of power and
not (as in Butler) the destabilization of power. For Butler, however, what is
excluded or prohibited by power is only an effect of prohibition. Butler also
explains the pre-discursive “effect” of sex according to the signifier’s logic of
reference (1993,68). And if discourse (and power) can be identified with the
system of signification then it makes sense both to speak of what that system
excludes and to demand an explanation for the location and internalization of
that system. This is precisely what Butler demands of Foucault: an account of
the outside of discourse and a description of the workings of power in the
constitution of the subject.
In a similar manner, Butler turns to Luce lrigaray to explain the negation or
80 Hypatia

exclusion of the maternal origin. According to Butler, “[wlhen Irigaray sets out
to read the history of philosophy, she asks how its borders are secured: what
must be excluded from the domain of philosophy for philosophy itself to pro-
ceed, and how is it that the excluded comes to constitute negatively a philo-
sophical enterprise that takes itself to be self-grounding and self-constituting?”
(1993, 37). Irigaray cannot be construed as an essentialist if the feminine is
only the effect of the negation of corporeality that establishes the masculine
subject. O n this reading, the feminine is constituted as feminine through dis-
avowal. The feminine cannot be appealed to as that which exceeds the system,
precisely because the feminine is only an effect of systemic exclusion. For But-
ler, “the feminine exceeds its figuration. . . . [Tlhis unthematizability consti-
tutes the feminine as the impossible yet necessary foundation of what can be
thematized and figured” (1993,41).
The body, precisely because it is only experienced as a body and is always
already signified, gives us a radical outside, limit, or surplus that cannot be ex-
hausted by representational closure. But this excess has nothing to do with the
being of the body per se (the body’s ontology). It has to do with epistemic con-
ditions in general. For it is the character of signification as such that whatever
it refers to is given as referent only through the act of signification itself. The
body is not a privileged lever for the disruption of representational closure, for
representation’s own logic (as re-presentation) demands that any “presence”
is never given immediately but only us present. Not surprisingly, then, Butler’s
work on materiality begins with that specific instance of the material that
“turns” upon itself in order to generate the meaning of the material: the sig-
nifier. For Butler, the notion of an originary materiality is the effect of a certain
tropic or linguistic turn (1997, 68). The concept of materiality can only be
conceptualized through the very material forms of signification (actual linguis-
tic marks or differences). However, the material forms of signification can only
be seen as material after the concept of materiality that they constitute: “every
effort to refer to materiality takes place through a signifying process which, in
its phenomenality, is always already material” (1993, 68).
The first problem with Butler’s emphasis on epistemic conditions is this:
that which is known is perceived ex post facto (after the event of knowing or
positing). But is this logical order to be taken as the order of being, such that
what is known is conceived as a “constitutive outside,” as a “beyond” of the
limit or as a negated, excluded, and radically anterior Real of phantasmatic
projection? Is it correct to say that if “sex” is only known ex post facto then sex
is an effect, an outside or “beyond” whose locus of negotiation can only be
those structures through which sex is known as sex?If this is the case then the
body is, much like any other referent, only known as referent through the struc-
tures of language. A corporeal politics, on this model, would attend to those
features of signification and reference that destabilized the referential structure
per se. Here, the structures of differentiation are seen as radically divided from
 Claire Colebrook 81

some effected, constituted, or negated outside; this is because the structures of

