{"id":1415,"date":"2017-03-09T11:10:16","date_gmt":"2017-03-09T16:10:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/nietzsche1313\/?p=1415"},"modified":"2017-03-10T09:40:50","modified_gmt":"2017-03-10T14:40:50","slug":"gayatri-chakravorty-spivak-nietzschederrida","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/nietzsche1313\/gayatri-chakravorty-spivak-nietzschederrida\/","title":{"rendered":"Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak | NIETZSCHE\/derrida"},"content":{"rendered":"

N<\/strong>IETZSCHE\/derrida BLOG<\/h1>\n

By Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

Spurs<\/em> is about gender. The Grammatology<\/em> pages I will ask you to look at are about Heidegger and Nietzsche.\u00a0 Derrida was critical of Heidegger around gender, as his material on Geschlecht<\/em> shows.\u00a0 Derrida argues that sexual difference is before propriation.\u00a0 If you have the time, read a novel by Christine Brooke-Rose called Life, End of.<\/em> I have included below a paper I wrote on it, “Old Women,” which relates to what I will say about Nietzsche on gender, as also pages 40-41 of the Loeb classical edition of Clement of Alexandria (Demeter and Baubo<\/a>).\u00a0 I am also attaching \u201cDisplacement and the Discourse of Woman<\/a>,” a piece I probably wrote in 1979.<\/p>\n

Heidegger in Early Greek Thinking<\/em> (p. 104-5) wrote that Clement suggested that the best in Greek philosophy was already inscribed with the spirit of Christianity and therefore we ought to discard what Kant called the secondary tasks or Nebengesch\u00e4fte <\/em>\u2013 such as Baubo worship — the denigration of women.\u00a0\u00a0 Peculiarly enough, Nietzsche blocks the idea of the Greeks being more okay than the Christians by simply reversing this statement in Clement about old woman’s genitals [Loeb classical 40-41]. And research shows that his source for this is not at all definitive. When the current apologists for Christian Leninism suggest that Christianity is in its spirit self-deconstructive, they belong to a way of thinking that Derrida in his \u201cTwo Sources of Religion\u201d tried to undo, by suggesting that the secondary tasks are not just secondary, but also one of the primary sources of religion.\u00a0\u00a0 Incidentally, this is quite useful for our global historical moment, not just Euro-U.S. turf-battles.<\/p>\n

Circumfessions<\/em> \u2013 the running footnote (as it were) to Geoffrey Bennington\u2019s Jacques Derrida — <\/em>takes the idea from Nietzsche of mother\/blood::father\/name and therefore, I cannot mourn my mother. The Ear of the Other<\/em> broaches the idea.\u00a0 I wrote a piece involving Circumfessions<\/em> in the early nineties that I attach as well, Three Women’s Texts and Circumfession<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Is writing like \u201cwriting\u201d \u2013 Derrida\u2019s early description of the other way of recognizing Nietzsche \u2013 something like writing from a self-consciously contingent epistemological position?\u00a0 Is it what Brooke-Rose and Adrienne Rich (I am forever thinking of \u201cWhat Women Need to Know,\u201d an unpopular commencement address given by Rich at Smith College in 1979 to be found in a volume called Blood, Sweat, and Poetry<\/em>) teach those of us feminists who have also taken on the task of the passing on of legitimacy and the holding of property in other words also complicit with what the phallocentric world wants plus what we have secured, which seems aporetic if we are not to resemble New Age fathers. Here I want to compare my trajectory with Hortense Spiller\u2019s.<\/p>\n

The Nietzsche we need now is \u201cTruth and Lie in An Extra-Moral Sense\u201d \u2013\u00a0 \u2013 we need the ability to flex to the extra-moral sense \u2013 aporetic now with complicity \u2013 and not to forget, at the same time remembering that it is not only the originarity of metaphor that we must think, as in Nietzsche; the concept is also important; this is where Derrida distinguishes his own idea of diffferance from Nietzsche\u2019s, in those Grammatology<\/em> pages and again in \u201cWhite Mythology.\u201d And I want to correct myself because my piece called “Supplementing Marxism” (Steven Cullenberg and Bernd Magnus, eds. Whither Marxism?<\/em> (New York: Routledge, 1995, p. 109-119) does not recognize this.<\/p>\n

Experience moves Spillers and me from mothers to gender-inclusiveness \u2013 and this should not be dismissed as “liberal biopolitics.”\u00a0 This can come from the us Baubos if there is an effort to subl(im)ate the fear (I may tell you a story \u2013 I keep forgetting it is only 15 min.s \u2013 about kamini kanchan<\/em>).<\/p>\n

