A Thealogy of Radical Immanence: Goddess and the Posthuman

Thealogy is still negotiating its place in academic discourse. In this article I am exploring the possibilities of a thealogical contribution to discussions about challenges presented by a posthuman world. A focus of early expressions of Goddess feminism was on the regenerative power of reclaimed language and symbolism. As this process developed, the non-realist aspects of thealogy were discussed and debated by participants in and commentators on the Goddess movement. I, however, have argued for further discussion of the possibilities for non-realist thealogical discourse to contribute to the transformation of the religious and cultural imaginary. I propose a radical, post-realist approach to Goddess-talk which offers the potential of refiguring expressions of sacrality in a post-metaphysical, postmodern and – as I attempt to argue in this article – a posthuman context.

My thealogical starting point is the recognition of the vital significance of narrative and, consequently, the transformative and subversive power of renaming. ¹ Like many others, I was inspired to embrace Goddess feminism by reading Carol Christ’s Why Women Need the Goddess. ² This provoked me to confront the paradigm-shifting implications of feminist critiques of androcentric language and symbols. It generated my fascination with the power of symbol and story. This interest was further fuelled by my encounters with Asphodel Long, sometimes known as the ‘grandmother of the British Goddess movement’. I remember vividly the impact of attending one of her early workshops in which we recited ancient prayers written to worship female deities and experiencing for the first time a shocking sense of identity and connection with the notion of sacrality I was expressing.

My notion of ‘Goddess’ was further informed by the work of Nelle Morton. Although Morton only published one book, The Journey is Home, very late in her life, she had, nevertheless, an enormous influence on the development of thealogy. I found very convincing her argument that images have much more impact on the shape of our worldviews than words or concepts do. Morton argued that whilst concepts can be changed, images have to be shattered or exorcised before their effect on us can be altered. This, for Morton, was the impetus behind the need to move from ‘God’, a symbol which was completely identified with the sexist, patriarchal worldview which it sanctions and sustains, to ‘Goddess’. She described this iconoclastic and revelatory move as ‘metaphoric process’ which could usher in a new reality and greater vision. ³ She maintained, however, that the term ‘Goddess’ should be understood to function solely for ‘iconoclastic purposes’ ⁴ Morton recognized that Goddess could also become a dead metaphor if she is set ‘out there’ and literalized. Morton was certain, however, that, for now, the Goddess metaphor is necessary because it ‘produces a shock, a shattering and opens the way for exorcising the old image’. ⁵ Morton warned of the dangers of undermining the metaphoric process if women in the Goddess movement continue to envisage the Goddess as ‘out there’ or ‘up there’ – all powerful and all loving. This, Morton argued, only provided a sex change for the authoritarian ruler without exorcising him from one’s consciousness’. ⁶ Morton contrasts the sense of dependence, surrender, obedience and gratitude provoked by the symbol of God with the independence, resourcefulness and celebration generated by Goddess. For this very reason, Morton presents the metaphor of Goddess as one which must be transient rather than fixed or eternal. She therefore argued that ‘the Goddess tends to be transparent, to make herself dispensable in such a way that in time we will be compelled to seek a totally different way of speaking of reality’. ⁷

I identify with Morton’s argument that Goddess-talk is not about defining the gender of a supreme, transcendent divinity but is about the power of renaming. Furthermore, I am certain that the social, political and cultural transformation that feminist theo/alogy strives to enact cannot be realized through the use of a God-talk which is so inextricably enmeshed into the patriarchal structures of oppression which we are trying to dismantle.

Also influential is Morton’s use of journey imagery where the journey is home. Instead of the God of immutable eternity, Goddess-talk celebrates the otherwise messiness of flux, fluidity, transience, plurality and ambiguity. At the same time, Goddess-talk challenges the hierarchical dualism around which traditional theology is constructed and provides instead a language of connectedness and interdependence which celebrates rather than denigrates the material, the physical and the Other. The significance of Goddess-talk, therefore, is that it exposes the dualistic and life-negating assumptions of traditional worldviews. Early in the development of thealogy, Charlene Spretnak expressed the ways in which the metaphor of Goddess can convey an affirmation of immanence, process, connectedness and plurality when she wrote:

The revival of the Goddess has resonated with so many people because She symbolises the way things really are. All forms of being are One, continually renewed in cyclic rhythms of birth, maturation and death. That is the meaning of her triple aspect – the waxing, full and waning moon: the maiden, mother and wise crone. The Goddess honours union and process in the cosmic dance, the eternally vibrating flux of matter/energy: She expresses the dynamic rather than static model of the universe, she is immanent in our lives and our world. She contains both male and female, in Her womb, as a male deity cannot; all beings are part of Her, not a distant creation. ⁸

Such ‘theapoetical’ expression demonstrates the ways in which Goddess narratives can provide the language for a metaphoric process enabling ‘other’ ways of understanding the relationship between all forms of ‘life’.

