File spoon-archives/french-feminism.archive/french-feminism_2000/french-feminism.0008, message 26


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/




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