CCRU- From Pleasure to Desire Involution and anti-climax in Octavia Butler-s Dawn

00- Dawn or the Awakening of the body. Awakening was hard, as always. The ultimate disappointment. It was a struggle to take in enough air to drive off nightmare sensation of asphyxiation. Lilith Yapo lay gasping, shaking with the force of her effort. Her heart beat too fast, too loud. She curled around it, fetal, helpless. Circulation began to return to her arms and legs in flurries of minute, exquisite pains. (DX 1987:3) After years of unrecorded dreams, Lilith has finally awaken. Her body strives to re-acquire the bio-rhythm of the heart beating through the circulation of the blood. However, pervading her body's cells and neurones, the surrounding environment reduces her immunity system of self-defence to a laugh. Yet, she feels much more than a conflict between the self and the other, the known and the unknown. This is not simply an alien penetration of the pure organism. Her body is caught in the middle of a passage, a genetic trade proliferating inside her body as much as coming from outside. This environment dissolves the faces of her identity. Lilith does not realise where she is and why she is there. Her body feels different, modified as if it was no longer hers. Opening and closing her jacket, her hand touched the long scar across her abdomen. She had acquired it somehow between her second and third Awakenings, had examined it fearfully, wondering what had been done to her. What had she lost or gained, and why? And what else might be done? She did not own herself any longer (DX4-5). This sense of loss communicates a dispossession of the body from the self, a state of opening without shelter which often

resonates as dangerous, but that ultimately results in the capacity of a body of being affected. The power of being affected, as Spinoza underlines, is not determinate by emotions, which are merely subjective reactions to external conditions. Affection, on the contrary, conveys an intensity, an unqualified passion operating through an impingement upon the body (Ethics,III, D.2, 3). Intensity operates at the level of the body never solidified into the organism. At this level of passional suspension, a body "exists more outside of itself, more in the abstracted action of the impinging thing, and the abstracted context of that action, than within itself." (AoA:225). Intensity can be felt yet never simply experienced. For Spinoza, the essence of a body cannot be confined to its actual existence. The power of being affected deploys indefinite potential emerging from the encounters with other bodies. (Ethics, II, P. 10, schol.). Lilithšs essence is not exhausted by her human existence. Her body surprisingly reveals a power to become something else. For two hundred and fifty years, she has been kept dormant by the Oankali species orbiting in a spaceship around the earth. Her body has been preserved through catatonic phases whilst her biology was trained to mesh with the an alien race. In spite of regressing towards nothingness and finitude, this suspended living marks her becoming intense. As Deleuze and Guattari gloss, death is " what is felt in every feeling, what never ceases and never finishes happening in every becoming-----in the becoming-another-sex, the becoming-god, the becoming-a-race, etc., forming zones of intensity on the body without organs." (AO:330). Death points neither at a final end nor at a linear inorganic regression opposed to life drives and organic development. "It is absurd to speak of a death

desire that would presumably be in qualitative opposition to the life desires" (AO:329). Nevertheless, Freud maintains a dualistic qualitative distinction between Eros and Thanatos eliminating the libido and imposing a regulating and indifferent neutral energy which renders the conversions between the two drives impossible. Moving away from Freudšs death instinct, Deleuze and Guattari argue that there is no transcendent principle of death without model and experience. "The experience of death is the most common of occurrences in the unconscious, precisely because it occurs in life and for life, in every passage or becoming, in every intensity as passage or becoming." (AO:330). Catatonia involves a subversion of the death instinct: a molecular a-death, a continuum never ceasing to distribute through the becoming of a body. In suspending the bio-rhythm of her body, the Oankali were preserving Lilithšs time. At each Awakening, however, her body was eager to live and survive. Jdahya, her Oankališs guide, explicitly says to her: "You wanted your time back-the time wešve taken from you. You didnšt want to die." (DX:24). These are not forces of life rebelling against death. The potential becomings of a body surpass the actual point of death and infold its virtual essence of a body. For Spinoza essence is never unbounded yet never determined by existence. Essence is defined as the power or conatus of an actual body existing in a web of affective relations with other actual bodies. Lilith's body never ceases to be affected by the Oankališs trade. Even when suspended in catatonia, her body participates in a genetic continuum unfinalised to points of

