Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology by Astrida Neimanis (review)

Astrida Neimanis’s new book makes a persuasive case for reimagining “ embodiment from the perspective our of bodies’ wet constitution” (1). We are not embodied, on the one hand, and consisting of water, on the other hand, we are bodies of water (1). This reimagining is explicitly opposed to the dominant thinking of subjectivity bequeathed by Western metaphysics, which, as is well known, posits the human in static terms as an autonomous and discrete individual. To think our bodies as water, or better, to think as water, is to acknowledge that our existence and our thought does not take place in a vacuum. We are porous watery beings in ongoing and myriad relations with other bodies of water and we depend on these bodies for our very survival.

For Neimanis, to conceptualise our bodies as water is to acknowledge that the human is always also more-than-human. We come to be and we live in watery milieus. This amounts to a refusal of the phallogocentric suppression of the human bodies that gestate and birth the subject, as well as western humanism’s constitutive anthropocentrism. Neimanis writes:

crucially this watery gestationality is also decidedly posthuman, where human reprosexual wombs are but one expression of a more general aqueous facilitative capacity: pond life, sea monkey, primordial soup, amphibious egg, the moist soil that holds and grows the seed.

(3)

Neimanis says that her figuration of “bodies of water” is partly inspired by Elizabeth Grosz’s suggestion that the promise of feminist theory resides in the invention of concepts. For Grosz, the creation of concepts is a way “to surround ourselves with the possibilities for being otherwise” than the forms of being that dominate our present (Grosz 14–15 in Neimanis 4–5). Neimanis is drawn to the idea that concepts have the potentiality to generate “radical change” (5). She disagrees, however, with Grosz’s Deleuzian framing of the concept as incorporeal because Neimanis reads the incorporeal in its irreducibility to materiality as “unfettered by the world we actually live in” (5). Instead, with reference to Donna Haraway’s “material-semiotic knots” (2007, 4–5), Karen Barad’s theory of intra-action (2008, 140), and to Rosi Braidotti’s contention that concepts are “living maps” (Braidotti 2011, 14), Neimanis says that her “bodies of water” are “figurations” or what she also calls “embodied concepts” (5, 183). Following Braidotti, Neimanis argues that the motivation for a figuration is never arbitrary; it is a response to a contemporary question or problem (5–6).

Clearly our planetary waters and water systems are wounded in many ways. Worsening droughts and floods, aquifer depletion, groundwater contamination and salination, ocean acidification, as well as commodification and privatization schemes that too narrowly seek to direct water’s flows, all speak to this. My contemporary figuration of bodies of water is a direct response to these issues. Our bodies are also of air, rock, earth—even plastic at a growing rate— but figuring ourselves specifically as bodies of water emphasises a particular set of planetary assemblages that asks for our response right now.

(5)

Insofar as our bodies are also made up of air, earth, rock and plastic, the figuring of human beings, more-than-human beings, indeed the planet as such, as bodies of water articulates a privileging of emphasis rather than the postulation of a fact. Neimanis distinguishes her attention to water from the valorisation of the fluid that is found in several of Zygmunt Bauman’s works in the early 2000s and from Luce Irigaray’s famous essay “The mechanics of fluids” from This Sex Which is Not One (1985). While Irigaray’s work displacing the valorisation of solid logic in Western metaphysics in favour of the fluid is important to Neimanis, she is concerned that fluid thinking remains bound to the idea of water “in the abstract” (22). She argues that, “the reduction of water to fluidity is really just a good old-fashioned stereotype (i.e., based on some...