A Requiem to Sexual Difference; A Response to Luciana Parisi’s ‘Event and Evolution.’

The Southern Journal of Philosophy Volume 48, Spindel Supplement 2010 A REQUIEM TO SEXUAL DIFFERENCE: A RESPONSE TO LUCIANA PARISI’S “EVENT AND EVOLUTION” Jami Weinstein abstract: Aside from constructing a compelling case for how rereading evolution from a neomaterialist and radical empiricist perspective undermines an enduring binary of sexual difference, Luciana Parisi underscores a tension in the work of Elizabeth Grosz, known both for her novel, feminist, neomaterialist study of Darwinian evolution and her staunch support of sexual difference. Parisi contends, and I suspect Grosz herself is keenly aware, that there is a paradox in holding these views simultaneously. Thus, this paper will not only expand upon Parisi’s argument for preaccelerated, unbounded, creative, inhuman, neomaterialist, and radical empirical accounts of matter and sex but also propose a reading of Grosz’s work that could potentially wrest her from the perceived paradox. I call this the “theory sex” reading, which can be characterized as a metatheoretical difference materially embodied in the unbridgeable gap between Grosz’s two theoretical stances. Theory sex is not an ontology but a concept in line with a Deleuzo–Guattarian understanding of the philosopher’s mode of living with chaos. Theory sex produces vibrations and dissonance, which reproduce or chart lines of flight toward theories like Parisi’s. These vibrations compose the requiem both honoring and retaining the virtual legacy of sexual difference into the future. sjp_27 165..187 Any respondent charged with the task of addressing Luciana Parisi’s paper, “Event and Evolution,” would find herself faced with an embarrassment of riches. Parisi’s paper astutely pinpoints, with two important examples, one Jami Weinstein is Assistant Professor of Gender Studies at the University of Utrecht. Her recent research includes: “Traces of the Beast: Becoming-Nietzsche, Becoming-Animal, and the Figure of the Trans-Human,” in A Nietzschean Bestiary: Becoming Animal Beyond Docile and Brutal, ed. Ralph and Christa Acampora (Rowman and Littlefield, 2003); “Reality TV: Life in the Petri Dish,” in Fenomenologi och teknik (Södertörn Philosophical Studies, forthcoming in Swedish, 2010); and “The Move to Genre: Evolution and Imperceptibility,” in New Feminisms: Mapping Out Feminisms to Come (forthcoming). With Claire Colebrook, Weinstein has coedited both Deleuze and Gender (Edinburgh University Press, 2008) and Inhuman Rites and Posthumous Life (forthcoming). Weinstein is currently completing a monograph entitled “Returning to the Level of the Skin and Beyond: A Technozoontology.” The Southern Journal of Philosophy, Volume 48, Spindel Supplement (2010), 165–87. ISSN 0038-4283, online ISSN 2041-6962. DOI: 10.1111/j.2041-6962.2010.00027.x 165

166 JAMI WEINSTEIN of the key lines of flight out of the debate around sexual difference—the combined dynamic neomaterialist and radical empiricist approach that demonstrates and takes as fundamental the infinite potentiality of matter for becoming and self-overcoming. Parisi’s particular brand of this strategy puts the debate around sexual difference to rest by deploying endosymbiotic conceptualizations of sex and exposing evidence through her case studies, that of algorithmic modeling and of genetic engineering as a form of parthenogenic or bacterial sex, which crystallize the repudiation of the claim that sex can be reduced to a binary fundamental ontology. Even stronger, the evidence provides a foundation for the claim that sex is necessarily multiple and irreducible to a stable enduring mode of any type, it is an immanent material relation between the increasing complexity of organisms and evolutionary futures. Sex is not, Parisi claims, a prehension of a specific form, nor aesthetic exorbitance of organisms in excess of their survival interests leading to a further justification of sexual difference via sexual selection, but is inextricably linked to the materiality of organic life, an event, relation as such. Given that I wholeheartedly agree with Parisi’s conclusion that there is a nonnegotiable, infinite complexity and multiplicity of sex, the following response will, at least in part, echo and expand upon her insights. However, aside from constructing a compelling case for her own views about the way in which a rereading of evolution from a neomaterialist and radical empiricist perspective undermines feminist sexual difference theory, Parisi underscores a tension in the work of Elizabeth Grosz, known both for her insightful, novel, feminist, neomaterialist study of Darwinian evolution and her staunch support of a fundamental ontology of sexual difference. Parisi contends, as many theorists have noted, and I suspect Grosz herself is keenly aware, that there is a contradiction in holding those two views simultaneously. In my introduction to Deleuze and Gender, I argued for a way out of this dilemma by isolating the logic contained within the concept of sexual difference and extracting it from the ontological claim in order to mobilize it against a variety of monadic ontologies with the aim of radically destabilizing the pillars of Enlightenment Humanism.1 This logic, like genetic histories, is virtual and thus real in the present, despite the fact that conceptually or evolutionarily it may no longer possess the same force nor play the same role it once did. The move to view sexual difference as at least a dual ontology rather than from the phallocentric monadic one, I suggest, sets the stage for the possibility of conceptual evolution in the direction of infinite, irreducible multiplicity. I will reference that argument in the conclusion of this paper as 1 See Jami Weinstein, “Introduction Part II” in Deleuze and Gender, ed. Claire Colebrook and Jami Weinstein (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008), 20–33.

A REQUIEM TO SEXUAL DIFFERENCE 167 an ancestor to what I will argue here is a more productive reading of Grosz than the one that condemns her project for its perceived irresolvable internal contradiction. My primary aim is to reconceptualize her juxtaposition of these two incongruous strands of thought. In effect, I will make an attempt to have the proverbial cake and eat it too, or to locate a reading of Grosz that figures her claims as not only compatible with but also perhaps constitutive of arguments like Parisi’s. With dual trajectories in mind, I will ultimately claim that while Parisi incisively articulates the way out of the problem of sexual difference, we might also want to consider the possibility of supplementing that with an argument that demonstrates the way through. Before approaching these two trajectories, however, it is important to highlight some of the main threads of Grosz’s interpretation of Darwin in order to situate the paradox of simultaneously maintaining both a neomaterialist and radical empiricist view of matter and evolution and a fundamental ontology of sexual difference. Thus, it is to that task we will turn first. 1. GROSZ’S READING OF DARWINIAN EVOLUTION In Nick of Time, Time Travels, and elsewhere, Grosz deploys her analysis of Darwinian evolution in the service of the feminist agenda to reclaim nature and matter from its long-standing elision by theorists privileging textual, social, linguistic, or discursive analysis. Her analysis has been desperately needed to counter the now-standard feminist rejection of nature and biology in general (in the nature/matter as fixed and immutable versus culture as fluid and changeable dichotomy) and Darwin’s important and useful work on evolution in particular. Even with more recent feminist turns to the body, the issue of materiality itself has been at best subsumed under epistemological questions about how bodies matter in a sociocultural sense and, at worst, wholly neglected.2 Thus, despite the alleged feminist turn to the body and embodiment, analyses and interventions into the precise bio-ontological constitution of matter have been woefully relegated to the shadows of the epistemological spotlight. Grosz highlights the need for and timeliness of this turn back to the undertheorized bio-ontological issues of matter and materiality, because feminists, she holds have forgotten a crucial dimension of research . . . useful for . . . reformulating the concepts on which they so heavily, if implicitly, rely. Not just the body, but that which makes it possible and which limits its actions: the precarious, accidental, 2 See the work of Judith Butler in particular.