Morton also related her own experiences of the Goddess as metaphoric image. She challenges, however, the assumptions of others about what constitutes these things as ‘really happening’ and maintains that such experiences were ‘more real than if they had been literal’ ⁹ Morton’s approach to ‘realism’ led to some debate about the realist or non-realist nature of Goddess and I agree with Beverley Clack’s contribution that Morton’s understanding of Goddess opens up thealogical possibilities for renegotiating the boundaries between ‘realist and non-realist’ expressions of sacrality. ¹⁰ As a result, I refer to my thealogical position ‘post-realist’ and call for a post-realist understanding of Goddess as metaphoric process. I am in no way denying the ‘reality’ of women’s experiences of ‘the Goddess’ but I am claiming that, like the figurations presented by Braidotti and Haraway, the transformative power of Goddess-talk needs no point of reference beyond the language itself. For me, the potency of Goddess-talk lies not in attempts to create a sense of relation with ‘local’ Goddesses such as Brigid or Ceridwen, much as I respect the ways in which this process can express the sacrality of specific, material and physical locations. In my own experience, Goddess narratives are powerful when they allow us to perceive ‘otherwise’ the worldviews which have been constructed by the dominant discourse we have inherited. Reclaiming narratives of demonized figures such as Lilith, Tiamat and Asherah can provide us with figurations of female sacrality which challenge the metanarratives of toxic dualism and gynophobia. This re-visioning can access subjugated ways of knowing which enable us to disrupt the prevailing religious symbolic and cultural imaginary.

Recently one of my colleagues gave a presentation for a research seminar at our university which introduced his Transcendental Materialist Philosophy of Religion. ¹¹ He entitled his paper ‘God is Real, There is no God’. I would therefore venture to suggest that, following Morton, I can claim that ‘Goddess is Real, There is no Goddess’. I would also argue that the move from ‘God’ to ‘Goddess’ provides access to expressions of sacrality which are post-metaphysical and which can embrace transience, plurality and ambiguity. I would also argue that such Goddess-talk could have a place in conversations about the role of narratives of sacrality in a postmodern and posthuman world. There has, however, been rather slow progress in the incorporation of scholarly thealogical reflection into recognized academic discourse. I continue to be convinced, however, that the intellectual possibilities of thealogical discourse have yet to be fully recognized.

As the British Goddess movement emerged, it was apparent that not all its participants were ready to heed Morton’s warnings about dangers of ‘literalising’ the Goddess. There were also considerable tensions present between those who did and those who did not want the Goddess to be associated with feminism or with the academy. I, however, am eager to promote a radical, feminist, engaged post-realist thealogy which can contribute to academic discourse. I do this fully aware of the potential problems presented by the use of a term, ‘Goddess’, which can be perceived as functioning, in binary opposition, as a female counterpart or – even worse – a feminine diminutive, to the male ‘God’. I nevertheless cite Morton’s claim that the iconoclastic potency of ‘Goddess’ lies in its ability to shatter androcentric preconceptions and generate new possibilities for refiguring sacrality. In order to avoid literalization and welcome plurality, I also choose to refer to ‘Goddess’ rather than ‘the Goddess’, and to ‘sacrality’ rather than ‘the Sacred’.

I have already used the work of Rosi Braidotti to illustrate the relationship between a feminist appropriation of subjectivity as process and the ‘power of renaming’, expressed in her use of the image of the nomad, to propose that thealogy has a role to play in renegotiating the social imaginary. ¹² This exploration resulted in an understanding of Goddess-talk as the creation of feminist figurations (Braidotti’s term) as ‘heteroglossia’ (Donna Haraway’s term) which can disrupt patterns of oppression and offer possibilities for positive responses to difference. Such Goddess-talk, I then argued, could convey post-realist understandings of transgressive and performative sacrality which are grounded in a sense of relation with all forms of life.

