claire colebrook, sex after life: essays on extinction, vol. 2 — review
a deadly polemic against those who think this book is their friend, a boring book for almost everyone else
even though its contents are valuable and rigorously argued, this text is very boring to read, more than your average text, but thats a common pattern with colebrook. what makes it especially so is that the entire text is not just epistemological in character (no metaphor, no introduction of extra terminology, no conceptual wordplay, no references that exist above their own weight), but also that its just an infinite set of recursive explanations about something that has already been narratively argued, something that claire literally already posited, she posits it again "this time around it sounds slightly more definitive", you might think whilst reading, but she also neutralizes the stakes in the middle of discovering the problem, so that you're also left with quite literally no satisfaction from the topic.
supposedly shes returning to the thought to look at another angle, but the angle lands at the exact same point every time. maybe that angle does exist in the more nuanced epistemic domain she occupies, but it doesn't feel like a worthy thing to excavate, it feels like she's sitting exactly on the edge of the comprehensible and trying to squeeze out every remnant of thought she possibly can on the topic, so you get this type of epistemic regression that feels impossible to read, like a text that wants you to not read it but just to assume that its correct and already situated and just to move on with your life. it almost feels like she's begging you to not read it, here's a structural example showing how the main narrative has zero developments in its point, and only everything around it slowly shifts from the idea that man's domination produces destruction -> that life/enviornment is a supposed escape -> that man again subsumes it whilst decoupling itself from what it previously identified with -> that anything else (first-wave feminism, posthumanism, vitalism etc) does the same thing from different angles:
claire says in the first page: "“feminism… has always appealed to some broader justice in which all humans would be included… as long as man excluded… his own humanity would be diminished.” and continues with almost the exact same line in the second page: “there is… an affinity and passion for life as such… deflected by a masculinist tendency towards mastery and domination…” in the third page, she re-confirms whats was already implicit: “if an appeal to humanity in general overturns… hierarchy… then that same humanizing gesture will lead to a questioning of the human.” in the fourth page, something that was obvious is restated: “the very definition of the ‘properly human’ constitutes a chauvinistic exceptionalism… in all cases… a rejection of any simple notion of ‘man’ as a proper form or ground.” in the fifth page, a common idea returns once again: “a thought of life without or beyond man becomes imperative… [otherwise] destruction of the environment… and self-destruction.” in seventh page, her critique subtly shifts the term but not the subject matter or the general point, yet offers nothing else in its substance to offset this: “all the shrill protestations of proper care… maintain the anthropocentric alibi… the world… always presented… in a normatively homely manner.” in the ninth page, a general heuristic returns once again: “if we are seeking to save ourselves then are we also saving the survival mechanisms that have brought… destruction?”
its a sure thing that you could span the entire book with examples like this. the total lack of theatrics is further complicated by the restrained use of terms, every time the terms "life, vital, conscious, feminism, man, extinction" come along, only their most non-descriptive and plain uses come about, so that even when colebrook is arguing a very specific epistemological direction, it makes it seem as if shes operating from the most common sensical possible state, like a philosopher who is somehow already working at their argumentative pinnacle only one day after starting from not even knowing what philosophy is about, but who has only discovered the world around him through simple observation (man, woman, life, death, pain, progress), and has never encountered a single book of abstractions, a glossary of terms or even come close to unlocking the "secrets of a concept".
not to be said that the prose itself isnt honest towards the concepts, but it reduces perceived conceptual depth even when argument is complex. it is in fact true that secular theology involves constant ruminations on genders, races, sexes and identities divorced from their actual category and contextualized in a weird political aglommeration, but claire is so deadly honest with the way she continously uses the concepts that she strips any little remaining "theoretical concentration" (sharp association and built-up nuance) they otherwise may have naturally contained. even posthumanism, the term that deserves her most sharp polemical operation, also gets deconstructed by her, so even that doesnt experience any peak.
colebrook's voice is legislative and flattening, it issues claims in a steady, uniform tone without much modulation—no shifts in rhythm, no stylistic escalation—so the reading experience lacks peaks and troughs. claire's authoratitve choice to foreground her statements in as little polemical power as possible and to take the narrative standpoint of an "above-the-stakes" commentator also makes it not feel like immanent critique but a kind of "boring exorcism" of the stakes she's dealing with, like an exorcist showed up to extinguish a demon and everyone in the house is scared but in the middle of it he just drops one liners like "boss wanted me to work today, but would you look at that, all im exorcising is another halfling. look, the halfling cant even scream properly when exiting the body, it's not even worth exorcising this thing". this is partially reflected in her writing too, the exorcist in question here isn't a sarcastic and tense character, he's miserable and overly polite when he shouldn't be, its like hes exorcised so much that the mystery is already gone for him, and all thats left is like the video gamer's narcassism, the "oh yeah this thing" of everything around him.