OLD WOMEN<\/h1>\n

\u201cThe body [staggers and lurches] unless contact is made through headtop hand finger thigh calf with the ground the earth the planet the galaxy the universe. But then the universal is what is wrong with humanity.\u201d\u00a0 This is a sentence from Life, End of<\/em>, a novel by Christine Brooke-Rose, an old woman at the time of publication, 83 years of age.[i]<\/strong><\/em><\/a>\u00a0 The body is being represented as perceived by the protagonist: as part objects.\u00a0 Touching the earth is being represented, as perceived by the protagonist, in terms of what we are obliged to call the objectivity of the body, through which, by the simple fact of being on the ground, we are part of the universe.\u00a0 When we speak of the universal<\/em> by an act of mind, we create the problems that this audience knows only too well.\u00a0 This is not an un gendered passage.\u00a0 The novel is often described as an autobiography.\u00a0 Throughout this slim book it is very clear that it is a female literary critic who is represented as attempting to come to grips with the pain in a female literary intellectual’s way:<\/p>\n

No, it’s an imbalance from the brain\u2019s wrong messages to the inside of the feet and legs, their nerve fibers slowly withering and reversing their tasks, so that where there should be feeling there isn’t and vice versa . . . ..\u00a0 The legs now burn permanently, hot charcoal on the feet creeping up the shins and knees and growing tall, two burning bushes, two pillars of fire for frail support.\u00a0 At every step they flinch wince jerk shirk lapse collapse give way stagger like language when it can\u2019t present the exact word needed, . . . . Thalamus means inner chamber, or cavity, or the receptacle of a flower, a ventricle in the brain, and so surely, a cerebral womb.\u00a0 Yet like a phallus it takes over the medulla’s transmission from the spinal cord to the cerebellum, still in the hindbrain, and sends it all to the cerebrum, the top brain, that convoluted glory as developed in the higher mammals and more especially human.\u00a0 At any rate this gland is where Descartes places the soul, thus putting de cart before dehors (BR 8-10).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This is mind over matter, the intellectual’s trick to bring things under control.\u00a0 While she is trying to assert when\u00a0\u00a0 matter there, she cannot help but do what the last phrase I have quoted says — she cannot help but bring de cart before the horse. “De cart”\u00a0\u00a0 sounds like the French philosopher Descartes.\u00a0 And “dehors” is the French word for outside.\u00a0 Read in English, the untranslatable phrase becomes “putting the cart before the horse,” Descartes before the outside, mind before matter even as she tries to control her pain by understanding it as matter, over mind.\u00a0 A double bind.<\/p>\n

In 1976, before producing a robust account of the politics of reading, Derrida had attempted to reverse\/displace Nietzsche\u2019s writing as \u201cthe feminine \u2018operation,\u2019 as have others after him.\u00a0\u00a0 I have my problems with this, but I will quote the passage, for it gives the topos:<\/p>\n

I fear that women who have grown old are more skeptical in the secret recesses of their hearts than any of the men; they believe in the superficiality of existence as in its essence, and all virtue and profundity is to them only the disguising of this \u2018truth\u2019, the very desirable disguising of a pudendum<\/em> \u2013 an affair, therefore, of decency and modesty, and nothing more![ii]<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The more famous Nietzsche passage is also quoted by Derrida: \u201cPerhaps truth is a woman who has reasons for not letting us see her reasons? Perhaps her name is – to speak Greek – Baubo<\/a><\/em>?\u201d[iii]<\/a><\/p>\n

On the track of Baubo we will encounter many fascinating Euro-classical complications that we cannot pursue here.\u00a0 It is quite possible that Nietzsche finds this staging of truth more attractive than uncritical rational speculation.\u00a0 Without falling into the famous intentional fallacy, we can submit that this staging of truth as disguised post-reproductive female genitals carries a tone of fear and derision quite unlike the tone of the celebration of a Zarathustra figure.\u00a0 To see how this position, critical of the honorary male confidence in uncritical speculative reason, can be staged another way,<\/p>\n