When I first encountered the work of Rosi Braidotti I found it difficult to appreciate her argument that the ‘gesture which binds a fractured self to the performative illusion of unity’ was an ‘act of violence force’. ¹³ I have since been convinced by feminist arguments that Descartes’ narrative of the unified, separate self was constructed upon a correlation between ‘self’ and the situation of elite maleness. Furthermore, this model, determined by the Enlightenment projects of emancipation, posits the male, elite subject as the norm, against which notions of equality were measured. This construct of the self was linked to the project of Western rationalism, which was perceived as a relentless march of progress towards an ideal of ‘wholeness’ which lay beyond the fragmentation of imperfect and perspectival perceptions. A recognition of the damaging effects of such models has prompted many feminists – including Braidotti – to argue for the socio/political implications of challenging this fictive unity of the self. I became convinced that thealogy’s openness to plurality, ambiguity and process equips it to assist in narrating such challenges.

Braidotti maintains that the ‘death’ of the subject does not mean that feminists need fall into relativism, cynical nihilism or political despair. She notably claims that it is possible to blur the boundaries without burning the bridges. And this ‘blurring’, Braidotti maintains, allows new possibilities for respecting difference and diversity. In order to facilitate this, she employs the image of the nomadic subject which allows her to re-imagine subjectivity as process in ways which affirm movement and diversity whist still retaining the possibilities of community and commonality. The mythic figure of the nomadic subject allows Braidotti to move through the challenges of postmodernism on her own terms. Furthermore, Braidotti asserts that because ‘nomadic cartographies need to be redrafted constantly’ they are therefore ‘structurally opposed to fixity and therefore to rapacious appropriation’. ¹⁴

Braidotti understands the nomadic subject to be a ‘figuration’, or ‘politically informed image’. She understands the use of feminist figurations to be part of a ‘visionary epistemology’ which is necessary to ‘free the activity of thinking from the hold of phallocentric dogmatism’. ¹⁵ Braidotti, therefore, alongside feminist theo/alogians, recognizes the vital importance of ‘positive renaming’ and cites Donna Haraway, who also calls for ‘ecstatic speakers’ and ‘heteroglossia’, as an important ally in this endeavour. Haraway’s well-known figuration of the cyborg is used to challenge the damaging legacy of binary opposites by exploring the possibilities of a breakdown of distinctions such as those between organism and machine. ¹⁶ Haraway’s resulting ‘Manifesto for Cyborgs’ has been championed as an early herald of the emerging discipline of posthumanism. ¹⁷ Braidotti has summarized the vital question posed by the Cyborg Manifesto as what counts as human in a posthuman world? She carries her exploration of this question into her own later book on posthumanism. ¹⁸

Braidotti and Haraway make it clear they do not regard Goddesses as useful figurations. Braidotti views Goddess-talk as being inevitably tied to a nostalgia for essential unity. ¹⁹ Similarly, Haraway has famously declared that she would rather be a cyborg than a goddess. ²⁰ I beg to differ and affirm that Goddess figurations have far more potential to disrupt narratives of ‘phallocentric dogmatism’ than they are given credit for here. I have used the work of Catherine Keller to illustrate this. ²¹

Keller has identified links between the re-membering of Goddess narratives and the concerns with traditional notions of subjectivity voiced by Braidotti and Haraway. In her ground-breaking book, From a Broken Web, Keller makes the powerful claim that ‘it is a self conceived as separate that has … projected its grid of fragmentation upon the world’. ²² Having recognized that ‘self is a process’, Keller relates her interrogation of dominant notions of self to a dis-covering of the process by which powerful Goddesses have been trivialized or demonized in Western culture. She provides a compelling analysis of the transmission of the myth of Perseus and Medusa which, she argues, reveals its presupposition of the transcendent independence of the ego and the normative self as masculine. She claims that the myths which have determined our symbolic order inform us that true selfhood, the prize of heroic quests, can only be attained by conquering and exterminating the Other. Keller shows how, in the myths which shape our imaginary, the Other is so often presented as the monstrous female – Medusa, Tiamat, Lilith. And yet, lying beneath these dominant narratives of the rape, denigration, demonization and ultimate destruction of these monsters, there are hidden herstories of powerful, wise, autonomous Goddesses. Braidotti and Haraway have also recognized the role of ‘monsters’ in ‘the systems of myth and meaning structuring our imaginations’ to determine ‘limits of community’ ²³ and ‘the status of difference within rational thought’. ²⁴ They too recognize the links between monsters and the role of women as figures of devalued difference and therefore the monstrous Other. What Keller’s analysis so skilfully shows, however, is that, very often, when you scratch a mythic monster, you find a Goddess. Goddess figurations can therefore provide transgressive narratives which disrupt the boundaries of ‘otherness’. I have, therefore, presented my own ‘Manifesto for Goddesses’.

