Abstract
This essay is a critical exploration of Peter Sloterdijk's philosophy of spherology. It asks whether we can live apart from protective spheres, find new forms of being-in-common, and discover new forms of immunity in the wreckage of sphere-based existence. It argues that the relationality associated with the placenta—or afterbirth—is a source of immunity distinctive from the politics of birth, identity, and belonging. To show this, it turns to the appearances of the placenta in the thirteenth-century text The Secret History of the Mongols, which challenge the political authority and genealogical foundation for Chinggis Khan's sovereignty. The second half of the essay examines the persistence of spheres as infrastructures of survival at the end of the world and imagines ways of moving beyond them.
I sense my own limit,
my shell-jaws snap shut
at the invasion of the limitless,
ocean-weight; infinite water
cannot crack me, egg in egg-shell
—H.D.
In the fourth canto of H.D.’s epic poem The Walls Do Not Fall, it is a shell that protects against the crushing weight of the infinite.1 The canto, composed during Germany's firebombing of London in World War II, opens with the line “There is a spell, for instance, in every sea shell.”2
On its own, the shell, in its materiality, cannot withstand the “pressure on the heart, lungs, brain / about to burst its brittle case (what the skull can endure!).” It requires a further symbolic layer of protection: a prayer—that is, a Word hovering over it.
An analogous line of thought is at the center of Peter Sloterdijk's Spheres trilogy. There is no bare life. There is only prosthetic life held together by symbolic and somatic structures, as long as they can hold. “Living always means building spheres”3: Spheres form the “prosthetic life-worlds”4 and immune systems that make living possible.5 As Sloterdijk quips, “You never camp outside in nature.”6
Even the steppe nomads—at home in the exposure of the elements—sleep in a ger, a mobile dwelling of felt swaddling a wooden trellis, further enveloped in a protective aura of sprinkled milk, burning juniper, and the gaze of ancestral portraits.7
In a commentary on Sloterdijk's philosophy, Bruno Latour suggested that “we are never outside without having recreated another more artificial, fragile, more engineered envelope.”8
The shell is both a skull and a poem.
Sloterdijk's trilogy offers an account of human history as the construction and extinction of spheres, including our current moment, characterized by awareness of their having burst. How people respond to this awareness is always a political decision. Sloterdijk's work articulates without being able to resolve the question: Can we live outside of spheres? Either spheres are ontologically necessary immune structures or there are forms of immunity beyond spherical existence. Sloterdijk's argument that spheres are the product of mimetic repetition gives little hope that his proposal for a new “imperative” of “immunitary reason,” which “transcends all previous distinctions between own and foreign” in a “global co-immunity structure” will find a receptive audience.9 The problem is a familiar one: we need to become people we seem incapable of being.
This tension, compounded by his rejection of the legacies of Marxism and communism, makes Sloterdijk's political conservatism legible. Still, one reason to read Sloterdijk is for the simple fact that countless people (including at times Sloterdijk himself) remain invested in the imaginary security provided by spheres. The spreading unease of spherical catastrophe further intensifies the drive to fortify our immune defenses. It is short-sighted to ignore such investments and even more dangerous to embrace them. For the same reasons, however, it is also necessary to move beyond Sloterdijk.
As an antidote to Sloterdijk's spherology, I take my point of departure from Anna Kornbluh's argument that “there is no life without forms, yet form has many lives.”10 In this essay, I attempt to respond to Kornbluh's call for new forms of solidarity in two ways. One is to search for different relations of immunity; the other is to perforate spheres to allow for fugitive passages within, between, and beyond them.11 The first half of the essay turns to the placenta as a nonspherical immune relation in the theories of Sloterdijk and posthumanist feminist Rosi Braidotti; a challenge to the sovereignty of the Chinggisid empire in the Secret History of the Mongols;12 and a fulcrum of resistance against mining in Mongolia. In each case, however, with the exception of Braidotti's, the uncanny power of the placenta is domesticated in the politics of birth, identity, and belonging. Against this temptation, I argue that the placenta is a reminder and remainder of the little bit of flesh we lost without ever possessing.13
The second half of the essay examines the persistence of spheres as infrastructures of survival at the end of the world. My examples include postapocalyptic arks built for the rich; the makeshift teepee in the final moments of Lars Von Trier's film Melancholia (2011); and Chi Ta-Wei's queer- and trans-themed speculative fiction, in which life continues on an uninhabitable planet in biospheres. From these examples, it would seem that humans are unable to live without spheres just as a person cannot live without an immune system. But as scientists discover new properties of biomedical immunity that do not belong to the logic of individuation,14 so we must search for new political dispensations of immunity. During moments of spherical rupture, there are faint outlines of another world.
Utero-Mimesis
The drive to build spheres originates in the womb. Although this might sound like crude biological reductionism, for Sloterdijk it is a position of radical constructivism. He defines the womb as a “media environment” that consists of “the placental-mediated exchange of blood between mother and child” (B, 294), the amniotic fluid that converts sound waves into “sonorous presences” and felt vibrations (B, 296), the umbilical cord, and the soft cave of the amniotic sac. A fetus floats in amniotic fluid, gently vibrating in the acoustic resonance of the mother's voice. Intrauterine existence is not an undifferentiated totality. In Sloterdijk's formulation, “The primal error of reasoning that is found in all holistic worldviews and doctrines of uterine immanence” is to imagine life in the womb as a blissful state of oneness (B, 335). One is never alone in the womb but in the companionship of the placenta.