Tillie Olsen is perhaps the most apposite author; for in her novella \u00a0Tell Me A Riddle<\/em> she takes a Rosa Luxemburg figure, a woman who had participated in the 1905 Revolution in Russia, and then gone the path of marriage, and migration to the United States. It is as if the Rose, grown old in a more \u201cnormal\u201d trajectory, shows us the violence of reproductive heteronormativity, expectations from a grandmother who must not care about humanity, but only about grandchildren \u2013 the sheer, unremarkable, violence of the everyday, a gendered everyday, that unhinges the mind by a commonplace denial to the public sphere.[iv]<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0 Her faith in progress, in a double bind with individual death, is not groundless because suspended from a metaphor, and should be understood in terms of the double bind of a gendered violence that also spells love and social reproduction.\u00a0 As the protagonist moves toward death, Olsen weaves passages, sometimes dreamlike that lay out this conflict poignantly. She is scolded because she has scared her son-in-law the rabbi, \u201cHanna\u2019s Phil,\u201d \u201cAt once go and make them change. Tell them to write: Race, human; Religion, none.\u201d And the husband\u2019s response, \u201c Look how you have upset yourself, Mrs. Excited Over Nothing\u201d (TO 60). The killing cancer described as \u201cbeing able at last to live within, and not move to the rhythms of others,<\/em> as life had forced<\/em> [emphasis mine]\u00a0 her to: denying; removing; isolating; taking the children one by one; then deafening, half-blinding \u2013 and, at last, presenting her solitude\u2026.. Now he was violating<\/em> [emphasis mine] it with his constant campaigning: sell the house and move to the Haven\u201d (TO 68-69). \u201chunger; secret meetings; human rights; spies; betrayal; prison; escape<\/em> \u2013 interrupted by one of the grandchildren\u201d (TO 95).\u00a0 \u201cHer\u00a0 breath was too faint for sustained speech now, but the lips moved: \u2026 As a human being\u00a0\u00a0 responsibility<\/em>\u201d (TO 105).\u00a0\u00a0 \u201cDogma dead\u00a0\u00a0 war dead\u00a0\u00a0 one country<\/em>\u201d (TO 109).<\/p>\n

In 1994, in Politics of Friendship,<\/em> Derrida makes the useful comment that European political philosophy has allowed woman entry as “honorary males.”\u00a0 I am suggesting that becoming an academic, like becoming a nun in the European Middle Ages, was one way of becoming an honorary male if one could afford to ignore these kinds of questions, in public, having access to a certain kind of public voice. On a less sublime register than Derrida\u2019s honorary male, I might add here that the injunction to be unisex in the academy \u2013 in spite of the small gains of Womens Studies and Queer Studies\u2013 has not disappeared.\u00a0 In the usual everyday sexism of academic conversation I think of Rosa Luxemburg, a writer of books that changed left thinking all over the world, she did not make the grade because no institution protected her.\u00a0 The final abuse from those who killed her was the usual gendered words floating up: not a political opponent, but a \u201cwhore,\u201d a \u201cslut.\u201d\u00a0 Even as we speak of feminist work, we bracket much so that we can just simply present the ideas \u2013 as if they were just content — in a philosophical vacuum.<\/p>\n

Here is Brooke-Rose’s representation of another old woman\u2019s wisdom, not a frightening Baubo, but another kind of gendered voice that would domesticate socio-philosophical rationality in terms of the aging head:\u00a0 \u201cthere is now\u00a0 a fourth revival of Nietzsche in Europe. Who says, somewhere in The Genealogy of<\/em> Morals<\/em>, we must stop trying to change the world. Why? Forgotten\u201d (BR 72).<\/p>\n

The protagonist of Brooke-Rose\u2019s novel is a dying woman, as is Tillie Olsen’s, but she has been an academic, although she notes early on in the book, that a medical doctor \u201chas her rank to rest on, in a way a doctor in mere Language and Literature does not\u201d (BR 15), a sentiment I feel with social scientists and philosophers.<\/p>\n

The fact that this female protagonist has been an academic is as important for this book as it is for Coetzee\u2019s Elizabeth Costello.\u00a0 She can think public subjects without anguish: \u201cA sneaking suspicion arises: aid is given but in such a way as never to solve anything.\u00a0 Could this shabby treatment be forethought, to kill off tiresome over-population? . . . The crude process of cheating on the people is inexorable?\u00a0 Well, exore it.\u00a0 Do the young think?\u00a0 They now have nothing to complain of.\u00a0 Is that a complaint?\u00a0 Who\u2019s talking?\u00a0 To whom?\u201d (BR 30, 31).<\/p>\n

And so she goes, careening between world and self, objective and subjective, dehors and de cart.\u00a0 If early on the cart had been\u00a0 put before the horse, mind before matter, even if in a double bind, now at the end the dying female academic writes \u201cof that scrambled ego, because of the wholly captivating groundless ground, the extenuated earth the untrue world the ominous planet the hazy galaxy the lying universe.\u00a0 Dehors before de cart, after all\u201d(BR 119) \u2013 the individual in the ecological cycle.\u00a0 World and universe lie, and the rest threaten in various ways. When the mind seems in control, matter is\u00a0 actually winning surreptitiously, on a much bigger, other scale.<\/p>\n

This is the old woman as literary critical academic, Nietzsche’s transformed into something rather close to my stereotype of myself.<\/p>\n