differentiation are conflated with the way in which a thing is known and di-
vorced from the way in which the thing is. Butler locates the body, the ma-
ternal, woman, sex, or the material as such a limit, outside or other of discourse.
In so doing, the logic of representation is short-circuited, for no such original
presence is ever given. But language is still seen as re-presentation, a relation
between a meaning or sense and that which is signified. In this dualism, how-
ever, what is signified remains radically other than (beyond or outside) differ-
entiation. Secondly, these structures of differentiation are located as systemic
wholes, and this is a consequence of identifying differentiation with Lacan’s
Symbolic, an order radically divided from the Real. If the Real is that which
resists symbolization absolutely, this is because the real is only perceived as real
through positing, but this positing of the Real is always already a negation of
(or becoming other than) the real.
But from this insight into the non-coincidence between the Real and its
Symbolic repetition, feminism might follow two paths. The first is to focus on
those structures of positing as the condition for the experience of the Real.
This is the path taken by Butler and is, as I have suggested, a focus on epistemic
conditions. The second is to ask an ontological question (or questions). What
type of being is it that symbolizes itself as being? Furthermore, rather than
accept the logic of this radical and constitutive divide between the symbolic
and the Real, we might also ask a speculative question: how does this divide
take place, where is it drawn, and by whom?4
While Jacques Lacan’s work is used by Butler to demonstrate the constitu-
tion of sexed identity through a system of signification, Jacques Derrida’s work
is also deployed in order to argue for the impossibility of a non-textual outside.
The idea that “there is nothing outside the text” does not demand a linguistic
monism (Derrida 1973). The pervasiveness of textuality is not an argument
for rejecting real or material being. However, there are two ways in which we
can understand Derrida’s emphasis on the quasi-transcendental status of dif-
firance, writing, or textuality. The first is to argue that dif’irance, writing, or
textuality are conditions for the experience of any thing. In order to speak of,
or know, the real, it is necessary that I have a concept of the real. Concepts are
effects of a systemic differentiation, effected through a structure of differences.
That which exceeds the concept can only be figured as a beyond, outside, or
origin; and this very process of figuring the outside returns the outside to the
domain of the conceptual system. In order for concepts to workas concepts they
must be repeatable, iterable, or applicable beyond the specificity of a single
instance. For Butler, the repetition of a term is required if that term is to func-
tion as an identical concept, but this repetition also opens up the possibility of
the disruption of identity. A term is never self-present but functions only by
repeat performance; if this is so, however, there is always the possibility for a
hiatus, disruption, or destabilization of repetition.
82 Hypatia

The second path that might be pursued in thinking the Derridean notion of
diffirunce is that of positive difference. Rather than seeing differentiation as a
conceptual or ideal determination of some pre-differentiated outside or be-
yond, we might argue for diffirance as being more than a condition of meaning.
This possibility is already indicated in Derrida’s own work. Indeed, Derrida’s
writing seems to move between these two critical and speculative poles. The
critical possibility is to see diffirance as the condition for experience, concep-
tuality, and knowledge, an understanding of difiirance that can be found in
Derrida’s engagement with language philosophy in Limited Inc. (1988). The
speculative possibility is to see diffiranceas the mode of being as such. In “Send-
ing: O n Representation,” for example, Derrida argues that the multiplicities of
differentiation that “send” being are not negative: “This divisibility of the envoi
has nothing negative about it, it is not a lack, it is altogether different from
subject, from signifier. . . .This divisibility or this diffiranceis the condition for
there being an envoi, possibly an envoi of being, a dispensation or a gift of being
and time, of the present and of representation’’ (Derrida 1982,324).
In contrast to the notion of a differentiating linguistic system, the idea that
writing cannot be located within language, but characterizes a general or quasi-
transcendental diffirunce, marks not only Derrida’s deconstruction but many
other Continental interventions in the problem of ideality. Difference is not to
be located within a system of representation subsequently imposed as a grid or
scheme on experience. Diffirunce is not an epistemic condition, but a way of
rethinking what is as such. This is a radicalization not just of knowledge but of
ontology. It may not be that the body or materiality is only known or posited
through difference (or the linguistic structures of difference). Corporeality
might itself be differential. If this were the case, then sex, materiality, and cor-
poreality would be neither expost f a t o positings, nor radical outsides. O n the
contrary, the idea of an “outside” to differential structures or movements, an
outside to iteration, performativity, or discourse, need only be posited if we en-
close difference within signification. Both Grosz’s attempt to think pure differ-
ence corporeally and Gatens’s and Lloyd’s Spinozism address this problem of
positive difference. In so doing, the outcomes of their projects are ontological
rather than epistemological. The body, thought through in the work of fem-
inists like Grosz, Gatens, and Lloyd, was always more than a value or sign
within thought: it was both the locus of thought and that which remained
(necessarily) unthought.
Butler’s distinction between sex and gender (or the materiality of the body
and its representation), even when adopted critically, still works within a di-
chotomous logic of priority and origins. According to Butler, the ground of
“sex” is posited after the attribution of gender; sex is effected subsequent to the
performance of certain attributes. Butler sees the pre-discursive ground of
“sex” as an effect of the discursive representation of gender: “gender produces
the misnomer of aprediscursive ‘sex”’ (Butler 1993,6).This is not a linguistic
 Claire Colebrook 83

narcissism; “what is” cannot be reduced to its representation, but is still known
only as pre-representational.