168 JAMI WEINSTEIN contingent, expedient, striving, dynamic status of life in a messy, complicated, resistant, brute world of materiality, a world regulated by the exigencies, the forces, of space and time.3 Moreover, she continues: Feminists, and all theorists interested in the relations between subjectivity, politics, and culture need to have a more nuanced, intricate account of the body’s immersion in the world . . . not only how culture inscribes bodies . . . but more urgently, what these bodies are such that inscription is possible, what is in the nature of bodies, in biological evolution, that opens them up to cultural transcription, social immersion, and conceptual evolution.4 And finally: “We need to understand the body, not as an organism or entity in itself, but as a system, or series of open-ended systems, functioning within other huge systems it cannot control.”5 While Grosz’s return to materiality, biology, and ontology is not entirely foreign to post-Deleuzian theorists, her reading of Darwin through Bergson, Nietzsche, and Deleuze is indeed profound, original, and incisive and provides powerful new understandings of Darwin that open up a space for what Parisi calls “the unpredictability of virtual sexes” (155). Grosz’s exhortation to understand the nature of matter through a neomaterialist, bio-ontological lens has been incredibly influential to theorists such as Parisi, Colebrook, Hird, and me, providing us with a fertile new ground in which to plant the essential seeds for theories of unbounded creative difference and install feminist strategies of imperceptibility in place of visibility, identity, and recognition. This new ground has been tilled partly by her unique antiteleological reading of Darwin that locates materiality itself as constitutive of change, difference, immanent complexity, and self-overcoming. The teleological vision of natural selection (or survival of the fittest) entails the belief that a continual betterment of the species is possible; this implies, at least on some accounts, that humans are at the top of the hierarchy and, perhaps, even something like the perfection of nature. This human exceptionalism is precisely what Grosz argues against in her version of Darwin. To wit, Parisi underlines Grosz’s observation that Darwin “introduced the event to the sciences.”6 Grosz’s Darwin recognizes organisms and species to be open to future reconfigurations, variations, and even an inevitable self-overcoming rather than fixed and stable. This is the essence of the unpredictable 3 Elizabeth Grosz, Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution and the Untimely (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 2004), 2. 4 Ibid. 5 Ibid., 3. 6 Ibid., 8.

A REQUIEM TO SEXUAL DIFFERENCE 169 evolutionary process. “Events,” Grosz describes, are “ruptures, nicks, which flow from causal connections in the past but which, in their unique combinations and consequences, generate unpredictability and effect sometimes subtle but wide-ranging, unforeseeable transformations in the present and the future.”7 She claims that evolution itself is an event in this sense. It is thus, contrary to armchair evolutionary theory, not teleological but rather infinitely open to immanent and unpredictable variation. Richard Lewontin, for his part, endeavors to envision evolution as a more dynamic process. He challenges the notion that the niches preexisted organisms by proposing the alternative that they actually establish their own niches in a dynamic process whereby they modify and are modified by their environments. In other words, we might depict evolution as multiple parallel lines—a branching, dynamic genealogical process—rather than as a single linear system. Further, the environments themselves are not static. They, too, evolve in this relationship. It is a question of speeds and slownesses, relative rates of change, not flux measured against some stable substantive background. While Lewontin’s theory remains in many respects as controversial as the post-Darwinian strands, it invokes the kind of dynamism relevant here. It allows us to turn our sights toward “organismal activities and interactions for their own sakes, rather than as support for an idealized model of how the world should be ordered,” and opens up the possibility that we can, as Lynda Birke and Ruth Hubbard advocate, “understand nature from the inside as opposed to attempting to impose order from the outside.”8 This has the advantage of turning the tables on both Western science and epistemologically rooted feminist theories of the body, the former of which, according to Manuel De Landa, has “transformed the objective world . . . into the type of structure that would ‘correspond’ to its theories, so that the latter became, in a sense, self-fulfilling prophecies.”9 I would argue the same is true of those feminist theories. These remarks evoke some of the swell of theoretical approaches directed precisely toward the shift in focus to the nature of materiality and away from the sorts of epistemological analyses both Grosz and Parisi contest. Grosz’s reading of Darwin thus presents a formidable challenge to sociobiological and neo-Darwinian interpretations with her antiteleological and dynamic view and her repudiation of a monolithic rational and moral 7 Ibid. Lynda I. A. Birke and Ruth Hubbard “rEvolutionary Theory: Reinventing Our Origin Myths,” in Linda I. A. Birke and Ruth Hubbard, Reinventing Biology: Respect for Life and the Creation of Knowledge (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 176–77. 9 Manuel De Landa, A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History (New York: Zone Books, 1997), 273. 8

