internally riven
By shag carpet bomb • Jan 19th, 2007 • Category: Archiving, Feminist Fight Club, Janet Halley, Split Decisions2007-01-19 02:02:24
“I suspect it can be a good thing to be internally riven: Teiresias was a prophet, after all, not the village idiot. But even if it’s bad to be internally riven, many of us (the postmodernists) just are. There’s no putting that genie back in the bottle. And the genie has mischievous ways of providing the thrill of liberation from the self. A certain politics (and a certain hedonics) of the complexly constituted erotic self have arisen for me as the writer of these pages. I have held every position I describe in this book; I have abaondoned many of them, often with cries of pain but also with swoops of joy. (Or at least I claim I have, the resentiment with which I describe cultural feminism suggests that it retains some peculiar hold inside me.)
And there have been the pleasures of being wrong and changing my mind: if the project began as an effort to beat back the influence of Catherine A. MacKinnon in left thought and practice about sexuality, it has brought me to a vital new respect for her early, radical, and even critical work and a wish to promote and disseminate it. I look back with yearning on her early antinormativity, her profound appetite for epistemological crisis, and her somewhat inchoate critique of rights, and I wonder: where have they gone? I have often said of this book, “I need to finish it before I change my mind†— only to change my mind and set in motion a round of revisions equally humiliating and exhilarating. And if I could click my heels and become “a gay man†or “a straight white male middle-class radical,†I would do it in an instant — wouldn’t you? Even if certain identity strictures forbid me to claim to be Leo Bersani or Duncan Kennedy — my examples…of these two points of erotic and political articulation — the erotic interests that they put on the map are, to me, virtually my own. On the downside, that means that I can easily come into conflict with myself. As a gay man, I could want some things that hurt me in my life as a woman. I’m acquiring a deep sense that the resulting inner cacophony is fun. The project for me, then, has been to find a politics of internal-riven-ness — a discomfited politics — that is equally fun.
— Janet Halley, p 12-13 in Split Decisions
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