death and life. Her genetic particles are extracted and engineered by the ooloi's tentacled manipulations. They are diffused by the Oankališs genetic trade pushing her body far from the faces of identity and representation. Identity, the form of the self aiming to represent a priori the complexity of a body is not central to Octavia Butleršs trilogy Xenogenesis, and especially to Dawn (1987). The ontology burden of the self inscribed in the split between identity and copy, real and artificial is substantially turned without re-folding the potential of a body to the laws of the Same. Lilithšs body becomes a viral medium in the passage between the world of the humans and that of the Oankali. It incorporates a threshold of change within the economy of filiation and reproduction. Her body transforms the arborescent origin of the human species into a plane of untraceable encounters only depending on the capacity of a body to affect and being affected. The lines to follow in Xinogenesis are "of an other nature" embracing the fluidity of a "matter/mater/matrix" continuum (S). In reversing Platonism, Irigaray refers to the "myth of the cave" and turns the world of representation into the female material/maternal dens and cavities leaking out from the contoured projections of the gaze. The cave is used by the philosopher as a metaphor (i.e., a projection) of the womb, where he is imprisoned and from where he has to depart in order to be born. The uterine matrix is conceived as a symmetrical cave masking a material incommensurability through the game of representation. Substituting the indefinite obscure matrix with the enlightened world of Ideas, the prisoner will speculate and detach himself from uterine infection, the material and the maternal. His indeterminable

origin will be a place where he is no longer allowed to go back without his optical instruments of measure and distance. The matter/matrix is seen as an empty space to inseminate in order for the philosopher to be born and reproduced. Self-reproduction without contamination with the material. This illusion is at the heart of the patriarchal economy detaching the mind from the body, the abstract from the material. The speculation of the origin is only attainable through the (illusion of) unilinear genetic transmission impossible to occur without reversal affection. Such a reversal discloses the presence of a matter/matrix continuum, a female intensity never simply ascribable to the woman's organism and subject. 01- The matrix-ship connection. The first chapter of Dawn opens with a female environment. As the title recites, this is a "womb". Octavia Butler is taking us back to the fluids and flows of matter rather than to the origins of the terrestrial ape, the birth of the human race, the formation of the white male subject. But what is it this return which at the same time discloses a becoming? What does catatonia involve in this becoming? These questions are certainly familiar with the digital environment of cyberpunk, cyberspace or the matrix, where the flatline between the organic and inorganic, life and death constitutes the emergence of the complexity of time and space - a feedback between networked lines of the past and the future - and where the dissolution of the human illusion of progression and reproduction always indicates a path towards contamination. Lilith awakes in a living space-ship, an interplanetary womb with fleshy walls, conductive corridors and shrinking doors.

The entire environment is an interweaving agglomerate of plants, knee-high tufts of thick, fleshy leaves growing from the soil and indistinguishable from animals. The trees are structures meant to support the shape of the ship and to provide "food, oxygen, waste disposal, transport conduits, storage and living space, work areas, many things." (DX:35). This dormant intelligent ship can be chemically induced to perform innumerable functions. Yet, the relationship between the Oankali and the ship is not hierarchical. The matrix is not something external to the Oankali. Rather, "[t]here is an affinity, but itšs biological- a strong, symbiotic relationship. We serve the shipšs needs and it serves ours. It would die without us and we would be planetbound without it." (DX:33). The ship is an immense cyberspace where everything is in contact with everything else without the "possibility of distinguishing what is touching from what is touched" (Irigaray TS:26). This is not a space of origin or re-articulation of the female as subject and signifier. The non-dimensional space of the matrix entails a spatium of female potentials moving beneath the molar forms and functions of the organism. Rather than an empty incubator of the semen for reproduction, the matrix is populated by non-organised genetic material, also called organelles (mitochondrial DNA in molecular biology) and is constituted by bacterial recombinations leaking outside linear transmission and self-reproduction. The Oankali themselves carry the drive of recombination: "in a minuscule cell within a cell - a tiny organelle within every cell of our bodies." (DX:39). The matrix-ship is not the womb of the woman, but a wondering womb in a body. It delineates an hysterical zone of desire never fully repressed by the biology and culture of the organism.

