Lisa Hager
ENL 6076
1/20/02 -
Serial Essay
It's funny -- isn't it? To leave the typical paper header on an essay that has decided to refuse the fixity of paper and instead work itself out in a much more flexible form -- after all, it's only a bunch of 1's and 0's now. Binary code seems fitting to me because the code itself works on the principle of self and other, presence and lack. Still, I like the heading here because it calls attention to how this essay is not where it should be --
|
fixed on a sheet of paper. |
I have just changed the principle and means of transport. We are not in metaphor like a pilot in his ship. With this proposition, I drift . . . Therefore I ought to decisively interrupt the drifting or skidding. I would do it if it were possible. Bet what have I just been doing? I skid and drift irresistibly (103). Derrida's own words encourage my play with those same words. "Retrait" certainly does return and withdraw like crazy (in the sense of refusing any linear order). I cannot grasp the essay because, each time I touch its truth just a little bit, the rest of it has run away without me noticing. I wonder though, about the risk that Derrida runs and whether or not
the risk is too much?
In placing himself with the tradition of Western philosophy and/or metaphysics, he risks simply becoming part of that discourse.
And yet,
I cannot entirely dismiss the essay as too dense philosophy that I am obviously not smart enough to read -- this is not the threshold of the father where I must always sit and wait and never enter. Derrida drifts too much be entirely recuperated within this tradition. Perhaps he does show the man running the gears behind the curtain a bit; perhaps, in showing how we can never get away from metaphor, he does reveal the possibilities of the work of metaphor.
?Apologia?
the beginning no longer begins this essay, instead it, much like the essay in general, has drifted to new place (which is not it's final place)
As I start this essay, I feel as if I must apologize even before I begin. Apologize for the failure that I almost know this essay will become. Whether it is a failure in much the same way that Geoffrey Bennington acknowledges in Jacques Derrida or not remains to be seen. For me, this essay feels like a failure because I want to represent or at least vibrate on the same frequency as the energy and verve that I feel in Cixous’ writing. I want to slip out of the comfortable yet confining bounds of traditional academic writing, and yet, here I am – writing this in a very clean, well-organized paragraph.
| I would love to write | always |
like Derrida's two parallel lines |
| that cut each other at infinity |
a |
re-cut, split, and sign in some way |
| the one in the body of the other | between |
the one in the place of the other, |
| the contract without contract |
of their neighborliness. (124) |
I.
What strikes me as a reader when I read Cixous writing about reading is her intense desire for the book and for approaching what reading her favorite books means to her. Whatever this book may be, it is a book of desire,
I have already said what I didn't mean.
Desire is too pedestrian, too institutional, too lacking in violence for this book. After reading "The School of Dreams" and thinking in our past two seminars, I am still trying to wrap my mind around or even fold myself into Cixous' motif of violence. The word violence immediately makes me think of physical violence and, in particular, rape. At first, celebrating violence seemed to undermine much activist work in fighting violence against women and Others who are sexually problematic to a het. society (trangendered folks, lesbians, gays, bi's). What I hadn't realized and am trying to taste is the thought that
making physical violence the only meaning of violence stops any interrogation
INto how institutions have closed off the pleasurable excess possible in a violence that makes mutually permeable the boundaries between self and other
But I haven't made it out of that maze yet. I still don't know how to deal with my own dream of rape or believing that It is enough have parents to be the child: the assassin (74). As I type this, my own act of writing does just enough violence to my usual pathways of thought to wonder if perhaps the assassin is the figure who can enter, penetrate (like the soft and then harder touch of a woman's hand/tongue) the places where one feels the most secure -- the smooth black fortresses depicted often in fantasy fiction. Enter, and kill in our own love to give us death.
Cixous reminds me often of the poet in one of my favorite Lawrence Ferlinghetti poems --- "constantly risking absurdity" and therefore everything with each word. She risks so much as she turns to violence as a place of pleasure and in use of the word libidinal. This word stopped the flow of my reading a bit of a shock -- the shock of Freud's ghost looming so large over the text. But, now that I reread her sentence, I am simply working toward libidinal and geographical reorientation, I realize that I have missed the play immediately at work in even Helene's use of such a authoritative word as libidinal. Her call for reorientation means not only a reworking of the location of her terms but a certain tweaking of the way meaning of these words works. She finds a new, more unstable place for libidinal to live and die. A place where the line between body and mind blurs in/of erotic longing for the differance of the other. As a reader, I found myself surprised by this text that seemed theoretically dense and unwelcoming – I was surprised to see my own current quandary reflected in the opening pages on the first step of the ladder of writing. I will talk about truth again, without which (without the word truth, without the mystery of truth) there would be no writing. It is what writing wants . . . all the people I love and whom I have mentioned are beings who are bent on direction their writhing toward this truth over there, with unbelievable labor; they are fighting against the elements and principally against the innumerable immediate exterior and interior enemies (6). During the second to last meeting of a seminar that I was in last semester, several students and myself labored to explain this to our teacher. Labored because while we understood, as did he, that we are continually trying to reach complete understanding with the other through language, we did not find the prospect of never reaching but always approaching the other depressing or terminal. Instead, we enjoyed the approach, the process of discovery and friction – not wanting a particular point of finishing or arrival. I don’t know for sure if us all being women had anything to do with this discussion, but part of me wonders if beings whose bodies continually make their processes visible and cyclical can more easily appreciate the erotics of approach.
Even typing the word bodies on the page makes my own body smile – such a nice word to roll around on one’s inner tongue.
Reading is eating on the sly (21). Eating is such a dangerous activity: taking into one’s body some foreign object, The motif of the foreign recurs again in "The Book of Dreams" -- dreams become a way to become foreign in ways unimaginable in the legal sense of the term with its Green Cards and Passports. Borders don't exist. Borders are invisible lines that stir up war. They are as incredible as unicorns (131). Few folks outside of native Georgians remember that when Georgia was first given its colonial charter from England its borders went from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean. When I think of this, I smile at the arrogance of claiming all that country and enjoy the sheer magnitude of such an imagined state.
as the doctors call it, and allowing it full access so that one can survive. An abject process dependent on and bound up desire for the other. Perhaps this is why chocolate can be so decadent and why I continue to buy milano cookies. Reading is such a quiet way of approaching the other, of letting the other inside. With nothing other than the sound of a page turning now and then, I can let down the stiff demarcations between myself and the outside, the other. The words of writer inhabit my mind – I consume the words and they become part of me – much like the cells my body builds from the raw stuffs of the food I ingest. I am what I eat/read.
Suddenly, burning books becomes a way of avoiding contagion.
As with anything an epidemic has touched, we have burned the books that infect our minds, which are willing to cause pain and insanity. Reading books that are willing to imagine death makes us vulnerable to disease because it is a contact zone between the self and other where protection is rarely used by either participant.
School is inter(min)able (156).