AUSTRALIAN
CONTEMPORARY FEMINISM:
GROSZ,AND LLOYD
GATENS,

It is precisely this strict distinction between “what is” and its representation
that was challenged by Gatens’s ground-breaking critique of the sex/gender
distinction (Gatens 1996).5This critique did not just have the idea of an es-
sential female nature as its target. O n the contrary, by the time Gatens’s article
first appeared in 1983, the appeal to female nature had been dismissed as a
naive essentialism, and the sexlgender distinction had been intensified by sub-
suming the entire feminist problematic within the domain of gender or rep-
resentation alone. In so doing, those third wave feminisms that rejected both a
female nature and the conventional representation of that nature (as gender)
did so in the name of a radical representationalism. Any essence, it was argued,
was thoroughly within representation and could not be appealed to as a critical
lever in order to establish a more legitimate representation. However, as Gat-
ens’s article made clear, the idea of gender as an arbitrary cultural overlay not
only assumed the existence of sex as some pure thing in itself, it also made the
mistake ofseeinggender as aform of pure ideality. The critique of the sex/gender
distinction undertaken by Gatens ought therefore to be distinguished from the
host of similar critiques that followed in its wake. Gatens’s argument was (at
least) double-edged. It was not only sex as some pure, meaningless, and pre-
linguistic real that was exposed as critically untenable. The idea of gender as
representation, social construction, or signification presented the same politi-
cal and ontological problems as its naively materialist counterpart.
Politically, the sexlgender distinction reinforced a hierarchical opposition
that had underpinned philosophy’s sexism. The distinction between a brute
material reality and its purely ideal representation, along with the idea of phi-
losophy as properly concerned only with ideality, rehearsed and repeated an
opposition traditionally associated with the malelfemale binary. It should be
noted, then, that any “bracketing” of sex or insistence on sex as an effect of
representation also partakes in a representationalist refusal to question, or think
of a way of questioning, w h t it is that gender re-presents. It is not just that there
is no sex in itself (no simple essentialism), or that any such pre-representa-
tional sex would itself always be represented. Gatens’s argument suggests that
the representational side of the sex/gender divide is no less problematic than
the putative brute givenness of sex. The idea of a strict boundary between the
real (nature or sex) and its representation (language or gender) is precisely
what needs to be rethought, and not just for political reasons.
As I will argue below, it is precisely the question of the origin and effect of
such a boundary (between the real and the representational) which marks the
84 Hypatia

