Eco/feminist Perspectives on the Perversion of Death and Love
Hannah arendt’s philosophy of natality asserts that we are born to live, to create, and to begin. Before we can begin to imagine a paradigm of natality, we must first understand how necrophilia pervades the dominant Western paradigm. With a clear understanding of necrophilia, we can join Grace M. Jantzen and Adriana Cavarero in the emancipatory project of envisioning a paradigm of natality that builds on two assumptions: all humans are born of a mother, and we live an embodied existence within a living landscape.
If anthropogenic climate change represents the apex of the Western culture of death, then we must accept that Western civilization is catapulting toward mass extinction. However, if you, like me, hang on to shreds of hope that there is life after the collapse of Western values, then you join me in the search for ecocentric philosophies. I am convinced that the “way out” of the climate crisis must be different that the “way in”; therefore, a framework for climate change adaptation involves a radical change in how we think and how we are in this world that we call home. A philosophy of natality may be a radical “way out”—a new way to think and be.
Natality is under-theorized, yet offers potential for an emancipatory politic. Natality (n. from Latin natalis; adj. natal) means “pertaining to one’s birth” or “native” in reference to a place (Barber). Arendt’s philosophy of natality focuses on the distinctly human capacity to bring forth the new, the radical, and the unprecedented into the world (Arendt 178). She insists that, despite the fact of death, humans do not live in order to die, but to begin. Arendt offers three definitions of natality. First, natality refers to the fact of birth. The activity of birth is linked with nature and organic matter, which is governed by cyclical time of life, death, and regeneration (96). Every human enters the world as a baby, born of a mother. Secondly, natality refers to belonging to a world characterized by plurality, where each ensouled and embodied natal is different from anyone else who ever lived, lives, or will live (8). The acceptance of difference is necessary for harmonious communities. Our second birth occurs in the public realm where natals differentiate and take responsibility for their own creative initiatives. Thirdly, natality is a political philosophy in that each revolution is a new beginning enacted through collective agency (9). Initiative is the greatest political activity; thus, natality, not mortality, is the central category of Arendt’s political thought.
Necrophilia is a word with many layers of meaning. Necrophilia (n. from Greek nekro meaning corpse; -philia meaning love) means morbid and erotic attraction to death or corpses (Barber). Necrophilia implies sexual assault on an inert female body, illustrated by the classical narrative of the battle of Troy in which Achilles kills Penthesilea, queen of the Amazon warriors, and then violently rapes her corpse. Mary Daly defines necrophilia, “not in the sense of love for actual corpses, but of love for those victimized into a state of living death” (Daly Websters 59). Following Grace M. Jantzen, I interpret necrophilia as obsession with death, where obsession means a state of disordered thinking in which death is confused as love—the perversion of eros and thanatos—a perversion that robs death of dignity (Jantzen 135). The use of the date-rape drug is necrophilic in that it silences the victim and perverted in that it robs the victim and the sexual act of dignity, and indicates how necrophilia makes perversion normative by silencing resistance and outrage. In the following compressed overview, I identify only seven of the many ways in which death is valorized and perverted in the dominant Western paradigm.
death of nature
Western science favours mechanism and reductionism—two theories that separate humans from nature and support a worldview which holds that nature is an inert and mindless compilation of parts which have no inherent meaning. Francis Bacon, the so-called father of modern science, turned science into a gendered activity in which men exercise hegemony over nature and “others” (Sardar 2). Bacon was Attorney General for King James vi, who reigned during the worst of England’s witch-hunts, and this fact provides context for his misogynist language in which nature is no longer a wise, venerated Mother Earth, but a wanton female to be conquered by a male aggression. Using the language of the Inquisition, Bacon urged the domination of nature for human use:
He compared miners and smiths whose technologies extracted ores for the new commercial activities to scientists and technologists penetrating the earth and shaping “her” on the anvil. The new man of science, he wrote, must not think that the “inquisition of nature is in any part interdicted or forbidden.” Nature must be “bound into service” and made a “slave,” put “in constraint,” and “molded” by the mechanical arts. The “searchers and spies of nature” were to discover her plots and secrets…. “Nature placed in bondage through technology would serve human beings.” (Merchant Radical 45)
The science of mechanistic reductionism reduces Land to a machine that has value only insofar as it has utility for humans and can be converted into a commodity that supports capitalist economics. Newtonianism posits that the cosmos is “like an immense clock, a mechanism whose basic components and principles could be revealed and examined through science. According to a Newtonian worldview, nature is a machine and is no more than the sum of its parts,” meaningless in itself and subject to control by humans (Suzuki 15).
