LES HOMMES SE AGISSENT POUR ÊTRE.
Bataille, Le labyrinthe

Even a worm will turn…
ditado inglês[1]

§ An uneasy fag

Aristotle was an uneasy fag [bicha].

There may be other ways of saying it, but few are as adequate.[2]

The profound uneasiness that drives Aristotle is certainly not his alone. In fact, even today it proves to be essential to the being of the Western world. But in Aristotle we find a clear expression of it: his soul, the forms by means of which he explains and makes up the world, the construction of the ethereal as opposed to the earthly, the desire for an eternity beyond the finite body, the discovery of an Order that would allow for the persistence of his-Self beyond himself. It is an uneasiness with regard to degeneration, cripness, and death. In a word, the uneasiness of being material. On the other hand, it is an uneasiness with regard to being Man, to occupying the centre of the world, to being fulcrum of existence and reader of God―in a word, an anxiety of Being.

It was Bataille who best and most concisely expressed this uneasiness essential to Western Being: “at the basis of human life there exists a principle of insufficiency.” We find this principle, at the level of an interpersonal dialectic, in how, “[i]n isolation, each man sees the majority of others as incapable or unworthy of “being”” and how “[t]he sufficiency of each being is endlessly contested by every other.” (Bataille 1985, 171-173) The Principle of Insufficiency stipulates this empty centre that each individual bears, and which drives all our action, action in itself, as an attempt at filling it, as an attempt at Being.

This apparently inextinguishable insufficiency―which Bataille did not situate in Western patriarchy―is not limited to the relationship with oneself or with the other, but to worldmaking itself and the impossibility of the possibility of being. Dramatic attempts to give meaning to the world are born out of it; histories of symbolization, valuation, aversion, and abjection; the tragicomedies of being and of life:

This uneasiness on the part of everyone grows and reverberates since at each detour, with a kind of nausea, men discover their solitude in empty night. The universal night in which everything finds itself—and soon loses itself—would appear to be existence for nothing, without influence, equivalent to the absence of being, were it not for human nature that emerges within it to give a dramatic importance to being and life. (Bataille, 1985, 172)[3]  

This essay focuses on the reproductive theory Aristotle expounds in his Generation of Animals. It looks for the traces of the patriarchal logic that supports (and is supported by) the construction of the essentialized sex-gender division, a division presented as natural and as metaphysical. It finds, at its root, the dualism of form and matter, established by Plato and adopted by Aristotle. It follows these traces and comes upon a woman-female rendered secondary and instrumental, a vehicle for Man’s re-production. It continues and finds itself before a theory of monstrous abnormality that seems to justify defect, excess, deviation, and even the very existence of woman—the female as the first type of monstrosity!

Above all, however, this essay is about the movement Bataille identifies when he writes that “[t]hat which, in me, demands that there be “being” in the world, “being” and not just the manifest insufficiency of human or nonhuman nature, necessarily projects (…) divine sufficiency across space, like the reflection of an impotence, of a servilely accepted malady of being” (Bataille 1985, 171-173).

If the necessary counterpart to this divine extension and projection is an earthly partitioning and abjection, it is thus in such movement that we find the motive and core of Aristotle’s work. The King before the lean beggar. Or, to follow his own terms, let us rather say that it is in the opposition of the low to the ethereal, and in the very and ultimate separation between matter and form that we find both the essence and end of his natural philosophy. It is against the Principle of Insufficiency that Aristotle lays down the Principle of Sameness. Aristotle’s monstrous misogyny is one of the symptoms of his struggle for eternity, of his action against insufficiency.

And so, finally, this essay goes back. It goes back to the moment when, before representation, sorting and reason had acted in order to escape from a ubiquitous sense of insufficiency, the anxiety was more severe, and the abyss of difference had somewhat more obsclarity. And there, faced with the empty night of being, what it finds is not a raging bull. All it finds are shitty bichxs.

§ Natural philosophy: ideas and causes of a generational break

History of Animals, Parts of Animals, Generation of Animals, Motion of Animals, On the Soul: Aristotle devoted a considerable part of his work to the study of life, notably the study of animal life. Nowadays, however, the dominant view is that Aristotelian philosophy is an important legacy to be investigated and revisited, while his natural studies are, at best, worthy of curiosity, but, ultimately, consist of no more than an assemblage of remarks and hypotheses that contemporary knowledge was able to leave behind. After the Enlightenment and its disenchantment, after the sharp separation of science from all other forms of knowledge, Aristotle’s natural knowledge is taken apart from his philosophy and demoted to the status of a curiosity, something to be studied with the kind of distance and estrangement to which the objects of the history of scientia are always condemned.

Aristotle, however, is the first to insist that his work is a natural philosophy. This is not a one-way formulation.[4] The depth and richness of Aristotelian natural knowledges is bound to the rigorous application of its metaphysical principles. By the same token, those same principles are constantly revisited, corrected and reformulated through the empirical study of the natural world that surrounds him.[5]

An instance of this, in the sphere of natural life, is how Plato’s philosophy, notably the separation between matter and forms, was adopted and adapted by Aristotle (and subsequently termed hylomorphism). Also known as ideas, the forms are understood as the non-physical essences of all things, and as the only domain where true knowledge is possible. Aristotle’s Metaphysics shows the profound influence of these ideas, and how they are modified by the understanding of the living world.[6] Aristotle’s pre-Socratic predecessors were concerned with the question of prima mater: they sought to discover the fundamental element at the heart of everything, the element (or elements) whose appearance and quality could change, but which, ultimately, would always be conserved. Starting from this element, they looked for a compositional understanding of the whole world.[7] As he puts it, “of the first philosophers the majority thought that the causes in the form of matter were alone the principles of all things. For that from which all entities come, from which each thing primarily arises and into which it is at the end resolved, the substance remaining but changing as to affections, this they announced to be the element and principle of all entities, and for this reason they thought that nothing either came to be or was destroyed” (Aristotle 1998, 12-13).