The spherical environment of the womb discloses a “vague prefiguring of the experience of spatial boundaries” (B, 293). Throughout human history these are re-created in the form of prosthetic spheres. Instead of suggesting that this morphological connection makes spheres natural, Sloterdijk makes the opposite claim: that all wombs are prosthetic. At the moment of birth, nature disappears. After the amniotic sac bursts, the fetus exits from the uterus, passing through the birth canal into the “extra-maternal, completely other milieu” (B, 328). This milieu is the contingent product of history and chance, of when and to whom one is born. If things go well, which can never be taken for granted, the child is welcomed in the artificial envelope of the primary caregiver's attention (which is not necessarily that of the biological parents). This shell is the first of many prosthetic surrogates of the womb.15 The prosthetic womb can be a mother, father, kin community, or catastrophic emptiness; its material form can be supple flesh, a coarse shawl, or an ergonomic baby carrier; it can engender an atmosphere of care or a pressurized environment that generates a longing for escape. Its materiality is a matter of history and contingency.
Utero-mimesis perpetually creates the “artificial surrogate spheres” necessary to sustain human life in the outside world (B, 26). Spheres are both morphologically necessary and malleable. Even the most technologically advanced materials are assembled according to the blueprint of the womb. In an interview in Harvard Design Magazine, Sloterdijk suggests that “architects must understand that they stand in the middle between biology and philosophy.”16 What Sloterdijk's philosophy leaves unclear, and perhaps undecidable, is the extent to which the plasticity and plurality of forms are constrained by the mimetic imperative.
Intimate Doubles
In Sloterdijk's account of uterine space, new forms of relationality emerge. Next to the fetus is the placenta, which Sloterdijk calls the “double” of the fetus, a first companion who is also a source of nourishment and immunity (B, 277). In Sloterdijk's account, the placenta is not quite an object; it is an accompaniment, a sensation of being With (what Heidegger called Mitsein), a prefiguration of future intimacies. It is crucial to note here that the placenta opens up a dimension of relationality that is different from the morphological enclosure of the womb.
For most of human history, cultures have venerated the placenta. Given its special ontological status, handling it required careful ritual ministrations, ranging from the “placental-cults” of Egyptian pharaohs to Maori placenta burials, communal placenta feasts, and the smudging of one's skin with placental ash for its supposed curative properties, to name just a few examples (B, 381). Only in the late eighteenth century, with the invention of modern obstetrics, did upper-class European society begin to experience a placental disenchantment and dispose of the organ unremarkably. In a lovely take on anomie, Sloterdijk suggests that the modern individual self is the product of a “placental nihilism” that imagines it came into the world alone. We suffer from the oblivion of our earliest companions (B, 387).17 For Sloterdijk, the obverse of atomization is the fantasy of unmediated wholeness in “Mother/Nature or as immediate national totality” (B, 351). The placental double disturbs the harmonious oneness of the womb. A tension emerges in Sloterdijk's work between utero-mimesis and placental accompaniment, which bears on how social relationships are imagined and formed.
On the one hand, the womb's “vital geometry” is etched into morphological dispositions and somatic memories—a uterine anamnesis. On the other hand, we are attuned to intimate presences that are neither subjects nor objects. Sloterdijk offers the examples of an adult turning off the lights, dissolving the boundaries of the self into a prepersonal space of “pillows, duvets, feather beds, and quilts” (B, 360), the psychoanalyst listening from beyond the patient's field of vision, and the reassuring presence of the guardian angel. For Leo Bersani, Sloterdijk's speculative investigations “could be thought of as a brilliant, massively elaborated response to Foucault's call for the discovery and/or invention of new relational modes,” exploring states of “less differential otherness,” care, and attention.18
But Bersani also expressed feeling “distressed” and “alarmed” by Sloterdijk's “transition from micro to macrospheres.”19 Bersani worried that utero-mimesis provided a morphological justification for exclusionary politics. Although it is not difficult to point to examples of ancient city walls and militarized borders of nation-states, for Sloterdijk the paradigmatic sphere is the space station, a “completely implanted lifeworld [in] a milieu inimical to life.”20 A space station is a womb suspended in the terror of nothingness. If spheres are “closed political survival capsules directed against the outside,”21 what kind of politics can they generate?
The externalized womb exists in a permanent state of biopolitical emergency. From there, it is only a small step to Sloterdijk's opposition to Germany's policy of hospitality for refugees from the Middle East.22 Racist necropolitics are the infrastructures of biocultural spheres, even if, like certain physical infrastructures, they are meant to remain invisible.
Sloterdijk's work stages a tension between the uterine and placental, which is reflected in the political ambivalence of his positions. Bersani is attuned to the split between Sloterdijk's “generous argument for every human's connection, ineradicably established in the womb and maintained throughout life, to a welcoming and sustaining With”23 and his “almost elegiac lament” for a “now impossible, imaginary spheric security.”24 Likewise, Yuk Hui discerns in Sloterdijk a “political ambivalence . . . oscillating between a border politics of the far-right Alternative für Deutzschland (AfD) party and Roberto Eposito's contaminated immunity.”25 Rather than dismiss Sloterdijk's ambivalence, I suggest that it is symptomatic of the contemporary impasse or interregnum between the forms of collective existence traced in this essay.
