Date: Mon, 13 May 1996 17:47:49 +0100 (BST)
From: Stokely Webster <aw19-AT-st-andrews.ac.uk>
Subject: Reading groups



How surprised and pleased I am by the enthusiasm for a virtual reading 
group.  Unfortunately, the two I had been discussing (Women Reading 
Women's Theory/ Post-structuralist A-gender) are all too in the flesh.  
Readings normally bost between 4 and about 10.
However, I have been inundated with requests to participate in these 
groups.  I am sure others of you have more experience than I on how to 
organize such a thing.  As is, I can notify everyone of the text in 
question, the bibliographical details, &c. and can give the minutes or 
general group consensus or lack thereof from our in the flesh readings.  
I do not know how satisfying that would be.  Or how happily the 
french-feminism group that this is would take to having precisely half 
the writers under discussion being male (even though the issue of sexual/ 
gender difference is mostly explicit).  As Danny (was it) pointed out, 
the male continental thinkers all have a page to themselves already.  
Perhaps what we need then is a comparative page?  This leaving scope for 
us to bring in film/media, post-colonialism, any other disciplines which 
gain from the insights of french-feminism ... 

For the record, Friday the 17th May we will be reading Irigary's 
"Fecundity of the Caress" _Ethics of Sexual Difference_ in the light of 
Levinas' "Time and the Other" _Levinas Reader_.  One male has 
already commented to me that it is not like philosophy at all but 
religious mysticism.
Actually, what interests me is the relation between "Fecundity" and 
"Questions for Emmanuel Levinas", Irigaray's two responses to the same 
text.  I was hoping to go armed with both texts by way of fending off 
some of the responses to Irigaray.

??????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????
How can the ego become other than itself? This can happen only in one 
way: through paternity.
Paternity is the relationship with a stranger who, entirely while being 
Other, is myself, the relationship of the ego with a myself who is none 
the less a stranger to me.  The son, in effect, is not simply my work, 
like a poem or an artifact, neither is he my property [....] I _am_ in 
some way my child.

-Levinas, "Time and the other"

I am the Opoponax.

-Wittig
			Stokely Webster 
			aw19-AT-st-andrews.ac.uk
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