best work of Lloyd, Grosz, and Gatens herself. It is also the dependence on and
re-assertion of this boundary that enables us to distinguish the quite different
and exemplary work of Butler. Gatens’s critique of the sexlgender distinction
opened a new question. If gender is not an arbitrary, immaterial, representa-
tional overlay strictly divided from some brute corporeality, just how is it that
bodies become real and real as sexed? Grosz’s idea of a body that not only limits
but mobilizes its representational becoming might enable us to question Butler’s
radical separation of ground or origin-a separation which defines the body in
opposition to its signification.
In contrast to Butler’s understanding of the Real as a logical effect of pos-
iting, Grosz’s reading of Lacan describes the Real as an actual developmental
stage in the formation of the subject (Grosz 1990, 34). Grosz also argues for
the existence of the Real as a pre-semantic domain of sexual specificity. The
Real is not an ex post facto effect of symbolization, but is there to be symbolized
(and can function, therefore, as the locale for a possible re-grounding): “The
Real, where the vagina, clitoris, or vulva have the same ontological status and
functional utility as the penis and testicles, must be displaced and recoded if
women’s bodies are to be categorized as necessarily incomplete. The narcissistic
imaginary order mediates between the Real, in which there is no lack, and the
symbolic, where women represent for men a lack men have disavowed” (Grosz
1990, 117).
Grosz expresses a temporal logic quite different from that of Butler; for
Grosz what is signified is known after, but exists before symbolization.6Setting
herself against Butler, Grosz argues that sex is not a posited truth “expressed”by
gender but “is itself always already expression” (1995, 212). This distinction
between her own work and that of Butler’s reinforces Grosz’s sustained in-
sistence on the positivity of morphology; the expression or style of gender is
always a stylization of some specific body: ‘“Sex’ refers to the domain of sexual
difference, to the question of the morphologies of bodies” (1995, 213). In con-
trast with Butler’s attention to conditions of representation, speech, and dis-
course, Grosz’s early work attempted to think the body as that which marked
representation with its own force, difference, and motility. Grosz’s most recent
work on Darwin and Bergson extends this site of force and difference, not just
beyond human meaning to the body, but beyond the human altogether (Grosz
2000). Grosz’s work was always critical of representationalism and construc-
tivism, the idea that the body is given through its way of being known or fig-
ured. Whereas Butler focused on the productivity of discourse in the work of
Foucault, Grosz paid more attention to Foucault’sdispersion of power and pos-
itivity beyond the human site of knowledge and speech. Power, for Grosz, is
that eternally active and differential becoming from which any unified iden-
tity or law might emerge.7
In contrast with Butler’s mobilization and critique of Foucault in The Psy-
chic Life of Power, it could be argued that Foucault’s project set itself the task of
 Claire Colebrook 85

thinking power beyond the logic of subjectivity and in terms other than that
of prohibition, negation, and exclusion. Foucault was, therefore, highly criti-
cal of the structuralist attention to linguistic boundaries and conditions. For
Foucault, structuralism, the human sciences, and even attention to the “trace”
were ways in which thought recuperated itself (Foucault 1972,121). To think
power as immanent would preclude a logic of negation and exclusion (such as
Butler’s), for if power were immanent it would not be the power of a certain
force (language/discourse). It is not that there are beings who then have power
or who are limited by power; there is the event of power, and it is from this
multiplicity of events that beings and identities are effected. This “immanent”
way of thinking power was put forward by Grosz in her early work on corpor-
eality, where she links Foucault with Benedictus de Spinoza, Gottfried Leib-
niz, and Friedrich Nietzsche, “who have proposed a unified or monist rather
than a dichotomized or dualist understanding of corporeality” (Grosz 1987,
8-9). If being is not a substance or ground but only the active becoming of
qualities, then being might be interpreted positively as the assertion of force,
a force not in opposition to (or in negation of) some posited other, but posi-
tive force. Foucault’s attempt to rethink power might also then be tied to a
rethinking of corporeality. If there is not a single location of power, nor a priv-
ileged site for its origin or explanation, then power will not be an imposed
system, but will be a multiplicity of effects (Grosz 1995,215). In terms of sex-
ual difference, power might be rendered as, in Gatens’s terms, expressive: the
becoming of a certain quality, its development through regulation, cultivation
and relation to other powers (Gatens 1996, 149).
The uptake of Irigaray’s critique of philosophy in Australian feminism has,
similarly, focused on that aspect of Irigaray’s work critical of the idea of an
essential sexuality which is then re-presented. Indeed, as I have already sug-
gested, it is the question of the inauguration of the distinction between the real
body and its meaningful sexuality that characterizes the question of the body.
This is seen most clearly, perhaps, in Grosz’s Volatile Bodies ( 1994) and the the-
orization of the relationship between interiority and exteriority. While the
phenomenological paradigm of intentionality sees the subject as an effect of a
“directedness-towards” or “going-beyond,” Grosz argues for a convolution of
outside-in and inside-out approaches. While Irigaray’swork sought to redefine
intentionality away from a subjectlobject relation to a subjectlsubject relation
of sexual difference (Irigaray 1996), Grosz’s work on corporeality represents a
stronger challenge to the paradigm of subjectivity. But in so doing, her work
does not merely locate the corporeal as a materiality or simple other of the
supposed ideality of thought. Rather, as with Gatens’s emphasis on body image,
the corporeal for Grosz is not a given or origin to which thought needs to re-
turn; the body is precisely that peculiar given which is idealized, imagined, or
em-bodied in order for any given as such to emerge. As such, then, the body
marks that peculiar site of transformation whereby the human becomes hu-
86 Hypatia