in isolation, this quote reads ingenius: "feminism, today, facing the extinction of the human, should turn neither to man nor to woman: both of these figures remain human, all too human, as does the concept of the environment that has always allowed man to live on through a vitalist ethic. one would also need to say the same about posthumanism, which is more often than not an ultra humanism." alone, it looks wonderful, but when contextualized along with the fact that this exact argument just spanned nearly six pages in regression the chapter right before this one, and the fact that the letter combination "man" appears about fourty times a page but each time is used as if it were being used for the first time, it starts to look much like the exorcist analogy, the halfling in the air is being pulverized about four times more than the recommended amount, just to be sure that the priest doesn't have to return once more to the site and do the whole boring job all over again. the priest wants to be so sure, he's started rearranging the atoms of the halfling so that it can't possibly fuze back together into one being even if it wanted to.
claire begins a statement like this, in the classic academic-speculative tone "but has man really extinguished himself? has there not always been an insistence that thinking and being are the same, that—in old parmenidean terms—to think is to be in accord with a movement of life that affirms and sustains itself?" we expect something like this to already sound slightly sharper than it is, but the reader's contract is extended into this with the hopes that down the line she's setting up the tension only to blow it up. but not at all, she'll instead come in with something exactly like "it is against this anti-platonism or naïve literalism that i would suggest that we consider the world not as our own milieu but in its own duration"hy is she suggesting here? who is she tip-toeing around for? her entire chapter is about how this is a bad thing, she should be knocking this whole architecture apart far more brutally in style. compared to anglophonic contemporaries like heatherley or massumi, her style is even more neat and orderly, but in a passive and detached rather than comfortable way.
it does circle in on her contemporaries styles as well, someone like ian buchanan types in quite a similar manner, polite, restrained and in a sense patient: "i also suspect that, being more accessible, these chapters are perhaps more widely read and influential than the others", "i do want to correct the impression that the opposition between the state and the nomads is the dominant dualism here", "at this point, i want to pause to clarify my position on the exercise we have just been conducting." . yet, ian writes far more descriptively and is more caught up in the subject matter and loses his own narrative hinge too often to be a direct comparison at least in "a deleuzian century?" so the equivalence isn't direct, but the writing style influence is clear.
in something like old german idealism, the same common-term scaffolding or recursivity is excused by the fact that the narrative subtly shifts the stakes of the concepts over time by putting them inside of a temporal development. in more stylistic writers such as the new-wave e-flux adjacent theorists, the aesthetic and thematic value slowly brings about the narrative point through creative use of words and painting specific images or feelings in the reader. in pure theory and creative writing, the same thing happens naturally, the natural variations of the free thinker make the reading experience joyful. in exact commentatorial texts, the functional value of the text overrides the problem. yet, there is one more issue that we must point to, a particularly disgusting section in the chapter:
"i would suggest the latter, especially if we consider not only the joyous affirmations of life—with the discovery of empathy (rivkin 2009), affect (gregg and seigworth 2010), embodiment (rowlands 2010), universal creativity (russell feminist extinction 13 2007), and wondrous futures (levy 1997)—but also seemingly dire warnings. james lovelock’s ‘final’ warning is, after all, a warning for us— otherwise it would not be final. it assumes our duration, the end of life for us (lovelock 2009)." this whole section makes it unclear why the references even exist at all, looking like something that came straight out of an academic textbook meant to be thrown away after being looked at for two seconds by a student who realizes that its intended as an authoritative sigil for university permission rather than as an intellectual aid. the simulacrum of referentiality is going full course in this paragraph, where references are not integrated into argument, only indexed, but at least colebrook spares us the suffering of such paragraphs in other places by just getting it out all at once in this one - for whatever weird reason it seemingly even needs to exist in the first place.
in more explicit polemics, the feeling of reading itself experiences enough emotional turmoil to slightly overset the inaccuracy and explicity of the point. its exactly in rare braidotti-influenced texts like this one, or maybe in deleuze and heidegger scholarship in general, that nothing is able to shine, not a single line can make the reading experience worth it due to the fact that the "rehashing style" meant for commentatorial texts somehow makes its way into polemical texts. what does save the text is purely the content, and the content is very well reasoned and far more nuanced than it needs to be. yet, within the same chapter, colebrook runs out of the same epistemic steam she was previously fuiling on and enters into a literary analysis mode. the good part of this is the fact that the research is clearly seperated from the speculative thought, but the bad part is that the speculative thought is broken so quickly by the research especially when it was so maximalist in nature, that it sends off an odd impression. yet, since the analysis makes for a slightly better reading experience, we can analyse the content through it rather than cross-referencing it along the path as colebrook or the base assumption of the text may intend for a critic to read the work.
at the end of her analysis of atwood, claire lands on the statement "one might say that the consequences one can draw from this feminist tradition are that man always plans his escape through imagined posthuman futures and others", as if we didn't already know that this was the implied point after about fifteen pages of it. right before this page, a similar claim lands as part of the structural scaffolding of the future claims "what atwood poses is a world beyond ‘woman’ as man’s better other.", filled with other bleak and self-confirming statements such as "atwood describes fragile female characters who make their way through this landscape, forming lateral alliances of friendship rather than filial communities of reproduction, and, on the page before that if it wasnt already clear, clairebook lands with "what atwood suggests, against the present idea that man might surpass himself and find a new ecological future, is that such redemptive imaginaries have always allowed man to master life in order to maintain himself. ".