In turn, Aristotle introduces form as that which sustains and allows for the possibility of considering universals and its particular manifestations simultaneously. Regarding the analysis of natural life, this implies the ability to create a taxonomy and categorial division of the world of species despite and with their internal differences, and at an individual or familiar level. Aristotle thus establishes―at least according to his own testimony―a break with the philosophical view that did not take empirical particulars into serious consideration.

We can identify a further essential break with previous works by looking at how Aristotle lays down the four fundamental causes for understanding the cosmos, namely his concern with the final cause in the appreciation of the natural world. Comparing himself to the naturalists that preceded him―and which, with a certain contempt, or even derision, he calls “physiologists”―Aristotle claims to introduce an analysis of the natural world which does not simply have to do with each thing’s material cause, that is, with the issue of what is “the cause in virtue of giving the thing its matter.” He contrasts this analysis with a knowledge of the world that, if complete and true, must go beyond understanding of what gives matter to things (material cause), or what justifies their change (efficient cause)―an inquiry he identifies already in some of his predecessors. Crucially, in order to understand the nature of things and how they come into being, it is also necessary to know what gave them their form (the formal cause), and why and with what end did it come to exist, that is, the final cause, its telos.[8]

The consequences for the analysis of the natural world are tremendous. The search for the formal cause seems to enable, as with Plato, the interpretation of a system of universals that does not discard, neglect or subordinate each being’s particularities. The Generation of Animals is an extraordinary work of empirical observation, a collection of natural facts, a gathering of intelligence either directly or by means of testimonies subject to analytical skepticism, and even a search for non-immediate data through intervention in the animal realm, namely through dissection. The multiplicity, diversity and at times apparent contradiction of the animal realm do not deter Aristotle in his search for a higher knowledge. Matter is prone to transformation and de-generation; but form ensures the order of the universe and of the universal. In his eyes, these works are not an assemblage of scattered natural facts, a catalogue of loose testimonies, or of legends and captions. Knowing things is to know their logic even at the level of their motives, of the reasons why they are, of what they are for.

This is the project of a natural philosophy: to grasp the order of the world through its thorough observation and the explanation of things and their mutations based on their material, efficient, final, and formal causes; to know what things are made of, and how this making takes place, but also, and crucially, their purpose and the essence they embody; to understand, as far as the existence of things is concerned, their from what and their by what; as well as their for what and their why.

§ Species: the dichotomy’s form of life

The Aristotelian dichotomy at play in the matter-form pair is not an analytic scheme centered around a binarism of equal terms. It is established on the basis of an asymmetric and hierarchical valuation of a dualism that is as affective as it is rational, a pre-sentiment according to which the world cannot be conceived other than in terms of superiority and inferiority, better and worse, highness and lowness.

This means also that this dichotomy is not even a mere practical instrument of empirical analysis, nor a scheme of understanding deduced by a disengaged logos, a ground level of knowledge, prior to its applied existence. The form-matter division is, by all means, metaphysical, and presented as governing the world Order and allowing for its real understanding.[9] But what allows for this division is meta to this metaphysics. It is the possibility of interpreting, and acting in, the world. The Aristotelian dichotomy is, in a word, ontoepistemic.[10]

In other words, even though Aristotle presents his metaphysics as the first step in his understanding of the world, the dualism is presupposed by the metaphysics, even as an unquestionable image of thought and its natural sympathy with truth.[11] Aristotelian metaphysics is just one of the expressions of this asymmetrical, hierarchized dichotomy. So is his physics, the radical division between the supralunar realm of aether and of the constant motion of the heavenly spheres and the sublunar realm where the elements are vulnerable to transformation and degeneration, where everything changes and nothing is conserved. So is also his separation of body and soul, as well as that of being and non-being, life and non-life. In the Generation, he writes:

Now some existing things are eternal and divine whilst others admit of both existence and non-existence. But that which is noble and divine is always, in virtue of its own nature, the cause of the better in such things as admit of being better or worse, and what is not eternal does admit of existence and non-existence, and can partake in the better and the worse. And soul is better than body, and the living, having soul, is thereby better than the lifeless which has none, and being is better than not being, living than not living. (Aristotle 2014, 2477-2478)[12]

It is precisely this dualism which will justify, explain, and give reason to the existence of animal generation, and to the very existence of (the) sex(es). Before moving forward, we need to look at how the nature of nature is partially laid down here. Once again, we come upon the ontoepistemic dichotomy. Aristotelian nature follows two principles, that of what is best, and that of what is necessary. Nature tends towards what is best, it has a propensity – described in a very agential way – towards the higher side of the ontoepistemic dichotomy. What is best, as the previous passage indicates, is thus the eternal and the divine, in contrast with what admits of existence and non-existence (the transient, the mortal, the corruptible, that which enjoys a material limit). The soul is better than the body. The living, betterthan the non-living. What nature tries to emulate is that kind of eternity that characterizes the realm of forms so well―that projection of “divine sufficiency across space” (Bataille, 1985, 172-173).

What is necessary, on the other hand, is a consequence of the material embodiment of form, the way the world is itself an obstacle to the existence of ideas alone. The realm of necessity is, in its most abstract formulation, that of the impossibility of things being different from what they are. This form of necessity, complementary and opposed to what is best, and thus cancelling out the potency of contingency one might call impossibility, is one of the central features of the Aristotelian ontoepisteme and of the principle of sameness that rules this world.

As far as animals are concerned, what is necessary constitutes the reason of the species. Aristotle continues the previous passage:

These, then, are the reasons of the generation of animals. For since it is impossible that such a class of things as animals should be of an eternal nature, therefore that which comes into being is eternal in the only way possible. Now it is impossible for it to be eternal as an individual (…) but it is possible for it as species. This is why there is always a class of men and animals and plants. (Aristotle 2014, 2477-2478)

If, by their particular nature, animals by themselves cannot be eternal, they can at least be so in the sense that they pass on something essential of themselves to their offspring, to their descendants. The species becomes the locus of similarity, of continuity and Sameness. But also the way to escape death, to be able to have something of m’I-Self that can subsist under the form, or in the form, of the species.