Let me now move to a different history, a different time, a difference clouds, Mahasweta Devi\u2019s “Statue.”\u00a0 It is my memory that I spoke about this novella at Goldsmiths in a class last time, but John says no.\u00a0 Even if I did speak of it, I hope you will see that it is inserted in a different frame, serving a different purpose. I undoubtedly have a special understanding of it, because it is written in my first language and I translated it, and I have always claimed that translation is the most intimate act of reading.\u00a0 I probably have a sense of the history a bit better because of the accident of my birth.\u00a0 But in terms of my developed life, I am much more deeply in the grooves of the lives of the women in Olsen and Christine Brooke-Rose.\u00a0 I present it this way so that you can see that identitarianism would be misguided here. I look at the representation of the protagonist of “Statue” with a distant and uncanny wonder in the play of familiar and unfamiliar, whereas with Olsen I can say there\u2019s my mother if . . ., and with Brooke-Rose simply, I would put it this way if I could.<\/p>\n

\u201cSometimes she can be seen wandering\u2026,\u201d Mahasweta writes and then adds \u201cShe can be seen means the python sees her.\u201d[v]<\/a>\u00a0 There is no followup to this.\u00a0 Mahasweta is simply explaining her own language use.\u00a0 It is as impersonal a sentence as can be.\u00a0 I invite you to consider the problematic of being the object of an animal\u2019s look as laid out in Derrida\u2019s The Animal That Therefore I Am<\/em>.[vi]<\/a>\u00a0 Derrida describes the tradition of the philosophy that he knows — Western philosophy — as burdened by the autobiographical and the confessional mode of establishing the human being, and therefore generalizing the entire heterogeneous and diversified animal kingdom as non-human.\u00a0 In this autobiographical and confessional piece, I would like to think that some impulse of placing this woman in a definition outside of the accepted social definition of “human as female ” that makes Mahasweta constitute her as the object of the gaze of a named animal, merely as an explanation of how not to read her own sentence colloquially, rather than as a description of the person outside of the definition.\u00a0 A signal of the undecidable place outside of the double bind — we cannot “understand” the python\u2019s gaze.\u00a0 Is it significant that the name of the python in Bengali ajagar<\/em> is the name universally associated with learning the first letter of the alphabet: aey ajagar ashchhe terhey<\/em>?<\/p>\n

This woman is thus because she has been banished outside of the reproduction of the family.\u00a0 Remember, in the previous section, we had seen old women who had placed themselves there or failed to do so as honorary males or patriarchally defined, with fear, as Baubos.<\/p>\n

Let me give you a quick summary of the story so that I can get on with my argument:<\/p>\n

She is the daughter of a rural priest attached to a wealthy non-Brahmin family.\u00a0 The groom runs off on her wedding night.\u00a0 She is therefore technically a child widow.\u00a0 The Master\u2019s son falls in love with her.\u00a0 Because this marriage is impossible, another marriage is arranged for him.\u00a0 She herself is within this ideology, obviously without what Tema Kaplan had defined in the 80s as “female consciousness,” perhaps because it was a generalization of a specific situation?\u00a0 This one is specific too of course, and we must attend to detail.\u00a0 She watches the wedding from afar.\u00a0 He catches her eye, and runs away, joining a “terrorist” (by which is meant armed struggle against British imperialism — the story is set in the 20s of the last century) group, and inexpertly attempts to shoot a white man, and is hanged.\u00a0 Dulali is banished outside of the village, to live like an animal — “a poor bare forked animal,” the Shakespearean description of mad Lear, which, with its adjective “forked” miraculously matches a woman more than a man.\u00a0 A researcher looks at papers relating to the “terrorist” movement after Independence and finds letters, never sent, to this woman.\u00a0 The world of the humans intervenes.\u00a0 She is threatened to keep quiet.\u00a0 Of course she does, she would, she couldn’t have done otherwise and so on.<\/p>\n

A statue is built to her long-lost suitor.<\/p>\n

Mahasweta is taking us here into a thematic rather larger than women’s access to the public sphere.\u00a0 Third person narrative without too much free indirect discourse can provide a quick fix in not putting de cart before dehors.\u00a0 It does not last long — it is a rhetorical ruse.\u00a0 But she buys a little timeout by that sentence about the python’s gaze in the three-page description of the woman as forked animal.\u00a0 Without entering Dulali\u2019s consciousness, she makes visible a critique of nationalism to the Bengali reading public within a critique of reproductive heteronormativity where Dulali is a figure.\u00a0 Let us remember this word “figure.”\u00a0 Configuration is our weapon in protecting the fragility of reason, compromised by the requirements of the alibi of “rational choice” running capitalism.\u00a0 We will see that, almost in a parodic reversal of Brooke-Rose\u2019s text, she gives us a glimpse of the old woman’s consciousness \u2013 de cart — at the end of a story.\u00a0 She can just about manage to do this by not aspiring to inhabit the an other space defined as the liminal space of a textual double bind through the trace of the author.<\/p>\n