man, the body becomes sexed, and the subject emerges as its own. But this be-
coming is neither a manifestation of an already present sexuality nor an arbi-
trary overlay. The body “becomes” in order for becoming in general to emerge.
The body is the very passage from being to becoming. Cashed out in psycho-
analytic terms, terms which are both crucial and problematic for this project,
we might say that the human is nothing other than an interpretation of its own
body (a becoming-other than the body); at the same time this becoming-other
is also always a becoming-other of the body. The human is a becoming other of
the body and a becoming other than the body. The body is, if you like, the type
of being that, being essentially dispossessed of an essence, essentializes itself.
It is the very character of the human body to render itself meaningful, or
other than Corporeal. The body is that material being which transforms itself
immaterially, through itssignificance as asubject (Gatens 1996,13). It was this
corporeal dialectic in Lacan’s work, the passage to the imaginary, which moti-
vated much of the early work of Grosz and Gatens. But the thinking through
of the becomingcorporeal in Australian feminism also led to a move beyond
Lacan and Irigaray. Grosz’s work typically sees sense not as a bounded system
of signification or as a representational network, but locates sense and the
emergence of meaning at the level of the corporeal. The body is not that which
resists meaning, nor is it a constitutive outside to the structures of meaning; the
body is a becoming meaningful. Similarly, for Gatens the body is neither a
mental representation of some pre-semantic matter, nor is the body a sexual
real belied by subsequent images or stereotypes. Using the work of Spinoza and
modalities, Gatens argues that the body is not a materiality that is then ren-
dered meaningful. A Spinozist ontology thinks being as becoming. The body
is in its modes of practice, self-representation, and engagement. The body is a
becoming-meaningful. But meaning, here, is not a system of signs or significa-
tion, not a symbolic overlay, but “an immanent power of active nature” ( 1996,
148).
Once the notion of the subject is refigured in this way, new openings are
possible for political theory and ethics. Gatens sees the Deleuzian-Spinozist
emphasis on thought as the realization of the body as enabling the reformula-
tion of society’s predominantly masculine body-image. Gatens’s focus on body-
image sets itself against the idea that gender is merely an effect of cultural con-
struction or representation (1996,41). She sees the sexual subject as an effect
ofdoubling, whereby the subject occurs as a relation to its image (1996,35). But
this doubling is neither material nor ideal; it is the doubling of the material
body as an ideal body. It is the material becoming other than itself; and this
becoming also occurs in relation to an other body (1996,37). Lloyd also uses
the Spinozist idea of the mind as an idea of the body to argue both for sexual
specificity and for the dynamic character of the body’s sense:
The body is not the underlying cause of the mind’s awareness
and knowledge, but rather the mind’s object-what it knows.
 Claire Colebrook 87

And the mind knows itself only through reflection on its ideas
of body. Its nature is to be the idea of a particular body. . . . [Tlhis
way of thinking of minds and bodies implies that minds share
the sexual differentiation of bodies. . . . As ideas of differently
sexed bodies, minds must be sexually differentiated. Ideas of
male and female bodies will differ in ways that reflect the dif-
ferences of the bodies of which they are ideas. (Lloyd 1982,
20-2 1)
The idea of the body is an extension or becoming of a body’s being. This cre-
ates a quite specific role for the body in ethics and political theory. The body
is neither a brute and determining pre-political given, nor is it an effect of
political or ideological representation. Rather, as an idea the body would be
the political itself; the body is a relation to what is not itself, a movement or
activity from a point of difference to other points of difference. And so differ-
ence is neither an imposed scheme on an otherwise uniform substance, nor is
difference the relation between already differentiated self-identical entities.
What something is is given through its activity of differentiation.
This understanding of difference as positive is most clearly indicated in the
Deleuzian-Spinozist ontology put forward by Gatens and Lloyd. Here, it is not
that there is a ground, identity, being, or substance which then becomes de-
termined and differentiated through the ascription of certain attributes. On
the contrary, being itself is a modality and dynamism of attribution. As ex-
plained by Lloyd: “Spinoza’s attributes are mirrors, each expressing in its own
way the essence of substance. But what is ‘expressed’is also enveloped in the
expression, like the tree in the seed. This is no passive reflection, but an active,
dynamic articulation” (1996, 31).
In the case of gender and embodiment we might say, as Gatens suggests in
her critique of sexlgender distinctions, that sexual difference is neither an ar-
bitrary overlay nor a self-identical essence. There is not a biological sex that
takes on the attributes of cultural gender; sexed embodiment is nothing other
than its becoming. We might then put forward different modes of becoming.
Masculinity and femininity are more than mental or cultural representations;
but at the same time they cannot be appealed to as self-present substances or
essences given once and for all through certain attributes and qualities. Rather,
we might refer to different and specific modes of dynamic embodiment. The
body is not an anterior ground or posited origin but an event of its own doub-
ling, a “becoming-woman” (Grosz 1994, 176). Furthermore, this “doubling,”
or becoming, is not added on to an inert or pre-representational body, for it is
in the very character of the body to double or represent itself. It was this insight
into the body’s positive becoming that Grosz identified as the project of “cor-
poreal feminism” (Grosz 1987, 7).
While the Spinozist ontology of modalities already indicates that being is
never in-itself but is always a becoming of specific qualities, the body has as its
88 Hypatia