The species thus constitutes the individual’s only possibility of eternity. And reproduction is the mechanism through which such eternity is accomplished. The interdependent species-reproduction binomial establishes the existence of the living Order; without it, there would be no plants, animals, or men―the possible embodiment of Man.

This is thus what constitutes the final cause of a new being’s generation: the reproduction of the previous being, the possible eternity of a being to whom individual eternity is necessarily denied by nature.

But  one must also consider the material and formal causes of this new life. In fact, given that form, as opposed to matter, does not mutate, is not subject to transformation, understanding a new life’s formal cause is to understand exactly what the individual’s essence that exists beyond matter is, that is, that which is allowed a form of eternity that is both timeless and a-spatial. Reproduction is, in other words, the maintenance of the form of life.

§ A reproduction tool—the Female

Following the inquiry of the four causes, Aristotle determines that the creation of a new being, of a new life, requires the combination of form and matter. In the realm of necessity, nature is governed by the possible best, and so what is to be found in the higher animals―men―is a mechanism through which the form is kept as separate as possible from the lowness of the material world. The origin of the form which guides the formation of a new being rather be different from the matter that will constitute it.

This is the reason for the female’s existence. According to Aristotle, in the gestation of a new being, the male provides the form, and the female the matter. The reason for the female’s existence—her finality, her end—is such that the male may provide the form without it being tarnished by the matter provided by the female.

Again, as the first efficient or moving cause, to which belong the definition and the form, is better and more divine in its nature than the material on which it works, it is better that the superior principle should be separated from the inferior. Therefore, wherever it is possible and so far as it is possible, the male is separated from the female. For the first principle of the movement, whereby that which comes into being is male, is better and more divine, and the female is the matter. (Aristotle 2014, 2478)

An inversion seems to have taken place already: the female plays a secondary role in the generation of a new being, and exists not because it is necessary, but because it benefits the male’s active role. If, faced with a gestating and immediately reproductive body, one might ask what exactly is the male’s role. The transmission of the form by the male calls into question the need for the female’s existence. The male’s role in reproduction, his principle, is active; the female’s is passive. The dichotomy does not let go.

In the first book of the Generation, we also find the following passage:

Male and female differ in their definition by each having a separate faculty, and to perception by certain parts; by definition the male is that which is able to generate in another, as said above; the female is that which is able to generate in itself and out of which comes into being the offspring previously existing in the generator. And since they are differentiated by a faculty and by their function, and since instruments are needed for all functioning, and since the bodily parts are the instruments to serve the faculties, it follows that certain parts must exist for union and production of offspring. And these must differ from each other, so that consequently the male will differ from the female (Aristotle 2014, 2429-30)

Another inversion to empirical logic: the division of sexes, according to Aristotle, is a consequence of his metaphysics, and the essential dualism of form and matter is taken to be what causes this division, not a hypothesis that explains it. In other words, Aristotle’s essentialized division of sexes, that is, his cissexism, does not derive from empirical observation. Rather, its existence in the natural world is determined by metaphysical principles, and only subsequently verified by observation. Step by step, what is first determined in Aristotle is a) the metaphysical division between form and matter, b) that the generation of a new being depends upon the transmission of a form and the supply of matter, c) that the best way for this to happen is for these two elements to come separately, so that the form can be kept as immaculate as possible, d) that, there being two different elements, their transmission requires two different functions, which in turn require two different instruments. It is now, and only now, that the duality of sexes is established. For it is only now that the observation of the sexes, with their sexual organs as different instruments for different functions―that difference given “to perception by certain parts”―is rendered binary and parallel to the division between form and matter. According to Aristotle’s reasoning, cis-sexism is a direct consequence of the metaphysical division between form and matter, but can only be verified post-hoc. One should keep this inversion present, for Aristotle’s logic differs from various other ways of formulating and justifying patriarchal societies that take sexual difference as an objective starting point. For Aristotle, in contrast, the essentialization of sexual difference is a metaphysical consequence, not something that can be taken as given by empirical observation. That such difference exists in a clearer and more distinct way in human beings than in other animals, is for the philosopher proof that it is in human beings that nature best perfected its mechanisms of reproduction.

If the division between the transferal of matter and that of form can thus be logically deduced from the metaphysical principles Aristotle attributes to nature, its correspondence to male and female is verified empirically, a posteriori. Male and female parallel a division that is essential to the order of being, but are not identical to it. They are rather the possible realization―that is, the embodiment―of that crucial division.

§ The Principle of Sameness

Reproduction―and its necessary counterpart, species―are thus not a minor or secondary object of Aristotelian investigation, but a fundamental mechanism that makes possible the perpetuation or continuity of form in a world of degeneration, corruption and discontinuity. In the sphere of life, reproduction is the mechanism that maintains Order.

A possible way of formulating this worldview is to say that an operational centrality is given to the Principle of Sameness: that the same begets the same. It is this fundamental rule of life―and, in fact, of everything that exists―that supports the possibility of its analysis and understanding. Aristotle’s deepest assumption is that of the rigidity of Order as the possible continuity of that which is identical to itself. Not Anaxagoras’ infinite principles. Let alone the “conflict of opposites” of Heraclitus’ “everlasting fire”; not his river that runs without ever being the same―panta rhei, panta chorei. Nature’s rule and law are finitude and finality. It trusts extension and does not live without purpose. The necessary and the best. This is the outline of reproduction as understood by Aristotle, and the possible rendering of the atemporal and a-spatial eternity of forms into the sublunary, earthly realm.[13]

What Aristotle projected was not only a theory of Man’s eternity, but its practical possibility.