Reproductive heteronormativity is a simple notion: the normal thing for not just human beings but animal beings is for the male and female to copulate, to reproduce, and thus to continue life on Earth. Therefore, this is normal.\u00a0 It is upstream from sexual preference.\u00a0 We are in a double bind with reproductive heteronormativity.\u00a0 Historically both the normative coming of age, the young uprooting the old, especially young men \u2013 and of course gender struggle \u2013 that is a more recent thing \u2013 , feminism, queer resistance, are all in a double bind with reproductive heteronormativity.\u00a0\u00a0 Sexual division of labor ceaselessly tries to manage this double bind so that decisions can be made, life go on.<\/p>\n

If we love our mothers, or if we love our children, or if we, queer ourselves, have decided to have a child, we are in a positive relationship with the originary. Yet we cannot of course be in a completely positive relationship, in many. Reproductive heteronormativity upstream from gender struggle different ways, not just in the usual and recognized struggles.<\/p>\n

I repeatedly say that reproductive heteronormativity is the broadest and oldest institution for validation. It goes from the affective \u2013 one thinks of it as private \u2013 to all the way public, so that you win legislation on that model if you happen to be queer or decide not to legalize. But the legalizing of heteronormativity is neither here nor there.\u00a0 This law \u2013 I will not call it natural — is bigger than positive law. We are talking here about being in a double bind because we think that this is natural law, not positive law. It is upstream from imperialism, because both colonizer and colonized are within it. It\u2019s upstream from capitalism, because both capitalist and worker or subaltern, are within it. It is the oldest tacit globalizer before the globe could be thought. We cannot undo it \u2013 though these are good gestures — by deciding to keep our father\u2019s name or a fictive name. We cannot undo it by deciding to legalize it through political law of various kinds. We can be in a double bind with it, but when we are deciding, we do not congratulate ourselves.<\/p>\n

In Glas<\/em>, where Derrida mourns his father (elsewhere I have discussed the difference between this and the text where he attempts to mourn his mother), he argues that Hegel suppresses a double bind about the family.<\/p>\n

The family is marked twice. It is a determinate, a most narrowly particular moment. Its place is inscribed in the encyclopedia and in history and the history of spirit. A finite moment. One never passes through it more than once. But [this is the double bind that Hegel does not acknowledge, according to Derrida] simultaneously, another account of the family must be taken on another register, another chapter. This determinate moment of the family, this finiteness, figures (for now I leave a very large opening for this word), . . .<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I remind you of my reminder a bit ago:\u00a0 Mahasweta\u2019s Dulali is a figure working a critique.\u00a0 For Derrida, in Hegel, the family is working figuratively in order to suppress a double bind: \u201cFor now, this determinate moment of the family, this finiteness, figures,\u201d and Derrida\u2019s parenthesis, \u201c(for now I leave a very large opening for this word) figures the system\u2019s totality. A certain familial schema, a certain family,\u201dand in the French, of course, he uses the word, a certain family, \u201csch\u00e8me,\u201d which also if you take the \u201cs\u201d away, it\u2019s also the last supper. Right? C-e-m-e. I don\u2019t know if there is a corresponding word since you\u2019re a Romance language also, it\u2019s the last supper. So the Holy Family, in other words. So, \u201cA certain family scene suits the system\u2019s infinite totality. The system\u2019s infinite totality thinks, produces, and inflicts itself in that scene.\u201d<\/p>\n

Here is the finite determinate moment of the Hegelian family:<\/p>\n

After losing itself in nature and in its other, the spirit constitutes itself as an absolute spirit through the negative process of a syllogism [which, we all know, is a simple model of the dialectic, a negation must come in] whose three moments are subjective spirit, (which is anthropology, phenomenology of spirit, and psychology), objective spirit (rights, morality, Sittlichkeit<\/em>), [Sittlichkeit <\/em>is untranslated] and absolute spirit (art, religion, philosophy). Each of the three moments itself includes three syllogistic moments.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

So, the family is the first moment of the third moment of objective spirit, Sittlichkeit<\/em>\u2019s first moment. Sittlichkeit <\/em>is the third moment. Family forms its most natural instance and accomplishes itself by destroying itself, in Hegel it must, in three stages. Marriage, patrimony, education. For men. Some talk of women comes in, but the argument is about men. Derrida in Glas<\/u> tries to put on the right hand side a male homosexual.<\/p>\n

When one rashly says that the finite family furnishes a metaphoric model or a convenient figuration about the language of philosophical exposition, a pedagogical ease, a good way to speak of abstract things to the student while playing with the familiarity of family signification.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Because the student knows about family, everyone knows about family, so use it to explain something, right? \u201cEven then what the absolute familiarity of the signification is must be known.\u201d There\u2019s your RHN, why is it that everybody knows it? What is the absolute familiarity of something?:<\/p>\n