170 JAMI WEINSTEIN capacity thought by those interpretations to be found only in humans. Far from arguing that Darwin envisions evolution as a linear progression toward an increasingly more ideal end, she highlights his emphasis on contingency, possibility, and blind chance, challenging both the notion of human supremacy and the progress narrative associated with the Enlightenment Humanist project. This provides feminists with the insights necessary to advance their theories beyond the misleading epistemological approach and situates Grosz at the forefront of much of what is now being advanced by feminist posthuman and animal studies scholars. 2. THE GROSZ PARADOX This aperture into the reality of matter’s unpredictability, change, and selfovercoming, along with Grosz’s focus on the durée and the virtual of evolution, which grounds difference in temporality (a vital strategy for feminist interpretations of evolution), could indeed help feminists transcend the crystallization of difference into a foundational and constitutive, enduring, ontological sexual difference and move us away from depicting the body as an organism or entity in itself. Yet simultaneously, Grosz wants to ground these “open and generative forces” and the dynamic and infinitely complexifying novelty and variation they produce in her lingering preservation of a fundamental ontology of sexual difference. It is as if Grosz clings to a fundamental ontology of sexual difference like a life raft in this sea of material unpredictability. At first blush, I find this tension in Grosz’s work perplexing and share with Parisi a serious concern about the implications of the claim to sexual difference Grosz continually makes throughout her work. Lest we misinterpret Grosz’s claim about sexual difference, it is not intended to be a return to epistemological analysis. Contrary to epistemological methods, or what Myra Hird deems “the culture of matter,”10 Grosz aims to renaturalize sexual difference in a neomaterialist register. Parisi notes that “Grosz claims that the poststructuralist lack of engagement with the materiality of sex beyond text has led feminism to ignore what biology, and biological evolution in particular, can do for sexual difference” (151). Like Parisi and Grosz, Hird implicates feminist scholarship for its “focus on developmental and cultural aspects of identity formation and negotiation, figuring sex ‘differences’ as that which is compelled through discourse to ‘be’ sexual difference,”11 thus failing to attend properly to the issue of matter itself. While 10 11 Myra J. Hird, Sex, Gender and Science (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 3. Ibid.

A REQUIEM TO SEXUAL DIFFERENCE 171 Grosz certainly does not fall prey to this critique, I suspect that Hird, like Parisi, would still locate her take on sexual difference to be at the crux of the paradox. To Grosz, sexual difference, like culture itself, emerges from natural, bio-ontological, and evolutionary claims. But despite her attentive analysis of the materiality not only of human being but also of evolution itself, as Parisi so carefully sketched, she fails to adequately challenge or, rather, continues to insist upon an enduring, congealed, bio-ontological sexual difference. On this reading of her work as a whole, this claim to an enduring binary of sexual difference stands in conflict with her own assertions regarding the infinite possibility of matter for unpredictable change and self-overcoming. As such, her analysis falls short of Hird’s call for an understanding of matter that does not reify the binary of sex, despite her argument for the unbounded potentiality inherent in matter to provoke innovation. By leaving the binary form of sex concrete and stable, we are still left with the conclusion that, with regard to sexual difference, change rests only in the socially constructed, sociocultural, and fluid notions of the epistemological realm, even if we derive this realm, as Grosz suggests, from the natural and material. This prioritizing of sexual difference as a constitutive and originary difference seems to fly in the face of her nonanthropomorphic and antiteleological vision of evolution in its focus on the difference made possible by only a limited number of the vast spectrum of living organisms, condemning her work as, at best, anthropocentric and, at worst, biologically inexhaustive or inaccurate. While bi-parental sexual reproduction is widely thought to generate genetic variation at much faster rates, she fails to problematize it by taking into account the enormous range of reproductive processes, processes of genetic transfer and variation, and variations of sex that organic species, even humans, actually employ. She also fails to acknowledge that human ‘reproduction’ often itself has little to do with sex and, as Myra Hird argues throughout her work (primarily on bacterial sex and ontology), that “human bodies are constantly engaged in reproduction and only sometimes (and for a short time) engaged in specifically ‘sexual’ reproduction.”12 Parisi herself takes this up thoroughly in Abstract Sex: Philosophy, Bio-technology, and the Mutations of Desire where she attends to, as she explained in her Spindel lecture, the “infinitesimal number of differential sexes that are completely determined and yet do not exactly constitute the biology of sexual difference” (154–55) and, further, to the “thousand forms of process: sex-events” and the “immanent relations between virtual and actual worlds of sexual experience” (155). So ensconcing sexual difference in an enduring ontological binary, Parisi 12 Myra J. Hird, “Reproducing Sexual Difference,” Parallax 8 (2002): 94.

172 JAMI WEINSTEIN argues, has the effect of denying the unpredictability of what she called alternately “virtual sexes” (155), the “unthought of sex” (155), “heterogeneous microsexes” (158), and the “atomic and subatomic sexes: unformed, de-differentiated, preaccelerated forms of sex” (158) and privileges an inaccurate definition of sex. Reading Grosz in this manner compels us to relinquish sexual difference ontology if we want to uphold our claims to the bio-ontological reality of matter. This method is what I have called the way out of the problem of sexual difference ontology, and Parisi skillfully and comprehensively employs this approach in her paper. However, I have often wondered in reading Grosz whether her seemingly rigid insistence is not merely a provocation. Could we not formulate her appeal to binary versions of sexual difference as an elaborate seduction meant to stimulate us to re-envision the concept of sex in accord with neomaterialist renderings of matter? Many moments in her work seem to signal an acute awareness of the inhuman and to project toward something beyond the steadfast adherence to a fundamental binary ontology of sexual difference. While Grosz does theorize unequivocally in the interstice and tension between Deleuze and Irigaray, and does pepper her work with explicit references to upholding a fundamental ontology of sexual difference, she also occasionally intimates that this might not be the end of the story. Hence, on a more charitable reading, one that does not put her views on evolution and materiality at odds with her claims about sexual difference in a manner that denounces her work as internally contradictory, we might conjecture that Grosz not only has a hidden intention but also implicitly flirts with the more endosymbiotic framings of sex. After all, her call to revise feminist strategies such that we account for becoming in a Deleuzo–Guattarian sense by implementing “a politics of imperceptibility, leaving its traces and effects everywhere but never being able to be identified with a person, group, or organization . . . a process of self-marking that constitutes oneself in the very model of that which oppresses and opposes the subject,” in the stead of “a politics of visibility, of recognition and of self-validation,” recognizes that “[t]he imperceptible is that which the inhuman musters.”13 This resonates with Parisi’s implication in Abstract Sex that a move to “micropolitics exclusively highlights molecular differences or mutations of the body-sex by discarding . . . the feminist commitment and engagement with the macropolitics of representation that still determines the identity politics of sexual difference.”14 Arguably, one could claim that Grosz’s reference to the inhuman 13 Elizabeth Grosz, Time Travels: Feminism, Nature, Power (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 2005), 194. 14 Luciana Parisi, Abstract Sex: Philosophy, Bio-technology, and the Mutations of Desire (New York: Continuum, 2004), 17.