peculiar mode of becoming the capacity to mis-recognize its becoming and see
itself as being or identity. It is in this fictive mis-recognition that the human
“subject” is constituted. Precisely because the becoming of bodies takes place
within a single totality of substance, expressed in a variety of modes, the body
is always a dynamic relation to a totality, a totality it can only know in part, and
can only relate to through imagination or “fictions” (Lloyd 1996,61). But this
constitutive illusion of bodily identity is not a lamentable error; it is the posi-
tive way in which human being becomes human. This leads to an understand-
ing of ethics, not as the telos of some universal law, but as the responsibility and
recognition of the self-formation of the body. This self-formation does not take
the form of a transparent will thoroughly determining itself. As Gatens argues,
the becoming of the human is sexually embodied, historically located, and
politically related (Gatens 1996, 136). There is no “beyond” to the illusion of
the human precisely because “the human condition is a condition of illusion”
(Gatens 1996, 136).
Using Spinoza’s ontology, whereby substance is nothing other than various
modes of becoming, we might see the becoming of human understanding and
the “feigning”that marks the incompleteness of human knowledge as the posi-
tive capacities of afinite being (Lloyd 1996,61). It is because we must relate to
others, within a world, that we are never at one with that world. We therefore
have to think our identity as a mode of relation, and this will mean “doubling,”
“feigning,” or “becoming,” for as a finite being the human is placed in relation.
The human is essentially more than any static essence. Sexual identity and its
determination through imaginary doubling are not limits to be overcome but
positive ways in which ethics takes place as a specific and decisive activity. Such
an understanding of sexual identity is critical both of an essentialist under-
standing, whereby identity is a determined presence, and a negative under-
standing whereby identity is defined in opposition to some radically anterior dif-
ference or differential condition. Identity is defined positively, as the particular
and finite expression of a dynamic substance, and as an expression that affirms
becoming in general. This leads to an ethics of desire; affirming one’s own be-
coming is maximized in the affirmation of the becoming of others. Whereas
Butler argues that the “fiction” of identity is constituted through an originary
violence that turns the will against itself in a mode of subjection (1997, 27),
Lloyd’s Spinozist “ethics of joy” sees the desire for self-preservation as an affir-
mation of one’s becoming, an affirmation strengthened by desire for others and
the desire of others.
In her reading of the tradition ofwestem reason, Lloyd therefore argues that
although femaleness has been constituted through a structure of exclusion
and opposition, with definitive norms of reason being constituted as male, this
need not be the case (Lloyd 1984, 104). In Man of Reason Lloyd already sug-
gested that the affirmation of femaleness within our present conceptual appa-
ratus was “liable to be caught up in a deeper, older structure of male norms and
 Claire Colebrook 89