It is therefore evident that Dawn embraces the cybernetic revolution. The opposition between Nature (the realm of the given) and Culture (the province of the mutable) has been dissolved by a matrix of flows and desires. The matrix-ship is no less natural than artificial, it touches on contagions as opposed to filiation, on genetic recombinations as opposed to sexual reproduction and genetic heredity. In Dawn, genetic recombinations are key to the lines of becoming-a-race, becoming-another-sex induced by the Oankališs trade. These recombinations resonate as much with the past as with the future: genetic engineering has always been a mode of proliferation for the Oankali. We do what you would call genetic engineering. We know you had begun to do it yourself, but itšs foreign to you. We do it naturally. (...) Itšs part of our reproduction but it​s much more deliberate than what any mated pair of humans have managed so far. (DX:37) Genetic recombinations are indeed incompatible with the reproductive model of origin and finitude, life and death constituting the principles of existence of the humans, but also of their genetic structure. As Jdahya explains to Lilith, "[y]ou are hierarchical. It's a terrestrial characteristic (...) When human intelligence served it instead of guiding it, when human intelligence did not even acknowledge it as a problem (...) That was like ignoring a cancer. " (DX:37). The self-destructive war of the human race aspired to a point of final death/collapse. But Lilith has been rescued and, at the same time, captured by the Oankali species trading genes without origins in order to fuel a genetic continuum, a matter/matrix potential of becoming. This involves neither the

outcome of predefined parts nor the assumption of a pregiven whole. Following Spinoza, this matrix is an immanent substance (Ethics, I, 6). There is nothing for the substance to create and reproduce. It is already equipped with everything, but for no reason it is a determinate One. Substance is infinitely composed of coexistent attributes of which we know only two, extension and thought. The body, a mode of extension, and the mind, a mode of thinking. Between the two attributes there is neither separation nor reduction, but continuum and singularity. There is no hierarchical ladder between these attributes: all that is in action or passion in the mind is in action or passion in the body (Ethics, III, 2, note). Not only mind and body are one and the same thing constituting autonomous attributes of thought and extension, but more adequately, "the mind is nothing else but the idea of the actually existent body" (Ethics, III, 3, Proof). The continuum of mind and body emerges from the attributes of a univocal substance. As Lloyd underlines: "[i]ndividual minds and bodies alike are caught up in a prior unity of 'substance extended' and 'substance thinking'." (SE:49). These attributes mutually define a mode of existence through the weaving of a longitudinal axis of speed and slowness -extension- and a latitudinal axis of affection -thought. The longitudinal and the latitudinal axis offer instances of an intensive mode of existence through an immanent combination among "the simples bodies", according to differential velocities, and among "anonymous forces", according to capacities of affection. Such a combination is not determined by the forms and structures of the self. "Bodies are distinguished form one another in respect of motion and