The transformation of Earth from a living, nurturing mother to inert matter enabled capitalism to expand its exploitation of nature (Merchant Death 182). “The removal of animistic, organic assumptions about the cosmos constituted the death of nature—the most far-reaching effect of the Scientific Revolution” (Merchant Radical 48). Today, mechanistic science is the ideology that legitimates extractivist capitalism and its domination of land (58), feeding a culture of greed that is emotionally disconnected from the earth. Necrophilia is indicated by Western addiction to self-gratification through consumption, an addiction so intractable that it must be fed even when it clearly contributes to climate change. The perversion is manifest as pervasive disavowal—the state of disordered thinking which observes our culture’s slow death due to climate change but denies that it is so and makes no effort to reduce carbon emissions. A philosophy of natality contributes to the project of disrupting mechanistic reductionism by drawing on the sciences of relationality that understand organic nature as an amalgamation of creative, self-organizing systems which are active, intelligent, communicative, and intentional. Donna Haraway, in Staying with the Trouble, writes that it matters how we relate to the material world: “Materialist, experimental animism is not a New Age wish nor a neocolonial fantasy, but a powerful proposition for rethinking relationality, perspective, process, and reality” (165). She calls on us to make kin with land and with the human kin and other-than-human kin with whom we co-inhabit the land.
matricide
Male appropriation of birthing was a way of erasing the matriculture that existed prior to Western patriarchy. In the Olympian myths, Zeus swallows pregnant Metis, mother of Athena, and later gives birth to Athena from his head. Zeus’ matricide in the Olympian myths over-writes an earlier matricultural mythology (Cavarero 108). The male appropriation of birthing is linked to male desire to become divine by claiming the ability to create life (Jantzen 141; Daly Gyn/Ecology 65). The Abrahamic religions disavow the mother and establish a jealous male god in the sky who creates the world with his logos, not by gestation.
Francis Bacon argued that nature’s womb harboured secrets that could be wrested from her using technology. Modern medicine executed Bacon’s science by taking over the work of midwives and medicalizing women’s reproductive functions from conception to parturition. Cultural knowledge embedded in birthing myths and rituals fell into dis-use as Western medicine took control of birthing away from mothers. Birthing became technologically-oriented and detached from natural phenomena. Many women lost their awareness of natural regeneration cycles and birthing processes, acquiring a type of nature blindness (Haarmann 259). Necrophilic perversion is indicated when drugs are administered to reduce a mother’s consciousness of the birthing process, making her the abject object, not the active and conscious subject of birthing. Necrophilic matricide is condoned whenever the obscenity motherf–r elicits no outrage.
Adriana Cavarero asserts that the lack of attention paid to the fact that we are born from woman has given Western philosophy a preoccupation with death rather than birth. Western philosophy juxtaposes life and death in a way that disavows culture’s dependence on women’s generative maternal force. She critiques the academy for spurning the abundant “documented evidence of the existence of an original matriarchy” by claiming it “does not add up to the kind of proof accepted by every scholar” (5). Cavarero investigates the “traces of the original act of erasure” contained in patriarchal records, exposing Zeus’ crime of matricide and interpreting that act as symbolic of patriarchy’s erasure of the Great Mother (7f). She emphasizes that cultural continuity depends on the maternal power to generate. Continuity is assured only when the mother/daughter relationship is visible to human eyes. Earth’s beings flourish only when females give birth to daughters. When the maternal no longer has power to generate, we approach “the threat of nothingness” (61).