Sloterdijk is not alone in the “reactionary politics of birth, origin, and identity” that dominates contemporary political imaginaries.26 It is a commonplace of feminist and queer critique that state power treats the “uterus as a biopolitical site in which national sovereignty can be regenerated.”27 Take, for example, the following lines of Mongolian poet, Buddhist, fascist, and parliamentarian Ochirbatyn Dashbalbar (1957–1999), who wrote, “The future generation in the womb is carried by the woman walking. In her, the nation resides.”28 The nation, as a macrosphere of the womb, transforms all politics into the problem of birth and belonging; it is “inherently limited,” exclusive, and incapable of universality.29 For this reason, critiques of the nation that are based on counterclaims of birth, identity, and indigeneity are stuck in a mimetic loop of origins.
Contrary to the politics of birth, placentas are afterbirths, and, as such, they open up a different space of possibility both within and beyond the womb. They are also remarkable generators of immunity. Although Sloterdijk is enchanted by the placenta's magical properties, he does not fully develop his account of its immunitary potentialities. For this, we need to turn to Rosi Braidotti's account of placenta politics. Undoing the aggressive immunological borders between self and other, “the placenta is the third party, the porous membrane, a sort of liquid inner biosphere, that both connects and separates the dyad host/foetus.”30 Most of the time, a pregnant mother's immune system does not detect a foreign intruder but “hosts and nurtures it.”31 A life-giving, connective tissue, the placenta is an example of a nonlethal immune relationship.
Braidotti abandons the idea of placenta too early, “thirty minutes after the birth has taken place.”32 In fact, after it is ejected from the uterus, the placenta continues to lead multiple lives. As already discussed, it can be buried, ingested, burned, daubed, frozen—the examples are multiple. But why does the placenta's uncanny materiality require ritual domestication similar to that of a corpse? I am proposing that it is because the placental tissue belongs to no one. Although the placenta grows from the mother and nourishes the fetus, it is the possession of neither. As a form of relationality, it entangles self and other. As afterbirth, the placenta is neither origin nor identity but a reminder/remainder of the tissue of common existence.
But like anything in this world, placentas can also be turned into property. Their immune potentialities can be stored (for an exorbitant fee) in private placental banks or become the secret ingredient in cosmetics that advertise eternal beauty.33 What I am more interested in are the placenta's political uses. The next section looks at the contemporary ritual of placental burial in Mongolia as a way to reterritorialize the placenta in the soil of the nation. What I call placental nationalism is the search for a biocultural link between birth, territory, and belonging.
Placental Nationalism
The modern Mongolian word for placenta contains all of the above possibilities. Using the Cyrillic alphabet (which I have romanized for typographical simplicity), the word is spelled ekhes, which misleadingly suggests a shared root with the word mother, ekh. Phonetically, “placenta” is pronounced ikes, which invites two distinct interpretations. For some scholars, ikh refers to the great ancestors, making the placenta an ancestral medium of birth, origin, and identity; for others, ikh shares the root with ikher (sameness), making the placenta the uncanny double of the child. Caroline Humphrey argues that the second interpretation is supported by a perception among Mongolians that “over time, the child then grows, changes, gets tired and ill, needs reviving; but the mystic vitality of the ‘friend’ remains constant.”34 The ritual of burying the placenta in one's birthplace imbues the ground with spiritual significance and healing properties. But in this process, the enchanting and immunitary powers of the placenta are transferred to the land.
The burial of the placenta transforms land into “homeland” (nutag). According to Rebecca Empson, “The concept of ‘homeland,’ it seems, is created by giving a piece of oneself to a place and then moving away from it.”35 Although the “homeland” may be rooted in a location, it does not actually have a fixed referent. Homeland could refer to a pasture, mountain range, province, nation-state, or regional or religious geography.36 In Mongolia, the poetic association of homeland (nutag), motherland (ekh oron), and nation is the product of socialist aesthetic education. According to Dulam Bum-Ochir, all schoolchildren in socialist times had to memorize and recite the following lines from the poet Natsagdorj (1906–1937): “This is my birthplace / The beautiful homeland of Mongolia” (Ene bol minii törsön nutag / Mongolyn saikhan oron).37 Since then, the homeland has typically encompassed the borders of the nation, which constitute a structure of immunity (the Mongolian word for “immunity,” darkhlaa/darkhan, can also mean “sacred” and is used in the first lines of the Mongolian national anthem). Nationalism is a politics of immunity on the basis of birth.
For anthropologist Dulam Bum-Ochir, land nourished by the placenta creates a “nationalist sentiment” between birthplace and homeland. 38 The ritual of burial transfers placental immunity to the physical soil of the homeland, establishing a sacred, lifelong bond. In Dulam's words, “Besides its intimacy, the ritual of burying the umbilical cord and the afterbirth symbolically creates a natural or more precisely an umbilical relationship between the child and its birthplace.”39 Intimate protection offered by the birthplace is also an obligation of lifelong reciprocity, which becomes the “basic source for many Mongolians in the development of nationalist sentiments against mining operations.”40 Nationalism is not always a “pejorative label” as it can be the last defense against capitalist extraction.
