Teaching Subjectivity. Travelling Selves for Feminist ... - MailChimp

And lastly I find her theory important because of her insistence on situatedness;
that I am always embedded in the world and the issues I discuss.
The category of self or selves is a leaking concept; I am never in full possession
or fully aware of myself. 11 I spill over to the other, I am touched upon by the
other and certainly also touching the other. The categories that we live by are the
problem makers, in the sense of their insufficiency – they cannot follow the lives
we live. That is to say, it is not a problem of the life we live that we cannot find
adequate concepts to grasp the holes from where life exceeds the concepts – as
in my case of feeling lost between the way of doing academic life and the life I
left behind. The self is therefore a travelling concept since it changes meaning
in different locations and disciplines. 12 Mieke Bal states quite accurately what it
means for the self to travel intellectually and the gains and risks of its doing so:
“Hazardous, exciting and tiring, travel is needed if you are to achieve the gain of
new experience.” 13 I would like to add that travelling is a joint affair with other
selves – from the very inception of your coming into this world.
To return to my initial concern; it involves a rethinking of the self and
the other in terms of how they are related. In the question of sexual difference
Irigaray has dischanged the patriarchal way of thinking the relation between the
self and the other, which always ends up with the self-same (masculine) rather
than establishing the relation to the other as other. The self-same is the mode
of the cannibal; he eats you to make you fully his flesh. On a more cautious
mode of thinking the self-same has to be understood itself in terms of being
neutral in the matter of its sexuality (and power). This asserted neutrality is
amnesiac of the fundamental premise that we are always sexed – and have been
since the moment we were born into this world. 14 It is only in death that we
are all neutral. 15 This forgetfulness of my sex and my belonging was (perhaps)
an advantage for my entrance into a very male-dominated Philosophy department,
originally to become a philosophy scholar.
On the other hand, as the repression of the feminine might suppose,
it is women alone who form the figure of the other, albeit women are not
11
Margrit Shildrich, Leaky Bodies and Boundaries – feminism, Postfeminism and (bio) Ethics (London: Routledge,
1997).
12
Meike Bal, Travelling Concepts – in the Humanities (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002).
13
Ibid., 4.
14
In her later work she continues to rethink the term neutrality, and as I will make clear later in this text at the level
of the collective/societal (…) a society in neutral mode loses sight of the line separating life from death. Although
life, obviously, is always sexed, death on the contrary no longer makes this distinction. Luce Irigaray, Democracy
begins between two (New York: Routledge, 1994), 37
15
Elizabeth Grosz, Sexual Subversions: Three French Feminists (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1989)
37