Sex, Gender, Becoming - PULP

iNTRODUCTION: tOWARDS A POLITICS OF LIVING
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would be the politics by which a female subjectivity is claimed —
although this could have certain strategic value it could lead to
‘slavish subordination of action to some high ideal’. 20 They define
molecular politics as a politics of questioning and activation through
which ‘those tiny events that make such foundations possible’ are
questioned. 21 Deleuze and Guattari identify a double politics that
produces two dynamic senses of movement, a molar politics as the
organisation of subjectivity and a molecular movement as the
continuous challenge of becoming. 22 For them woman’s subjectivity
must not function as a ground, but as a ‘molar confrontation’ that is
part of a ‘molecular women’s politics’. 23 Woman’s subjectivity must
not be a mirroring of man, but ‘must affirm itself as an event in the
process of becoming’. 24 Virginia Woolf is recalled as a good example
of living in the ‘between’, ‘never ceasing to become’ — Woolf’s
writing does not represent an already expressed female identity, but
a continuous exploration of woman, Woolf ‘writes woman’. 25
Reference to Woolf’s writing and Cavarero’s storytelling and her
reliance on Arendtian natality recalls another contemplation – Helene
Cixous’ on ‘drawingness’. 26 The difficulty of how to describe or
represent life, natality or becoming comes to the fore. For Arendt
new beginnings revealed that ‘which cannot be expected from
whatever may have happened before’, something of ‘startling
unexpectedness’. 27 Cixous asks:
What do we want to draw? What are we trying to grasp between the
lines, in between the strokes, in the net that we’re weaving, that we
throw, and the dagger blows? Not the person, but the precious in that
person, not the Virgin, not the child, but what is between them in this
very moment, linking them – a secret, that which mysteriously renders
those two unforgettable. ... It’s not a question of drawing the contours,
but what escapes the contour, the secret movement, the breaking, the
torment, the unexpected. ... the trace of the quick of life hidden
beneath the rounded appearances of life, life which remains hidden
because we wouldn’t bear seeing it as it is, in all the brilliance of horror
that it is, it is without pity, like the drawing must be.’ 28
This questions Cavarero’s (and Arendt’s) belief in the ability of the
story to reveal who someone is. For Cavarero the disjuncture between
life and text can sometimes for a fleeting moment be suspended, as
20
Buchanan and Colebrook (n 19 above) 1; Deleuze Nietzsche and philosophy (1983)
123.
21 Buchanan and Colebrook (n 19 above) 1.
22
Buchanan and Colebrook (n 19 above) 1; Deleuze and Guattari (n19 above) 276.
23 Buchanan and Colebrook (n 19 above) 1.
24 Buchanan and Colebrook (n 19 above) 1.
25
Buchanan and Colebrook (n 19 above) 1.
26 H Cixous ‘Without end, no state of drawingness no, rather: The executioner’s
taking off’ (1993) 24 New Literary History 91.
27
H Arendt On revolution (1963) 177-178.
28 Cixous (n 26 above) 96.