Dulam's account of placental nationalism begins on a long car journey with his father, who is also an anthropologist, to the latter's birthplace in Bayankhongor aimag.41 When they arrive at the exact spot of his birth, Dulam's father “took off his clothes and started to roll in the earth with his bare skin.”42 The father explained that the afterbirth is believed to endow the land with protective and restorative properties. Dulam's father's account bears an affinity to Rebecca Empson's study of Buryats living in Mongolia's Khentii Province, who regard the placenta as the twin of the fetus. Empson writes of how “people spoke of visiting the place where their placenta was buried, should they fall ill, and rolling around naked on the ground and making offerings of dried curd, rice, and bread.”43 The placenta's curative properties are said to contain the “state of health and purity” from birth. Humphrey and Hürelbaatar Ujeed suggest that a person's potency (süld) and vitality (khiimori) are stored in the afterbirth.44
The fact that most Mongolian parents do not bury the placentas of their children does not make the ritual less effective. Dulam's father, who has lived most of his adult life in the capital city, admits to being unsure whether his parents actually performed it, while acting as if the placenta was there.45 City dwellers might view the ritual of placental burial as a strange, folkloric tradition, while still going on a pilgrimage each summer to the countryside to reconnect with their proverbial roots.46
For Dulam, the ritual makes visible a relationship between the land, immunity, and selfhood; a violation of the land is experienced as an attack on oneself.47 There is much to sympathize with in Dulam's proposal that an indigenous relationship with the land should command authority over multinational corporations’ claims of property rights and licenses to the land and what lies beneath it. The problem with Dulam's account is that it replaces a logic of property with the proprietary, which defines belonging in terms of birth and origin rather than ownership. Politics is trapped in a dialectic in which an exclusive right to the land is given either through ownership or birth.48 The political power of the placenta, however, is precisely its immunity to the dialectic of possession and the political authority that secures it.
Unsettling Sovereignty
To introduce the possibility that placentas unsettle political authority, I will provide an unorthodox reading of key passages from the canonical Secret History of the Mongols (hereafter, SH) which narrates the origins of the Chinggisid lineage and is revered today as containing the origins of the Mongolian nation. In two passages, Temüjin (later known as Chinggis Khan) is described as being born while “clutching a black clot of blood” alleged to be the size of a sheep's ankle bone; although there is no direct textual evidence that the clot of blood was the placenta (the word used is nödün [nöj], which simply means “clot”), it is plausible, given both the scene of emergence from the womb and other places in the text related to the placenta and umbilical cord. In the lament of his mother Hö’elün: “From the warmth of my womb / When he broke forth fiercely / This one was born / Clutching a black clot of blood” (Xaluunaas minu xaltxiin gararuun [garaxdaa] Gartaan xar nödün [nöj] atgan törlöö ene).49
According to Mongolian tradition, holding a “clot of blood” is an auspicious omen that the child will become a leader.50 The birth scene (along with numerous other omens in the SH) foretells Chinggis Khan's charismatic sovereignty. This passage's location in a maternal lament, however, casts a shadow of suspicion, especially in light of our understanding that the placenta is the double of the fetus. Hö’elün is mourning the fact that Chinggis (who at the time is still called by his birth name, Temüjin) murdered his half brother, Bekter; she is grieving the death of another son. Her lament is as poetic and visceral as Antigone's speeches. “You who have destroyed life!” is how she addresses Temüjin, after which she describes nature turning against itself: “Like a Khazar dog snapping at its own afterbirth [Xarvisaan xazax Xasar noxoi met]. . . . Like a gerfalcon that attacks its own shadow.”51
Later in the SH, when Chinggis Khan is nearly forty, there is a rift among blood kin, this time between Temüjin and his younger brothers, Qasar and Temuge, whom he accused of planning a rebellion. Temüjin interrogates Qasar by first stripping him of his investiture (literally his belt and robes, which also provide a kind of immunity). At this point, a heartbroken and indignant Hö’elün intercedes. She bares her breasts to remind her sons of what gave them nourishment and life.52 Then she accuses them, by contrast, of forsaking life: “[You are] the ones who have snapped at their own afterbirth / The ones who have cut their own birth cord” (Xarvisaan xazagsad / Xüigeen taslagsa).53 The image of a child devouring their own placenta and severing their own umbilical cord is monstrous. Hö’elün is said to have died soon after this lament. The scene, premised on the mother's erasure, marks sovereignty's bloody emergence.
A different logic of authority is at work in Hö’elün's lamentations, one that is negated by the struggles among her sons for political power. She exercises her maternal authority, in the words of historian Anne Broadbridge, to “keep the family together and alive.”54 The origins of her family are somewhat irregular even for the conventions of the time. At the age of fifteen, she is abducted from her first marriage to Chiledü (a brother of the leader of the Merkits)55 by the warrior Yisügei, with whom she later conceives Temüjin. After Tartars murder Yisügei while he is traveling, Hö’elün is abandoned by Yisügei's followers. On her own, she raises her five children along with other children in the camp in a state of destitution. The internecine warring among the brothers negates her own labor (in the double sense of the word), agency, and authority. Her laments brim with scenes of nature turning against itself as a consequence of the actions of her sons.
Hö’elün is doubly erased both as a presence in the SH and as an object of scholarship. To my knowledge, little scholarly attention has been given to her laments, which stands in stark contrast to the volumes of ink devoted to the SH as a whole.56 One possible reason is that the preoccupation with suturing imperial genealogy into national historiography crowds out alternative readings, and reduces anyone who is not a male sovereign descendant to a peripheral supporting character. As the mother of Chinggis Khan, Hö’elün's presence troubles the fantasy of self-grounding and sovereign authorship (which is also the authorship of sovereignty). Recall how Chinggis allegedly severs his own umbilical cord. Mothers’ bodies are reminders of the interdependency of flesh. Her physical presence and lament explicitly challenge the emergence and consolidation of sovereignty from fratricide. I suggest that she is erased because she exposes what Jacqueline Rose argues the “pain of mothers must never expose”57—that is, the “the cruel political world they are being asked to gestate.”58
In my admittedly unorthodox reading, the mother and placenta unsettle the violent consolidation of sovereignty. After the placenta is ingested, as if by a dog, and the mother disappears from the scene, Chinggis's sovereignty proceeds undisturbed. But traces remain in the text. The Secret History of the Mongols gestates within itself an internal critique of patriarchal sovereignty.