I maintain that the Goddesses with whom I wish to travel share with nomads the movement and spiralling energy of subject as process. For them, the journey is home. They also share with nomads a connection with and respect for the material environment in which they move and with which they are interdependent. Goddesses like Medusa, Lilith and Tiamat would be happy to converse with cyborgs about the subversive power of monstrous hybrids. These are no passive Earth Mothers. They do not represent a soft, blobby matrix who invites us to merge into her all-embracing lap. They move with the creative chaos of matter’s energy, they are wisdom Goddesses who present embodied ways of knowing and epistemologies which reflect the multiple, fluctuating nature of subjectivity. Furthermore, I would venture that Goddesses can provide what nomads and cyborgs cannot – an expression of sacrality. Goddesses also possess an historical specificity, they inherit a narrative of suppression, marginalisation and demonization which equips them with possibilities for new ways of understanding and responding to difference. ²⁵

I now wish to consider whether these travelling companions can help to navigate a way through the unsettling territory of the ‘posthuman’. In his influential attempt to answer the question ‘what is posthumanism?’, Cary Wolfe acknowledges that, as with most ‘posts’, there are a variety of differing, and sometimes contrasting, definitions and he welcomes such ambiguity, recognizing that some of this diversity results from competing notions of the embodied nature of the ‘human’. ²⁶ Posthumanism has emerged because, despite the differing approaches to Cartesian assumptions, it is recognized that new theories and ethics are demanded by ‘our’ changing relations to non-human forms of life, whether that be ‘artificial intelligence’ or other than human animals.

I have to confess that I cannot claim to share Braidotti’s self-acclaimed technophilia. ²⁷ Part of my attraction to Braidotti’s approach to the posthuman, however, is that it does not focus exclusively upon the more ‘popular’ fascination with the blurring between ‘humanity’ and ‘technology’ but also emphasizes themes which are very close to my understanding of a thealogical project. I am arguing that, in particular, feminist thealogy has something to offer in the exploration of three of the issues raised by Braidotti in her interrogation of the implications of a posthuman world. These are: the question of what is meant by ‘being human’ – and who has been and still is being left out of this ‘category’; the challenge to anthropocentrism; and the critique of a posthuman world’s move towards the commodification of ‘life’ itself in a global capitalist economy.

Intrinsic to the ‘posthuman turn’ is a critique of anthropocentrism, a prevailing perspective which Braidotti summarizes as ‘the notion of species hierarchy’ in which ‘Man’ is the ‘measure of all things’. ²⁸ Braidotti opens her exploration of the posthuman by noting that ‘not all of us can say with any degree of certainty that we have always been human, or at least only that…. not if by ‘human’ we mean that creature familiar to us from the Enlightenment and its legacy. She goes on to cite Wolfe in equating this notion of ‘human’ with ‘The Cartesian subject of the cogito, the Kantian “community of reasonable beings”, or, in more sociological terms, the subject as citizen, rights holder, property-owner, and so on’. ²⁹ Braidotti recognizes that, despite the attempts of conservative religious social forces to reinscribe the notion of the human, the concept of the human has ‘exploded under the double pressure of contemporary scientific advances and global economic concerns’. After a series of ‘posts’, she claims, ‘we seem to have entered the post-human predicament’. ³⁰ Braidotti recognizes that there is a range of responses to this ‘predicament’ – or opportunity – depending on your perspective, and a range of possible outcomes, some offering a grim view of the future and some offering hopeful possibilities. ³¹ Braidotti proceeds to explore responses to and implications of the posthuman condition and offers her own attempt at expressing an understanding of what is meant by ‘posthuman subjectivity’ and at constructing a notion of ‘posthuman ethics’. Braidotti believes that posthuman theory has the potential to act as a ‘generative tool’ to rethink the notion of the ‘human’ in the bio-genetic age referred to as ‘Anthropocene’, ‘the historical moment when the Human has become a geological force capable of affecting all life on this planet’. As such, she says, this theory has the potential to ‘help us re-think the basic tenets of our interaction with both human and non-human agents on a planetary scale’. ³²

In her critical analysis of the Enlightenment conception of the ‘human’, Braidotti mirrors a critique of androcentrism which is at the heart of feminist theo/alogy. Also, as in her previous explorations of Nomadic Subjects, the notion of subjectivity is crucial for Braidotti because she wants to maintain that ‘the posthuman condition urges us to think critically and creatively about who and what we are and what we are actually in the process of becoming’. ³³ Braidotti identifies this process of re-visioning with notions of the posthuman as ‘becoming- animal’, ‘becoming- earth’ and ‘becoming-machine’.