It is ironic that the Canadian Métis culture carries the same name as Metis, Athena’s Titan mother who was swallowed by Zeus. Metis’ fate mirrors the fate of the aboriginal mothers whose identity was swallowed by colonialist fur traders who claimed the mothers’ children as their own by giving them Scottish and French surnames. Indigenous women are reclaiming matriculture by decolonizing their bodies. Leanne Simpson links the material, the political, and the spiritual when she declares that Indigenous women are reclaiming their responsibility to serve their communities as carriers of culture (28):
If more of our babies were born into the hands of Indigenous midwives using Indigenous birthing knowledge, on our own land, surrounded by our support systems, and following our traditions and traditional teachings, more of our women would be empowered by the birth process and better able to assume their responsibilities as mothers and nation-builders (29).
Natality and matriculture are linked in the common value of mothering and birthing, not as an essentialist impulse, but as a cultural system embraced by both men and women, mothers and not mothers, for their contribution to cultural continuity. Indigenous cultures appear to be positioned to midwife the rebirth of matriculture, first in their own cultures and then in Western cultures. The Sedna myth integrates a core principle of indigeneity: living in balance and harmony with the cosmos is impossible if the culture does not venerate generative power. Matriculture refers to cultural traditions that valorize natality, in its literal and metaphoric meanings, and elevate The Maternal for its creative, spiritual, affective, educational, and judicial contributions to cultural continuity. Matriculture does not presume the subordination of men, but rather an egalitarian partnership between the sexes, and the expected division of labour determined by gender (Passman 85).
domination
The ideology of dualism and human separation can be traced to Greek philosophers, and is embedded in the Abrahamic religions; however, René Descartes is considered the father of modern dualism. Descartes’ philosophy consolidated and augmented Bacon’s reductionism and formed the intellectual context for the current ecological crisis (Plumwood Nature). Descartes held that there are two kinds of existing things: physical and mental. He argued that self-conscious awareness is a unique human achievement that elevates humans above all other species (Suzuki 15). Cartesian dualism seeks to master the body in order to reside in purely rational, intellectual states. Dualistic thinking categorizes phenomena into binary opposites in which one part of the binary is valuated as superior while the categorical “other” is devalued as inferior or primitive; thus, Cartesian dualism bastions hierarchical systems of domination: anthropocentrism, sexism, racism, androcentrism, colonialism, ableism, and classism.
Human-centeredness, or anthropocentrism, is the hyper/separation of humans as a special species; it weaves a dangerous set of illusions about the human condition into the logic of our basic conceptual structures. Human-centeredness is a complex syndrome which rationalizes the “delusions of being ecologically invulnerable, beyond animality, and ‘outside nature,’” and thus beyond the reach of the sixth mass extinction event (Plumwood Nature 115). Human/nature dualism conceives humans as not only superior to but different in kind from other-than-human beings, which are relegated to a lower non-conscious and non-communicative physical sphere (Jantzen 32f). Cartesian thinking is necrophilic in that its goal is to control the mind by transcending the body in order to achieve immortality and divinity in death. Christian and Islamic Fundamentalisms are similarly preoccupied with an external world and yearn to escape embodied life in this world for a heavenly home. The secular obsession with transcending the body manifests in celebrating war and building elaborate war memorials that beautify youth who die in battle.
Natality is situated in the continuum of ecocentric philosophies which include deep ecology, social ecology, ecofeminism, New Materialism, and indigeneity (Wolfstone 195). Freya Mathews’s ecofeminist philosophy moves beyond deep ecology to explore ecological interconnectedness or “oneness” to describe personhood as the embodied relation of self to the self-realizing universe in the extended region of spacetime (149). An ecocentric philosophy recognizes that all beings are equal and interdependent in earth’s living systems that are agentic and animated. As relationality with earth deepens, we acknowledge our ecological vulnerability and our animality. Interdependence is linked to the principle of sufficiency (enoughness) which frees humans from the drive to acquire and consume in accordance with the competitive ideology of capitalism (Plumwood Feminism 5).