There is some cultural plausibility to this reading.59 According to Humphrey, “Mongolian mythic imagination . . . contrasts the fruitful nurturing tree-image of the placenta with systematically dystopian images of kinship and the patriarchal social order.”60 In a Mongolian legend recounting “the origin of humanity” (khünii üüsliin domog), the first humans were terrified at the sight of their children, and so they fled. The children survived on fruit grown from the trees that sprung up from their placentas. In Humphrey's reading, “Although the placenta is anthropomorphised, it is not kin.”61 It is precisely in place of the unreliable parents that the placenta nurtures the children. Emphasizing its nonkin status, Humphrey points out that Buryats living in Russia “called the placenta ‘companion’ (Bur. nokhor, a word that is also used for Communist comrade, and informally for spouse).” Similarly, in the Mongolian language, the word nokhor has meant “posse comitatus” in the Mongol Empire, “comrade” during socialism, and “husband” as it is used now. In principle, what each of these distinct figures shares is a voluntary, non-kinship-based, lifelong bond of loyalty.
Instead of the narrow and exclusionary categories of nation and citizen, the word comrade is expansive and capacious. It entails, in Jodi Dean's words, a “love and respect between equals so great that it can't be contained in human relations but spans to include insects and galaxies (bees and stars) and objects themselves.”62 Here Dean is referring to the Soviet artist Alexander Rodchenko's insistence that objects and things should also be treated as comrades. As Rebecca Karl observes, in the Sinophone context the word for comrade (同志) has been re-signified to indicate “LGBTQ identity and being-in-common.”63 To this queer, multispecies, communist assemblage, we can add comrade placentas. But as Dean also points out, comradeship's universality is installed by a division: the cut of class antagonism.
Survival Capsules
As humanity confronts the question of extinction on a planetary scale, nations are badly designed survival capsules. In his characteristically mordant style, Sloterdijk writes, “The reason of nations still extends no further than preserving jobs on the Titanic.”64 The survival of the nation is a meaningless question on an uninhabitable planet. According to Sloterdijk, “The immunity offered by the national container is perceived as increasingly endangered by those who profit from it,”65 so those who can afford to do so may “abandon solidarity with the fates of their political commune” by designing their own private “individualistic immune order.”66 The immunity of affluence is different from that of national belonging as well as no longer dependent on it (at least not entirely). The immune privileges of the “pampered,” to borrow another term from Sloterdijk, travel with them across borders. Frequently, the affluent are also dissatisfied with the democratic politics of their own nations, from which they seek immunity. As Quinn Slobodian puts it, “Capitalism works by punching holes in the territory of [the] nation-state, creating zones of exception with different laws and no democratic oversight.”67 What he refers to as “zones of exception” could also be described as spheres of immunity, corresponding to the etymologies of immunity in both Latin (immunitas) and Mongolian (darkhlaa), which designate a privileged status and exemption from common obligation and shared fate.68
The contemporary phenomena of private space exploration, seasteading, bunkers, zones of exception, and offshore bank accounts are immunitary strategies. They are not designed for the salvation of everyone but as protection from others. Although the technologies may be cutting-edge, their forms extend the logic of the immunitary spherical enclosure. They are also not new. Such techno-survival capsules appear in mythic accounts of world-destroying floods, which can be found in many cultures, from the Noachian deluge in Judeo-Christianity to the Aztec myth of a life-raft built from a hollowed-out cypress tree. The significance of these myths for Sloterdijk is that they reveal the prosthetic life-worlds in which humans learn how to live apart from their environment; “ark building was the start of constructivism.”69
But they also highlight the constraint of scale. A sphere cannot envelope or save everyone. The arks designed for climate catastrophe are survival capsules for the few.70 Rather than accept the distribution of life chances by market forces, immunity—the question of who belongs—must be determined politically. What papers (passports or money) does one need to be allowed on the ark? On whose authority is the selection process determined? Is this a decision made on the basis of birth, race, class, and gender? If the decision is made democratically, does that make it any less destructive? What are the political and ethical implications of boarding a survival vessel designed to circumnavigate what Sylvia Wynter calls the “global archipelagos of poverty”71 on which most of humanity lives? In all of Sloterdijk's praise for the poetic and philosophical significance of seafaring, he never once mentions the refugee raft or the slave ship.72 Whereas the October Revolution was perhaps the last shipwreck of universality, today's arks are vessels of “immune privilege in the face of unlivable environments.”73
What is a survival capsule that is not designed to protect or endure? This is the imponderable thought in Bonnie Honig's reading of the final scenes of Lars Von Trier's film Melancholia (2011). Moments before the asteroid named Melancholia crashes into Earth, Justine and her nephew, Leo, go into the open and construct a teepee out of sticks. Joined by Claire (Leo's mom), the three wait inside the teepee for the impending catastrophe. In Honig's reading, the makeshift teepee functions as a “magic cave” that “is not falsely hopeful.”74 It is not a bunker, a return to the womb, or a lie that parents can protect their children from the world. Using the language of psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott, Honig argues that by building the teepee, Leo creates a “holding environment, a shared space in which to endure, if not survive, the most unthinkable of all abandonments” (PT, 76). The teepee is a response to spherical catastrophe that does not (fully) reproduce the tendency to build spheres.
