I Who Have Never…

Unworlding

Unworlding is a philosophy and an anti-anti-utopian idea that breaks with world-building projects (such as those found in early queer theory) and charts a course for queer and trans and feminist art and theory that skews towards violence and acts of undoing or dismantling. Unworlding embraces entropic unraveling. It seeks to stop the world as we know it and to undo its logics, its epistemologies and its sense-making systems. Unworlding thinks against the environments that Euro-American imaginations have visualized and built, and it works to unmake those spaces. While much of the philosophy of space, take Gaston Bachelard for example, has understood the relation between bodies and space in terms of the mapping of self onto house and house onto world (our house, Bachelard proposes, “is our first universe”), unworlding thinks of space as the gap, the chasm and the void. By this I do not mean that space is simply empty or tabla rasa, but that space is less the frame than the void, less the organization imposed by the room than the disorganization that awaits the body. Space is house minus an imposed social structure, relations between bodies minus the logic of the norm. Space can be radically disorienting, an unworld.

While Bachelard uses the house to “map the topography of our intimate being,” even he recognized that modern urban environments do not provide the conditions for such a mapping. “In Paris,” he wrote in 1958, “there are no houses, and the inhabitants of the big city live in superimposed boxes.” In other words, the house for him is not simply the structure preferred by real estate markets, it is a mark made on space by modes of being and a structure that constrains as much as it enables processes of living. This prevailing association of body with house implies a self that has been called to consciousness through the poetics of home. Unworlding pressures the walls, opens the doors and refuses to guarantee the inside by keeping the outside at bay. But it disorients before it offers a portal to an elsewhere. This disorientation through unworlding is the theme and the plot of an odd novel from the 1990’s and through its discussion of an unworld, we will encounter the carceral logics of world and the necessity of undoing them.1

In Jacqueline Harpman’s I Who Have Never Known Men, a young woman emerges from an underground bunker where she and thirty-nine other women have been kept captive. A siren has sounded and their male guards, who have just unlocked the cage door to distribute food, inexplicably, have disappeared. The women, cautiously at first, then with mounting trepidation, climb the stairs and leave their subterranean prison. As they head towards the surface, the women begin to hurry, spurred on now by anticipation of “the undreamed-of unknown, the outside, the world that was not the cage…” When they finally reach the top, the young nameless woman leaps forward and looks out: “It was the world.” It was the world but not their world, not the world they thought they may have known and lost in the past, and not the world they had imagined and striven for in the future. It was a world without people, without features—“I’ve never seen anything like it,” says one of the older women. “This plain is vast, it’s unbroken.” Others also see nothing that they recognize, and they decide they are no longer on earth and that, while they are not in the cage, they are still not in the world: “They’d wanted something all their lives, but now they had it, they didn’t recognize it.” As the women adapt to their freedom, they find an emptiness in place of the fullness they had imagined and a pointlessness in place of the meaning they sought. They are in a world conjured by and then emptied out by violence and prisons. It is a place without animals and with very little vegetation and it is the result of the human domination of all other forms of life. This is now a world without other people, without men, a place dotted with bunkers like their own holding only dead bodies. There are no places here that any of them recognize and, despite searching and wandering, they find nothing familiar. The women are in an atopia, a place that is neither worse nor better than where they left. They are in the world that required their elimination.

This is the basic plot of a curious novel written in the mid-nineties by Jacqueline Harpman, a Belgian novelist whose Jewish family, in her youth, during World War II, fled their home in Belgium for Morocco. Harpman (1929–2012) returned to Belgium only after the war, in 1945, and studied to become a psychoanalyst. I Who Have Never Known Men is curiously devoid of psychological twists given this biographical detail. It also focuses upon a character who has never known her mother or father and, as the title announces, has never known men at all. Psychoanalysis crumbles in this void. Harpman’s novel, if it is about anything, is about nothing, about the absence that remains and about the void that must replace world. In the novel, men, the agents of world, are cut out of the narrative altogether and even though the nameless narrator wanders through the terrain that she and the other women inherit, they never find another living soul. They find bunkers like their own filled with dead women, one bunker filled with dead men, and finally, the narrator, now the only survivor after all the other women have died of disease and old age, finds one concealed bunker in which a small world of books and things offers a temporary refuge from the emptiness of the outside. But eventually, this place too becomes empty, and the last woman resigns herself to an ignominious end in which she must confront her aloneness: “and I tell myself that I am alone in this land that no longer has any jailers, or prisoners, unaware of what I came here to do, the mistress of silence, owner of bunkers and corpses.”

In an odd turn of events, this bleak and hopeless novel became a publishing sensation about thirty years after its original publication. Dubbed “TheHandmaid’s Tale for Gen Z” by one critic, the book circulated on TikTok a little while after its 2022 republication and then quickly sold 100,000 copies! Some saw it as a COVID phenomenon—a dystopian novel about being locked in place with others and then freed into still more horrifying reality—reflecting the sense of both confinement and pessimism that colors our present. Others, explain the appeal of the book as deriving from its investigation into loneliness. Carmen Maria Machado, in The New Yorker, describes the book as being about “community, solitude and loneliness,” and she warns against looking for allegorical clarity in the novel. And yet, most commentators do search for meaning in a novel that has cautioned vigorously against such activity. Machado acknowledges as much in her conclusion when she comments: “The protagonist of I Who Have Never Known Men, I feel compelled to say, would hate this short essay. In the book’s dryly funny opening pages, she critiques the impulse of authors to explain, with a preface, the book that’s on its way, to give bashful context for something that she believes needs no context.” It is not just the context that the novel repudiates and refuses to supply, but also the meaning of the story and the potentiality that it might contain. 