A REQUIEM TO SEXUAL DIFFERENCE 173 force moving us toward imperceptibility finds its basis, as Parisi’s micropolitics does, in the infinite complexity of the unthought of endosymbiotic sex. Here, I intend something like Lynn Margulis and Dorian Sagan’s description in Slanted Truths, which is the analysis of sex Parisi staunchly and legitimately advocates. They observe that “(s)ex in the biological sense has nothing to do with copulation; neither is it intrinsically related to reproduction or gender. Sex is a genetic mixing in organisms that operates at a variety of levels; it occurs in some organisms at more than one level simultaneously.”15 Like Margulis and Sagan, Parisi reconceptualizes sex in a way that seems not only to more accurately reflect the broader spectrum of biological reality and complicated history of genetic exchange but also helps us to escape from the frequently unacknowledged humanistic assumptions inherent in the insistence on sexual difference ontology. I do not have the luxury of space to review all of these arguments already so capably drafted by Parisi in both her concept of microfeminine particle warfare in Abstract Sex and at length in her Spindel paper with her discussion of endosymbiosis and two concomitant cases of algorithmic and parthenogenic sex. But I would like to register my agreement that a more penetrating examination of these biological realities and histories reveals a highly effective strategy for extricating theorists like Grosz and others from the contradictions inherent in their claims to a fundamental ontology of sexual difference and for liberating us from the sway of not only anthropocentrism but also from what Myra Hird, following Margulis, dubbed a zoocentric “big like us” thinking. “Big like us” thinking is also conspicuous in the attempts to overturn Enlightenment Humanism by reconfiguring our relationship to animals while simultaneously eschewing the bacterial, viral, and inorganic. 3. MULTIPLE SEX: THE WAY OUT In her section titled “Virtual Evolution,” Parisi begins to lay the groundwork that allows her to pose serious challenges to Grosz’s opus in light of its apparent inherent theoretical tension. Following Whitehead, Parisi remarks that “no evolutionary form can endure forever. The becoming of form is eternal, not because the same form endures forever, but because each form implies the eventuation of the new” (149). The implication here for Grosz is that upholding a fundamental ontology of sexual difference would be akin to maintaining enduring forms, while her interpretation of evolutionary theory 15 Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan, Slanted Truths: Essays on Gaia, Symbiosis and Evolution (New York: Springer-Verlag, 1997), 285.

174 JAMI WEINSTEIN with its Deleuzo–Guattarian and Bergsonian twist incline her to maintain that the forces at work in Darwin provide “an explanation of the dynamism, growth and transformability of living systems, the impulse toward a future that is unknown in, and uncontained by, the present and its history,”16 and that “Darwin has outlined an ingenious temporal machine for the production of the new, which constrains the new only through the history that made it possible and the present which it actively transforms, but leaves its directions unknown and unknowable, discernible only in retrospect.”17 Grosz herself concludes that section by stating that “evolution is a fundamentally openended system which pushes toward a future with no real direction, no promise of any particular result, no guarantee of progress or improvement, but with every indication of inherent proliferation and transformation,”18 in clear resonance with Whitehead and Parisi. Grosz does not stop there though. Not long after she appears to endorse this version of materialist process ontology, she curiously returns to what sounds like a reversal of the Whiteheadian forms of process with her process of forms inflected assertion that “the human, as Darwin made clear, is the result of and an elaboration on sexual difference, and thus the human, and indeed the beyond-the-human necessarily take on (at least) two forms.”19 It is easy to see what the flap is about when these concepts are juxtaposed in stark contrast like this. The vibration caused by the tension between these two theories is viscerally palpable. “If sex selection is independent from sexual reproduction, and is rather driven by aesthetics,” asks Parisi, “why is sex to be ontologically grounded in the evolution of the two sexes, driven by the impetus of organic life to self-differentiate?” (153). This gesture to the aesthetics of sex thus only serves to re-entwine us within the binary, only at an ontobiological level. The problem with Grosz, therefore, boils down to founding sexual difference on the “onto-organic complexification of life” (153), as Parisi astutely diagnoses. On this reading, it certainly does appear as if Grosz aims to square the circle. Parisi’s response to this tension is typical of what any good philosopher would do when faced with competing or irreconcilable theories: relinquish or modify one of the theories in favor of upholding the other. Given that the evidence Parisi supplies with her algorithmic and biotechnological examples stack the deck in favor of preserving and enhancing the materialist line of infinite, open-ended, creative transformation, clearly the instinct would be to 16 Grosz, Time Travels, 19. Ibid., 25. 18 Ibid., 26. 19 Ibid., 42. 17

A REQUIEM TO SEXUAL DIFFERENCE 175 simply dismiss any claim to a fundamental ontology of binary sexual difference, as “such a reading falls short of challenging its subtended bioontological ground, which ultimately identifies sexual difference with the complexification of organic life.” This, she rightly maintains, denies “the unpredictability of virtual sexes” (155). Parisi locates Grosz’s critical error in her organicist vision of “virtual descent, which differentiates itself through actualities” (155) rather than the “thousand virtualities immanent to any form of differentiation . . . infinite singularities, multiplicities, virtual and actual planes of sex, which are evolutionary events that cannot be contained by the rule of the two” (155). I, too, share Parisi’s concern and conclusion that “for sexual difference to be thought in evolution, it cannot remain an eternal form of sex but must go through a radical becoming, a cut from a form of sex that is as complete as stratified sex” (156), as this binary form of sex is not enduring but an accidental evolutionary event. I am left wondering, however, whether there might not be another way to engage with Grosz such that, rather than quieting the vibration, we engage it toward more productive ends. What I would like to do in that vein is not attempt to reduce the vibration to some form of harmony, nor quiet it by simply doing away with sexual difference ontology, but rather I would like to use the vibration to compose a requiem to sexual difference that would honor its legacy and carry its memory forward into the posthuman theories of the present and future. In Bergsonian fashion, my suggestion is that we consider sexual difference as a type of habit-memory; it is virtual, always real but not necessarily actualized in the present, and future-directed. This characterization, after all, is the model of sexual difference ontology proposed by both Irigaray and Grosz as they repeatedly note that the time of sexual difference is the future. Perhaps it is Grosz’s very point to create that vibration, that charge, that dissonance, in order to propel the logic inherent in Irigarayan sexual difference theory to another stage of conceptual evolution, perhaps even one resembling or generative of Parisi’s. It is clear that Grosz is aware that Irigaray herself would take issue with the notion of being narrated through her Darwinian story. As such, I want to suggest that rather than trying to build some sort of grand unified theory in the mode some (especially male) philosophers aspire to do—which would entail fitting a square peg into a round hole—Grosz might be deliberately setting forth an internally contradictory theory to spark the kind of charge necessary to generate a metatheoretical or conceptual difference of an unpredictable nature. Though admittedly an odd way of framing this move, I would like to call this methodology “theory sex.” This concept can be justified through her description that “vibrations, waves, oscillations, resonances affect living bodies, not for