rest, quickness and slowness, and not in respect of substance" (Ethics, II, A.1, L. 1). From this standpoint, the power of Lilithšs body can only be defined in relation to the kinetic encounter with the Oankali genetic continuum whose elements are "ultimate parts of an actual infinity, laid out on the same plane of consistency or composition" (ATP:254). This is a Spinozist plane of Nature without projections. The most re-known framework of the evolution of the species also establishes a unity of nature. However, this is merely based on principles of analogy and difference among bodies (as species), organised in a ladder of relations through hierarchies and differences of degree and kind, of organs and functions. The unity fragments the plane of Nature "into irreducible, uncrossable, heterogeneous compositions." (ATP:254). The matter/matrix continuum of intensities is therefore divide into differentiated (i.e., already actualised) bodies organised by the principle of the original and the copy. The plane of Nature individuated by Spinoza turns this split between quantity and quality into intensive velocities. "Speed and slowness, movement and rest, tardiness and rapidity subordinate not only the forms of structures, but also the types of development" (ATP:255). This plane is produced by a schizogenetic multiplicity (i.e. a non-linear combination of genetic particles) irreducible to the arborescent economy of exchange. Darwinian evolutionism confirms the necessity of genetic exchange for variation and the predominance of meiotic sex or sexual reproduction as the base of such exchange. Evolution, for Darwin, is a force reacting against the pressures of a pre-dominant natural selection (NP:42). For schizogenesis, on the contrary, there are no progressive

novelties to achieve, but an immanent synthesis of forces, where genetic elements directly enter in a relation of movement and rest, acceleration and deceleration. Schizogenesis entails a continuous composition and distribution of particles never determined by one actualisation. In Xinogenesis and particularly in Dawn, evolution returns as an anti-origin. Xinogenesis demands of forces and particles to conjugate alongside a genetic flatland where is needed no added dimension. "We are Oankali." "Oankali. Sounds like a word in some Earth language." "It might be, but with different meaning." "What does it mean in your language?" "Several things. Traders for one" "You are traders?" "Yes." "what do you trade?" "Ourselves." "You mean...each other? Slaves?" "No. Wešve never done that." "What then?" "Ourselves." "I donšt understand." (DX:22). Lilith finds incomprehensible this trade without sacrifice, without the repression of the desiring body by the economy of exchange. For the Oankali, evolution is not induced by any external member. It simply proceeds from a genetic traffic independent of exchange and reproduction. Schizogenesis does not require the achievement of the ultimate summit, but the realisation of the limits of specular pleasure. Whereas desire subverts the illusion of filiative exchange, pleasure is consumed by localised organs of reproduction concentrating intensities into one point. Pleasure is central to the formation of the organism (i.e., hierarchically organised), and of the subject (i.e., the self as signifier of the body). In "Beyond the pleasure principle" (1920), Freud identifies pleasure and reproduction as conditions of organic survival springing from a tension between Eros and Thanatos. He affirms that sexual reproduction re-balances the death

tendency of the multicellular organism in favour of the immortality of germinal life. In this articulation, sexual instincts or Eros, also conceived of as the "preserver of all things" or as "life instinct", aim at the coalescence of portions of living substance, which operates in opposition to death instincts "brought into being by the coming into life of inorganic substance". (BPP:61). Freud refers to the entropic hypothesis of the second law of thermodynamics to demonstrate the existence of a primordial cyclic tension between two distinctive flows: life and death drives. The life process of the individual organism leads, for internal reasons, to an abolition of chemical tensions, that is, to death, whereas a union with the living substance of a different individual increases those tensions and let the substance live. Although this union implies a great expenditure of energetic and chemical tensions, it is considered necessary for the introduction of "vital differences" in the living substance. The thermodynamic hypothesis links sexual reproduction with sex selection according to a cycle of expenditure and re-balance which is based on the assumption that sexual mating brings rejuvenating variations to the germline. Freud understands drives as physical forces and explains their complementarity through Fechneršs constancy principle. His aim is to demonstrate that the organism keeps the quantity of energy or excitation as low as possible in order not to approach death. This energy is kept low enough not to "overstimulate" the organism that will release the excessive energy otherwise accumulating (SAP:200). The complementary function of death and life drives emerges from this dynamic cycle linking the surpassing of death to sexual pleasure. The tendency towards entropy (increasing chaos and death) is eventually overcome by a discharge of tension