loss of cosmology
Western culture’s scientific heritage from Bacon and Newton has bankrupted its cultural imagination; consequently, Western culture manifests symptoms of cosmological destitution such as anxiety, alienation, anomie, and a massive confusion over values (Mathews 134). The loss of cultural cosmology embedded in narratives and accessible to the entire community is accompanied by reduced a capacity for symbolic thinking, big-picture thinking, and ethical thinking. Modernity remains stuck in Newton’s atomistic social order, which regards humans as atoms, individuals keen on survival, and competitively self-interested while adrift in a meaningless universe (30). Instead of becoming rugged individuals, Arendt is concerned about homelessness and rootlessness linked to an ungrounded worldview and suggests that the Copernican paradigm shift toward a heliocentric and astrophysical worldview made it difficult for natals to trust their senses (Arendt 261). The Copernican paradigm shift took only decades, yet modernity appears to be incapable of making another rapid paradigm shift to a relational worldview in spite of the urgency of multiple ecological crises. Popular film culture manifests necrophilia by attempting to create beauty out of terror and horror and to mimic male dominance, capitalism and warfare in space, thus perpetuating the Cartesian myth of transcendence by escaping an over-heated planet in order to colonize other planets.
A philosophy of natality recognizes that “we stand in need of cosmological healing” (Mathews 47). Cosmology contributes stability and groundedness by evoking imagination and a shared symbology to express the sacredness of the whole and of ethical relationships. Indigenous cultures perceive Land as the source, the ground, and the womb, of life. Land is sacred under the aspect of Mother Earth, the great body that sustains all natals (156). Reclaiming cosmology restores the sacred. Some postmodern critics may level the accusation of essentialism regarding the Mother Earth metaphor that is so frequently used not only by ecofeminists, but also by many who hold to ecocentric and Indigenous philosophies. In this study, “Mother Earth” is a cosmological term regarding relationality to Land and timespace; it recognizes Earth’s agency, intelligence, and communication.
silencing the “other”
Bacon silenced nature so that she could be exploited. Similarly, continental psychoanalysts silenced women by denying them a subjective voice and European colonizers silenced other cultures by denying them subjectivity. Silencing the “other” is a colonialist strategy: “the de-mothering of nature through modern science and the marriage of knowledge with power was a source of subjugating women as well as non-european people” (Shiva Staying 18). Freud and Lacan projected their male morphology onto the entire female gender, presenting their phallocentric imaginary and symbology as a universal truth:
According to Lacan, there can be no women subjects. Subjectivity requires language, and language is masculine, grounded in the Phallus as universal signifier. Women qua women, therefore, cannot speak. When women speak, when women take up subject positions, it is not as women, but as imitation males, men in drag. (Jantzen 43)
Grace M. Jantzen diagnoses Lacan’s disordered thinking as masculinist repression and suggests a therapy by which the “material and maternal basis must be brought to consciousness” (97).
Gayatri Spivak uses the term “othering” for the process by which colonialist discourse creates “others”—those that are homogenized and marginalized by mastering them. When Spivak asks, “Can the subaltern speak?” she does not mean that it is impossible for the subaltern to reclaim a voice; she posits that when the subaltern speak, they create a voice consciousness that may not be perceivable by dominators because it is not pertinent or useful to the dominator (Spivak 80).
Necrophilic perversion violates the “other” after the “other” has been silenced and rendered incapable of giving consent; it is indicated by the ethical void of globalization in which multi-nationals appropriate the homeland of Indigenous cultures without their consent, degrade their landscapes, pollute their environments and impoverish their people in order to feed the insatiable addiction of Western consumers. In contrast, a feminist philosophy of natality embraces difference and plurality.
monoculture
Multinationals promote monoculture by marketing seeds that are genetically modified so that they cannot self-propagate, compelling farmers to purchase seeds annually instead of seed-saving. In India, more than 280,000 farmers have committed suicide after being forced into bankruptcy after investing in expensive, unreliable patented seeds. Vandana Shiva is a critic of multinationals who claim Indigenous farmers’ collective knowledge as their invention through biopiracy patents—a type of enclosure of the intellectual and the biological commons. Shiva advocates for farmers’ right to save and exchange seeds in order to preserve biodiversity. Necrophilia is indicated by the complicity of governments and multinationals to make seed-saving illegal.