176 JAMI WEINSTEIN any higher purpose but for pleasure alone. Living beings are vibratory beings: vibration is their mode of differentiation, the way they enhance and enjoy the forces of the earth itself.”20 I will return to this in the following section. But before turning to the task of explicating this reading of Grosz, it is important to pause and briefly note that Grosz herself is fully aware of the tension between these two sides of her work. While in some sense it may present as if she is engulfed an impregnable paradox, I gather from the parenthetical comments like “(at least) two forms” cited above that Grosz is uninterested in solidifying sexual difference in an unalterable, enduring binary form. Additionally, when faced with the critics who point out that the move to argue for sexual difference as a fundamental ontologically somehow pits sexual difference in competition against other loci of difference as more important or less mutable or constructed, Grosz notes, “where Darwin confirms Irigaray’s position is in claiming that the structures of racial, religious, and sexual orientation are open to potentially infinite historical transformations, given a long enough period of time, in ways that may or may not be true for sexual difference. This in no way places sexual difference outside historical or biological transformation . . . it simply insists that . . . sexual difference must be a consideration, a relevant factor.”21 I have added italics in an effort to highlight the potential that Grosz may not be insisting that sexual difference is as rigidly immutable or binary as it may seem to her critics, though it is true that she still necessitates some form of difference in the realm of the sexual as enduring and relevant into the unforeseen future. How one depicts the form of sexual difference that must remain relevant, however, does seem to be a more open question than one can read on the surface. Combined with the ‘at least’ remark cited earlier, this could lead one to infer that Grosz’s theory has the potential to open up to the infinite potential of matter for unbounded creativity with respect to sexual difference conceived as an irreducible multiplicity. Parisi acknowledges this when she remarks that an Irigarayan sexual difference ontology is groundbreaking insofar as it “must be conceived metaphysically and that such metaphysics is immanent to the fluid dynamics of matter” (151). Lest we forget, Irigaray held the mechanics of solids as phallocentric and connected to the logic of the One but offered fluid mechanics as its alternative for reflecting le féminin. It is here perhaps that the critiques against Grosz might be softened from an irresolvable paradox to a recognition that examining Darwin through a Deleuzo–Guattarian and Bergsonian lens could provide the basis for a theory of sexual difference that 20 Elizabeth Grosz, Chaos, Territory, Art: Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 33. 21 Grosz, Time Travels, 220n16; italics mine.

A REQUIEM TO SEXUAL DIFFERENCE 177 transcends the stereotypical notion of an Irigarayan utopia of a static, dualistic, fundamental ontology. However, while it may indeed be the case that the critiques have been too strong and that Grosz herself is already paving the way out, I do not believe this is the most compelling strategy for wresting the importance of her insightful work from the grips of the perceived irresolvable tension condemning her work to the realm of the illogical and contradictory. I would instead like to suggest that rather than attempting to locate a way out of the paradox via a wholesale abandoning of sexual difference ontology or even through transforming it into a multiplicity, that we dive into the vibratory force created by the tension between it and Grosz’s understanding of matter to see if there is not a more interesting way to harness that tension productively for feminist strategies. I will name this trajectory “theory sex,” or the way through. 4. THEORY SEX: A POSSIBLE WAY THROUGH I agree with Parisi entirely that on one read there is an intricate tension at the core of Grosz’s overall project. Moreover, I confess that I am seduced by the strategy of discarding sexual difference ontology in favor of probing deeper into matter’s unpredictable, inhuman, unbounded, irreducibly heterogeneous and multiple, preaccelerated, relational forms of sex that are infinitely open to future variation and self-overcoming, as this would definitively release this tension. I also admit that refiguring our understanding of material reality such that we free ourselves from the grip of an enduring binary fundamental ontology of sexual difference is not only one of the most compelling strategies to diffuse that tension but it is necessary in itself. But Parisi’s paper raises an important question that has inspired me to push my own thinking further: what can we do with the groundbreaking theoretical interventions made by those who champion sexual difference ontology? Given that I share Parisi’s methodology and her conclusion that sexual difference is not based on the sexes determined by sexual selection or sexual reproduction, much less that it endures in any specific form, it would be natural to inquire about my stake in wanting to trace a trajectory to multiplicity through sexual difference. Why do I not simply toss sexual difference aside (the way out) and move on to the work of neomaterialist and radical empiricist study of matter and its implications? My response is that even if we want to pronounce the death of sexual difference so figured by Irigarayan-inspired feminist theorists as an enduring form, sexual difference ontology nonetheless deserves a proper eulogy before laying it to its final resting place in the genetic virtuality of our conceptual history.

178 JAMI WEINSTEIN In addition, my effort to work through sexual difference operates in a different register. I am arguing on a conceptual and theoretical level, whereas Parisi is arguing on a bio-ontological level. Sexual difference as a concept has been a difficult one to bypass or undermine. Philosophically, we still have to account for the extent to which we have inherited its legacy in our thinking, problems, concepts, and arguments. Reading Parisi, it is clear that, bioontologically, there is no real basis for a claim to an enduring, stable, binary sexual difference. As she describes it, “sex and sexual differences are events” and “technocultural, ethico-aesthetic, sociopolitical assemblages” and that “these events are not simply linked to historical/epistemological contingencies determined by scientific thought but are, above all, linked to the infinite potentialities of matter to become and form anew as indicated by evolutionary theories” (147). And, with that, I have no argument. But going through rather than bypassing or eliding sexual difference allows us to take the virtuality of its forces and affects with us to the current stage of conceptual and philosophical evolution that has landed us in the ontological realm of multiplicity and irreducible relation. It permits us to incorporate feminist insights regarding sexual difference into the fundamental ontology of pure difference and multiplicity, thus, reconceptualizing it as a figure in the assemblage of multiplicity. As such, part of my motivation to wrest Grosz’s work out of the clutches of the harsher critiques is that the concept of sexual difference has a long complicated history in our conceptual evolution and, whether one is sympathetic to it or not, it lingers in our present as both an active and inactive residue. It is real, if only virtual, in our present.22 Thus, if only in the spirit of making a final attempt to derive something valuable from the legacy of sexual difference theory, I suggest that it is worth pushing Grosz just a bit further in order to see whether we might not be able to locate some critical purchase and possibly expose a hidden intention in her work. What mission might Grosz be undertaking with her persistent return to sexual difference ontology in light of her views about evolution? As I mentioned above, Grosz does not strive to erect a grand holistic theory that reconciles the two incompatible threads of her work, nor is she unaware that they are in tension. For that reason, I will forego any attempt to resolve the tension by restoring harmony. Instead, I want to argue that the force of her work lies at a metatheoretical level, within the relation and the 22 There are four ways one could approach the question of sexual difference. Either there is no such thing as sexual difference, there is sexual indifference (whereby there is a perceived sexual difference that amounts to a monosexual ontology of one sex and the lack of it), there is a binary (or fixed plurality) of sexual difference, or there is an infinite multiplicity of different sexes. I would argue that all four of these possibilities are always already virtual in our conceptual genetics.