Braidotti revisits the ways in which the concept of the human is posited upon the concept of Man emerging from the Renaissance and Enlightenment as epitomized by Leonardo’s white, European, handsome and able-bodied ‘Vitruvian Man’. Braidotti’s rejection of this concept leads to a proud recognition of her stance as ‘anti humanist’, maintaining that ‘Humanism’s restricted notion of what counts as human is one of the keys to understanding how we got to a post-human turn at all’. ³⁴ At the same time, she is ready to acknowledge the positive achievements of the Humanist tradition and is very aware of the complexities and contradictions involved in her anti-humanist stance. ³⁵ Braidotti nevertheless maintains a critique of the historical construct, ‘Man’, and identifies with a rich heritage of feminist, postmodern, post-structural and post-colonial thought which problematizes this concept on epistemological, political and ethical grounds. ³⁶ Her anti-humanism leads her to object to the unitary subject of Humanism and to replace it with ‘a more complex and relational subject framed by embodiment, sexuality, affectivity, empathy and desire as core qualities’. ³⁷ Such a move is, I would argue, one which is very much part of a thealogical project as I understand it.

Alongside this, Braidotti is also in agreement with thealogy in her analysis of the destructive effects of an androcentric, dualistic worldview. Braidotti affirms that the ‘human’ (he) operates as normative and she therefore rejects ‘the unitary identities indexed on that Eurocentric and normative ideal of ‘Man’’. In doing this, however, Braidotti recognizes the danger of speaking ‘in one unified voice about women, natives and other marginal subjects’ and instead calls for an emphasis on issues of diversity and differences among them and on the internal fractures of each category. In this respect, she maintains, Braidotti’s anti-humanism rejects the dialectical scheme of thought where difference or otherness played a constitutive role, marking off the sexualized other (woman), the racialized other (the native) and the naturalized other (animals, the environment or earth). Braidotti recognizes that these ‘others’ were constitutive in that they fulfilled a mirror function that confirmed the Same in His superior position. She argues that this political economy of difference resulted in passing off entire categories of human beings as devalued and therefore disposable others: to be ‘different from’ came to mean ‘less then’. The dominant norm of the subject was positioned as the pinnacle of a hierarchical scale that rewarded the ideal of zero-degree of difference. This Braidotti identifies as the former ‘Man’ of classical Humanism. ³⁸ Such an analysis, which identifies the interconnection between the othering of ‘women’, ‘natives’ and ‘nature’ has always been at the heart of feminist theo/alogy. What feminist theo/alogy adds to this interrogation, however, is the recognition that narratives of the ‘Sacred’ provide the ultimate sanction and legitimacy for this positioning upon a hierarchical scale. Whilst a patriarchal, imperialist God is in his heaven, ‘Man’ is secure in his role as dominant norm. Feminist thealogy can provide a further argument that the exorcising of such ‘God-talk’ is essential in order to enable the renegotiation of the social and cultural imaginary which is needed to disrupt such ingrained, systemic structures of oppression. Such a metaphoric process is, I maintain, necessary to enable the becoming that Braidotti envisages.

Braidotti could also be in conversation with thealogy in her recognition that central to her analysis is the rejection of a dualistic understanding of ‘nature’ and ‘culture’. Braidotti, however, cites the seventeenth century philosopher Baruch Spinoza as the primary influence for her non-dualistic understanding of the nature-culture interaction. She identifies her ‘monistic philosophy of becomings’ with her understanding of Spinoza’s ‘self-organizing (or auto-poietic) force of living matter’. ³⁹ Braidotti aligns herself with a school of Continental Philosophy which admires the work of Spinoza and, consequently, she interprets Spinoza’s ontology as enabling a worldview of ‘vitalist materialism’ which rejects all forms of transcendence and she advocates an embracing of ‘radical immanence’. Significantly, Braidotti maintains that these monistic premises are crucial for constructing an effective response to posthuman challenges to notions of subjectivity which, at the same time, challenges anthropocentrism. She further argues that a Neo-Spinozist understanding of the unity of all matter is reinforced by contemporary developments in science which recognize the self-organizing or ‘smart’ structure of living matter’. ⁴⁰ Braidotti champions her ‘vitalist materialism’ over against Descartes’ dualism of mind/matter. Thereby, she claims, avoiding anthropocentrism and allowing an approach which ‘is supported by and expanded by new developments in the mind-body interrelation within the neural sciences’. For Braidotti there is a direct link between monism, the unity of all living matter and post-anthropocentrism as a general frame of reference for contemporary subjectivity’. ⁴¹