Harpman, unlike so many dystopian writers, refrains from offering hope or solutions, outcomes, or resolutions. This book has no heroes, no triumph, no magnificent gestures, and no discoveries. The world it depicts is one that the prison system has produced—a world without people, without law, without life, hope, happiness, joy; it is a post-war world; and it is the one that Harpman inhabits. Harpman is trying to depict not the end of an oppressive world order but its continuation in the present, and she recognizes that what we call world is irredeemably contaminated. The ideological systems that conspired to create the bunker system in Harpman’s novel have turned all the world into a prison. The prison is not the system that keeps the world safe; it is the mechanism that depletes safety and opportunity for all. The women in the novel can find nothing in the space above ground because that space is the positive space that the negative space of the bunkers limned. Its positivity resides in its elimination of danger, predation, conflict for the men who rule. Until the unnamed world-ending event, it was a world full of men holding women in bunkers. Now it is a world of women without men but also without a world that they can recognize. The world into which they emerge from captivity is indeed not their world and their liberation therefore only means that they are no longer confined spatially. The only possible ending for the novel is the end of the narrator herself, who, having learned how to mercifully deliver death to all of her female comrades with a sharp knife to the heart, prepares to make this final cut onto her own body. The end of the narrator is the end of the world. Only by cutting herself out of the picture—since she is the final remnant of the world of prisons—can the unworld begin.

The Cut

The cut is the first and the last gesture in the process that we might call unworlding. But it is not a cut that awaits a suture. In Harpman’s novel, the cut is beyond repair. Repair implies restoration and a return to the way things were. But of course, as it was in 1945, a return to the way things were is a return to a world that depends absolutely upon systems of oppression, racial terror and heteronormative fantasies of reproduction, restitution, and replacement. The World Wars of the twentieth century were not interruptions to a glorious way of living; they were world-building enterprises that resulted in the harsh and violent realities of nation, capital and an imperial order that Harpman, and we, her readers, inherited. As we are all too aware of now, the end of World War II did not usher in a period of self-reflection about fascism and genocide. On the contrary, as so many historians have shown, the enemy of post-War Europe was immediately identified, by the Allies, as communism. And so, it was the Cold War and the fear of communism that dictated the form, shape and content of post-War European politics rather than an anti-liberal, anti-Fascist set of concepts and ideas. Fascism is a political ideology that, as Alberto Toscano has proposed recently, pre-exists its expression in mid-twentieth century extremism, and has possibly existed for longer than democracy. Toscano was hardly the first person to make such a claim. In 1936, Langston Hughes claimed: “Fascism is a new name for that kind of terror the Negro has always faced in America.” And in Discourse on Colonialism, Aimé Cesare insisted that fascism was a mode of racial terror that elicited no commentary from Europeans until it was turned against white populations. No one would or should call the early settler colonial states in North America or Brazil, in India or Latin America, democratic since regimes that depended on slavery and genocide could make no claims on freedom, justice or equality. Nonetheless, the political fictions about democracy and freedom have bolstered many an authoritarian regime (such as the USA today) and have justified covert and brutal interventions into socialist countries. Indeed, most attempts in the post-war period to build political systems around redistributive practices and non-exploitative economic systems (think of Allende’s Chile, Lumumba’s Democratic Republic of the Congo, Jacobo Arbenz’s Guatemala and so on) were quickly and violently dismantled by the USA. It is this post-war, post-socialist, post-utopian landscape that Harpman is asking us to explore, not in order to learn a lesson about how to avoid disaster, but rather to recognize that we are living it.

In I Who Have Never Known Men, the nameless narrator is stranded in the atopic space between helplessness and immutability. She has no recollection of a before-time that preceded her imprisonment and, when she gets out of the jail, she has no future to project onto the blank landscape that greets her. She has agency but no purpose; she has time and space and companionship but nothing to activate, no goal. The women without men, in other words, and contrary to earlier feminist utopias like The Wanderground by Sally Miller Gearhart or Herland by Charlotte Perkins Gilman or even The Lesbian Body by Monique Wittig, are women without world. They cannot reproduce; they cannot extend their line into the future; they are the remnants of only a world that required their complete domination. The emptiness of the novel, both geographically and metaphysically, represents the end of the world as the end of an imaginary, the end of a mode of being, the end of the versions of the human that depend upon binary gender, incarceration, domination. The end of the version of the human that projects world outward onto space only to possess everything and everyone within its bounds. 