Indigenous farmers protect their biocultural heritage by actively resisting Monsanto. On the face of it, their protests may appear to be conservative resistance to modernity, but at the heart of their active resistance is a radical reclamation of the traditional knowledge that sustained biocultural diversity in the past. Like the Roman Janus, they look into the distant past in order to look deeper into the future, while Monsanto takes a short-term view of future profits by promoting a culture of death in “Roundup-Ready” seeds. Monoculture is three dimensional; it manifests as loss of biodiversity, loss of languages, and loss of cultures. The emerging field of biocultural studies has collected data that indicates the rates of culture loss and language loss parallel the rate of loss of biodiversity (Maffi 412). According to Luisa Maffi, an anthropogenic extinction crisis is indicated by the massive loss of biodiversity in Earth’s plant and animal species and in the health of the ecosystems that sustain them. Cultures and languages are vanishing under the rising tide of global monoculture, and Maffi worries that we are rapidly losing critical life-support systems and the human knowledge that can teach us how to live in balance with our planet (414).
Natality celebrates plurality and difference and recognizes that biocultural diversity is critical to cultural continuity. Vandana Shiva’s work reflects the intersection of biocultural diversity, matriculture, and political revolution: “When nature is a teacher, we co-create with her—we recognize her agency and her rights” (Shiva Everything n.p.).
choking democracy
A healthy democracy is participatory and consensual, but Western democracies are collapsing into a post-political condition that makes democracy unrecognizable. The post-political condition has also been theorized as post-democracy, depoliticization, and de-democratization.
Governments, controlled by corporations, induce passivity in citizens by feeding an addiction to consumption and by discouraging activism. A passive citizenry is indicated by declining voter turnout. The lack of overt citizen consent and participation makes Western nations increasingly vulnerability to fascism. Theorists concur on four theoretical elements of the post-political condition: a) the neoliberal economy has subjected governments to the demands of corporations, and this renders governments powerless to deal with macro issues such as climate change; b) in consensual postpolitics, government is a social administrator, replacing an institution where activists debate ideologies of equality and justice; c) neoliberal governments create an environment of unspecific anxiety to soften public resistance to increased surveillance; and d) in the ideological vacuum created since the Left ceded victory to capitalism, there are few Western political organizations advocating an alternative economic ideology based on an agenda of equality and eco-social justice (Dean; Swyngedouw; Žižek).
Politics has become a public relations game with large corporations owning and controlling the media—both the message and medium. Mainstream media witness the perversions of necrophilia but keep citizens in the dark about the real state of the world by producing propaganda that keeps citizens in their place. The voyeurism of the media can be compared to the observers of a date rape who videotape the necrophilic act and then post it on social media to extort the victim who never gave consent, was not a participant and is powerless to reclaim her privacy. Human rights are eroding through distortion. Pipeline protesters are criminalized as domestic terrorists. Religious organizations demand the “right” to exclude based on religion. Activists are regarded as domestic terrorists if they obstruct the economy with blockades or boycotts. Governments perpetuate the oppression of vulnerable citizens, silencing them and instilling fear by invading their privacy. Governments promote consumption, which has the strategic effect of numbing the shrinking middle class into giving up privacy and freedom if it means greater protection for their lifestyle. This then is the perverted necrophilia of democracy in the dominant Western paradigm.
In contrast, Arendt’s political philosophy of natality celebrates collective imagination and initiative in generating new ideas and enacting them. Repoliticization disrupts the post-political consensus that has silenced and numbed citizens. The political task is to enlarge equality and freedom by acknowledging Earth as a political being that is meting out justice through climate change and mocking those who co-opt the notion of sustainability in order to prolong capitalism’s tyranny. For models on acknowledging nature’s rights, we look to Indigenous philosophies of vitality and regeneration including Buen Vivir or Sumak Kawsay in Andean cultures, Ubuntu in southern Africa and mino bimaadiziwin in Anishinaabeg (Simpson qtd. in Klein np).
conclusion
The dominant Western paradigm is experiencing massive systems failure as it faces self-inflicted death by anthropogenic climate change. The urgent need to deconstruct the dominant necrophilic paradigm is not driven by reformist ideology. This deconstruction of necrophilia clears a space to imagine a different paradigm of natality that offers us a radically different way to think and be in eco-social communities committed to the vitality and regeneration of the ecosphere—our planetary home. In researching a paradigm of natality, I discovered that it not a new concept; it is, in fact, a living philosophy in many Indigenous cultures whose resilience in adapting to climate change spans millennia.
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