I cannot claim to share Braidotti’s understanding of, or commitment to, Spinoza’s legacy and confess that I have some reservations about contemporary feminist theorists relying on the work of past male philosophers. I maintain, however, that there are real possibilities for points of contact between Braidotti’s radical immanence as celebration of the connectedness of all ‘living matter’ and the central concerns of feminist thealogy as outlined above. Indeed, it might be that thealogy has something further to bring to the conversation about Spinoza’s legacy. Braidotti mentions the work of Neo-Spinozist feminist thinkers Moira Gatens and Genevieve Lloyd who draw upon Spinoza’s emphasis on imagination in order to argue for the contemporary need for a qualitative shift in our ‘collective imaginings’. This they identify as necessary in order to bring about socially embedded and historically grounded changes. ⁴² Gatens and Lloyd highlight Spinoza’s emphasis on imagination and maintain that this emphasis on the importance of the ability to imagine other bodies allows for a positive response to difference. ⁴³ This leads them to explore the importance of restructuring the ‘social imaginary’ in order to bring about socio-political transformation. Susan James, in her thorough consideration of Spinoza’s Theologico-Political Treatise, acknowledges her debt to Gatens in highlighting the importance of Spinoza’s conception of ‘imagination’ in the development of his theories. ⁴⁴ James maintains that, for Spinoza, there is an important connection between the different ways in which God can be ‘imagined’ and the possibility of facilitating ‘true religion’ and of developing a just and harmonious society which enables liberty. ⁴⁵ I am not claiming here that James’ arguments contribute one way or the other to the ongoing debates about Spinoza’s ‘atheism’ or ‘pantheism’. I am only focusing on the suggestion that Spinoza was aware of the implications of ‘God-talk’ when developing his ethical and philosophical arguments, something that Braidotti chooses to overlook completely. For me, however, it does leave open the possibility that ‘Goddess-talk’ could also be included in conversations about the ways in which a ‘neo-Spinozist political ontology of monism and radical immanence’ might be relevant for responses to the posthuman condition. ⁴⁶

Braidotti aims to apply her monistic philosophy of becomings to the construction of possible posthuman ethics. Again, Braidotti is in tune with feminist theo/alogy when she recognizes the role of the insights of ecology and environmentalism as ‘a powerful source of inspiration for contemporary re-configuration of critical posthumanism’. Along with thealogy, Braidotti recognizes that these perspectives rest on what she calls ‘an enlarged sense of interconnection of self and others, including the non-human or ‘earth’ others. ⁴⁷ She claims that, in the face of the challenges presented by current scientific revolutions, we must seize the opportunity of the decline of the unitary subject to open up new area of acceptance of difference and diversity. This, she argues, could reveal ‘untapped possibilities for bonding, community building, and empowerment’. She announces that a new ‘conceptual creativity’ is needed in order to enable this. ⁴⁸ I am maintaining that the metaphoric process generated by Goddess-talk is precisely what is needed to facilitate such conceptual creativity.

In constructing her posthuman ethics, Braidotti recognizes, again along with feminist thealogy – and theology, that we need to move into an era of post-anthropocentrism, where the ‘human’ no longer claims the right to be the norm of life itself. In exploring this, Braidotti refers to her early love of the work of George Eliot, before discovering that Mary Anne Evans was herself also an admirer of Spinoza’s philosophy and had translated some of his work. Braidotti provides her favourite quotation – from Middlemarch – to illustrate her point.

If we had a keen vision and feeling of ordinary life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk around well wadded with stupidity. ⁴⁹

According to Braidotti, this ‘roar on the other side of silence’ is ‘the Spinozist indicator of raw cosmic energy that underscores the making of civilizations, societies, and their subjects’. ⁵⁰ I would want to suggest, however, that Braidotti shares her admiration of Eliot’s vision of the interconnectedness of all forms of life with feminist relational theologians such as Mary Grey and that her celebration of the raw cosmic energy underpinning all consciousness could find echoes in Spretnak’s characteristic expression of theapoetics quoted above.

