Sex, Gender, Becoming - PULP

iNTRODUCTION: tOWARDS A POLITICS OF LIVING
ix
the former and women’s association with the latter, establishes
men’s claim to gender neutrality. 11 The untying of the body from the
soul is what is aspired to, the body is seen as a negative, a burden and
because the pure untying takes place in death the concept of life is
displaced. 12 Also, it is in her reaction to this that Penelope’s political
action comes to the fore, in her reweaving, retying of soul and body:
‘Penelope tangles and holds together what philosophy wants to
separate. She brings back the act of thinking to a life marked by birth
and death’. 13 Authors in this volume engage with the restrictions on
women’s lives resulting from dualities or binaries like mind/ body and
public/ private. Their contributions could be seen as attempts to tie
theory (thinking) with postapartheid lives.
Stories of resistance
In a later work Cavarero follows Hannah Arendt and Karen Blixen’s
insistence on storytelling as a way of putting forward a new way of
politics. 14 Central to her argument is the uniqueness of every person
so often negated by traditional philosophy. Cavarero recalls the
following story told by Karen Blixen: 15
A man, who lived by a pond, was awakened one night by a great noise.
He went out into the night and headed for the pond, but in the darkness,
running up and down, back and forth, guided only by the noise, he
stumbled and fell repeatedly. At last, he found a leak in the dike, from
which water and fish were escaping. He set to work plugging the leak
and only when he had finished went back to bed. The next morning,
looking out of the window, he saw with surprise that his footprints had
traced the figure of a stork on the ground.
Blixen responds to this story by asking: ‘when the design of my life is
complete, will I see, or will others see a stork?’ 16 Cavarero continues
and asks if ‘the course of every life allows itself to be looked upon in
the end like a design that has a meaning?’ 17 However, she adds an
important aspect – the design in question cannot be foreseen,
projected or controlled. The man in the story did not intend anything
more than to fulfill the purpose of finding the cause of the noise and
then fixing the dike. The significance of this story is the end result –
the ‘figural unity of the design’ that simply happened without any
preconceived plan, design or project.
11
Cavarero (n 1 above) 26.
12 Cavarero (n 1 above) 26.
13 Cavarero (n 1 above) 29.
14
A Cavarero Relating narratives (2000); Arendt (n10 above). See also Cavarero For
more than one voice: Toward a philosophy of vocal expression (2005).
15 Cavarero (n 14 above) 1.
16
Cavarero (n 14 above) 1.
17 Cavarero (n 14 above) 1.