Honig speculates that the asteroid could either portend the end of a world founded on “histories of theft and appropriation” (PT, 78) or the beginning of a different world. According to the first reading, it is a theological punishment for “past sins,” the Noachian flood in mineral form. But, Honig asks, could it also be read as a “sign of a future to be celebrated and built, in which our dwellings are more open to nature or at least not fortressed against it, and in which we risk experiencing each other in conflict and through play, collaboration, and touch?” (PT, 83). The question marks the uncertainty of survival. Unlike the protective felt of the Mongolian ger, the bare-bones frame of the teepee in Melancholia is “without skin” (PT, 80)—it has given up its immunity.75
Conclusion: What Kind of Beginning Is the End?
It remains an open and exigent question whether humans are capable of acting on Foucault's call to “abandon our tendency to organize everything into a sphere”76 and live without shells. While the desire for spherical protection can be overwhelming in the face of crisis, the minimal frame of the teepee gestures toward more capacious and permeable configurations. In the Anthropocene, all political thought should include a passage through the question: What forms of being-in-common must we build to live together on a dying planet?
At first glance, the passage opened in Chi Ta-Wei's 紀大偉 novel The Membranes (膜) is, predictably for the genre of science fiction, dystopian. Originally published in Taiwan in 1996, the novel is set in postapocalyptic underwater spheres. After the destruction of the ozone layer renders the earth's surface uninhabitable, the “ocean made a perfect protective membrane.”77 The reproduction of human and vegetal life in the ocean requires the installation of a vast techno-membrane of domes and greenhouses, a double-layered shell of the oceanic and prosthetic. Chi writes, “To face ultra-violet radiation, they needed a new ark,” upgraded to be submersible (M, 19).
The inhabitants of T City do not leave behind the colonialist and capitalist violence of the surface but move it underwater78: “As humanity labored to carve out a home in the sea, it seemed to fall right back into colonial ways.” Treaties “stipulated that the new undersea territories would be distributed based on proportional equivalents to nations’ holdings on the surface,” including powerful multinational corporations (M, 25). On their basis, robotic soldiers were deployed to guard the uninhabited possessions of national territory above ground “lest anyone seize a piece of their land when they weren't looking.”79 War continues after the world's end. There is not much distinction between above and below; in both geospheres, people survive in the “artificially climatized inner space”80 of Sloterdijkian prosthetic life-worlds.
But the novel also challenges the principles of utero-mimesis. Momo, the main character, is not “born from a womb” but from a peach (the word momo means “peach” in Japanese). When Momo discovers her mother's video diary of the day she was born, she observes her mother sharing a peach with a friend. “Whereupon the two women went to split the peach with a knife, but as soon as the knife broke the skin, the shrill wail of an infant burst out of the peach: Momo was born” (M, 108). A peach is not a protective sphere but one with skin “so delicate it would bruise if you blew on it” (M, 1). Momo's body does not have the same protective integrity as the body does in immune fantasy.
In 2022, during the COVID-19 pandemic, Chi Ta-Wei wrote a short story sequel to The Membranes titled “Biospheres” (生態球). Here the architectural design of the “underwater colonies” have proven to be a vector for viral epidemics. To save humanity (again), a decision is made to recolonize the scorched surface of the earth by constructing biospheres. “Our biospheres could only survive if they were completely isolated from one another. If disease took any one biosphere, the others could only survive by keeping a safe distance.”81 Each biosphere is reconstructed on the basis of memories of past cities, such as Taipei and Nagasaki.
The main characters are Taotao (nicknamed “Torrent”) and his artificial companion, who is designed in the lab to monitor Taotao's vitality, health, and “libido index” and is the story's narrator. Their mission is to reconstruct the Taipei biosphere on the basis of an archive of memories, which are accessible as holograms. The archive belongs to none other than Momo's mother from The Membranes. To transmit her memories, the mother has given birth to another child, Taotao, with the help of artificial reproductive technologies.
As they bathe in the Yuanmingyuan hot springs, Taotao and his companion meet two muscular “uncles” who turn out to be members of a group called the Andalusian Dogs, or An-dogs for short. The narrator searches in his archive to retrieve an image of “a hand nimbly slicing through a spherical object.” They are plotting to “slice through the thin skin of the biosphere.”82 Against his companion's protestations, Taotao decides to join them.
“Biospheres” ends with Taotao telling the story of his mother to justify his decision. When the earth's surface became uninhabitable, his mother, who was a young girl at the time, was sent in an ark to the bottom of the ocean. She assumed that all of her family on the surface had perished. Later, she discovers that her family has survived in underground shelters. “‘Every biosphere needs both halves to be whole,’ said Taotao. ‘While you and I enjoy the scenery of the superstructure [上層結構], my mother's descendants live out their miserable existence in the substructure [下層結構].’”83 Under the cover of night, the workers from the substructure repair the biosphere.
In the Mandarin text, left out of the English translation, Chi describes the membrane as an “eggshell” (蛋殼). The eggshell does not offer the protection provided by H.D.’s “egg in an eggshell” that infinite water could not crack. It is maintained by an infrastructure of inequality and death. For the An-dogs, “cutting open the biosphere is to liberate it, not destroy it” (切開生態球,不是為了破壞,而是為了解放).84 The story ends with the lines, “‘We are not seeking destruction,’ Taotao said, looking me straight in the eye. ‘We're seeking liberation. I'm sure Mother will understand.’”