A post-anthropocentric vision must also examine the relationship between the human and the very notion of ‘life’ itself. As a technophile, Braidotti is eager to welcome many of the technological advances of the posthuman world. At the same time, however, she clearly recognizes the threats involved in such advances. Braidotti cites Vandana Shiva in claiming that ‘contemporary capitalism is ‘bio-political’ in that it aims at controlling all that lives. It has already turned into a form of ‘bio-piracy’ because it exploits the generative powers of women, animals, plants, genes and cells’. ⁵¹ This move is an example of some of the ‘inhuman’ and ‘inhumane’ aspects of this aspect of globalization. Braidotti identifies the ethical and political challenges for a post-anthropocentric world taking on globalized capitalism. She sees that ‘advanced capitalism is a spinning machine that actively produces differences for the sake of commodification’. ⁵² Braidotti recognizes that the contemporary global economy is techno-scientific in its structure and identifies its bio-genetic structure as being particularly significant, citing, for instance, the Human Genome Project, stem cell research and bio-technological intervention upon animals, seeds, cells and plants. In substance, she claims, advanced capitalism invests and profits from the scientific and economic control of all that lives. It is undertaking the commodification of ‘Life’ itself. ⁵³ Braidotti is aware of the profoundly disturbing features of the posthuman from the ways in which globalized capitalism has made ‘life’ itself the main capital to the use of ‘contemporary death-technologies’, such as drones, which heighten ‘necro-political power’ in the posthuman context. ⁵⁴

To face these challenges, Braidotti argues, there needs to be a post-anthropocentrism in which ‘Life’ is viewed not as ‘being codified as the exclusive property or inalienable right of one species, the human, over all others or being sacralized as a pre-established given’ instead it must be understood as ‘process, interactive and open-ended’. In order to facilitate this post-anthropocentric perspective, Braidotti exercises ‘the power of renaming’. She calls for a recognition of the difference between life as bio and life as zoe – as part of what she describes as a vitalist approach to living matter which displaces the boundary between bio (traditionally reserved for anthropos) and zoe (a wider scope of animal and non-human life). For Braidotti, zoe is the ‘dynamic, self-organizing structure of life itself’. It is the ‘transversal force that cuts across and reconnects previously segregated species, categories and domains’. Such re-visioning of ‘the meaning of life’, Braidotti argues, can lead to a ‘Zoe-centred egalitarianism’. This, she claims, ‘is the core of the post-anthropocentric turn: it is a materialist, secular, grounded and unsentimental response to the opportunistic trans-species commodification of Life that is the logic of advanced capitalism’. ⁵⁵

When Braidotti refers to her post-anthropocentrism as ‘unsentimental’ I suspect that she is contrasting her approach with what she has described as the ‘nostalgic’ and essentialist approach of the Goddess movement. Her rejection of life as being ‘sacralized as a pre-established given’ also reflects her lack of confidence in anything that narratives of sacrality can offer. I find it very interesting, however, that, in employing the term ‘Zoe’ to express her conceptual creativity, Braidotti is using a name which has a rich – if ambiguous – thealogical genealogy. In some expressions of contemporary Paganism, the terms ‘zoe’ and ‘bios’ are associated with the Goddess and the God respectively and used to define different aspects of ‘life’: the Goddess as the whole, the eternal cycle of the unity of life as and death as a single process and the God as manifest life, subject to cyclical processes of birth, growth, decay, death and rebirth. One Pagan website relates this to ancient Greek thought where ‘… Zoe signified infinite and universal life, while bios referred to the finite and individual life. Zoe was Life itself, while bios was the living and dying manifestation of Zoe in time and space. Bios is the immanent form of a transcendent Zoe. Together, these two words express the two dimensions of existence: the eternal and the transitory, the unmanifest and the manifest, the universal and the particular’. ⁵⁶ It also suggests that this distinction as ‘natura naturans’ (‘nature naturing’) as opposed to ‘natura naturata’ (‘nature natured’) is present in Spinoza’s thought although this interpretation is disputed. Whilst I do not feel comfortable with the dualistic and essentialist assumptions underlying these distinctions I nevertheless find the prospect of Zoe as a goddess figuration full of interesting possibilities. I would, however, want to argue that an understanding of such a figuration would need to disrupt these hierarchical distinctions between concepts such as ‘transcendent’ and ‘immanent’, ‘eternal’ and ‘transitory’. Perhaps there is further potential in the narrative of Zoe as the Gnostic goddess, ‘emanation’ or daughter of the Great Goddess Sophia. There is, I believe, considerable scope for creativity in Zoe’s association with Sophia as Wisdom and her identification with Eve. Perhaps, also, the stories of a feisty Zoe taking on and overcoming the Demiurge present some very interesting possibilities for further ‘heteroglossia’.