(ejaculation and sexual reproduction). This cyclic dynamics of death and life requires localised pleasure aimed at reproduction. As Grosz affirms: Particularly in Freudšs phylogenetic perspective, sex or pleasure and death are internally linked. The pleasurable sexual activities of individuals are closely linked to the reproduction of the species, and the reproduction of the species is continentally dependent on the life, reproduction and death of individuals. (Grosz SAP:201) Pleasure infolds the entropic tendency of the organism based on consumption and gratification. It is as driven to climax as limited to the restoration of physical energy through sexual reproduction. Yet, this restoration always includes the repetition of a peak, the constant achievement of a climax, a monorythym without variation. The entanglement of pleasure with reproduction reinforces evolutionary theories retaining sex selection (the association of reproductive sex with the reproduction of the species) as fundamental to the survival and variation of the species. The internal entropic tendency of the organism - conceived as a semi-closed system - is overcome by reproductive discharge, a climax of filiation leading to the rejuvenation of the species. Notwithstanding, as complexity theories argue, closed thermodynamic systems are more an exception than a rule. The thermodynamic emphasis on equilibrium and constancy has been substituted with a study of open and far from equilibrium systems depending on turbulence rather than on entropic collapse (OOC). Similarly, the evolutionary framework based on hierarchical differences among species (according to principles of analogy) has been turned by molecular biology into a map of population of codes and their

differential relations: a question of affect and velocities among codes on a territory (ATP:47-48). 02- The contagion of touch. As opposed to discharging pleasure, genetic trades involve the activities of an intensive touch. In spite of economies, trades do not include the exchange of commodities ruled by the principle of constant reproduction. Quite the contrary, trades count on affect never finalised to the release of energy. The mission of the Oankališs trade is to unfold a female erotic out of sight and balance. The success of the trade demands that: "[p]leasure (...) must be delayed as long as possible because it interrupts the continuous process of positive desire" (ATP:155). Only through a genetic contact never needing an interrupting pleasure, the Oankali will keep on trading and acquiring humanšs genes. More primordial than the visible and without any necessity of distance, the tangible is the sense of coming into contact in a middle zone, without inside or outside. This is a female flatland where the two lips touch and link the inside to the outside as a continuum. Irigaray put it very adequately, "Long before your birth you touched yourself innocently. Your\my body doesnšt acquire its sex through an [external] operation." (TS:212). Touch functions as an immediate diffuser of genetic contagion, inducing degrees of intensive desire unrelated to the vertical escalation of climatic points. Tactile proximities infold the construction of a plateau through "continuous regions of intensity constituted in such a way that they do not allow themselves to be interrupted by any external termination, any more than they allow themselves to build towards a climax." (ATP:158). Touch gives access to a plateau of intensities without confinement and distance.

The Oankali seem to have learned much more from touch than from the sight. The grey mass of tentacles on their body functions to hear, to smell, to see. All of their senses are caught in intimate contact; they are above all tactile and operate only through touching. To the Oankali, the senses of sight and hearing are primarily part of the tactile environment of their sensory organs. Yet it was true that he had no eyes. She could see now that there were only dark patches where tentacles grew thickly. The same with the sides of his head where ears should have been. ( ...) In fact, he said, you should be aware that I can see wherever I have tentacles-and I can see whether I seem to notice or not. (DX:16). Lynn Margulisš theory of symbiogenesis develops the genetic function of touch even further (RS:1985). In the most exemplary theories of evolution, the ladder of life starts with the appearance on earth of cells with nuclei (i.e., eukaryotic cells) considered to be at the origin of development of multicellular organisms (animals, plants). The primordial importance of the eukaryotic cell consequently affirms the centrality of sexual reproduction or meiotic sex involving "the reduction by half of the number of chromosomes to make sperm, eggs, or spores, and the fertilisation that re-established the original chromosomal number."(RS:187). While evolutionary biologists sustain that sexual mating in animals (i.e., the mixture of the haploid egg and sperm) is a necessary stage for the development of genetic variation and sexual diversity , endosymbiosis demonstrates that bacterial and parthenogenic organisms - fungi, dandelions, but also certain lizards and rotifiers - produce as many successful

