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

a ‘materiality’ of connections, a provisional coherence of joint being(s), some
‘real’ rootedness, their presence. A style that connotes a unique way of being in
the world and that completely fits to each of them separately was outside the
range of any possible collecting procedure. I ‘exercised’ remembering. Writing,
walking, carrying oneself, facing problems, articulating feminist questions, all
these moments connote the virtue of their particular style.
My primary impetus in responding to the loss was to keep them as (a)
whole(s) with and within me, to carry them beyond any theoretical analysis or
response to the issue. Knowledge itself was neither a key nor an entry but a gentleness
of emotions which in intrinsic waves spoke both in public and in myself
honouring them, formatting a discourse on honouring them, responding to
the call. I tried intensively to keep saying their names publicly and privately, to
keep ceaselessly reading their texts, to keep continuously writing about them in
the gap between facing loss and a time of mourning which would never arrive
in its final shape. At this point I echoed Derrida’s explanation that the inability
of acceptance defined that which mourning itself is, namely “the history of its
refusal” 15 . Therefore, “(t)he work on mourning is not,” as the abovementioned
author pointed out in his article By Force of Mourning “(…) one kind of work
among other possible kinds; an activity of the kind of ‘work’ is by no means a
specific figure for production in general” 16 .
The moment when I accepted the temptation to work on this very
challenging task, I realised not only how this particular ‘travelling’ assumes
multiple efforts of Self in its dramatic and often unknown setting, but how
any claim for an auto/biographical narrative resists the politics of closure or
its own imaginative order. Along with facing my own limitations for critical
insights, this quest seemed very difficult, especially in terms of inner-positioning.
Numerous dilemmas suddenly appeared. Is it about the issue of personal
mourning after the loss of the feminists with whom I shared very often an
inexplicable closeness or a peculiar concept of nostalgia for recalling a joint
feminist past or both that turned out to be an invocation? Do I think of me
and my loneliness? Or is it about my ultimate will to work on mourning as an
act of personal responsibility?
The very meaning of death and loss and the ways in which they resonate
towards the meaning of the lives of those who continue to live, are ontological
15
Jacques Derrida, Cinders (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1991), 55.
16
Jacques Derrida, “Excerpt from By Force of Mourning by Jacques Derrida,” transl. by Pascale-Anne Brault and
Michael Naas, Critical Inquiry, (Winter 1996).
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