§ Woman: the cost of property, of essence, of eternity

This eternity’s cost is clear: to consign woman to matter, to the earthly realm, to the lower plane, to lowness. To render woman into the space of material tarnishing through which the soul, the form, must necessarily pass. To condemn woman to the submissive role of gestating the conditions for the perpetuation of the essence of man, that is, of the body. To render woman equivalent to woman qua female. To create an asymmetrical and hierarchical system in which, as far as essence’s perpetuation is concerned, woman plays an auxiliary and, although crucial, secondary role. And, thus, to grant men an existence that can go beyond itself, the possibility of being beyond one’s body, of being completely, of Being―not only male, but Man.

This is the distilled essence of Western patriarchy’s traditional logic: that it is through paternal lineage that the very essence is passed on. That is, the logic of inheritance is Man’s, as is the right to form; that is, in both senses, the right to property is his.

On the one hand, it is thus possible to recognize the patriarchal grounds of Aristotelianism even if they are presented as deductions from a metaphysics established a priori. On the other, it is also possible to recognize in Aristotle something essential to the Patriarchy that still permeates us today: his desire for the eternal and self-contained, self-sufficient essence. This is, after all, Patriarchy’s wet dream.

This dream’s first semblance is that of a world in which man does not need females to reproduce himself. One in which women are unnecessary. A world in which essence is perpetuated through parthenogenesis. But Man’s deepest desire is not reproductive self-sufficiency. It is non-necessity of reproduction. That, indeed, would be the best. This is Man’s desire of total sovereignty. The complete Man. He who does not need anything or anyone. Sufficient in itself and Master of the world. Man of the soul – that “most obstinate, the most powerful of those utopias, by which we erase the sad topology of the body.” (Foucault 2006, 230) Man of absolute sufficiency. It is, therefore, the Man who would not even need to reproduce himself, to make himself anew, for he would be eternal, infinite, inexhaustible, immortal. He who would need nothing other than Himself.

Patriarchy is a constant battle for Man’s eternity. For a timeless and extensionless Man. A bodiless Man. An endless Man.

Patriarchy is Man trying to be God.

§ On Woman’s Existence

After establishing the masculine principle as the active and superior principle of reproduction, one of the fundamental questions posed by Aristotle is that of the reason of the female’s existence. Following his causal logic, he presents the question as twofold:

(…) why is it that one thing becomes and is male, another female? (…) the sexes arise from necessity and the first efficient cause, from what sort of material they are formed. That they exist because it is better and on account of the final cause, takes us back to a principle still further remote. (Aristotle 2014, 2477; my emphases)

The second formulation has to do with the final cause, i.e., the end and purpose of the female. We have already found the answer to this question. The final cause is the transmission of form, that is, the far from insignificant but nonetheless inferior role played by the female in enabling the separation of matter and form prior to gestation. The female exists because it is better that it be so (and the principle of the tendency towards perfection is a direct consequence of a nature defined by finality, by a telos).

We are left with the first question: to know the reason why it is necessary that, in the material realm, the female should be created. What are the workings of natural gestation that make it inevitable that, instead of a male, a female is brought into existence.

To understand this, however, one must understand what monstrosity means.

§ De-form-ation

Part of Ancient Greek literature presents nature as a space of disorder and chaos. The space of wilderness, out of control, outside the city and the space of civil order. There was a direct link between nature and monstrosity, wild spaces being seen as incubators of monstrosities.[14] The distance from civic space, from propriety, from Man, defined the forms of disruption of a world at once strange, curious, and abject. The term monstrous is thus fitting to refer not only singularities or occasional―organic or inorganic―anomalies, but also monstrous species and, strikingly, monstrous races, an epithet and understanding of racial and bodily difference that would survive for at least a millennium and a half, up until the economic structures of the 17th and 18th centuries needed to readjust their human taxonomies for the development of racial capitalism.[15] 

Moreover, this conception of monstrosity as realization and embodiment of disorder, the monster as disorder made flesh, was often applicable not only to the space of wilderness, but also to wilderness within civic space. The body of the monstrous child or fetus was itself interpreted as a moment of disruption that was simultaneously natural and moral. According to what would also become an age-old tradition, the monstrous birth or apparition was the manifested node between a break with the natural and of a break with the moral law.[16] The monstrous body would come into the world endowed of textuality. To understand it was to discover what kind of improper intercourse, or perverse imagination, or infamous act had resulted in such abnormality. The monstrous body became, for over a millennium, the object of a specific exegetic tradition.[17] Endowed of the power of disruption, revelation and presage, the very term monster comes from the Latin verb moneō, the verb for showing, forewarning, admonishing.

None of this seems to hold in Aristotle. In his world, nature is itself an orderly force, a force that not only respects an order, but also enforces an order. And the space of life, as we already saw, is the space where that order exists, and is maintained under the various species’ forms. The Aristotelian project concerning monstrosity is then to completely deprive the monstrous body from the locus of chaos that is at the same time its fate and potency.

According to Aristotle, monstrosity is a mere matter of malformation. Even so, and despite this re-framing, it is still one of bad formation.[18]

Book IV of the Generation is devoted to monstrosity and to abnormal births. The question is, right from the start, framed as part of a spectrum of deviations caused by material flaws in the being’s conception and gestation, in the embodiment of form. For Aristotle, monstrosity is a deviation from the form. Monstrosity recognizable qua monstrosity is a high degree of such deviation, but not different in kind from any other variation.

There is thus, from the outset, a fundamental relation between the female and monstrosity. Any embodiment of form, given its own nature, has to result in a deviation from it. Woman, in providing matter―indeed, in being by definition the provision of matter―is the at least the space, if not even the cause, of such deviation. This is what happens in most monstrous cases, in which the deviation takes place in the woman’s womb and through the form’s material development. There are other cases, in which Aristotle justifies deviation as a defect of the masculine seed. But even in cases in which the defect lies in the male, the flaw belongs by essence to the sphere of the female, for it belongs to the material realm. Here lies the first relation of woman as regards to monstrosity: it is its reason.

