Sunshine Belt

“…by writing her self, woman will return to the body which has been more than confiscated from her, which has been turned into the uncanny stranger on display—the ailing or dead figure, which so often turns out to be the nasty companion, the cause and location of inhibitions. Censor the body and you censor breath and speech at the same time. Write your self. Your body must be heard. Only then will the immense resources of the unconscious spring forth. Our naptha will spread, throughout the world, without dollars—black or gold—nonassessed values that will change the rules of the old game.”

—Helene Cixous, “Laugh of the Medusa”  

Audre Lorde—-Who Said It Was Simple

“The woman is wife and mother. But for her, this role is a function of an abstract duty. As far as she is concerned, she is a wife and mother inasmuch as these roles represent a task vis-a-vis the universal which she discharges by renouncing her singular desires. She has no right to singular love nor to love for herself. She is thus unable to love but is to be subjugated to love and reproduction. She has to be sacrificed and to sacrifice herself to this task, at the same time disappearing as this or that woman who is alive at the present time. He has to love this woman considered as singular nature, provided she stays bound to that singularity and provided she stays bound to that singularity and provided he may pass over into it while remaining faithful to his relation to the universal. Thus the master-slave dialectic occurs between the sexes, forcing woman to engender life to comply with the exigencies of a universal linked to death. This also forces woman to mother her children so as to subject them to the condition of being citizens abstracted from their singularity, severed from their unique identity, arising from their genealogical and historical conception and birth, adults or adolescents who are subsequently exposed to the risk of actual death for the sake of the polis or to a spiritual death for the sake of culture. At the present time, society is controlled by money And slavery lies, above all, in that fact. All human beings, or almost all, are dependent upon money. The only exceptions to this are some peasants or vegetarian hermits…This creates a society without any freedom, with sudden aggressive outbursts from individuals, groups, or nations. Everyone wants to assert that their subjectivity, their resources, their culture, or their power permits them to make a special case for themselves amidst the general state of dependence and interdependence. For a while, they become the focus of attention: sub-systems are organized in a different way but fundamentally things remain the same. Two natural necessities dominate societies. One of them may appear to be neuter, unmarked by the sexual: we all have to breathe, feed, clothe and house ourselves. Our societies are controlled by this need, which, rightful as it is, accords money a power that is totally disproportionate—a power rarely questioned by democratic regimes even though it inevitably leads to new hierarchies between rich and poor and between.”

—Luce Irigaray

I was thinking about the serious depth of asking myself a question and the problems of thinking of myself as beyond myself. This might be a hopeful project which is only possible through the imagination—certain points of remembrance and traces which disclose something else entirely.

Someone anterior, clattering hands which make it down one end to the other of my fur, closing the openings of inside burial, spinning the flesh which never arrives, a skin-port which is aflutter in delay. Soon there is the shaking of the head, and once there is a force of the touch which stops inside of fingers without the inheritance of years, without the genesis of separation, a supplement to my second nature, a green return to the interval which finally is the attempt to still life. Outside in the circumscribed grass, your legs float across the terrain, tiding the air behind you, forcing my breath in your wake. I am here I am here.

“How I should love you if to speak to you were possible. And yet I still love you too well in my silence to remember the movement of my own becoming. Perpetually am I troubled, stirred, frozen, or smothered by the noise of your death. The recollection of my birth still lies stifled under the din of your hate. Or the shroud of your indifference. For, round and round, you keep turning. Within yourself. Pushing out of your circle anything that, from elsewhere, remembers. But I am coming back from far, far away. And say to you: your horizon has limits. Holes even. You have always trapped me in your web and, if I no longer serve as your passage from back to front, from front to back, your time will let an other day dawn. You world will unravel. It will flood out to other places. To that outside you have not wanted. Yes, I am coming back from far, far, away. And my crime, at present, is my candor. “

—Luce Irigaray

“Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don’t know how to replenish its source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings.” —Anaïs Nin

Oikos and the politics of resistance, Part 2

“…the entry of zoe into the sphere of the polis—the politicization of bare life as such—constitutes the decisive event of modernity and signals a radical transformation of the political-philosophical categories of classical thought. It is even likely that if politics today seems to be passing through a lasting eclipse, this is because politics has failed to reckon with this foundational event of modernity.” (Agamben, Homo Sacer 4)’

I am interested in trying to ask what the implications of Agamben’s philosophy may be for feminist thinking. When was the turning point for Agamben’s “modernity”? How is it that the structure of sovereignty in modern democracy has politicized woman’s body from the perspective of Irigaray’s Woman? From the perspective of the objectivization of power via biopolitics, the body is that which consolidates power into greater units such that this consolidation requires a separation of the body, wherein the subject must be inoculated against the negativity of his own death via the suspension of what qualifies him human. The man who lives under the regime of biopower is not permitted to think death as a political marker which organizes existence. That which has typically adorned the unintelligible, and that which has previously provided the upper limit of thinking for man, no longer qualifies political life. Instead, the subject now exists in a state of suspension between life and death, no longer able to be “subjectivated” by either within the normal structure of the polis.

There is a double structure here, one of the bios and one of the impossible. The question that runs through Agamben’s book is what is the inclusion of politics in the impossible such that there is no distinction between the two? The state of the impossible is the ban, whereby the impossible is rendered in its full capacity as lived. The impossible, the very limitation of man—death, is incorporated into the structure of biopolitics as a bidding of the sovereign. So that which was impossible to bear under traditional strictures of life, the mark of death, now becomes integral to living it. What are the implications of bios for that which is impossible to render about the human? The point which Agamben makes about the inclusion of zoe in the polis does not mean that the human is indefinitely reduced to zoe. The originary ban which is the jurido-political content of existence must operate materially, though it is entirely topological. Where this shifts the frontier of warfare though, is to the oikos itself, where biopolitcal warfare now opens up a zone of indistinction between the public and the private. The question is now no longer who is the enemy. We full well know that we are hosts of the oppressors. The question is now rather, how might I extricate myself from a political structure which assures me my life, but robs me of what qualifies it as livable? 

Those of us who stand outside the circle of this society’s definition of acceptable women; those of us who have been forged in the crucibles of difference—those of us who are poor, who are lesbians, who are Black, who are older—know that survival is not an academic skill. It is learning how to stand alone, unpopular and sometimes reviled, and how to make common cause with those others identified as outside the structures in order to define and seek a world in which we can all flourish.

—Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider 112