From: "D. Diane Davis" <d-davis-AT-uiowa.edu> Subject: RE: Forgetting of Air Date: Mon, 28 Aug 2000 06:05:53 -0500 Thanks for the wonderful post, simone. Lots to think about in there and, as you suggest, to critique and talk about. Since you've got me all jazzed up this morning, I'll jump in here before I prep for classes. You ask: "Wouldn't really asking the question of Being be to ask the question of sexual difference, which Heidegger does not do?" And in response to that question, let me pose another question-to you, but also to the list: --When it comes down to it, isn't really asking The Question of Being (definitively) the problem (that leads to exclusion/excretion) in the first place? Might a better question be how to *avoid* thinking The Question of Being? Or perhaps, how to move that question (which issues forth from the registers of immanence) into the arena of finitude, of originary non-belonging, of Being-not-One? Jean-Luc Nancy defines finitude as the infinite lack of an infinite identity; it's not the opposite of infinity but what absorbs infinity. Beginning with the trope of immanence, one asks the questions of Being and difference. In contradistinction, beginning with the trope of finitude (a kind of counter-troping trope), one asks the questions of becoming and differance. And from there even the question of sexual difference (an immanence question, par excellence) becomes a question of sexual differance. The distinction b/w Irigraray and Cixous's thought comes mostly down to this, I think: irigaray thinks being and difference; cixous thinks becoming and differance. From the perspective of finitude, multiplicity can neither be reduced to the (one masculine) One *nor* to Irigaray's (still too phallological for me) two. Multiplicity would require an encounter among radical singularities perpetually be-com-ing. I think, to be fair, we also should acknowledge that heidegger did offer a rethinking of the relation as primordial, as preceding the cogito. That is, though he couldn't really stick with it or tease it through carefully enough, heidegger did describe finite being as always already with-others. He posed an originary community, noting that there was no being that was not already being-with (the "with" was not a supplement to being but rather was *constitutive* of being). And that did crack what had been some fairly impenetrable philosophical ground. Still, having stumbled upon this originary community, heidegger let it go all too quickly; being obsessed with his question, The Question, and possibly also being a "philosophical redneck," as Avital Ronell has suggested, heidegger had to get on with the program/pogrom, get back on the track of Being, and in the process, he let the Other go. But: Is there any way to ask, which is also to *answer,* the question of Being without taking out the other? And by the other, I also mean that (finitude) which would not be thinkable, which would get the squeeze, even within the confines of Irigaray's "two." Gotta prep. Thanks again, Simone. --ddd ______________________ D. Diane Davis Rhetoric Department University of Iowa Iowa City, IA 52242 319.335.0184 d-davis-AT-uiowa.edu http://www.uiowa.edu/~ddrhet/ --- from list french-feminism-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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