But the relation is twofold, and deeper. The male provides the form. The provided form is the male’s form. This means, according to the Principle of Sameness, that any dissimilarity from the masculine progenitor, the father, is already, in itself, a deviation. In general, anything different from the paternal resemblance reveals how the necessary material world represses the form.

And this also means that a reason is needed for a female, dissimilar from the male, to be born. A being is born male by default—the fruition of the form passed on by the seed. On the contrary, an explanation is needed for why a being was born female. This is what Aristotle writes about flawed births:

For even he who does not resemble his parents is already in a certain sense a monstrosity; for in these cases nature has in a way departed from the type. The first departure indeed is that the offspring should become female instead of male (Aristotle 2014, 95).

Woman is from the very beginning a break with the ideal, a deviation from the form.

Woman is a de-form-ation; the first monstrosity.

§ Necessary monstrosity

Woman is thus part of that wide spectrum of form’s erring. From this “first deviation”, however, a very specific kind of monstrosity follows: a necessary monstrosity. From among the world’s monstrosity’s, this one is not anti-natural, it does not go against the ways of the world. Remarkably, what distinguishes necessary monstrosity from all contingent, unnecessary monstrosities is not its process, its material or efficient cause, but its end, its telos.

Some of the feminist literature that has looked at the Generation as a seminal work of Western patriarchal thought seems not to have paid enough attention to this aspect.[19] And some criticisms of such literature have precisely insisted upon it to support the (nearly absurd) stance that Classical thinking is not fundamentally patriarchal. A certain traditionalist―and, by all means, conservative―attachment to the figure of one of Philosophy’s Fathers, has occasionally tried to shield the Aristotelian theory from an anti-patriarchal critique on the grounds that, despite being a man of his time, and the sexism that characterizes it, Aristotle ascribed to woman a fundamental role in reproduction.[20] The idea that conceiving woman as necessary to animal gestation illustrates a non-patriarchal stance is as absurd as is hilarious, as tragic as it is comic. One would indeed be left wondering what is a patriarchy that does not recognize this very role. What structural patriarchy do we know that does not recognize the importance and necessity of woman qua female for the patrilineal maintenance and re-production of phallic law? Notice that the fact that Aristotle recognizes this does not mean that he does not want it, that is, that he does not envy this role, or that he does not wish for women’s obsolescence, their uselessness and, ultimately, their extinction. Indeed, we find all this in Aristotle.

What we ought to emphasize, when confronted with these analyzes, is precisely that necessary nature of woman: the necessary woman is the woman qua female. It is important not to neglect this issue, for its terms are far from innocuous, and the relation between woman, female, and femaleness remain one of the central issues of the various feminisms. It is rather necessary to invert its terms and ask whether woman’s association with her necessary function in reproduction is not, precisely, one of the foremost expressions of Western patriarchal logic.

The patriarchal and cissexist hallmark in Aristotle’s work, and its imprint, which extends to the present day, in theories of natural and social life, is not about woman’s uselessness, but, on the contrary, about its utility, its necessity. Woman qua female. Woman, the embodiment of inevitable imperfection. Woman, synecdoche of matter. Woman, the cost of form’s eternity.

§ De-monstration

Monster, that name of contingency beyond itself―of difference―carries within itself the unbearable weight of the omen, but also its power and its potency. Monstrosity, among so many other things, is the possible expression of impossible difference. The force that pierces through and overflows the monstrous body is the threat and herald of the breakdown of the Order that is so dear to Aristotle. Monstrosity is the difference that cuts the body to free the flesh. And it is a force that opposes the Principle of Sameness, the Principle of Identity, precisely what these try to keep at bay.

Derrida once said that “[m]onsters cannot be announced. One cannot say: ‘Here are our monsters,’ without immediately turning the monsters into pets.” (Derrida, 1990, 80)

There is, however, something more violent about monstrosity than announcement: demonstration. Demonstration shares its etymological root with monster. It is composed, on the one hand, by moneō in its sense of showing (but also as  warning and admonition). On the other hand, the prefix de- can mean about, in respect of or on―such as in, for instance, to delimit, to define, or even De Generatione Animalium. But the same prefix can mean something apparently opposite: removal, reversion, or simply extraction.

Monstrosity, however, is precisely the place where this distinction, like so many others, no longer makes sense. For monstrosity is precisely the place where speaking about is to destroy, to undo, to remove, and to extract. With regard to monsters, to demonstrate means to explain away, to produce an explanatory transparency which rids itself of the potentiating opacity of what cannot be grasped, read, or mastered. To demonstrate is to take monstrosity away. De-monstration.

Aristotle’s theory of life does not exclude monsters. On the contrary, it expels its monstrosity through its inclusion. In their intended ubiquity, or even universality, Aristotle’s demonstrative principles express over and over again the absence of an epistemological space outside that of proto-Western reason, as well as the ontological impossibility of difference in itself. Everything is identical to itself; all generation is re-production; and where matter falls short of the ideal, the Order of the cosmos, of life, of nature, supplements what it claims to constitute. Even Aristotelian curiosity itself, which initially strikes us as a loving relationship with the world’s multiplicity, re-emerges, perversely, as the colonial and all-encompassing effort of dominion over diversity. Reading Aristotle is to come upon the familiar disenchanted effort of mastery.

The Generation is a gentle theory, one that tames monsters through its explanation according to a natural philosophy and an understanding of the world characterized by the Order―as organization and imperative―of sameness. This is a theory of monsters without monstrosity.

§ Shitty creatures [bichos]

But monstrosity always comes back. It is always there.

For monstrosity is the excess and the failure, the surplus and the insufficient, what any de-monstration necessarily re-instates under new forms (and matters). Monstrosity is the constant threat and promise of chaosmos.