Without the biosphere, would life be possible? If not, are the An-Dogs terrorists or liberators? Is their refusal of immunity that would entail the sacrifice of others an act of class struggle and solidarity? Since it is impossible to live without an immune system, the An-Dogs potentially expose their biosphere to annihilation. But in doing so, they give themselves a chance to discover other forms of immunity and life together in the wreckage.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Caroline Humphrey, Rebecca Empson, Anna Kornbluh, Eric Santner, Adam Kotsko, Erik Vogt, Ivan Franceschini, Todd Altschuler, and Ramsey McGlazer for commenting on different versions of this article and helping the ideas emerge. I would also like to thank Chi Ta-Wei for sharing his new manuscript with me.
Notes
Sloterdijk, Bubbles, 28 (hereafter cited in text as B).
For Sloterdijk, latent in Heidegger's thought is the intermediary enclosure of the sphere: “The spherical is the midpoint between dense animal enclosure and the light apocalypse of Being; it allows its inhabitants to be simultaneously localized in the dimension of nearness and in the monstrous immensity of world-openness and world-outwardness.” Sloterdijk, Not Saved, 110. Between the Umwelt (environment) of the animal and the Welt (world) of Da-Sein (the Being-there of the human) is the techno-membrane shell of the sphere.
These are among the reasons that I do not find the metaphor of “nomadism” in philosophy compelling. For scathing critiques of Deleuze and Guattari's nomadology, see Sneath, Headless State; Myadar, Mobility and Displacement.
Kornbluh's theory of political formalism based on an antimimetic theory of realism offers a salutary antidote to Sloterdijk's concept of utero-mimesis. Kornbluh, Order of Forms, 27.
On the concept of fugitivity, see Moten, Stolen Life.
In the words of Alfred Tauber, immune systems resemble “complex cooperative collectives” more than they do border police. Tauber, Immunity, 5. See also Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women, 203–30; Napier, “Nonself Help.”
Sloterdijk's conceptualization of motherhood as a form of surrogacy resonates with Sophie Lewis's argument that gestational surrogacy, biotechnical birthing, and the labor of gestation make possible the utopian “promise of the reproductive commune,” in which care would no longer be tethered to biological connection. Lewis, Full Surrogacy Now, 151.
There are echoes here of Silvia Federici's famous argument that medieval “witch-hunts” targeted and destroyed indigenous knowledge of women's reproductive powers, which paved the way for capitalist accumulation. See Federici, Caliban and the Witch.
Sloterdijk, Foams, 390.
In an interview given in 2016 with the German political magazine Cicero, Sloterdijk justifies his opposition to Germany's hospitality toward the influx of refugees at that time by stating that “there is no moral obligation to self-destruct.” Sloterdijk, “Es gibt keine moralische Pflicht.”
Hui, “One Hundred Years of Crisis.” In his recent book on the pandemic, Esposito detects in Sloterdijk's concept of “co-immunism” a companion concept to his own notion of “common immunity” and uses them interchangeably. Esposito, Common Immunity.
Preciado, Apartment on Uranus, 75; also see Billé, Sinophobia.
For more on the concept and organization of nutag, see Stolpe and Tumen-Ochir, “Nutag Councils.”
When I told my father about this essay I was writing, he told me that my mother buried a piece of the placenta from my birth in an aloe vera plant in the backyard of my childhood home in New Jersey. My mother has no recollection of the incident.
According to Humphrey, “It has become common in Mongolia for incomers to city life to memorialise their rural childhood with a visual image. They hang a painting of the birthplace in the city apartment in a respected place, such as above the altar.” Humphrey, “Displacement and the Natal Paradise,” 19.
Dulam quotes his father: “When I told him that I wanted to write about nutag and resource extraction, he told me about one of his media interviews where he had stated bi bayalaggüi nutagt törsöndöö bayartai baina [I am happy to be born in the nutag without wealth]. He continued, ‘I would go mad if a mine dug up my birthplace.’” Dulam, “Nationalist Sentiments,” 170. See also Billé, “Territorial Phantom Pains.”
Christopher Atwood (pers. comm.) points out that this symbolism is common in many different cultural traditions.
Interestingly, Hö’elün faults Chinggis for not providing her with as much relief/pleasure as Qasar did when breastfeeding: “What has Qasar done? Temüjin used to drain this one breast of mine. . . . As for Qasar, he completely drained both my breasts and brought me comfort until my bosom relaxed. He used to make my bosom relax.” Thus, after Chinggis defeated the enemy people and no longer needed his brother, he turned against him (out of envy?): “You can no longer bear the sight of Qasar.” De Rachewiltz, Secret History, 169.
De Rachewiltz, Secret History, 169; Choimaa, Mongolyn nuuts tovchoo, 202. The word for afterbirth used in the Secret History, xarvisaan, is an archaic term that is no longer used in modern Mongolian. The word for umbilical cord, xüi, is the same.
In a beautiful passage, she gives Chiledu a shirt with her scent on it for him to remember her, before she tells him to escape with his life.
For notable exceptions, see Broadbridge, Women and the Making of the Mongol Empire; Wang, “Heroic Mother and Wise Wife.”
Rose, Mothers, 47. One could argue that Hö’elün does not reject the world of dynastic politics, tout court, but the divisions within it due to fraternal civil war. Her laments, after all, are for her children, and not for the death of other people's children. That being the case, I still think the fact that her second lament both terrifies and shames Chinggis is destabilizing for his project of sovereignty.
In the introduction to his recent translation of the Secret History, Christopher Atwood provides elaborate textual support for “the tantalizing possibility that the anonymous author was in fact a woman,” pointing toward the “ambivalent relationship of the Secret Historian to the patriarchal world.” Atwood, Secret History, lxiii.