If that can be thought and named without the family then one needs to ascertain that the finite family in question is not infinite already in which case what the alleged metaphor would come to figure would be already in the metaphor.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This is how the double bind is launched. For Tillie Olsen the double bind was, for the old woman, between grandmothering and mothering your own, and affecting and working for the collective other (autrui<\/em>), when you are not an honorary male; for Brooke-Rose, between minding matter and body as matter as old woman, when you are in the critical margin of honorary maleship: a literary academic.\u00a0 A taxonomy.<\/p>\n

Mahasweta\u2019s old woman is left to forage in youth and now has the wisdom of the animal.\u00a0 In post-reproductive old age, she is no \u201cgoddess as old crone,\u201d as imagined by Clement of Alexandria, or Nietzsche\u2019s Baubo, figuring truth.<\/p>\n

She too is liminal, materially.\u00a0 She<\/p>\n

earns her keep. Even at seventy-eight years of age she binds kindling in creepers, drags it and puts it at the other edge of the yard.\u00a0 [The women of the family] give [her] some rice-salt-oil-lentil at month’s end, two saris yearly….\u00a0 If one feels like feeding, why give such a small amount of rice?\u00a0 These are most complicated questions.\u00a0 She often weaves a net in her mind with the questions, is herself caught in the net and gives up.\u00a0 With a belly always empty or three-quarters empty, there is nothing left in her body.\u00a0 She likes the fire\u2019s warmth and for lack of blood feels chilled all the time.\u00a0 She sits by the fire even in Boishakh and Joishtho, the high summer months.\u00a0 [Discuss translation problems here — anch tant]\u00a0 The word “warmth” [tant] blossoms and falls like a distressed flower….\u00a0 Sometimes it is seen that’s, in the hot month of Choitra, just as dusk falls, far from the village, plucking ripe branches of lentils at speed from someone else’s field.\u00a0 There is but one reason, to solve the food problem.\u00a0 She looks most unearthly then.\u00a0 Thin frame, the hot winds in her white hair, a rapt look in her eyes….\u00a0 Perhaps she is thinking of that [lifelong injustice her nephew] thinks.\u00a0 In fact she doesn’t think of the past.\u00a0 She, too, believes in the present, as does [her nephew]….\u00a0 In her dream she wears a whole cloth and eats a full serving of rice in a bell metal plate, everyday, only rice, no lentils, no vegetables, only rice.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I have argued elsewhere that, wishing to access what we imagine should be the impersonal subject of ethical behavior understood in the hetero sense, we choose an abstract average subject, and fall into the seduction of statistics.\u00a0 Her nephew, named Nabin or “the new”, is in the seduction of statistics.\u00a0 He feels for the old woman and takes her in the dark to see the statue once it is established.\u00a0 She is allowed a moment of dry wisdom clear of reproductive heteronormativity when she perceives the statue as a statue, not the representation of a lost object as beloved, and says: “the flowers at his feet are already wilted, Nabin.\u00a0 Crows will shit on his head, dirt will cover him, haven’t you seen the distress of the god at Monosha\u2019s open shrine all year-round?”<\/p>\n

There is powerful irony here.\u00a0 In her innocent consciousness, the old woman conveys an equation of the man with the idol.\u00a0 The merely good human man is somewhere else: “yet for the sake of a statue a great [statistical, a lot of good could have been done with the money] can descend on the Nabin\u2019s of this world.”\u00a0 She is elsewhere.<\/p>\n

In the second story in the collection “The Fairy Tale of Mohanpur,” Mahasweta moves down in class to represent a subaltern old woman.\u00a0 In this story, the young male postcolonial activist is shown at work calling on the state to insert the subaltern into the circuit of citizenship.\u00a0 The subaltern herself is only imperfectly aware of the efforts, accepting the frailties of old age, in her case the loss of eyesight especially, as she accepts the changing world.\u00a0 In the end the activist succeeds in bringing her to the hospital, in extremis.\u00a0 What we are shown at the end is the simple joy in material comfort, again, when the subaltern is unexpectedly rewarded with the blessings of citizenship.\u00a0 This is a warning to all benevolent feudality, including that of the world social forum, which sees in the subaltern\u2019s smile evidence of a self-conscious support for critical activism that\u00a0 is perceived by\u00a0 the subaltern subject\u00a0 it must also be strictly distinguished from the representation called the rural Brahmin girl as the old woman in the wisdom that has touched bare life:<\/p>\n

Andi’s eyes are heavy with sleep.\u00a0 She thinks nothing about the fate of her eyes.\u00a0 She has been admitted to hospital.\u00a0 She will eat all kinds of things at the hospital, the doctor will come again from that district town, ‘everything jes like a fairy tale one by one!’\u00a0 She mutters, amazed, and her face, in sleep within the depths of this fairytale ravine, looks most fulfilled.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

