File spoon-archives/lyotard.archive/lyotard_2002/lyotard.0211, message 77


From: steve.devos-AT-krokodile.co.uk
Date: Thu, 21 Nov 2002 16:17:58 -0000 (GMT)
Subject: =?iso-8859-1?Q?Re:_more_on_subjectification?=


Lydia

A necessarily brief note as I'm under severe time pressure today.

Yes - I agree, actually with both you and Badiou. However my issue is as I 
hope is getting clearer that in some sense we - that is people on the left 
of spectrum - need to be able to construct a radical 'political subject' in 
the same sense that has always existed for the right. In this sense I agree 
with Hardt, and misquote(the frailty of memory), when he said at a meeting 
that I attended '...the left has lacked Utopian dreams and part of our 
intent was to produce one...' Such a statement requires a universal 
element. Which incidentally feminism has always contained. But opf 
necessity - at least in the European field - the feminist construct 
of 'woman' is in no sense, necessarily a left category, feminists as 
fascists have been in easy supply. 'Woman' as such is an entirely seperate 
issue. 

So of course I agree with Badiou - (would not have written it in that way 
if I did not) but recognise that they are seperate and equally necessary 
struggles. Unlike say the ill-fated PIE excahnge which plainly was a 
fascist always to be oppressive direction.

Bensaid quotes Marguerite Duras (one of my favorite novelists who when 
asked what should be done said '...resurrect the class struggle...'

But equally I agree with the below.

regards
steve
> Steve,
> 
> For "women", it seems, there is no home.  On one side there are 
> poststructuralist men eager to dissolve binary differences, including
> the  sexual one, into a joyous explosion of multiplicities that escape
> permanent  signification.  On the other, there are theorists like
> Badiou who dismiss  gender as a poor stand-in for the universal (though
> proletariat fares  somewhat better, I'd assume?); and like Zizek, who
> argues that to identify  with the idea Woman means to identify with the
> ultimate male chauvinist  fantasy.
> 
> Rosi Braidotti is correct, "women have always been postmodern." 
> Solitary  stutterers, instead of creators of traditions; fear of
> authorship instead of  anxiety of influence.  Not-just-yet-it,
> almost-consistent, deterritorialized  pseudo-subjectivity.  Women are
> bad citizens of philosophy today, as they  have been bad citizens of
> states from times immemorial.
> 
> As Drucilla Cornell shows, thinkers whose primary political/
> philosophical  concern is to get rid of oppressive femaleness that
> confined individual  women for too long, may end up perpetuating
> misogyny. It is from within the  sexual difference that we must start
> the very deconstruction of sexual  difference.  It is in this
> double-bind that women negotiate every hour of  the day.
> 
> But that is not of interest to Badiou.
> 
> In an essay on Woolf's 'A Room of One's Own' and Homer's Penelope,
> Peggy  Kamuf writes about the role of interruption in women's
> coming-into-subjects.  'A Room' is "a book that, like a woman's
> thought, a woman's body, is  frequently broken in upon. And broken
> off." She cites Woolf: "the book has  somehow to be adapted to the
> body, and at a venture one would say that  women's books should be
> shorter, more concentrated than those of men, and  framed so that they
> do not need long hours of steady uninterrupted work. For  interruptions
> there will always be."
> 
> And misrecognitions.  And injurious names.  And simple neglect -- the 
> madwoman at the attic will often have to be unattended to and left to
> her  own ghostly devices.
> 
> So let us try to understand that for her, it will always be about
> identity.   It always has.
> 
> L.
> 
> _________________________________________________________________
> Protect your PC - get McAfee.com VirusScan Online 
> http://clinic.mcafee.com/clinic/ibuy/campaign.asp?cid=3963



   

Driftline Main Page

 

Display software: ArchTracker © Malgosia Askanas, 2000-2005