“Imprisoned within a limited, false set of concepts”: Posthuman Absoluteness and Relativity in Lawrence’s Women in Love1

Anyone who has seriously engaged with D. H. Lawrence's Women in Love has probably at some point been frustrated by its many inconsistencies. The characters repeatedly change their minds about and their attitudes towards different questions, while the text is often ambivalent about the meaning of its key words. Rather than pure relativism, this can however be seen as a dissatisfaction with the logocentric, dichotomous restrictions of human language—what Birkin calls an "[i]mprison[ment] within a limited, false set of concepts." I here analyze how Women in Love simultaneously stages absolute opposition and an intertwined relation between the concept of the animal and that of the human, which parallels the relation between the absolute and the relative. The posthumanist perspective thus reveals the novel's inconsistencies to be an active dismantling of anthropocentric preconceptions whose foundation is in human language, constructed as a system of absolutes that are defined in relation to each other. The contradictions are thus the result of the limitations of language, which steers human thought into dichotomies. By refusing to align itself with the humanist principles of coherence and consistency, the text uses words against themselves, thus rejecting logocentric ideals.