To conclude this autobiographical and confessional piece, I move to my own standing as honorary male, receiving gifts from what was, in my time of studentship, the male-identified academy from my good teachers, even as I’d received the patriarchal Constitution that has marked me and all women of my generation permanently. in onset to a question at the radical philosophy meeting, I was able to acknowledge one of the gifts that I have received from my subaltern educational activism: The instrumentalization of “love” as one of the historically specific ways to reproduction within an originary queerness.\u00a0 Now I outline my own itinerary as far as I can on the high road.<\/p>\n

As some of you know, Paul De man was my teacher.\u00a0 In a piece published in boundary 2<\/em>, I have suggested that in Allegories of Reading<\/em>, de Man gives us a confessional moment when he describes in his a-historical approach generationally, pointing towards another way of reading.\u00a0 I follow de Man to displace his history-bound mistake into another use of Schiller following Kant.\u00a0 I track that trajectory as the methodological red thread through a book of essays.<\/p>\n

Thought as an instrument of abstraction, gender is in fact a position without identity (an insight coming to us via Queer Studies from David Halperin), sexualized in cultural practice.[vii]<\/a>\u00a0 We can therefore never think the abstracting instrumentality of gender fully.\u00a0 With this brief introduction I will go to the conclusion of de Man\u2019s \u201cKant and Schiller\u201d and myself conclude this Preface.<\/p>\n

De Man did not meddle with gender.\u00a0 Yet he singles out a passage in Schiller that en-genders the aesthetic and leaves it deadpan.\u00a0 Allow me a longish quotation:<\/p>\n

Hypotyposis for Kant is . . . a very difficult problem that again threatens philosophical discourse; whereas here [in \u201cOn the Necessary Borderlines in the Use of Beautiful Forms\u201d] it is offered by Schiller as a solution.\u00a0 . . . The sensory . . . becomes a metaphor for reason.\u00a0 This extends to humanity, which, it turns out, is not entirely a principle of closure, because humanity is not single \u2013 but it has a polarity, it has the polarity of male and female that inhabits it, and this is how Schiller copes with that problem.\u00a0 \u201cThe other sex,\u201d he says, the female sex, \u201ccan and should not share scientific knowledge with man, but by ways of its figural representation, it can share the truth with him.\u00a0 Men tend to sacrifice form to content.\u00a0 But woman cannot tolerate a neglected form, not even in the presence of the richest content.\u00a0 And the entire internal configuration of her being entitles her to make this stern demand.\u00a0 It is true, however, that in this function, she can only acquire the material of truth, and not truth itself.\u00a0\u00a0 Therefore, the task which Nature disallows women, the other sex, this task must be doubly undertaken by man if he wishes to be the equal of woman in this important aspect, in this important aspect of his existence.\u00a0 He will therefore transpose as much as possible out of the realm of the abstract, in which he governs and is master, into the realm of the imagination and of sensibility.\u00a0 Taste includes or hides the natural intellectual difference between the two sexes.\u00a0 It nourishes and embellishes the feminine mind with the products of the masculine mind, and allows the beautiful sex to feel what it has not thought, and to enjoy what it has not produced by its labor\u201d (Werke<\/em>, 21:16-17).\u00a0 That much for women.\u00a0 Schiller\u2019s humanism is showing some of its limits here.\u00a0 At any rate, the theoretical conclusion of this passage would be that just as the sensory becomes without tension a metaphor for reason, in Schiller, women become without oppression a metaphor for man.\u00a0\u00a0 Because the relation of woman to man is that of the metaphor to what it indicates, or that of the sensory representation to reason<\/p>\n

In the same way, Schiller\u2019s considerations on education lead to a concept of art as the metaphor, as the popularization of philosophy. Philosophy, as you saw, is the domain of men, art is \u2013 basically, the beautiful is \u2013 the domain of women. The relationship is that of metaphor. [viii]<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I have no interest in rescuing either Schiller or de Man into good gender politics, whatever that might be. It is not a secret that \u201cfeminization\u201d is a putdown. Yet, by itself \u201cfeminization\u201d cannot necessarily be a putdown. And the aesthetic, for Schiller is a powerful thing, fit for princes, which can save the world from itself. It cannot be denied that these peculiar deployments of woman is the moment of transgression which beckons to be undone and I hope to do so.<\/p>\n

