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

matters. How might one live with the absence of dear, beloved ones, or even
more demanding questions such as how to authorise oneself to work on mourning
belongs to these unanswerable questions or something that, as work on
origin (literature, poetry), as Gayatri Ch. Spivak on one occasion said, is “(…)
the necessary experience of the impossible, which is lived as a calculus without
guarantee” 17 .
It seemed to be this type of journey that I took as my personal entry
knowing how uncertain and sometimes very fragile I could be. The first time I
was exposed to the risk of doing this, I felt an enormous quivering, restlessness
and sense of being lost. All these aspects, dilemmas, unclear moments, temptations,
sensors, constituted the conditions of my embodiment and put me,
namely Myself, into question parallel with the Other, Myself and the Other, in
a new way of exposure. Indefinite, uncrossable, unpredictable.
On one hand, embodiment, as Levinas rightly notices, “(…) is not the
inevitable closure of the mortality of each person; rather, it is openness to the
mortality of others” 18 , on the other hand it always (re)posits the Self itself as a
potential subject of this inquiry, as one from which the potential of both autobiographical
reflection and biographical work about Others might appear.
Places and (re)placement
Posing the very fundamental question, “Where is one’s place?” 19 , Bill Ashcroft
pointed to the intrinsic tension between a sense of place and the experience of
displacement. “(…) [A]nd where is the place? (…) clerical-patriarchal Belgrade?
Humph!” stands in the middle of one of the last email messages I received
from Žarana in December 2001.
Žarana and Nirman experienced this tension by travelling within violent
ambiguities and across them during the 1990s to the greatest extent; through
displacement in the pure geographical sense either by political pressure or by
their own ethical stand, but above all, being “in” their own de-territorialisation
or witnesses to the same, or being in their own exile as the only possible place
that was very soon re-installed in the desired/desirable situatedness. Human
atrocities, memorycide and ruptures everywhere.
17
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press,
1999), 428.
18
Richard Cohen, “Introduction vii,” in Emmanuel Lévinas Humanism of the Other (Urbana and Chicago:
University of Illinois Press, 2006), XXXiii.
19
Bill Ashcroft, Post-Colonial Transformation. (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), 124.
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