Text page
Parisi - Event and Evolution
A central Parisi essay that rewrites event, evolution, and sexual difference through a technical and processual account of becoming.
Contextual work page available
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Archive condition
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Core idea
These pages are crucial because they show how the section's most demanding philosophical line works. Event and evolution are treated as processual relays through which bodies, sensation, and difference are continually composed.
The pages operate by refusing a simple split between matter and abstraction. Technical processes and lived embodiment are forced into the same frame, which changes how difference itself can be described.
That matters because this is where the section most clearly exceeds scene history and becomes a serious metaphysics of technical subjectivity. It is also where later xenofeminist arguments inherit some of their most difficult material.
How to read this text
Read for how event is made to precede stable identity. Once that shift is clear, the account of bodies and difference becomes much easier to follow.
Track where process is treated as both material and conceptual. That crossing is the core of the page's force.
Representative extracts
Definition · paragraph 1
EVENT AND EVOLUTION Luciana Parisi abstract: Why have theories of evolution become now (and again) a matter of concern for critically rethinking sex and sexual difference?
Definition · paragraph 1
EVENT AND EVOLUTION Luciana Parisi abstract: Why have theories of evolution become now (and again) a matter of concern for critically rethinking sex and sexual difference? Why after years of deconstructing the ontologies of sex rooted in biological discourses and metaphysics of identity has critical thought turned to biology, physics, and mathematics?
Definition · paragraph 9
With Deleuze, one must conceive of virtual and actual planes as multiplicities whose differentiation necessarily implies a becoming in kind and degree, and not a continual complexification of one form. The ontol- ogy of sexual difference cannot eternally endure beyond the event and evolution of sexes, which are not governed by the bio-logics of complexi- fication.
Definition · paragraph 8
And yet, there are at least two problematic implications, which derive from such compelling conceptions of sexual difference and evolution. On the one hand, the notion of durée in evolution may imply a “fallacy of misplaced concreteness,” as Whitehead points out, as it substitutes the “becoming of continuity,” and thus evolution as made of events of irreparable breaks and novelties, with the “continuity of becoming,” where all remains fundamentally determined by a physical chain of variations.
Definition · paragraph 3
“There are no processes of form, but forms of process,” Whitehead argues.4 From this standpoint, no evolutionary form can endure forever. The becoming of a form is eternal, not because the same form endures forever, but because once a form perishes it implies the eventuation of the new.
Appears in sections
Cyberfeminism, Xenofeminism, and Technical Subjects Primary section
Sadie Plant, Amy Ireland, and the technical, gendered, and synthetic subject positions running through the archive.