Microfeminine Warfare

From particle-forces to warfare

Microfeminine warfare is Luciana Parisi's micropolitics of mutation across bodies, scales and modes of sex. Its precursor, “microfeminine particle-forces” names relations that compose and decompose bodies before those relations congeal into identities or macropolitical positions. Femininity is not localized in a female organism: Parisi says microfeminine desire is “not exclusively addressed to women” but may proliferate through biophysical, social, economic and technical compositions (Luciana Parisi/Texts/Books/Author/Luciana Parisi - Abstract Sex_ Philosophy, Biotechnology and the Mutations of Desire (Transversals_ New Directions in Philosophy Series).pdf, pp. 51–52).

The concept replaces representation of a pre-given feminine subject with an engineering of proximities. Particle-forces are neither spontaneous liberation nor an essence hidden beneath gender; they arise from nonlinear relations between virtual capacities and actual compositions. The resulting molecular ethics asks what a body can do in an encounter rather than which stable category it represents (Luciana Parisi/Texts/Books/Author/Luciana Parisi - Abstract Sex_ Philosophy, Biotechnology and the Mutations of Desire (Transversals_ New Directions in Philosophy Series).pdf, pp. 44, 51–52).

A war without object

The conclusion of Abstract Sex turns this micropolitics into warfare. Strata capture symbiotic aggregation by imposing nucleic, reproductive and identitarian organization; they do not create the mutations they capture. Microfeminine warfare therefore escapes, precedes and exceeds stratification rather than meeting it as one constituted enemy facing another (Luciana Parisi/Texts/Books/Author/Luciana Parisi - Abstract Sex_ Philosophy, Biotechnology and the Mutations of Desire (Transversals_ New Directions in Philosophy Series).pdf, pp. 209–210).

The glossary condenses the idea as an endosymbiotic field of desire and a war without an object. Its mode is bacterial recombination, reversible parasitism and viral transduction; its method is the endosymbiotic connection of variations; its instantiation is the crossing of biological, economic and cultural bodies (Luciana Parisi/Texts/Books/Author/Luciana Parisi - Abstract Sex_ Philosophy, Biotechnology and the Mutations of Desire (Transversals_ New Directions in Philosophy Series).pdf, pp. 213, 217). It is the political vector of abstract sex, not a military metaphor applied from outside.

Feminist stakes

Parisi uses microfeminine warfare to detach feminine desire from organic innocence, reproductive destiny and the equation of woman with nature. It also refuses the opposite move in which technology becomes masculine activity imposed upon passive matter. Biodigital engineering belongs to the same hypernature as microbial and sexual organization, so its effects must be evaluated as new capacities and captures rather than classified in advance as natural or artificial (Luciana Parisi/Texts/Books/Author/Luciana Parisi - Abstract Sex_ Philosophy, Biotechnology and the Mutations of Desire (Transversals_ New Directions in Philosophy Series).pdf, pp. 212–213).

CONTRADICTION Andrew Goffey calls this a molecular, micro-feminist refusal of mind/body, nature/culture and form/matter dualisms, but notes that extending sex and femininity into unknown matter can itself look anthropomorphic (Luciana Parisi/Secondary Sources/Texts/Reviews/Goffry - Sex Cells (Review of Parisi - Abstract Sex) (Mute) (2009).pdf, pp. 1–2). Jami Weinstein, by contrast, treats microfeminine particle warfare as part of Parisi's successful exit from a fundamental binary ontology of sexual difference (Luciana Parisi/Secondary Sources/Texts/A Requiem to Sexual Difference; A Response to Luciana Parisi’s ‘Event and Evolution.’.pdf, pp. 8–9). The archive preserves the unresolved risk that a molecularization of femininity may either undo or redistribute essentialism.