Water Contamination and the Thought of Futurity: Subterranean Flows from the Ground Zero of Bhopal

In this paper, Spiegel explores the powerful campaign for justice led by women in Bhopal, India. When a valve broke in the American-owned Union Carbide factory in 1984, forty tons of methyl isocyanate were released, killing thousands on the spot. Meanwhile, as early as 1976, run-off from the factory had begun slowly leaching into the ground water. Nearly three decades later chemicals continue to leak from the abandoned factory site. It is feared that this spread of contamination is linked to increasing rates of congenital malformations in those born in affected areas as well as elevated rates of disease, bearing upon the potential futures of the living.

To help us think these overflows and their futurity, Spiegel directs us to an essay on “Planetarity,” by Gayatri Spivak, where the nuances of textual configurations of the uncanny earth/home are explored via Luce Irigaray’s famous feminist reading of the cave as a womb that participates unacknowledged in the very thought that it births. Spiegel posits Spivak’s notion of planetarity against a totalizing notion of the Earth as a singular global image that would universalize flows according to the logic of capital. Thinking with the contamination of ground water, Spiegel thus re-reads the cave/womb as a site through which uncanny and multiple re-articulations of the future flow, destabilizing the ground of thought and re-inventing futurity. Invisible, the flow of contaminated ground water spreads from the abandoned pesticide factory of a multi-national conglomerate, transmuting future bodies, leaching into the flesh, blood and wombs of its consumers. Following the subterranean flows of ground water contamination, the specters of feminine fluids and the uncanny womb again resurface in the form of an international environmental justice movement.