To say that his theory of life is one of monsters without monstrosity is not to say that there is no monstrosity in Aristotle. Instead, the moment in which monstrosity comes through more intensely, and more æffectively, is not when monsters appear. The whole Generation is dedicated to the different ways in which male and female principles interact, and to enshrine them as premise of all animal generation. But right at the beginning of the work, in its first substantial paragraph, Aristotle finds himself having to deal with―and to compartimentalize―what is an obvious exception to this premise, an exception that was well known and well established at the time: that there are certain creatures that “are not produced by animals,” but are rather generated “from decaying earth and excrements” (Aristotle 2014).

What Aristotle writes about the reproduction and generation of these beings is not straightforward, and its complexity is also revelatory of his helplessness and anxiety:

(…) all which are produced by union of animals of the same kind generate also after their kind, but all which are not produced by animals, but from decaying offspring is neither male nor female; such are some of the insects. This is what might have been expected; for if those animals which are not produced by parents had themselves united and produced others, then their offspring must have been either like or unlike themselves. If like, then their parents ought to have come into being in the same way; (…) for it is plainly the case with other animals. If unlike, and yet able to copulate, then there would have come into being again from them another kind of creature and again another from these, and this would have gone on to infinity. But nature flies from the infinite; for the infinite is imperfect, and nature always seeks an end. (Aristotle 2014, 2429-30).

What disturbs Aristotle is not that these beings are not the product of sexual reproduction. Their existence alone is not disquieting. What distresses him is that these scatogenic creatures might reproduce themselves sexually. The certainty Aristotle needs to establish is that these creatures are not a part of the sexual economy, that they do not have sexes or sex. To allow for their generation and multiplication is to make room in the world for beings that differ from their progenitors in kind―for they have a different origin-cause, a different way of becoming. To allow for this sexed generation―the generational generation―is to allow breaking the species’ rule insofar as a new being would emerge from the previous one. And nothing forbids this from happening again in the next generation. And so on. Infinitely. Differentially.

If the creatures born out of excrement were sexed, and could thus have offspring different in origin, this would mean that they were also different in essence. What Aristotle sets out to de-monstrate is thus that these beings must be entirely “of another kind.” For what he cannot allow, what he must pre-exclude, is not the existence of deformed beings, but of deforming ones. Aristotle cannot allow de-generation, and not just reproduction, to be a form of animal generation.

In these creatures that emerge from excrement, these scatogenic creatures [bichxs], the uneasiness central to the Aristotelian analytic structure, and to the corresponding cissexual understanding of the world, unfolds. On the one hand, the consequence of the possibility of this non-re-productive generation, of this de-generation, is a deviant and failing essence. In their multiple de-generations, the creatures’ [bichxs] form mutates and metamorphoses. The creatures [bichxs] trans*-form their-selves.

But what is this if not a complete break with the Aristotelian ontoepistemic dichotomy? The impossibility―or even the sheer difficulty!―of form’s eternity is the dissolution of its separation from matter. The tarnished form is not form anymore. One of the key assumptions of the Aristotelian understanding of the world no longer holds.

It is not only the asymmetrical binomial that is called into question. Aristotle can domesticate the necessary and contingent monstrosities addressed in Book IV because they are finite. The contingent ones are finite because, even in their material deviation, their progenitors’ form is preserved, and so their progeny returns, by means of nature’s careful work, to be in line with species, to the specific lineage.[21] On the other hand, the necessary ones are finite because they have an end—they exist, in fact, on behalf of that end. And both are finite in the sense that they do not wildly overflow the natural order.

The same is not true of the crapogenous. If their progeny were unlike them, different from them, “then there would have come into being again from them another kind of creature and again another from these, and this would have gone on to infinity. But nature flies  from the infinite; for the infinite is imperfect, and nature always seeks an end.” (Aristotle 2014, 2426-7; my emphasis). An infinite nature: endless and without end. When the formal cause is called into question, so is the final cause.

Along with its metaphysical principles, patriarchy falls to the ground. (And just look where!) The male’s role is no longer essential. The Order no longer holds. Sameness is no longer found. The species ceases to function as a unity of similarity. Lineage, the property of similitude, property held and inherited, family continuity, even sovereignty―all this ceases to belong to man by default.

The moment when these creatures’ possibility is allowed, these creatures that generate without re-producing themselves, that pierce through and overflow the world’s essences, is the moment when difference is found in the world’s extension. Or, as Fanon put it, it is “the real leap [that] consists in introducing invention into existence.” (Fanon 2008, 179)

§ anality

The Generation of Animals renders Aristotle’s metaphysical principles into a natural philosophy that simultaneously justifies and is justified by a patriarchal essentialism. In this work, the Aristotelian ontoepistemic dichotomy, namely the fundamental division of form and matter, is resumed and restated in the form of sex. Sex, in its turn, is given the role of a fundamental articulation and identifying of apparently distinct elements: the division of reproductive principles is taken as equivalent to the genital organs’ dualization; from there, these are made to correspond to sexual organs, which, in turn, are rendered equivalent to the practice of the sexual act; finally, the sexual act is rendered analogous to sexed reproduction. In other words, in Aristotle, sex is articulated in a way that conflates genital dualism, the correspondence between the genital and the sexual (an conflation still largely upheld today[22]), sexual practice, and the reproductive act. It is not possible, according to Aristotelian nature, for genitalia not to perform a sexual role, and for sex not to perform a reproductive role. As is familiar to us, the equivalence of these functions, along with its equivalence to gender, underpins the purposes of the patriarchal structure.

The anxious logic of the scatogenic creatures’ [bichxs] preclusion from sexual economy makes this quite clear. The possibility of these creatures being genitally marked is, without mediation, the possibility of their sexual encounter and the possibility of their re-production. But the creatures [bichxs] seem to disrupt Aristotelian sexual economy in an even more radical way: the scatogenic creatures [bichxs] introduce anality in the framework of generation.