A REQUIEM TO SEXUAL DIFFERENCE 179 tension it produces. It is this tension produced by the relational encounter of these semiotic-material bodies, the vibratory force between the disharmonious themes that, in its precise form of materializing difference on a metatheoretical level, exposes the content, the reproductive and evolutionary force of difference. Perhaps wittingly, Grosz establishes this productive vibratory tension between these competing motifs, which sexualizes the theoretical itself such that, on a metatheoretical level, the very attraction, oscillation, vibration, and difference that can spawn new concepts is in place. It is for this reason that I call the way through “theory sex.” Theory sex can be characterized as a metatheoretical form of difference epitomized by and embodied in the unbridgeable gap between Grosz’s two theoretical stances. Theory sex produces a friction and reproduces or charts lines of flight toward theories generating multiplicity and relation as the smallest unit of analysis. While it is in a certain sense dual (one theory is pit in opposition to another), it is generative of, reproduces, and spawns multiplicity and, thus, could be positioned as an evolution from mono-logical or bi-logical accounts, though one that contains those accounts as an ingredient of its conceptual genetic history. Thus, I will argue further that theory sex is constitutive of accounts like Parisi’s. Before continuing to push deeper into theory sex, however, we might want to pause momentarily to register a potential and perhaps valid criticism of this approach. Surely one could argue that theory sex, insofar as it seems to still maintain an irreconcilable dualism, simply transfers the criticism of sexual difference ontology itself to the metalevel, at least on a superficial glance at this particular instance of theory sex. I do not deny that one could interpret the unbridgeable gap between the theoretical claims as a reflection of an Irigarayan account of sexual difference. And if these were properly analogous paradigms, it would clearly render the theory sex reading equally prey to the critiques lodged against sexual difference itself, making it a worthless endeavor to continue with this proposal. The analogy, however, contains key dissimilarities that render this critique mute. First, whereas sexual difference is constructed as a dualism, theory sex appears to be but is not. Theory sex has, on the one side, a reading of evolution that contains an infinite multiplicity of unpredictable sexes and, on the other side, a reading of sexual difference ontology constituted by (at least) two enduring forms. In that sense it is a binary—if not a multiplicity23—pit 23 It bears recalling, as I mentioned earlier with the reference to Grosz’s parenthetical “at least two” remark, that sexual difference is never and has never been properly dialogical. It is and always has been conceptually, virtually, “at least” two, multiple, and polymorphously perverse.

180 JAMI WEINSTEIN against a multiplicity, thus not logically collapsing into a proper binary in the way sexual difference ontology does under orthodox interpretations opening up a line of flight that can produce the framework for relation as fundamental and multiplicity as an irreducible foundation. As we have already seen in Parisi’s argument and in similar interpretations, this framework of multiplicity does not exist under the logic of sexual difference taken in isolation.24 Second, given that theory sex is not meant as an ontology but a figure or, better yet, a concept, it is not clear that the same criticisms would apply. As a concept, theory sex becomes a tool for philosophers to respond to problems and to chaos. Concepts, unlike ontologies, do not endure in a single form. Quite the contrary; concepts according to Deleuze, as Grosz explains, are deployed by philosophers “to deal with, to approach, to touch upon, harness, and live with chaos,”25 and, as I have detailed elsewhere,26 concepts are multiplicities, at least double or triple,27 since “the concept speaks the event, not the essence or the thing.”28 Thus, if theory sex dwells in conceptual rather than the ontological terrain, as I am arguing it does,29 it is more properly a “center of vibrations”30 or a dissonance31 than it is about some ontological truth of the matter. As is the case with all concepts, according to Deleuze and Guattari, if a concept is unable to constitute itself, it is likely the result of its being mired in other problems. Further, perhaps due to the vibrations and forces within the concept itself, it triggers an event that helps create future concepts, concepts that might better resolve the problems to which the initial concept was originally linked. I expect that Grosz is well aware of this potential of concepts to produce, through vibration and dissonance, future concepts. And while I do not want to overstate the point nor over-ascribe intentionality to Grosz, she does acknowledge throughout her work that she deliberately juxtaposes competing, different, and often theoretically incompatible paradigms, 24 Though I argue elsewhere that there is a way of figuring sexual difference such that it might be able to in itself generate a foundational multiplicity through the logic contained within it. See Weinstein, “Introduction Part II.” 25 Grosz, Chaos, Territory, Art, 27. 26 Weinstein, “Introduction Part II.” 27 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy? trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 15. 28 Ibid., 21. 29 I have also argued that sexual difference itself can function as a concept and, as such, brings forth a logic rather than remaining fixed in an enduring ontological form. See Weinstein, “Introduction Part II.” 30 Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy? 23. 31 Claire Colebrook suggests that the Deleuzo–Guattarian notion of becoming-woman is a dissonance, which I argue resembles the vibratory conceptual character of sexual difference. See both Colebrook, “Introduction Part I,” 1–19, and Weinstein, “Introduction Part II.”

A REQUIEM TO SEXUAL DIFFERENCE 181 purposely producing and working with the dissonance. Salient among these, she names as her guides the multiply incongruous projects of Deleuze and Guattari and Irigaray. My suggestion here is that rather than uncharitably dismissing Grosz’s work as lodged in an inextricable paradox, perhaps we can read this tension, the friction, in Grosz as her performance of theory sex. Theory sex would, accordingly, be part of an overall project of intertwining erotics with theory to engender the sort of difference that could charge philosophical concepts with the sort of vibratory (sexual) pleasure that would propel them toward their own self-overcoming and extinction and create the mise-en-scène for the next phase of conceptual evolution. The offspring of this theory sex relation would thus inherit a conceptual genetic history as part of its virtual present existence and memory. During the Spindel Conference, Parisi noted in her response to a question raised in the discussion that Whitehead thinks matter through as vibration or a relationality of contrasting forces. Perhaps we could map this onto Grosz and plot a sort of materiality of theory at the core, not a substance-based but a process-based materiality found within the dynamic of theory sex. Addressing the chaos in Grosz is also important, as this relates to the issue of music and vibration as much as it does to the issue of concepts; all of these motifs taken together buttress my argument for a theory sex reading. In the abstract to the chapter entitled, “Vibration. Animal, Sex, Music,” Grosz informs the reader that her aim is to examine “music’s most elemental relations to chaos.”32 Faithful to Deleuze and Guattari, Grosz depicts chaos “not as absolute disorder but rather as a plethora of orders, forms, wills— forces that cannot be distinguished or differentiated from each other, both matter and its conditions for being otherwise, both the actual and the virtual indistinguishably.”33 It is evident from her take on Deleuze and Guattari that philosophers do not strive to divine some “true or inner order”34 by creating concepts to address the chaos. This is analogous to my suggestion that Grosz is also not attempting to reconcile the dissonant themes of her work; as I mentioned above, philosophers aim to create concepts not intending to order or control but to reduce the chaos “to some form that the living can utilize without being completely overwhelmed.”35 These concepts exist only temporarily and are inherently self-overcoming in that the problems they are meant to address (their milieu) are also in flux. 32 Grosz, Chaos, Territory, Art, 25. Ibid., 5. 34 Ibid., 27. 35 Ibid., 28. 33

