lifeforces,+wordplays,+moonlight+and+rain--thoughts+on,+of+the+future+of+political+theory

“Deluze has argued that the creation of a new concept can be marked by a proper name, which serves to locate its “origins” but does not limit its future use or value: a concept “begins,” and may therefore be attributed a proper name, the name of its “inventor,” but its life consists in the uses to which it is put, the different concepts that develop **out** of or as it.” (36)

“Forever unable to saturate a context, what reading will ever master the “on” of living on? For we have no exhausted its ambiguity: each of the meanings we have listed above can be divided further (e.g., living on can mean a reprieve or an afterlife, “life after life” or life after death, more life or more than life, and better; the state of suspension in which it’s over—and over again, and you’ll never have done with that suspension itself) and the triumph of life can also triumph over life and reverse the procession of the genitive. I shall demonstrate shortly that this is not wordplay, not on your life.” (Derrida 77)

Alive! Still alive. Alive…again.

The force of this wordplay is in its repetition and difference, continuity and pronouncement. Lilith is living, a triumph of life. Living from the beginning on, perpetuating and preserving, but always from that which came before, “an account of the genesis of the new from the play of repetition and difference within the old, the generation of history, movement, and the dynamism of evolutionary change from the impetus and mobility of existing species.” (19) Lilith’s story is a story of becoming. It is a story of, on the future, and it is marked by Lilith’s unease (and perhaps our own unease) with the eruptions of evolution, the lag between epistemology and ontology. And it is her ignorance, contrasted with the vast knowledges, technologies, and methodologies of the Oankali—which owe a debt to living forces, “Your desire to live is stronger than you realize” (Butler 24)—and self-overcoming of this ignorance, even through risk of adaptation beyond-the-human, which one is always already becoming, that holds this story together—structures it, shall we say?

“Some of you will go to Earth with us?” “I will, and my family and others. All Dinso.” “Why?” “This is how we grow—how we’ve always grown. We’ll take the knowledge of shipgrowing with us so that our descendents will be able to leave when the time comes. We couldn’t survive as a people if we were always confined to one ship or one world.” “Will you take…seeds or something?” “We’ll take the necessary materials.” “And those who leave—Toaht and Akjai—you’ll never see them again?” “I won’t. At some time in the distant future, a group of my descendants might meet a group of theirs. I hope that will happen. Both will have divided many times. They’ll have acquired much to give one another.” “They probably won’t even know one another. They’ll remember this division as mythology if they remember it at all.” “No, they’ll recognize one another. Memory of a division is passed on biologically. I remember every one that has taken place in my family since we left the homeworld.” “Do you remember your homeworld itself? I mean, could you get back to it if you wanted to?” “Go back?” His tentacles smoothed again. “No, Lilith, that’s the one direction that’s closed to us. This is our homeworld now.”

The Oankali are talking about living. Where do they **figure in** becoming?

“Newton posited a regular, predictable, law-abiding universe in which, if life could understand and utilize its consistencies, would find itself at home, could know, comprehend, and harness the universe and its properties for itself. While Darwin sought to model his own scientific endeavors on such an enlightened understanding of the role of science in rendering life safe, what he produced instead was a very different account. Life can be life only because the universe, at least as far as the living are concerned, is where it is never fully at home, where it can never remain stable, never definitively know itself or its universe, control itself, its world or its future, where it must undergo change over generations, where species must transform themselves even though they do not control, understand, or foresee how.” (Grosz 39)

At the end of //Dawn//, after Nikanj tells Lilith that she will be a mother, a monstrous mother, it tells Lilith that they will go home now, home to do work. “Home? she thought bitterly. When had she last had a true home? When could she hope to have one.” (247) Here is the border between the Newtonian and Darwinian universe, the engineer and the scientist. The Oankali’s practice is to **figure out** and put into play certain properties of the universe. This is how they survive, by utilizing natural selection—artificial selection.

Lilith can never have a home just as she can never be human, again. All she can do is say “Learn and run!” “She would have more information for them this time. And they would have long, healthy lives ahead of them. Perhaps they could find an answer to what the Oankali had done to them.” (Butler 248) Lilith's work is to **figure out** natureculture. Figuring what? In and Out where?

“Life is that which opportunistically, in an ad hoc fashion, utilizes the contingencies of the material world to endure and extend itself, to evolve into something other than itself. The confrontation between endless, accidental variation and the more or less relentless and uncontrollable forces of natural selection is a machinery that explains the remarkable inventiveness of biological existence, and the endless generation of new species, each of which is adapted to in its own way to the necessities of survival its position in the world entails.” (38)