Suppose we attempt to reverse and displace the ancient binary until \u201cwoman\u201d is a position without identity. I say \u201cattempt\u201d because the force of the effort is the force of reading and thinking, since interest determined by sexual difference cannot disappear.\u00a0 Keeping this in mind, I recall our efforts in the early days of academic feminism we used to distinguish between male tasks and domestic (female and servant) tasks, as follows: one-time only and repeated because forever necessary. Something you can footnote as opposed to cooking and cleaning, let us say. Schiller\u2019s woman is upper class at first glance. If, however, you look closely at the passage de Man quotes, you will see that the distinction between access to truth and access to figuration is a displacement of the distinction between one-time and repetition that we discussed as historically assigned to male and classed female. It is in this sense that one can add the concept-metaphor of female to Baubo — the tasker as old woman rather than Schiller\u2019s gentlewoman — to think the place of the aesthetic as useful to shore up a world gone awry by rational choice and the extreme abstract rationality of the electronic, where imagination itself is empiricized into reasonable programming, even as the imagination as event inevitably escapes.<\/p>\n

I end these remarks with an impossible \u201cfemale\u201d task \u2013 in Schiller\u2019s sense and mine.<\/p>\n

Many many<\/em> years ago, I used to distinguish between male tasks and domestic (female and servant) tasks, as follows: one-time only and repeated because forever necessary. Something you can footnote as opposed to cooking and cleaning. Let me end with the invocation of such a task as I conclude my walk as an honorary male. The conclusion of Jacques Derrida’s Voyous<\/em>, not a thankless task, but a gendered task, a necessary repetition of difference, where gender is a position without identity, Schiller’s injunction to feminize the aesthetic, the last best gift to me, a woman, his first Ph.D., bequeathed against the grain by my disgraced teacher, Paul de Man.<\/p>\n

Here is the double bind.\u00a0 \u201cTo be responsible, . . . would be to invent maxims of transaction for deciding between two just as rational and universal but contradictory exigencies of reason as well as enlightenment.\u201d<\/p>\n

And here is the task: \u201cIt remains to be known, so as to save the honor of reason, how to translate<\/em>.\u00a0 For example, the word reasonable<\/em>.\u00a0 And how to pay one\u2019s respects to, how to . . .greet . . . beyond its latinity, and in more than one language, the fragile difference between the rational<\/em> and the reasonable<\/em>.\u201d[ix]<\/a>\u00a0 The task of the translator transforms with the task, and announces other fragile differences, such as that between queer and singular, for example.\u00a0 We can all think of others.<\/p>\n

The other side of the violence in the Nietzschean imagining of the post-reproductive old woman as Baubo is the Cumaean Sybill, whose utterance — I want to die, because she grew old and wise without death because, when young and foolish, she had asked only for immortality — appropriately quoted in the original Greek, as reported by wise men, was the epigraph to TS Eliot’s “The Waste Land.” My generation of postcolonialists graduated into globality, attempts to instrumentalize the Cumaean Sybill, on the way to subalternity, for there too reasonable and rational hang out as a difference.\u00a0 I hope some of you will walk with us there.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

NOTES<\/h1>\n

Note to readers: In addition to the text on Spurs\u00a0<\/i>written in 1980,\u00a0Displacement and the Discourse of Woman<\/a>, I will also refer to two ways of reading Nietzsche which Derrida speaks of in the the Grammatology. <\/i>I will refer also to something Derrida proposed in “Otobiographies: The Ear of the Other,” and the bottom part of Geoffrey Bennington’s Jacques Derrida<\/i>, which is called “Circumfessions.” I discuss the latter in a text also published several years ago, Three Women’s Texts and Circumfession<\/a>. Derrida distinguishes diff\u00e9rance from Nietzsche’s prioritization of the metaphor in “Wahrheit und L\u00fcge<\/i>,” in “<\/i>White Mythology,” which I thought I would mention.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

[i]<\/a> Christine Brooke-Rose, Life, End of <\/em>(Manchester: Carcanet, 2006), p.8; hereafter cited in text as B-R, with page numbers following.\u00a0 And<\/p>\n

[ii]<\/a> Cited in Derrida, Spurs<\/em>, tr. Barbara Harlow (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1979), p.57; translation modified.<\/p>\n

[iii]<\/a> [citation coming]<\/p>\n

[iv]<\/a>\u00a0 Tillie Olsen, \u201cTell Me A Riddln,\u201d in Tell Me A Riddle<\/em> (New York: Dell, 1994); hereafter cited in text as TO, with page numbers following.<\/p>\n

[v]<\/a> Mahasweta Devi, Old Women<\/em> (Calcutta: Seagull, 1999), p. 15; hereafter cited in text as MD, followed by page number.<\/p>\n

[vi]<\/a> Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, tr. David Wills.<\/p>\n

[vii]<\/a> David Halperin.<\/p>\n

[viii]<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0 Paul de Man, \u00a0Aesthetic Ideology<\/em> (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota press, 1996), p. 154.\u00a0\u00a0 A good example of Schiller\u2019s usual remarks on women is to be found on AE 213 and passim.<\/p>\n

[ix]<\/a> p. 156, 159.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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