[-empyre-] Permission Toward Matrixial Understandings

[Danny Butt <db@dannybutt.net>]

I was going to write something earlier about the discussion, geopolitics and
the response to Raul's initial intervention, but then I found myself reading
something which was not only much more insightful :7, but more useful to the
list and also relevant to Kate's posts.

"Cixous might be bringing into the feminine familiar that space described by
Heidegger as a space of prior interrogation, 'a vague average understanding
of Being... [which] up close, we cannot grasp at all.'

We know that Derrida has reread such Heideggerian passages as the
effaced/disclosed trace (not a past present), and the differed/deferred end
(not a future present), inscribing what we must stage as our present, here
and now, here only insofar as it is also away, elsewhere. Cixous' genius is
to take these ways of thinking and straining and turn them into something
doable. I think she is helped in this by her somewhat unexamined belief in
the power of poetry and art in general which she has never lost. To be sure,
in the hands of essentialist enthusiasm, this doability can turn into
precious posturing. But then, in the hands of rationalist convictions,
attempts to bring the aesthetic into the Lebenswelt can lead to interminable
systems talk bent on the simple task of proving that the aesthetic is
coherent. And, in the grip of *anti*essentialist enthusiasm, the Derridean
maneuvers can *also* turn into precious posturing. I think it is in this
spirit that Cixous has recently written: 'I believe the text should
establish an ethical relationship to reality as well as to textural
practice.' The task here is to not suspend reading until such time as the
text is our of quarantine.

All precautions taken, then we can say that Cixous is staging the thought
that, even as we are determined in all kinds of other ways - academic,
philosopher, feminist, black, homeowner, menstruating woman, for example -
we *are* also *always* in the peculiar being-determination that sustains
these. She is staging that dimension in the name of the place of
mother-and-child. This is not really a space accessible to political
determinations, or to specific determinations of mothering in specific
cultural formations. Following a chronological notion of human
psychobiography, this is where, at the same *time* as we mature into
adulthood and responsibility, we continue to exist in a peculiar
being-determination to which the name 'child' can be lent:

  The relation to the "mother", in terms of the intense pleasure and
  violence, is curtailed no more than the relation to childhood (the
  child that she was, that she is, that she makes, remakes, undoes,
  there at the point where, the same she mothers herself)."

- Gayatri Spivak, "French Feminism Revisited", Outside in the Teaching
Machine, p155.


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