In a work characterized by genital dualization, creatures born out of excrements compel us to consider the anus as a genital organ, that is, as a generative organ, one that generates. Put another way, the scatogenic creatures [bichxs], that form of monstrosity that Aristotle feels the need to exclude even before expounding and explaining his work’s principles, those creatures [bichxs] that Aristotle has to push to the margins of the phallic knowledge he sets out to offer, are precisely the creatures that present the possibility of a non-reproductive generation.

They do so, furthermore, through a historical and conceptually heretical association: the finding of a vital, desiring energy, where pleasure can be found next to, or even in, the useless and abject. The excrement that is no longer of any use, that does shit, the purposeless surplus, the disgusting being expelled, defecation as expulsion and canonical act of abjection.[23]

Prior to the Christian sin, there is a common depiction of Ancient Greece as an exception to the prejudice against homosexuality between men.[24] In the context of philosophical schools and of a homosocial culture, pederasty was a common, non-stigmatized practice. Homosociability, in this context of the master-philosopher’s posthumous extension and, therefore, of the reproduction and continuity of the epistemological lineage, is also part of a logic of sameness. Greek homosociability is a central instrument of perpetuation and containment of a hermeneutic circle.

The same cannot be said, however, of the one who take pleasure from being anally penetrated. This is not simply the one who plays the penetrated role, but the one who desires penetration. The latter, under the figure of the kinaidos, is often characterized as “frightfully shameful and miserable”, as one who doesn’t discriminate between “good kinds of pleasure and bad ones” ―as Socrates depicts him (Plato 1999, 30-31). Bad kinds of pleasure, of course, are also bad kinds of knowledge―knowing is always knowing in the Biblical sense, and is always a moral act.

If the history of anality is, time and time again, one of exclusion or pathological constitution in relation to the scope of sexuality, moral politics, and knowledge, it is not surprising that creatures emerging from excrements constitute the dystopian vision of a degenerative generation.

The hallmark of anxiety is not the pederast. It is not the homosocial homosexual―or homonormative, as one could say today. It is, rather, the desiring and generating anus, the gapping and birthing asshole, the fag [bicha], the creature [bicho].

§ The shitty bichxs’ flesh

The matter-form dualism is indissociable from the male-female, man-woman dualism. The same hierarchical asymmetry is at work in both. Not by analogy, nor even by attributing it to the empirical analysis of deductions from principles. Rather, because they belong to that same matrix―inevitable for Aristotle―of understanding and constitution of the world. One does not precede the other: cissexual knowledge of the world is at the basis of the metaphysical dualism as much as the latter is based upon the former.

Patriarchy is also indistinguishable from cis-sexism. This is not a minor claim, and certainly not a tautologous one: the dual existence of male and female, man and woman, is, in Aristotle, tantamount to its hierarchical asymmetry. The world’s cissexual division is essentially patriarchal.

Finally, the main organizing and ruling principle of this dynamic is that of sameness. Cis-sexism, patriarchy and Aristotelian metaphysics itself are basically mechanisms through which differences that might threaten the world Order are made impossible.

Faced with the Principle of Sameness, all difference is assimilated, explained away, de-monstrated. And when difference survives―and because difference always survives, because monstrosity not only survives impossibility but feeds on it and grows from it―the space it is destined to is not simply that of exception and preclusion. No, the possible impossibility of monstrous difference has to be rendered abject to Man, excluded from the organ-ized body, literally expelled as excess and defect, as shit.

It is difficult, unbearable, inevitable, to cope with that “uneasiness on the part of everyone [that] grows and reverberates since at each detour, with a kind of nausea, men discover their solitude in empty night.” It is understandable that that “universal night in which everything finds itself” appears as an “absence of being.” It is equally understandable that in view of this endless and purposeless emptiness, a natural philosophy emerges “within it to give a dramatic importance to being and life.” The ethereal versus the earthly, the higher versus the lower, the soul versus the body, life versus non-life. What is Aristotelian philosophy if not the projection of that “divine sufficiency across space,” as a result of the demand “that there be “being” in the world, “being” and not just the manifest insufficiency of human or nonhuman nature” and “like the reflection of an impotence, of a servilely accepted malady of being.” (Bataille, 1985, 171-173)

If Aristotle’s work has stood for millennia as fundamental to scientia, philosophy, and other European forms of knowledge, it is because it had the merit and the ability to codify within its excluded center an inability that remains within the heart of the West today. It is the uneasiness of a deep and inevitable insufficiency. Not only the uneasiness of not being man enough, but the impossibility of Being Man. It is the patriarchal uneasiness of being “female,” the white uneasiness of being animal, the ableist uneasiness of being crip, insufficient.[25] It is, finally, the uneasiness regarding the anus as locus of desire, as locus of life, and of abjection as a de-generative movement.

                 No matter how much dualism or Order,

                                                                     Aristotle was an uneasy fag.

                 monstrous difference

                 survives                                                         in the flesh

                             bichxs of shit

[1] I’d like to thank Nasser Zakariya for his incredible support, and for a trust that knows neither end nor finality. I’m always and forever thankful to Simão Cortês and Lake Elrod, without whose voices and ears writing would not be possible. I’m also grateful to João Esteves da Silva, whose attentive care, commitment and sincerity made the editorial and translation processes so easy to navigate. If it is important to recognize work well done, one must do it twice over when considering the misery of financial conditions for academic work in portugal, and the amount of non-paid work that is repeatedly required from those without a professorship.
But even a worm will turn.

