Introduction: Survival, From the Other End of the Telescope

Correction: In the introduction to WSQ Survival, the documentary How to Survive a Plague was incorrectly referred to as United in Anger. It has since been corrected.

To survive is messy, elaborate, layered. The metaphysics of deferral are implied by the word’s Latinate roots: sur (over) vive (life). Sur-vival, “to live beyond,” implies competition among the living, some who go on and some who, perforce, are survived. Live, survive, preserve, and conserve all share the root vivre, which itself is preserved by its prefixal adaptability. Linguistically, life survives. Its animacy is not merely grammatical but neither is it a guarantee of human living; the root vivre’s uptake into multiple frames and fields suggests viral proliferation more than a predictive, grammar-like generation. To survive takes and creates risk, both philologically and materially.

If survival has just one affective mode, it might be defiance—the feat and fate of living beings after injury, trauma, war, captivity, and natural disaster. It would also be the survival of words, signals, and germinal states of being in the world that we sometimes call natural, but that also encode the cultural landscape. A topography of ruins, trash, exhaustion, and depletion remains and reminds us of that which lives on after in a state of belatedness that is survival: the afterlife of what was not supposed to remain, that which was to have died, but did not, after all. Survival defies nostalgia, envy, and accusation. Survival in the realm of resources—whether human, animal, or mineral—gives the lie to a necropolitics, forcing the living, those living, and those living on to accede to a call from the future to turn away from that fallen angel of history.

Survival is too often the given of living. It is the affordance of the political, that which cannot be not-assumed: no social program welcomes not-surviving. Especially within the contemporary awareness of environmental crisis—survival and surviving against the calculations of doom—survival is a directive. It is only in the affirmative, against its negation. And yet, as a combination of instinct and drive, species survival is bound to outlive itself and to produce unrecognizable difference, either through extinction or evolution. Survival contains such impossible positions and awareness. It cannot be properly thought in time, by an individual, or by a species. How does survival work, then, as the never to be negated assumption of a politics? And what is the temporality of survival? It is not predictive, though it is only oriented toward the next moment, a form of future that is not really a future. Ultimately, survival is a will that always fails.

To underscore the untimeliness of feminist survival, we revisit for this issue Valerie Solanas’s classic SCUM Manifesto (1965). Although hardly in need of rediscovery, SCUM Manifesto has not been understood for its hilarious invocation of a specifically biological rationale for the r/evolutionary (and environmentally salutary) extinction of the male sex. Its winking pseudoscientific language of male genetic abnormality and incompletion (XY is an incomplete XX) and its invitation to enlightened men to “relax” and enjoy the ride to their “demise” cast the war of the sexes as one in which gene expression, more than holistically gendered belongings, contends through sexual selection. In this case, women choosing women, the core of lesbian social action, promises an overthrow of sexual reproduction’s social power as rooted in patriarchal heterosexuality. Solanas’s version of gender essentialism to the death had once challenged even the most radical separatist lesbian-feminism. But to the extent that Solanas’s “groovy woman-choosing-woman” has a contemporary (audience), we might say she has survived her times, only in a ghostly, diminished form. This special issue includes two articles that give SCUM Manifesto new life in the context of feminist philosopher Elizabeth Grosz’s uptake of Darwinian evolution. In Becoming Undone: Darwinian Reflections of Life, Politics, and Art (2011), Grosz insists on the disruptive potential of female-driven sexual selection as an aesthetic, willful, irrational, noninstrumental force not necessarily coordinate with survival under...