modes of sex and as many genetic variables as two-parents do through sexual mating. Endosymbiosis breaks with the "zoocentrism" of the theories of evolution confined to the formation of Homo Sapiens and its modes of reproduction, and demonstrates that "each eukaryotic ​animalš cell is, in fact, an uncanny assembly, the evolutionary merger of distinct prokaryotic metabolism." (MBM:363). This theory focuses on the emergence of multicellular life across differential lines, novel alliances among bacteria integrated by "more or less orgiastic encounters (eating, infecting, engulfing, feeding on, having sex and so on)" (366). The assemblage of bacterial genes entails a process of "aparallel evolution" or "genetic drifting" which questions natural selection as the principle of evolution and innovation. As Margulis states, "the evolutionary innovation of eukaryosis involved far more than the accumulation of mutations: it required integration of heterologous genomes." (MD:321). The eukaryotic cell itself only arises from a fusing recombination of several bacteria directly attracted to each other through processes of incorporation. These processes only occur through touch. By a brief contact to send genes, bacteria proliferate, recombine and populate bodies. This tactile transmission of particles does not require penetration and is not guided by the binarism of death and life drives. A body, therefore, is always populated by a multiplicity of bodies assembled by infectious contacts rather than by linear filiation. Bacteria recombine by means of a tactile merge of genes and disclose a plane of desire which is committed to neither reproduction nor pleasure. As Sagan glosses: bacteria trade variables quantity of genes with virtually no regard for species barriers. Indeed

despite a lingering Linnaean nomenclature, bacteria are so genetically promiscuous, their bodies are so genetically open, that the very concept of species falsifies their character as a unique life form. Bacteria are omnisexual. (MBM:378) The hierarchies of the tree of reproduction and origin are substituted by a complex and transversal composition of genetic material. This is a genetic web displaying a female tactility without projections and demanding that the pleasure of the organism could be lost into a distributing desire. The binary aggregates of the organism between the sexes and between sexuality and reproduction are dismantled by a flatline of connected intensities. "This is a far cry from filiative production or hereditary reproduction, (...) there are as many sexes as there are terms in symbiosis, as many differences as elements contributing to a process of contagion." (ATP:242). Rather than starting from the already organised body, symbiogenesis is concerned with the contagious environment of "unnatural participation" between interkingdoms: "a human being, a bacterium, a virus, a molecule, a microorganism" (ATP:242). This is the environment where Lilith finds herself as an in-between line of connection for the humans and the Oankali. She is not asked to initiate a new lineage for the survival of an alien species. The Oankali do not simply aim to use her body for reproduction and pleasure. Her body is instead desired to disclose its potential becomings by coming into contact with a genetic continuum which infolds a female intensive essence and existence. Lilith is on the verge of disclosing the human species to the symbiotic complexity of a body by disrupting the illusion of filiation and the imperative of finalised pleasure.

03- Aquatic pressures. Your people will change. Your young will be more like us and ours more like you. Your hierarchical tendencies will be modified and if we learn to regenerate limbs and reshape our bodies, wešll share those ability with you. Thatšs part of the trade. Wešre overdue for it (DX:40). Lilithšs encounter with Jdahya, her Oankali guide, reveals the genetic capacities of these creatures of a sea-slug appearance. In manipulating her genetic cells, the olooi, Oankališs relatives, have allowed Lilithšs body to absorb a cancer without surgical intervention. But, it is suggested, this is only a tiny modification compared to the contagions that the trade will spread. The trade will induce a necessary mutation in the genetic structure of the humans, hierarchically programmed to extinction. You have a mismatched pair of genetic characteristics. Either alone would have been useful, would have aided the survival of your species. But the two together are lethal. It was only a matter of time before they destroyed you (DX:36). The trade requires a mutual recombination of genetic material on the base of the symbiotic capacities of the humans and the Oankali. To Lilith, the trade will provoke a dispersion of human characteristics, a genetic mutation leading to the revival of her bodyšs sea memories; a leap into the unknown shocking the security system of the self. " ​If this is what they found me for, I wish theyšd left me.š Medusa children. Snakes for hair. Nest of night crawlers for eyes and ears." (DX:41). The Oankali are pushing marine pressures on the hierarchical

