From: "Lydia Perovich" <fauxprophete-AT-hotmail.com>
Subject: Re: Double-binded at birth
Date: Sat, 23 Nov 2002 21:58:33 -0400


Thanks everyone for bringing back Lyotard into discussion, and Hugh for that 
kewl reference that I wasn't aware of.  [It was the turn of my prepositions 
to join the Axis of Evil in my last message: it is the madwoman that is IN 
the attic (sorry Gilbert and Gubar!), not AT the attic, grrrr...]

Ah, seems like Eric introduced Spinoza through the back door, and I am happy 
about it!  But since I read *Ethics* when I was too young to appreciate it 
properly, I have just a question for starters.  I am aware that there is a 
lot of writing going on currently on the topic of Spinoza as "a Deleuze 
avant la lettre", radical thinker of embodiment, etc...  Anyone been reading 
anything of that sort recently?  (I know that H&N write a lot about Spinoza, 
but I am interested in this particular aspect, body, universality, sexual 
difference?)

L.

[As an aside, re: difference sexuelle, difference ontologique.  As you're 
probably aware Eric, there's a famous Derrida essay on Heidegger by that 
title, and Lyotard was probably referring to it indirectly.  (Where is "Can 
Thought Go On Without a Body" published?  I'd love to read it.)  I have only 
second-hand knowledge of DSDO essay (it's impossible to find it, what 
collection is it in?  If Geschlecht I, has it been translated into 
English?), through references from other articles, esp. from Rorty.

I take it that Derrida in that old writing shows that in many of the 
perennial philosophical questions and nomenclatures, sexual difference 
figures in a certain way. Sometimes the metaphors of femininity and female 
sex are inextricably linked to some other metaphors or philosophical items 
(to use simple examples of aristotelian oldness: passivity as opposed to 
activity; potentiality - activity; inertness of space in/on which Demiurgos 
acts; or, mess and multitude of particularity as opposed to the Idea, and so 
on.) The philosophemes thusly merged would assume a metaphysically debased 
status. And, of course, the exclusion of a debased, (always already) 
gendered item is a sine qua non of all universalizing: it is what is 
expelled in order for universality to be able to, ha, take place.

Or for the modernes, the distinction speculative/practical/aesthetic carried 
its gendered baggage. The irreconcilability between 'ought' and 'is', 'fact' 
and 'value' and the transcendental/empirical doublet too.

Here's Rorty in 'Feminism, Ideology, and Deconstruction: A Pragmatist View' 
on male homo-social affair that is philosophy: "...Derrida's most original 
and important contribution to philosophy is his weaving together of Freud 
and Heidegger, his association of "ontological difference" with gender 
difference. This weaving together enables us to see for the first time the 
connection between the philosophers' quest for purity, the view that women 
are somehow impure, the subordination of women, and "virile homosexuality" 
(the kind of male homosexuality that Eve Sedgwick calls 
"homo-homosexuality", epitomized in Jean Genet's claim that "the man who 
fucks another man is twice a man"). Compared to this insight (which is most 
convincingly put forward in Derrida’s Geschlecht I), the grab bag of easily 
reproduced gimmicks labeled "deconstruction" seems to me relatively 
unimportant."

Irigaray has written quite a lot and often angrily about the canon though 
the prism of sexual difference.  But I beg those who are more knowledgeable 
in this to say something.  I, for my part, recommend the interview of Judith 
Butler and Drucilla Cornell that Pheng Cheah and Elizabeth Grosz did for the 
special Diacritics issue (Spring 1998)dedicated to Irigaray.  Butler starts 
like this:

"I think that probably early on, when I started working on French feminism 
as a graduate student in the early '80s, I was not interested in her at all 
because she seemed to me to be an essentialist and that was a term we used 
quite easily then, when we thought we knew what it meant. In the late '80s, 
I started to rethink my objections to her on that basis and found that she 
was, among the feminist theorists I had read, perhaps the most versed in 
philosophy and that her engagement with philosophy was a curious mixture of 
both loyalty and aggression. And it became very interesting to me when I 
started thinking about her whole practice of critical mimesis--what she was 
doing when she was reading Freud, what was she doing when she was reading 
Plato--and I read Speculum again and again, frightened by its anger, 
compelled by the closeness of the reading, confused by the mimetism of the 
text. Was she enslaved to these texts, was she displacing them radically, 
was she perhaps in the bind of being in both positions at the same time? And 
I realized that whatever the feminine was for her, it was not a substance, 
not a spiritual reality that might be isolated, but it had something to do 
with this strange practice of reading, one in which she was reading texts 
that she was not authorized to read, texts from which she was as a woman 
explicitly excluded or explicitly demeaned, and that she would read them 
anyway. And then the question is: what would it mean to read from a position 
of radical deauthorization in order to expose the contingent authority of 
the text? That struck me as a feminist critical practice, a critical reading 
practice that I could learn from, and from that point on, highly influenced 
by both Drucilla's work and Naomi Schor's work [see Schor], I started to 
read her quite thoroughly..."]

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