Harpman then, is not describing an unworld so much as cutting free from the world that results in the harsh landscape where the freed women perish. Once we have recognized the endgame of our own “late fascist” present, we must unworld. Unworlding begins from the premise that utopian aspirations as we currently conceive of them can only proceed by way of world unmaking, such that concepts like the human, subject, object, animal, vegetative are tipped out of their hierarchical formations and disordered in meaning and in their relations to one another. This work is ongoing across many different projects—anthropologist Anna Tsing,for example, looks for “mutual worlds” and their “latent commons” by tracking the growth of the Matsutake mushroom in areas where humans have disturbed and damaged the environment. She then elaborates on “disturbance-based ecologies” and proposes that we become more curious about forms of “collaborative survival.” In this gorgeous ethnography of matsutake mushrooms, The Mushroom at the End of the World, she follows the life cycles of the mushrooms and the human pickers that depend upon these fungal forms to make a living. Describing in dense detail the commodity chains within which these mushrooms appear alongside the vegetal disturbances that they create, Anna Tsing offers a new way of knowing worlds. Braiding a methodology out of healthy doses of curiosity, Tsing encourages readers to explore alternative modes of being and knowing without needing to understand everything. She writes: “If we open ourselves to fungal attractions, matsutake can catapult us into the curiosity that seems to me the first requirement of collaborative survival in precarious times.” For Tsing and others, entanglement rather than strict and orderly separation offers ways around the traps of “humanization” and allows for “unruly edges,” in Tsing’s words, and modes of “collaborative survival.”  

And in science fiction, N.K. Jemisin, in her Broken Earth series, imagines not simply a new landscape of being and doing but also the break-up of old ways of seeing and being. Her work offers imaginative scope to the work of unworlding by representing earth as an actor in unworlding—a force seeking to throw humans off its surface. In return, humans must try to make peace with the earth and live in the shadow of its unpredictable violence. In the first book, The Fifth Season, as one reviewer in the NYT put it: “the world is ending… and yet that is not such a bad thing because the world is the enemy of the story.” The world is the enemy—in which case, only unworlding can offer an exit route. In Jemisin’s series, the society of the Stillness is broken up into different communities or comms, and human communities are regularly destroyed by earthquakes and chasms that open up on the earth’s surface. Different species fight for survival in different ways. Some, the Orogenes, can control the earth’s movements and destroy humans. Others, the Geomests, are scientists looking for chemical ways out and still others are Stone Eaters who eat rock and are living statues with special powers. Like Ursula LeGuin and Samuel R. Delany, N. K. Jemisin offers experimental takes on race, class, gender and sexuality and scrambles kinship and affinities in the process. But what remains constant throughout the series is the notion of world-breaking, ground-breaking, unworlding and all of it is offered without endless explanation. Jemisin gives us an entire world that is in the process of gradual and cataclysmic collapse. 

In all examples of unworlding, intellectual as well as cultural and aesthetic—Tsing’s mushrooms that emerge out of the effects of human-wreaked devastation, Jemisin’s earth breakers, Harpman’s lonely landscapes of finality —the work tries to answer the question: how do we end the world? This is not a frivolous inquiry, nor an apocalyptic vision; it is a real and urgent inquiry into transformation. 

And the end of the human world, in many places, is already here. In a beautiful meditation on the fates of places abandoned by humans in the wake of ecological or environmental or political or economic disaster, Scottish journalist Cal Flynn proposes: “We are in the midst of a huge, self-directed experiment in rewilding. Because abandonment is rewilding, in a very pure sense, as humans draw back and nature reclaims what was once hers. It has been taking place—is currently taking place—on a grand scale, while no one has been watching”. And while Flynn calls this process “an extremely exciting prospect,” she in no way wants to romanticize or indulge in rhapsodies “upon the allure of the untouched”. Instead, the book is clear about the disasters that have created such spaces and unsure about the direction such unraveling might take. Some of these sites Flynn visits are associated with catastrophic events, like the Chernobyl nuclear reactor disaster, and others, have become no-man’s lands, as in the buffer zone in Cyprus, between two disputed territories. Still other sites are associated with colonial ruination and interference —Amani, Tanzania—or with isolation. One chapter explores Swona, Scotland, an island off the North coast of Scotland where the last human inhabitants of the island died in the 1980’s leaving it to feral cattle. Some of the sites that Flyn explores are wild in the sense of thoroughly undomesticated, others constitute what Flynn calls “enclaves of wildness in a sea of tarmac and brick.”

I am not arguing here for abandonment, any more than Flynn is, but abandoned places, the wild and unpeopled sites of animal and vegetal riot, remind us, just as the visions of violent unworlding from utopian and dystopian fiction do, that humans mostly do not make the world a better place. Unworlding proposes that we cannot remake, sculpt or reimagine the world. This world—the ideologies and orders of being and economic structures that shape and support human life—depends absolutely upon imprisonment and exploitation but also upon more positive inducements to living such as the promise of ownership, endless hymns to liberty, and continuity, which is delivered by way of methods of memorialization, family systems that pass on corrupt modes of intimacy, philosophical traditions crafted to justify slavery and male domination, and architectures that wed power to wealth and both to the heroic figure of the architect. All that remains to us, the survivors who have never known anything but world and capital, violence and exploitation, is to unbuild the world.