Finally, we may not be relying on the hypothetical passage of legislation to defend the resolution, but our method is actually capable of making change within a system that is modeled to exclude women from the academic sphere.

If only we could just balance the negativity and the melancholia—it can be ‘and/and’ rather than ‘either/or’—with a dose of feminist relational ethics. Admittedly, that’d be sobering, like a vaccination or an immunity shot, and probably unwelcome, but it would be what we call critical theory as a clinical practice, detoxing us from negativity. We have to keep in mind that, as academics, we are civil servants balancing potestas—managing what we have—with potentia—inspiring what’s possible. That’s the balance everyone has to find for themselves, rather than sink into a listless depression. There is a job to be done here to inject a visionary, imaginative but not utopian energy into the world with words, texts, concepts, festivals and public engagements. We need to send out counter-codes. My Deleuze seminar this year is on fascism, and I pointed out to the students that not one of them had asked me why I had chosen that topic. They laughed, which was an example of Nietzsche’s tragic laughter. It was just too self-evident. We hope to generate work on micro-fascisms, and we’ve already managed to get people activated. The seminar works as a transformative switch to give students and teachers alike a purpose and a sense of what is possible. We cultivate together an affirmative, transformative ethics, so that it can get injected as an antidote and self-implemented in the world, in response to the successive attempts at devastation. A nomadic approach demands a great effort of self-analysis, especially when it encounters feminism, which emphasizes the politics of location and immanence. You have to start from where you are at and acknowledge that you’re part of the problem, and then read the situation from there to become part of the solution. The left thinks this feminist politics of locations is cultural and not political, because for them politics is the dialectics of negativity. Too bad that the Marxist subject is still a transcendental entity that coincides with rational consciousness—a subject that knows exactly where history is going, waiting for the revolutionary break. That is completely different from what we’re saying in nomad thought. We first need to compose a subject, a missing ‘we’. That’s why critical Spinozism, read with Deleuze, goes so well with nomadic feminism, with consciousness-raising and with understanding that all ethics is relational and the personal is political. Brexit is personal. It impeaches movement at an ideological and physical level, so we need to start from there and not from the fog of inadequate understanding. It’s all there in Spinoza—and in George Eliot!