[2] From beginning to end, this essay makes use of the neologism bichx, a wordplay untranslatable into english. It results of an articulation of bicha, bicho, bitch and the x as a cuir linguistic intervention (rather than a marker).
Bicha is slang for an effeminate gay man, and broadly associated with bottoming. Something between sissy, queen and faggot, it is an offensive term that has been reappropriated by queer movements. It is itself already untranslatable. There are words that are just like that. Their semantic constellation and the situationality and particularity of their use are inseparable. What is more, they have been entangled and sown by the intensity of the affects mobilized each time it is used—the intensity of violence and joy, of the use among us or against us. Between the slur heard since childhood and the tender and vulnerable vocative of non-inherited intimacies, bicha is part of the elusive margins of a grammar otherwise made for translation.
A second portuguese word, bicho, means a strange creature, maybe small or insect-like, but marked mostly by its oddness and a certain sense of repulsion. It might be a trick binary grammar played on itself, but for me bicha and bicho have always existed in relation. This sense of being a weird creature, between discomfort and abjection, is also a necessary part of bicha’s universe. A bicha also finds no place in the socio-animal taxonomy. Eppur si muove.
Finally, and similar to what has been done by Latin America’s cuir movements, the x has been adopted as a replacement for the a/o binary that often genders words. This cuir intervention in language at the same time demands a consideration that is not gendered-determined, requires that such consideration goes beyond the default dichotomy (x is not necessarily non-binary, but it is not binary), insists in the necessary friction between cuir excess and the (un)sayable (the unreadale x), and marks the presence of all these difficult conditions through an absence that we carry (the x that erases, the x that cuts).
In this essay, bichxs marks the play between the condition of a sissy fag, and that of an abject, small creature, marking the lowness and bottomness of both, as well as a monstrous excess no proper noun can hold and no grammar can tame.

[3] I do not always follow the translation verbum ad verba. Wherever I’ve introduced minor changes, I’ve followed the original text (Bataille 1970, 433-435).

[4] Compare this analysis with Kullmann 1991.

[5] Cf. “Introduction: Aristotle’s Philosophy and the Generation of Animals” in Falcon & Lefebvre 2018, pp. 1-11.

[6] Cf. Aristotle 1998, 12-13.

[7] Aristotle mentions, as touchstones against which he stands, that Thales thought water was the basis of everything, “from which other things arose while it was conserved”; that Anaximenes and Diogenes rather thought “that air was prior to water and was especially a principle of the simple bodies”; that Hippas of Metapontum and Heraclitus of Ephesus, in their turn, thought that this substance was fire; and that while Empedocles set earth alongside these and considered four elements, Anaxagoras of Clazomenae “said that the number of principles was infinite” (Aristotle 1998, pp 12-14).
It is crucial to understand that the narrative that juxtaposes these theories and equivalence is itself markedly Aristotelean. Part of his philosophical program consists of understanding these inquiries as belonging to the same sphere, as opposed to the realm of ideas introduced by Plato.
Even his description of these theories allows us to see how these philosophers did not take themselves as simply replacing one element by another, but rather propounding radically different cosmologies and worldviews. The framing of all these material inquiries as being of the same nature is a consequence of Aristotle’s self-demarcation and an important discursive device that allows for the radicality of its reconceptualization. The conception of form can only appear as a revolutionary innovation as ann antagonist to this homogenized pre-Socratic thinking (indeed, the term “pre-Socratic” has the same effect) (Cf. Aristotle 1998, 12-14).

[8] Cf. Aristotle 2014. “Past students of nature (…) did not see that the causes were numerous, but only saw the material and efficient and did not distinguish even these, while they made no inquiry at all into the formal and final causes” (Aristotle 2014).

[9] Cf. Aristotle 1998, 3-39.

[10] As I conceive it, this term originates from Foucault’s concept of episteme as the matrix of the possibilities of knowledge of a certain time and regime (cf. Foucault 1982 and 2012), as well as from the necessary relation between epistemology and the world’s constitution that Denise Ferreira da Silva emphasizes when speaking of ontoepistemology (or when she claims that we must seek “the End of the World as we know it” (Silva 2017, 84)).

[11] Cf. Deleuze 2001.

[12] All quotations from the Generation are from Arthur Platt’s translation (Aristotle 2014). In some of the quotations the translation was modified.

[13] It is worth noting that the most general formulation of such Principle of Sameness, explicit as far as generation is concerned, is the Principle of Identity―that is, that 1=1. The difference between the two is a matter of material possibility. The being that cannot just be formal and, therefore, eternal, that, confronted with caducity, has to find other means to ensure its continuity, needs to produce itself anew, to re-produce. In the realm of natural life, the Principle of Sameness is the Principle of (possible) Identity.

[14] Cf. Felton 2017.

[15] On how the “monstrous race” survives today under new metamorphoses, cf. Davies 2016 and Seth 2010. On racial capitalism, cf. Robinson 2000 and Silva 2007.

[16] Cf. Huet 1993 and Canguilhem 2009.

[17] For cases in Portugal, cf. Costa 2005.

[18] It is worth noting that, still today, the mal in malformation maintains the moral-normative charge of the Latin malus.

[19] Cf. Thomson 1996 and Freeland 1998.

[20] Cf. the introduction, by Sousa e Silva and Paiva, to the Portuguese edition of the Generation (pp. 18-26), and Connell 2016.

[21] The other possibility expounded by Aristotle, which I have not addressed here, is that of the production of contingent monstrosities without reproductive ability. This is the case of monstrous births that display severe deviations from the form. It is also the case of hybrid beings that, due to the lack of a form of their own, can unite themselves but never constitute a species―Aristotle mentions the classic example of the union of a mare with a donkey, the mule.

[22] Cf. Preciado 2018.

[23] Consider the history of anal sex, from the heretical act that breaks the moral-natural law, through the deviant onanism that makes useless (non-reproductive) use of the body, to the pathological social type characterized by a flaw in its development―a similar formulation to that of 19th century teratology. (Cf. Foucault 1999, Preciado 2018, and Halperin 2002). For an initial approach to the concept of abjection, cf. Kristeva 2010.

[24] Here I foresee a historical contextualization critique of this argument. In relation to this cf. Richlin 1993, Boyarin 2009, and Halperin 2002.

[25] Cf. Thomson 1996, Boisseron 2018, and Jackson 2020.

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