Bacterial Sex and Death: Darwirigaray and <i>Life Death</i>

This article discusses the New Materialist interest in biology and agency, drawing on Elizabeth Grosz's Becoming Undone, a work that provides a feminist ontology of life based on sexual difference. Grosz presents a ‘cross-fertilized’ reading of Charles Darwin and Luce Irigaray, placing them in what she calls the vitalist philosophy of ‘the question of life’. In order to conceptualize life, she posits sexual reproduction as the philosophical essence of life in terms of the maximalization of creativity, productivity (overabundance) and diversity. In this context the article contrasts this vision with Jacques Derrida's reading, in Life Death, of the notion of life based on sexual reproduction in François Jacob's The Logic of Life, with particular attention to Jacob's discussions of sexual reproduction and death. Read in the light of Derrida's insights, Grosz's deployment of this vitalist discourse of infinite productivity necessarily misses complexity in the notion of life that she develops.