Annu Dahiya, PhD

The Conditions of Emergence: Towards a Feminist Philosophy of the Origins of Life 

The Conditions of Emergence: Towards A Feminist Philosophy of the Origins of Life argues that a phallocentric scientific and theoretical framework is incapable of addressing the emergence of life out of matter on Earth. A phallocentric theory of the origin of life posits a vertical hierarchy between life and matter and understands them as fundamentally opposite to each other. In creating a division between matter and life, phallocentric approaches to the origins of life create a dilemma for themselves of needing to pinpoint exactly when life emerges, in other words answering exactly when “inanimate” matter is animated or penetrated with a logos of life. 

The Conditions of Emergence argues that there is a philosophical alliance between transcontinental feminist theory and contemporary origins of life research. My project crafts a dark feminine philosophy of life rooted in black feminist thought, twentieth-century continental philosophies of science, and origins research that suggests cellular life may have first emerged in deep-sea vents. Building on the feminist science studies tradition of examining the relation between metaphor and science, The Conditions of Emergence studies how certain strands of origins of life research are beginning to question whether scientific work rooted in metaphors of light, energetic stasis, and autonomous self-birth can attend to the question of how cellular life first emerged from matter somewhere between 3.8 and 4.2 billion years ago. In lieu of this, origin of theories concentrating on deep-sea vents re-embed life’s cellular beginnings within a geochemically volatile ancient Earth through metaphors of darkness (rather than light) and gestational birth in inorganic wombs (rather than within narratives where a cellular body brings itself into being). I argue that a dark proto-intrauterine space that is bioenergetically never at rest and rooted within the geochemical forces of the Earth makes, perhaps for the first time, the question of how life emerged a conceptual possibility within both scientific research and a philosophy of life that is not antiblack and phallocentric. 

Ultimately, I contend that metaphors associated with the dark feminine, when explored and used in scientific models, bring us closer to being able to theoretically understand the scientific question of how cellular life first emerged out of matter. An antiblack phallocentric theory of the origin of life posits a vertical hierarchy between life and matter and understands them as fundamentally opposite to each other. Moreover, such a theory is unable to address darkness and matter as a generative space that gives form to life. In creating a division between matter and life, antiblack phallocentric approaches to the origins of life create a dilemma of needing to pinpoint exactly when life emerges, in other words answering exactly when “inanimate” matter is animated or penetrated with a logos of life. Across three chapters, I engulf key debates in origins of life studies—the evolution of metabolism, the invention of the first cellular membranes, and the birth and role of genetics—in a dark, far-from-equilibrium fluid milieu that creates the possibility for their emergence.