182 JAMI WEINSTEIN The link between chaos and music is too extensively detailed in Grosz to provide an adequate exegesis here. However, one point bears mentioning. She holds that “(t)hese inartistic chaotic forces, forces that do not reveal themselves except through processes of composition that lay them out for . . . auditory consumption, cannot be lived: they are fundamentally inhuman,” moreover, they are, “experienced or lived, at best, as chaotic.”36 This points to the way we, as living beings can experience the musical composition issuing from the deterritorializing, sexual-erotic, vibratory dissonance of theory sex performed in Grosz’s work. These inhuman, chaotic forces pulsing through her work in the form of musical vibrations and oscillations urge us, as philosophers, to innovate, form novel concepts, and find ways to utilize the virtual force of the generative chaos with which we are confronted in the dissonance of her work. In that light, it makes sense to figure theory sex as a framework for the reproduction of irreducible, nonanthropocentric and nonteleological, unpredictable, inhuman, multiplicities of sex. While Parisi thoroughly rehearsed the problems of linking art or aesthetic exorbitance to sexual selection and sexual difference taken in itself as an isolated theory, when considering it in relation to the theory sex reading, perhaps we can locate another of Grosz’s possible veiled agendas. Key to this is the idea that art “not only works in cooperation with natural selection but at times functions in conflict with it, placing individuals and species in potential danger to the extent that they attract partners.”37 She cites the peacock and the “costs incurred . . . for the magnificence of its plumage, the risk of predatory attack . . . sexual appeal imperils as much as it allures; it generates risk to the same extent that it produces difference,”38 as demonstration of this conflict. Extrapolating out this risk of aesthetic exorbitance and placing it within the dissonance of theory sex, we could infer that it is the very art of her work, in excess of its survival needs and in potential conflict with its survival interests, that makes Grosz easy prey and leads her insistence on the sexual difference ontology toward extinction. It is thus that the issue of self-overcoming and extinction returns to the fore, not only as it relates to organic life and materiality but also with respect to the conceptual and theoretical materiality I am proposing as theory sex. Grosz underscores that the question of futurity is central to her understanding of Darwin through the work of Deleuze and Guattari, Bergson, and even Irigaray. Sexual difference is always already located in the time of the future, according to Grosz’s interpretation of Irigaray. This situates it as always 36 37 38 Ibid., 86. Ibid., 26. Ibid., 27.

A REQUIEM TO SEXUAL DIFFERENCE 183 virtual, real insofar as it “exerts its influence indirectly in the present,”39 though not actual (perhaps not even actualizable). My wish to account for the legacy of sexual difference by opting for the way through is echoed in Grosz’s observation that “(e)ach moment carries a virtual past with it: each present must, as it were, pass through the whole of the past” and contains the immediate future.40 In this sense, even the rigidly dualistic concept of sexual difference, like the monadic one it opposes, is virtual and real in the present moment of multiplicity and into the future. This is not to say that dualism and monism will endure in an actualized ontological form for perpetuity, but simply that they will remain components of our conceptual genetic architecture into the unknown future, even in an inactive state. The question of futurity in its application to matter is the question of self-overcoming and extinction. With respect to organic material life, the process of extinction transfers into the novel future a rich virtual genetic history. Similarly, with respect to concepts, this transfer retains a conceptual map of memories depicted through Deleuze and Guattari via Bergson as virtualities. Yet the actualization of the original organic life or material concept in the present and, presumably, into the future, ceases and their existences become real only in the virtuality of the past. They become no longer possible. In short, then, if evolution (conceptual or biological) is directed toward unpredictable futures and is self-overcoming, as Grosz claims, she must also be aware of the fact that creating this tension itself will, in propelling forward, lead toward theoretical extinction of concepts like sexual difference. In line with Bergson, Grosz theorizes that life, “even in the simplest organic cell, carries its past with its present as no material object does. This incipient memory endows life with creativity, the capacity to elaborate an innovative and unpredictable response to stimuli, to react or, rather, simply to act, to enfold matter into itself, to transform matter and life in unpredictable ways,” and further that “such elementary life can only evolve, become more, develop and elaborate itself to the extent that there is something fundamentally unstable about both its milieu and its organic constitution.”41 Extracting the organicist element of this definition of life, or alternately imbuing theory with life, we can map this schema onto the metatheoretical theory sex argument. What I propose is that we see the vibrations, oscillations, and dissonance between the two motifs as the motor of internal instability that drives the conceptual evolution into unpredictability and irreducible multiplicity. As 39 40 41 Grosz, Time Travels, 102. Ibid., 104. Ibid., 6.

184 JAMI WEINSTEIN transformation takes place through this process, the future stages of conceptual evolution retain the memory of the extinct past forms, which then act with the spark of creative virtual potentiality to respond unpredictably to new pressures and stimuli (like Parisi’s theoretical opposition). This has the effect of opening the present up to infinite transformation and evolution into the future unthought, but always self-overcoming, forms of conceptual life. But extinction also significantly carries with it a genetic (conceptual) history. With final self-overcoming, extinction, we need to acknowledge the extent to which we carry the history, if only virtually. As such, the sexual difference project and feminism as such need also take account of their own self-overcoming, most importantly in the strands that lean toward a temporality that emphasizes futurity, as in sexual difference theory. As Parisi urges, “there is no veritable endurance or continuity of sexual difference because as an actual occasion nothing comes into being once and for all. . . . An actual occasion can only endure if it radically renews itself, by breaking from its actual form” (156). And that is what I am suggesting that Grosz is effecting on a metatheoretical level; that by creating the reproductive friction, the vibration, the oscillation between these opposing forces, she is using a metapseudobinary logic to break with the form of binary sexual logic itself, fertilizing the egg that will spawn the progeny of what Parisi articulates through algorithmic models of nonteleological heterogeneous complexity as the precondition of evolution. Hence, if we accept the premise that Grosz is adopting a metatheoretical materialist strategy to philosophically and, thus, conceptually account for the chaos of sexual difference through its juxtaposition to evolutionary theory, she is also, thus, propelling binary sexual difference theory toward its immanent and virtual self-overcoming and extinction. Only by affecting this extinction and driving the concept of a static form of ontological sexual difference into the past, as memory and real conceptual genetic history, can it play an active role via its virtuality in producing actual and unforeseen potential forms of sex. It is for this reason that I characterize theory sex as the way through. 5. REQUIEM, ELEGY, CONCLUSION My choice of the term ‘requiem’ to describe what I want to accomplish with rereading Grosz in this metatheoretical light is deliberate. The term captures my multivalent purpose. On the one hand, it indicates my solidarity with Parisi and others who wish to once and for all lay the notion of sexual difference to rest. It further portrays the way in which I think that process needs to take place: honoring and bringing forth into the future the legacy of