the parts of this writing that are actually most entertaining to see are the specific ways in which atwood herself organizes these distinctions, or in other words, where colebrook actually takes the terminology from her literature and applies it to the conceptual field that requires its application, claire says: "the two warring factions in atwood’s novel both make a claim to be acting for a life that would destroy previous modes of human self-imprisonment: the adamic cult of gardeners appeal to the vital value of the earth as a way of controlling bodies, production, and reproduction, while the govern ing corporation (corpsecorp) aims at maximizing life through genetic manipulation and data management." colebrook's analysis that "the year of the flood" actually enables her exact reading seems in fact to be correct and to follow along her analysis of the work itself, yet, her constant need to supplant the main thesis obscures her ability not only to properly analyze the work, but also to allow anything else to be said about it that can later fall in line with the narrative, whilst also hiding the main situating of "frankenstein" and "the year of the flood" that actually enables the reading to be conducted to begin with.
the problem with her analysis of woolf's lighthouse is more subtle. she does actually properly manage to excavate the main emotional tensions in that work and weaponize them to accord with her point - but at a cost that wasnt visible with atwood. in atwood, her analysis of how women are portrayed was self-evident even before she pasted the second paragraph about how amanda's wiscounsin bioart uses waste material as a destruction of an inherently subsumed future to come after man's inherent self-progression to his own waste (whilst, the waste conceptualization itself also remains very thin in the first chapter).
yet in woolf, when the protagonist paints a line over her nurturing mother's finished portrait, the metaphor seems beyond stretched "not only does her vision result in a single dark line painted down the center of the picture of mrs. ramsay that she has been struggling to compose throughout the novel; her creative act is coupled with a recognition of art’s decay—as though briscoe’s refusal of art history and representa tion is also an embrace of transience. this is not man as homo faber, being infused with a life other than his own that he goes on to present, repre sent, and preserve, for lily’s approach to her canvas occurs quickly and almost as a distraction".
at the end of the quoted paragraph, woolf says through the protagonist "i have had my vision" which does in fact point to transcience as colebrook notes, yet, with such a small amount of explication, colebrook makes it unknown whether she is simply drawing from the work to confirm her own narrative, or whether woolf actually explicitly intends for this exact reading to be the case. what is evident is that the reading relies on conceptual importation rather than textual necessity. there is in wolf something implicit about the denial of art's representation and the denial for a subsumptive progress most definitely, and woolf is already known to deliver the feminist readings that are necessary to join the "man as homo faber" critique, yet, the metaphors for "waste/enviornment/futures/sexual communion over functional communion" dont make a clean intersection in the specific quotes colebrook uses. atwood is not mentioned in the text at all after chapter 1, but woolf is, and is partially salavdged.
in chapter 8, colebrook only talks about woolf through the concept of a "mode of writing" in light of becoming-woman, but in chapter 10, becoming-woman is also unpacked along the gendered-sexuality split axis, as well as in regards to what perception does to becoming and experience as opposed to what it just does for representation. colebrook notes: "the first section of the novel, ‘the window,’ sets up a series of oppositions that take the binary form of equivocity: one term—man—is the ground, origin and center from which the other term ‘woman’ is effected as different." followed by "we should therefore consider the style of the novel with regard to the problem it expresses, what the novel as an event of sense is striving to do, and the potentials or infinitives it releases [...] in the concluding section of the novel lily briscoe no longer represents mrs ramsay, nor is her artwork pure form and imposition; she is invaded by perception. her work is neither an intended act, nor a performance that produces her as a distinct subject, so much as a perception in which two terms—lily’s desire and the painting—are produced as distinct through their specific relation."
this finally allows colebrook at the very least to piece the analysis together, yet its nine chapters apart, literally set at opposite ends of this book. the analysis is sparse enough to be considered more like a scaffolding than an actual content-piece of this work, and in that sense, it doesnt follow as easily as something like fishers "the weird and the eerie" directly develops along its own analysis of the fiction. yet, content-wise, colebrooks assertions are backed by what she's saying, and they are even historiologically valuable. its clear that chapter 1's analysis is incomplete scaffolding, not a finished reading, and that colebrook only manages to use woolf to her full extent when she passes it quite well through her reading of deleuze & guattari's modernization interpretation of woolf.
this alone is acceptable, but in its fragmented form lands weaker than if it was a cohesive totality, especially due to the fact there is no split between clarebook's comments on the enviornment and guattari's use of woolf's modernization thesis in the first chapter. in this sense, the work succeeds as a conceptual archive, but fails as a reading experience and as a locally coherent analytic practice, because of the way that the stylistic mishap influences the method and ends up influencing the total structure of the work along with it in a negative way, stretching the argument across distant chapters rather than concentrating it where it needs to be and re-developing it only when correctly scaffolded.