and aggressive structures of land or terrestrial mammals like humans. The Oankališs multispecies history includes a blending with the olooi who, as Nikanj, the ooloi child tells Lilith, used to live on a white-sun water world, "in great shallow oceans" (DX:61). As Lilith remarks, the Oankali look like starfishes coming from the oceans. Their sensory arms are tactile eyes, nose and ears, their skin is smooth and cool, they can breath underwater and perceive with their snaky hair. Regardless recurrent feelings of confusion and rejection, Lilith cannot retreat from the trade. She feels almost addicted to fuel it as if positively caught into a genetic continuum. We are as committed to the trade as your body is to breathing. We were overdue for it when we found you. Now it will be done- to the rebirth of your people and mine. (DX:41). The Oankališs commitment to the trade is above all driven by an intensive desire rather than promised by a subjective pleasure. Instead of rescuing the humans for the purpose of reproduction, the Oankali themselves have been captured by the humanšs fascinating structure, the singularity of their mismatched genetic material. They too have become addicted to the humanšs genome. As Jdhaya explains to Lilith: "A partner must be biologically interesting, attractive to us, and you are fascinating. You are horror and beauty in rare combination. In a very real way, youšve captured us, and we canšt escape." (DX:154). Rather than a pleasure to fulfil, the Oankali manifest a desire of incorporation mainly entailing listening and learning. They are "powerfully acquisitive"; surely cybernetic rather than

thermodynamic creatures. "We are not hierarchical (...) But we are powerfully acquisitive. We acquire new life-seek it, investigate it, manipulate it, sort it, use it." (DX:37). There is no external termination to their positive desire of incorporation. They have been captured into a symbiotic loop: being fed by and feeding a genetic continuum. This is an open feedback which inevitably induces a bodyšs potential to emerge . Similarly, Lilith increasingly and without deciding is triggered by a desire to come into contact with the sea. She cannot refuse to become marine. Her body has been chosen to enliven the aquatic memories of the humans. It will re-animate the bio-geological passage of the human apes from the land to the sea provoked by the withdrawal of terra firma into the oceans. This passage, however, is not arbitrary. Marine pressures highly resonate with femaleness only as an intensive affinity springing from bio-geological thresholds of evolution. This affinity cannot be exhausted by a principle of identity and property. The link between women and water is often limited by symbols and representations where water signifies the womb and the mother. Quite the contrary, this affinity opens up femaleness to the immensity of water, leaking outside the constrains of the organism and the subject. As Elaine Morganšs work The Descent of Woman (1972) demonstrates, the affinity between women and water infolds a shift in the evolution of apes into humans. Whereas the Darwinian study The Descent of Man (1871) individuates a linear inheritance between primates and "homo sapiens", Morgan challenges the "Tarzanlike" figure of the prehominid male, coming down from the trees and then becoming mighty

hunter. Breaking with this androcentric interpretations of evolution and searching for a threshold of mutation from apes into humans, Morgan finds out that it was a female ape to open the path of such becoming. The most famous savannah theory claims that hominids are descendent from those apes who left the trees and moved onto the grassy plains or savannah. There they moved from being vegetarians to meat-eaters and finally hunters. According to this theory, the modifications of the apešs body are a direct result of becoming a plainsš dweller and a hunter. Becoming bipedalist, the ape was able to survey across the plains, being able to run faster after the prey whilst carrying weapons within his newly acquired free hands. The theory suggests that the ape also lost most of his body hair in order to keep cool while chasing the prey in the sunshine. In contrast to this view, Morgan argues for the theory of the "aquatic ape" comparing the physiological and morphological features of the female body, unique among land mammals, with aquatic creatures. She explains that when the first torrid heat waves of the Pliocene invaded the African continent and caused the forest to fall in the drought, all the apes were forced to retreat to the plains. Large areas of the northern half of the African continent were engulfed by the sea, but, during this period hairy, unspecialized human apes of the Miocene type adapted to the aquatic environment. For the next twelve million years or so, these creatures lived in or near the water, evolving an erect posture to keep the head above the water and developing a smooth skin. Once the waters receded and new ecological opportunities were offered, these apes did not disperse but saved the acquired marine traits. Thus, discarding the rather incoherent explanation that bipedalism