A REQUIEM TO SEXUAL DIFFERENCE 185 the conceptual life of sexual difference ontology, my preference for a methodology that argues the way through. ‘Requiem’ is the accusative of ‘requies’, from ‘re-’ and ‘quies’, to quiet or rest, again. The laying of sexual difference ontology to rest, I am thus suggesting, must be performed not in the sense of either relinquishing or reconciling, which would quiet the vibration or tension in different ways, but as a quieting or laying to rest that comes from moving through, through harnessing the vibration in the service of a musical composition steeped in mourning to honor the death of a theory, through a re-quieting. Another valence of this term is divined from Grosz’s work itself. As I mentioned earlier, Grosz devotes a great deal of time analyzing music and its relation to evolution in Chaos, Territory, Art. In the spirit of her linkages between evolution, vibration, oscillation, sexual difference, and music, the term struck me as apt. I also entertained the idea of characterizing this argument using the term ‘elegy’. This term encapsulates the erotics of theory sex, as often elegies are poems or works of music of an erotic nature, though they can also sometimes possess a sense of mourning or a somber quality. Additionally, the rigid structure of elegiac couplets, which reflect the bidirectional rising action of the first verse and descending action of the second and express a complete and self-contained concept, is relevant to what I am arguing might be Grosz’s hidden intention. This structure invokes the paradox between the two theoretical paradigms being juxtaposed in Grosz’s theory sex and the way in which the vibration and dissonance between the two form an unbridgeable and non-self-identical theoretical basis that operates in the generation of irreducible sexual multiplicity. Despite its relevance in these senses, this term fails to capture in full the sense of death and honoring that ‘requiem’ does. Then again, perhaps, in the spirit of the argument itself, the title should have been “An Elegiac Requiem to Sexual Difference.” While the scope of this paper does not permit me to advance this trajectory in full detail here, it is important to note that figuring the way through the problem of an enduring binary sexual difference ontology can also be performed on that theory alone without appeal to a metatheoretical concept of theory sex. As I have indicated throughout this paper, I argue this trajectory in Deleuze and Gender;42 and, in a certain sense, what I argue as theory sex here is writ large my argument there. There I situate sexual difference ontology in the landscape of philosophical concepts in order to locate its critical purchase for philosophy proper (read: male philosophy). Briefly summarized, I cast sexual difference as a philosophical concept in order to distill and extract the logic within it, namely, a move away from the mono-logic of the One toward 42 Weinstein, “Introduction Part II.”

186 JAMI WEINSTEIN a logic of at least two, a logic of multiplicity. I do this in the hope of demonstrating that, rather than relegating this concept to the margins of philosophy, it can be mobilized and applied widely in the service of the repudiation of the other mono-logical ontologies constituting Enlightenment Humanism. I argue that this move is necessary in order to avoid the selfmarginalizing process associated with feminists who, perhaps inadvertently, perpetuate the need for feminism by continuing to debate one another over the worth of concepts like sexual difference or becoming-woman for feminist theory. This latter methodology has the collateral effect of ensnaring important philosophical concepts in a feminist ghetto rather than marshaling the force of the logic hidden within the concepts for the purposes of philosophy proper: to respond to problems and to chaos. In this vein I ask, if sexual difference is taken as a philosophical problem, the sort that evades the divisively ghettoizing consequences for feminist theory, how might it be, as a concept, “inventive: creating new concepts, new questions and new problems?”43 My suggestion is that rather than endeavoring to order the chaos by implanting sexual difference in a static, enduring ontological framework, an unrealizable goal, feminists should more productively open up the logic of sexual difference to dissonance and chaos. Thus, rather than conceptualizing sexual difference as the constitutive foundation for all differences, or theorizing sexual difference as a fundamental ontology, I use sexual difference as a starting point for theorizing ontology more broadly. I believe that this move toward fluid, irreducible, unpredictable, multiplicity and the self-overcoming characterized by theoretical extinction is part of the sexual difference line of flight, virtually present in the logic of the concept itself. It is this reading of sexual difference that has informed my theory sex reading of Grosz here and is its ancestor. Nomenclature and previous arguments aside, my wish is that the theory sex reading of Grosz helps move us beyond not only sexual difference as a dualistic fundamental ontology but also builds a foundation for a host of posthuman feminist theoretical explorations into the realm of the infinite potentialities of matter to become “the nexus of microworlds eventuating new sexes underneath the eukaryotic realm of the two” (157), beyond the human, in a continuing unpredictable process of self-overcoming and extinction, virtual and real, conceptual and ontological. Parisi has already met that challenge with her brilliantly articulated argument and justification for the necessarily multiple, inhuman, bio-ontological, relational forces immanent in the underbelly of matter. And I am optimistic that many others will follow 43 Claire Colebrook, “Is Sexual Difference a Problem?” in Deleuze and Feminist Theory, ed. Ian Buchanan and Claire Colebrook (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000), 114.

A REQUIEM TO SEXUAL DIFFERENCE 187 suit. What my argument for reading Grosz provocatively, as engaging in the metalevel strategy of theory sex, adds to Parisi’s project is a method of accounting for the conceptual genetic history and honoring the legacy and importance of sexual difference as a philosophical concept, even as we pronounce it ontologically dead and thrust into the preaccelerated, unbounded, inhuman future of neomaterialist and radical empirical accounts of matter and sex.44 44 I would like to acknowledge that this paper was greatly enhanced as a result of discussions with and/or encouragement from the following people: Sarah Clark Miller, Claire Colebrook, Luciana Parisi, Ulrika Dahl, Paola Marrati, Penelope Deutscher, and Nicole Anderson.