female complementation” (1984,105). Rather than adopt a critical attitude to

these conceptual structures that negate the feminine, Lloyd’s Spinozism en-
ables a new way of thinking identity, concepts, and the possibility of feminist
philosophy. Rather than seeing identity as defined through the imposition of
representation, or the subjection to a Symbolic order, Spinoza’s ethics of joy
sees the expression of identity as an activity of a particular being’s becoming.
The body, here, is neither ground (immediate given) nor limit (radical
beyond). The body is the site of the distribution whereby it becomes as a body.
It is this suggestion of modalities of becoming and positing which is explored
in the recent turn to Spinoza by Gatens and Lloyd, and in Grosz’s mobilization
of Deleuze. Gatens suggests that “[wle need to understand and remember how
we became what we are, not in order to live what we have become as our ‘truth’
but rather as our conditions of possibility for that which we may become”
(1996, 77).
Sexual difference, therefore, emerges as more than a question of feminist
politics and as more than a strategic use of essentialism. The sexual specificity
of bodies presents itself as a poblem, a way of dislodging thought from its
Cartesian homeliness. If thought is an active becoming of that which cannot
be reduced to thought, then we cannot put forward the idea of thought (or
mind) in general. Rather, there will be multiple modalities of becoming. Grosz
redefines the body neither as a biological presence nor as a purely differential
writing, but as an “open materiality”:
It is an open materiality, a set of (possibly infinite) tendencies
and potentialities which may be developed, yet whose devel-
opment will necessarily hinder or induce other developments
and other trajectories. These are not individually or conscious-
ly chosen, nor are they amenable to will or intentionality; they
are more like bodily styles, habits, practices, whose logic entails
that one preference, one modality excludes or makes difficult
other possibilities. The kind of model I have in mind here is not
simply then a model of an imposition of inscription on a blank
slate, a page with no “texture))and no resistance of its own. As
any calligrapher knows, the kind of texts produced depends not
only on the message to be inscribed . . . but also on the quali-
ty and distinctiveness of the paper written upon. (Grosz 1994,
191)

CONCLUSION
What I have identified as a tendency in the Australian corporeal feminism
of Gatens, Grosz, and Lloyd is the addition of a speculative question: what are
the specific ways in which the real becomes meaningful? This type of ques-
90 Hypatia

tion is explored through the project of an ontology adequate to thinking of the

body neither as a pre-representational surplus nor as a determining essence. The
question is not one of how the sexes are differentiated,but rather: are there dif-
ferent modalities of sexual differentiation due to the specificity of different bodies?
(Grosz 1994, 189).This type of question is in many ways similar to the Irigar-
ayan project of an ethics of sexual autonomy and the general “French” feminist
orientation towards difference. It is possible, however, to discern a specific way
in which the question of difference has been taken up in the Australian project
of corporeality. Gatens’s work on the body politic served, early on, to extend
the question of the body beyond the formation of the individual subject to the
domain of social power and political constitution. The question of ethics in
Irigaray’s work was, of course, always political, but Gatens’s specific attention
to the formation of a body politic did more than render the personal political;
it also indicated the corporeal and erotically invested nature of the political
ideal. And this means that we have to rethink the very being of theory. If it is
the very character of corporeality to become through images, and if this be-
coming is always a relation to others, then theory will have to acknowledge its
own status as an event of becoming and as a production of images. This means
that feminist theory will no longer be the cause of theory (in general) for fem-
inist politics and identity. Sexual difference is not a question within theory. For
it is only because there is sexual difference, the becoming or imaging of specific
bodies, that theory as such i s possible.
It is not surprising, then, that Grosz has recently turned to Bergson, a phi-
losopher intent on returning theory and the intellect to the event of existence.
For Bergson, as for Spinoza before him and Deleuze after him, being is not an
inert presence that is passively doubled in images. Life itself is an infinite
becoming of images, with one particular image, the body, taking itself as the
center of all images (Grosz 2000). Like Gatens’s and Lloyd’s use of Spinoza,
Grosz’s re-reading of Bergson redefines the very possibility of feminist philoso-
phy. If thought and theory are activities of imaging bodies, then philosophy
will be better understood not as a diagnosis of the past or present, but as an
anticipation of the future.
The becoming of feminism can be understood in two senses: as less than the
real or as more than the given. Butler’s emphasis on instability as the motor of
political change, her attention to the positing power of identity alongside its
failures at full realization, stresses the disruptive power of feminist becoming.
By contrast, the Spinozism of Gatens and Lloyd affirms becoming as an actu-
alization and enhancement or enrichment of being. Identity is not static and
self-present, but not because it necessarily fails (Butler) but because it is noth-
ing other than affirmation. Similarly, Grosz uses Deleuze and Bergson to dif-
ferentiate between a future that is a playing out of the past’s possibilities or, as
in Butler’s case, instabilities, and a future that creates: “What Bergson, through
Deleuze, shows is that life and duration, and this history and politics, are never
 Claire Colebrook 91