allowed the ape to run faster (to four legs are surely faster than two), Morgan explains that it was the immersion in the sea instead of the dwelling on the plains, that obliged the ape to keep a straight position on two legs. As a result of swimming in the sea, the ape gradually developed a smooth skin losing most of her bodily hair. However, most interestingly of all, Morgan argues that it is the specialised anatomy of women to present the marine scars of evolution of a body living inside and near the water. In particular, the morphology of the female ape changed once water remained the only environment where she could to survive, her sole line of escape (DW:19). The affects of the sea on her body are evident by the displacement of organs on her body. For example, buttocks developed as a protective feature from sitting on the beach and the vagina migrated from the rear to an inward and forward position. These modifications, among many others, involved a completely different outcome of sexual and reproductive modes compared to other apes. As Theweleit reports (MF:292), Sandor Ferenczi, in his formulation of a genital theory in psychoanalysis, also focuses on the conjunction between femaleness and water arguing that living species first evolved out of the sea. Before the drying of waters, he states that fertilisation took place through a simple contact between exposed organs. There was no need for penetration in order to copulate, and penetration was not associated with ejaculation. It was only when these creatures were forced to live on land that: "the female interior were forced to being penetrated by the erectile penises the male had developed and to being turned ​into oceansš."

(MF:292). To Ferenczi, this development indicates the emergence of male aggression in the sexual act. Similarly, Morgan argues that male aggression was reinforced when males had to learn to approach females frontally after the aquatic modifications had occurred (i.e., the displacement of the vagina from the rear to an inner and forward position). Whereas the combination of sexuality and violence is absent in other mammals, it is a specific characteristic of the human species. The female aquatic mammals refused frontal penetration, but were however submitted to it after the males "lost the ability to react [i.e., letting the prey go] to th[eir] gesture of submission." (MF:293). The relation between copulation, sexuality and violence is not however as consequential as it appears. Morgan underlines that the entire apparatus of intimate and loving behaviour was integrated to the human act of copulation so as to overcome the violence. This confirms that the humans are the only land mammals to have conjugated sexual love with copulation. This conjugation provides the territory mapped by the pleasure principle, the libido repressed and channelled by the economy of reproduction. Meiotic sex constitutes a level of organisation of multicellular organisms enclosing bacterial recombinations into a genetic structure of reproduction. However, these evolutionary phases are never ultimate, they do not move in a linear progression, but include an indefinite number of re-arrangements. In her attempt to argue that the origin of human (male) aggression is related to the modifications of the ape sea-body, Morgan presents a complex natural and social insight which overcomes the binary machine of biological or social explanations, sex and gender dualisms. Morganšs study on

the connection between femaleness and water touches on the presence of a multilayered essence both entailing processes of bio-geological and socio-cultural organisations. This study displays the singular aquatic scars of a female body never limited to the structures of the organism. The marine scars submerging from Lilithšs body disclose a path of becoming-another-sex, another-race, another-species which collapses the illusion of the humanist laws of origin, creation and evolution. To Lilith the middle passage of the trade constitutes a zone where the essence of a body becomes fluid, smooth and wet like water. The thing to acquire from the passage is not its ultimate goal, but the intensive opening of a body Outside the self yet absolutely full. Lilith learns and runs only in order to "stop and start over at ​zeroš: her-body sex" (S:29). This zero is not a black hole of nothingness, an empty space to fulfil or simply a point of departure. Zero marks the genetic continuum of the trade between Lilith and the Oankali. It conveys the intensive desires of a body emerging from an anti-genealogical matrix.

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