Humphrey, “Displacement and the Natal Paradise,” 14. This idea is also found in the work of Rebecca Empson, who writes, “The placenta is not attributed to a person's female (mother/blood) or male (father/bone side). Rather, it is viewed as a replication or ‘shadow’ of the child, and is ascribed by some as its ‘twin.’” Empson, Harnessing Fortune, 159–60.
Karl, “In the Realm of Comrades?,” 26. See also Bao, Queer Comrades.
Nations like Mongolia have been preoccupied with the insecurity of their survival and specter of extinction since their birth. See Bulag, Collaborative Nationalism, 206; see also Billé, “Faced with Extinction.” Giorgia Meloni, the current prime minister of Italy and head of the far-right governing party Fratelli d'Italia, has conjured the “extinction of the Italian people” due to falling birth rates, immigration, and gender politics. Quoted in Broder, Mussolini's Grandchildren, 7. Extinction fantasies on the right related to gender politics are also the topic of Judith Butler's Who’s Afraid of Gender?
Esposito offers a genealogy of the ancient Roman legal category of immunitas, which granted exemption from communal obligations. Before the biomedical discovery of the immune system, immunity was understood in terms of privilege, which placed its bearer “outside of the community” and its “obligation of mutual care.” During the rule of Chinggis Khan and his descendants, immunity—darkhlaa in Mongolian—was a prerogative of sovereign power, coextensive with the royal body. Only the khan had the authority to grant immunity, which was a protected and privileged relation to royal authority. Esposito, “Twofold Face of Immunity,” 4; See also Esposito, Common Immunity. I am currently working on a manuscript that explores the different etymologies of immunity in Latin and Mongolian.
Like the biblical ark, these are not new arguments. In 1975, ecologist and white nationalist Garret Hardin called for a “lifeboat ethics” among rich countries “on guard against boarding parties” from the nonwhite Global South. As Kate Aronoff puts it, Hardin's ecologism was driven by his anxiety that so-called overpopulation in the Global South would put an “intolerable strain on the planet's resource.” Hardin's famous concept of the “tragedy of the commons” is being-in-common perceived from the paranoid enclosure of whiteness. Aronoff contrasts Hardin's insular “lifeboat ethics” with former US ambassador to the United Nations Adlai Stevenson's 1965 address, in which he refers to the planet as a “spaceship,” a “fragile craft,” requiring global cooperation. For Stevenson, the spaceship is not an escape from the earth but is the earth itself. Aronoff, “Biden's Climate Summit Won't Save the World.” According to Christian Parenti, militarized borders in response to climate change–induced migration will lead to “a politics of the armed life-boat.” Parenti, “Catastrophic Convergence,” 35. Slobodian also describes his concept of the zone of exception as a “lifeboat—or more likely—as a cruise ship.” Slobodian, Crack-Up Capitalism, 236.
Cited in Sharpe, introduction, xxv.
For his praise of early transatlantic seafaring, see the chapters “Nautical Ecstasies” and “The Poetics of the Ship's Hold,” in Sloterdijk, In the World Interior, 77–80, 122–23. See also ten Bos, “Towards an Amphibious Anthropology.” For an example of a politics counter to Sloterdijk's, Michael Hardt and Sandro Mezzadro launched a migrant rescue ship off the coast of Italy. See Hardt and Mazzadra, “We've Launched a Migrant Rescue Ship.” For theorizations of the slave ship as well as the container ship, see Sharpe, In the Wake; Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts”; Harney and Moten, “Fantasy in the Hold,” in The Undercommons, 84–99; Khalili, Sinews of War and Trade.
Honig, Public Things, 78 (hereafter cited in text as PT).
Living without immunity is, strictly speaking, impossible and therefore potentially only a theological state of grace. “As the biblical traditions would have it, this is, of course, what also makes possible the emergence of the kingdom of God—I am tempted to say, the royal neighborhood of God—in which our various immune systems against external and internal aliens have been finally rendered inoperative.” Santner, Untying Things Together, 109.
Chi, Membranes, 17 (hereafter cited in text as M).
The after-Earth perpetuation of racial, class, and gendered divisions is a common trope in dystopian science fiction. To give just one among numerous examples, see the class-stratified division of labor and humanity, which maintains postapocalyptic survival, in Bong Joon-Ho's film Snowpiercer (2013). It is as if, as Sloterdijk puts it, “even the negative utopia, the anticipation of global natural catastrophe, is incapable of creating a transcending horizon of binding departures.” Sloterdijk, Rage and Time, 188.
Chi, “Biospheres,” 165. Almost fittingly for a text that problematizes origins, translations of “Biospheres” have been published in English and Italian, while the original version in Mandarin has not yet been published.
I propose that Chi Ta-Wei is queering the contextually overdetermined word liberation by defining it as a bursting of the biosphere, as it subverts the Chinese Communist Party's pledge to “liberate Taiwan” from what it considered a fascist dictatorship (ruled by the Nationalists until democratization in the late 1980s). The desire for reunification is also one of the pillars of Chinese nationalism. Interestingly in the context of this essay, the Republic of China (Taiwan) did not officially recognize Mongolia as an independent country until 2002 because the latter formerly belonged to the Qing Empire, from which both the Republic of China and People's Republic of China establish the patrimony of their nation-states. The geopolitics of this essay, if there is one, is composed of phantoms of nonrecognition and nonbelonging.