With or without such figurations, Braidotti’s ‘Zoe-centred egalitarianism’ requires a new approach to the relationship between humans and non-human animals. ⁵⁷ However, because of her suspicion of Humanism, Braidotti does not believe that the way forward is to ‘extend the privileges of humanist values to other categories’ and bestow on animals the hegemonic category of human, ignoring their specificity. ⁵⁸ She instead calls for a recognition of the posthuman as ‘becoming –animal’, recognizing posthuman relations as the inter-relation human/animal as constitutive of the identity of each. Braidotti draws a powerful connection between post-anthropocentrism and embodied femaleness. She gives an impassioned pronouncement that, as a woman, she feels that she is ‘structurally serviceable and therefore has more in common with Dolly the Sheep than with dominant categories of subjectivity. In an outcry which could almost be theapoetical, she claims the ‘rebellious components’ of her identity as ‘embodied female’ and declares

As such, I am a she-wolf, a breeder that multiplies cells in all directions: I am an incubator and a carrier of vital and lethal viruses; I am mother-earth, the generator of the future. ⁵⁹

Furthermore, she states that ‘the becoming-posthuman speaks to my feminist self, partly because my sex, historically speaking, never quite made it into full humanity, so my allegiance to that category is at best negotiable and never to be taken for granted’. ⁶⁰

For Braidotti, the challenge to boundaries between the human and its ‘others’ means that the posthuman must also be understood as ‘becoming-earth’. Braidotti is, however, suspicious of deep ecology as, despite its good intentions, ‘the full-scale humanization of the environment’ and likens it to what she regards as the sentimentality of Romanticism. She cites as an ally Val Plumwood in claiming that the message of deep ecology ‘misreads the earth-cosmos nexus and merely expands the structures of possessive egoism and self-interests to include non-human agents’. ⁶¹ Instead Braidotti bases her understanding of the interconnectedness of all life upon her ‘neo-Spinozist political ontology of monism and radical immanence’. ⁶² Although Braidotti recognizes the notion of manifestations of ‘spiritual death’ caused by ‘the interaction with and resistance to the political economy of commodification of all that lives’ she has no place for the notion of the sacralizing of earth/matter. ⁶³ For me, however, this is a vital (in both senses of the word) component of the socio/political transformation for which we are striving. Narratives of the sacred are too powerful to ignore and, as Christ highlighted in the very beginnings of thealogical discourse, the religious symbolic which generates such narratives ‘abhors a vacuum’. Transgressive and subversive narratives of sacrality can provide the impetus to challenge the boundaries between ‘profane’ and ‘sacred’ drawn by a dominant discourse which delineates the ‘human’ from its ‘others’. Goddess narratives can also provide empowering figurations for the radical immanence and raw cosmic power which Braidotti envisages as source for a Zoe-centred egalitarianism.

In presenting the conclusion to her book, Braidotti identifies the need for ‘visionary power’ and ‘prophetic energy’ in constructing posthuman ethics to equip us to negotiate the challenges of the contemporary world. She recognizes that feminists have a ‘long and rich genealogy in terms of pleading for increased visionary insight’ and that a ‘creative dimension’ has been central to feminist epistemologies and, I would argue, feminist theologies and thealogies. Braidotti believes that this creative dimension is the ‘visionary fuel’ which can enable the conceptual creativity necessary to secure an affirmative hold over the present and be ‘the launching pad for sustainable becoming’. ⁶⁴ I want thealogy to be part of that process and part of that journey. My attempts to travel along with nomads – and who knows, maybe even cyborgs – as well as Goddesses have led me to claim that thealogy can make a contribution to an academic discourse which addresses the blurring of boundaries between the human and its ‘others’ in a posthuman world. I am proposing that thealogy can offer a language for post-anthropocentric thought and can join thinkers such as Braidotti in their attempts to disrupt the complex and systemic patterns of oppression which might determine the future of coming generations.