ABSTRACT
Chapter 4, “Emergence, Submergence, Insurgence: Politics on Liquid Ground,” makes explicit the ecological premises which inform all these Diatopian readings. I explore the possibility of a more sustainable politics, concurring with Val Plumwood that this would require us to let go of the tendency to “hyperseparate” ourselves from nature. On “liquid ground,” texts by Lutz Seiler, Rita Indiana or Linda Hogan enable me to conceive of politics not as disagreement, but as whirl. Their imaginations of hybrid bodies in flux uproot identity politics, offering a vision of transversing and transversed voices, agency, and borderlines. In a darkly comedic rather than tragic mode, they expose the “fragile states where man strays on the territories of animal,” challenging the white, cis-gendered, territorialized and hierarchical consensus that underpins the socio-political order. In this politics of di- and re-fraction, the “agentic entanglement” of world and text changes the preconditions of our politics, which we have seen to be ecologically destructive precisely because the interleaving of human and non-human life is too often obscured.