either a matter of unfolding a n already worked out blueprint, or the gradual

accretion of qualities which progress stage by stage or piecemeal over time,
Duration proceeds not through the accumulation of information and the ac-
quisition of knowledge, but through division, bifurcation, dissociation-by
difference, through sudden and unpredictable change, which overtakes us with
surprise” (Grosz 2000, 230).
Feminism is not then a position that would justify itself philosophically;
feminism would be a specific modality of philosophical becoming. And once
we see philosophy as creation and becoming, and as a n always specific becom-
ing, we would open the way for other becomings. Initially, asking the feminist
question of sexual difference opens the possibility for feminist autonomy. But
from this carving out of a new mode of self-definition, the “theory” of sexual
specificity inaugurates a new way of negotiating theory as such. Theory is no
longer that distanced point of observation on the real, but the real’s way of
folding back upon itself through a multiplicity of becomings.

NOTES

1. Butler addresses the following question to the theory of discourse: “Does

Foucault’s effort to work the notions of discourse and materiality through one another
fail to account for not only what is excluded from the economies of discursive intel-
ligibility that he describes, but what has to be excluded for those economies to function
as self-sustaining systems?”(1993,35).
2. This means that Butler’s question of an “outside”to power, or an attention to
exclusion, would have to see power as a closed system or as an imposed order. Foucault’s
theorization of discourse and power as immanent, on the other hand, aimed to see
power as a univocal field without an anterior ground and without a posited outside:
[M]y discourse, far from determining the locus in which it speaks, is
avoiding the ground on which it could find support. It is a discourse
about discourses: but it is not trying to find in them a hidden law, a
concealed origin that it only remains to free; nor is it trying to es-
tablish by itself, taking itself as a starting-point, the general theory of
which they would be the concrete models. It is trying to deploy a dis-
persion that can never be reduced to a single system of differences, a
scattering that is not related to absolute axes of reference; it is trying
to operate a decentering that leaves no privilege to any center. (Fou-
cault 1972,205)
3. Butler clearly accepts Foucault’s criticism of the idea of repression. It is not as
though there are desires which then come to be repressed. Rather, it is only through
repression or prohibition, that desires then come to be seen as original or natural. How-
ever, Foucault’s rejection of the idea of repression emphasizes the positivity of desire.
Unlike Butler, who regards the negution of desire as originary (such that desire is the
92 Hypatia

effect of the prohibitive character of power), Foucault sees desire as irreducible to its
intersections with power.
4. According to Gatens, “The question that needs to be asked concerns not the
referent (the male body or the female body) but the conditions of referentiality for the
utterance of meaningful statements about sexual relations (in their broadest sense)”
(1996,85).
5. See: “A Critique of the SexlCender Distinction” (Gatens 1996). A n earlier
version of this article was first published in “Beyond Marxism? Interventions after
Marx,” Intervention, no. 17 (1983).
6. This point is emphasized in Space, Time and Perversion, where Grosz asserts that
female sexuality cannot be reduced to representation and that the unrepresentable is
more than a n effect of the referential logic of discourse: “Female sexuality, lesbian de-
sire, is that which eludes and escapes, that which functions as an excess, a remainder
uncontained by and unrepresentable within the terms provided by a sexuality that
takes itself as straightforwardly being what it is” (Grosz 1995, 222).
7. In Grosz’s recent work on Bergson this idea of positive and infinite difference
is fleshed out in a theory of becoming. The future is not some idea1 point added on to
the being of the present; the present is just that active anticipation of a future, and so
the future is always an event of quite specific becomings (Grosz 1999).

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