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rachael m. wilson//////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
“What is indispensable to feminism?” is a question practiced more than posed, taken up as an activity – for example, by a group of women based in Montreal in the 1980s – not only, though especially, on weekends. It was the question by which “we were able to synchronize our internal clocks and our explorers’ watches,” writes Nicole Brossard in the Foreword to Theory, A Sunday.1 “What is indispensable to feminism” – meaning, of course, what is necessary to feminism, what is critical or vital to feminist thought, what must be counted in any deep accounting of feminist theory and yet, also, what precisely is un-countable and unaccountable in feminism, what is in-dispensable,2 what cannot be weighed, measured, meted out, paid, or spent. Or, acknowledging the inclination towards punning so manifest in the writings collected in this volume, we might hear the question as: What is in-dis-pensable (what is ‘not unthinkable’ or, rather, ‘not not-thinkable’) to, or by, feminism.
I want to acknowledge all these possible versions of the one question and, further, to assume the existence of variations I haven’t discovered (perhaps as many versions of the question as persons to ask it). The question – a sort of tuning fork for the group’s activity, a device that enabled the women to “synchronize” their explorations – was distinctly polysemous and polyphonic. Such were the means of “A ‘theorizing’ that would be a non-totalizing, non-despotic way of organizing.”3 Nicole Brossard also calls this ‘theorizing’ activity a kind of ‘concentration’, which she claims was “essential to the emergence of our plural singularity.”4 If we understand the question “What is indispensable to feminism” not only as “What is necessary to feminism” but, additionally, as “What is it that cannot be measured or parsed (e.g., in discursive terms) when we come to theorize feminism,” then we might hear the second question as a rejoinder to the first. So that, what is necessary to feminism is that which cannot be weighed or measured out: it is exactly that which escapes dispensation.
It is around this fundamentally negative definition of feminism that the Montreal group was able to forge itself as a “plural singularity” and, I would venture, as what Maurice Blanchot calls a “negative community.” Blanchot describes the “negative community” as a collectivity defined by a “principle of incompleteness” deriving, at least in part, from a “principle of insufficiency at the root of each being.”5 In the negative community, “A being, insufficient as it is, does not attempt to associate itself with another being to make up a substance of integrity. The awareness of the insufficiency arises from the fact that it puts itself in question, which question needs the other or another to be enacted.”6 In her essay, “Four Sketches for a Morphology,” Louise Dupré gestures toward the relation between feminist thought and Blanchot’s negative ontology when she writes, “I’m suspicious of any idea of identity that is fixed, immutable, closed. As France Théoret has stated, ‘I want women’s identity to be open and multiple in its access to culture’.”7 As we may readily observe – not only in the denotative function of these sentences but in the imbrication of authorship through recursive citation8 – a disposition towards openness, incompleteness, and multiplicity pervades the writings collected in Theory, A Sunday. Yet, one wonders: what does it mean and, moreover, what does it require to continuously rend or render the self “open and multiple”?
“Women often feel stuck in a transitional gap between object and subject,” observes Gail Scott.9 Louky Bersianik traces the ontological between-ness of women back to Aristotle, who ventured a definition of women unrivaled in the history of Western philosophy for its discretion and economy: “woman is female because of a certain lack of qualities.”10 Though it’s tempting to hold Aristotle’s simplicity in contempt, I think it behooves feminism to seriously consider the proposition and, even, to assume Aristotle’s premise as its own: Ok, then, woman is female because of a certain lack, and feminism is the critical work made possible – no, not just made possible but necessitated, or catalyzed, by that “lack.”
In a different context, but one I nevertheless want to invoke, Fred Moten has argued that such a constitutive lack or “break” in the subject unfolds itself as a “fugitive law of movement” that poses a radical challenge to “already given ontologies”; this movement issues a “constant demand for an ontology of disorder, an ontology of dehiscence.”11 Extemporizing on this theme in a lecture on “Performance and ‘Blackness’” at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, Moten proposes:
You can think about it in two ways: On the one hand, this is a mode of life which does not lend itself or submit itself to normative ontological considerations, and therefore you can say, well, there’s something lacking there or something wrong there. Or, on the other hand, you can say this is a form of life or a mode of life which is disruptive of ontological explanation in ways that reveal the limits of the ontological as a mode of study or as a mode of thought.12
In “The Case of Blackness,” Moten develops this argument in relation to Heidegger’s theory of the “thing,” suggesting a parallel between the “fugitive case” (a grammatical non-case, we might say) of the “thing” that slips between subject and object and the “fugitive case” of “black social life” that unfolds in the frictive non-coincidence of the “fact of blackness” and “the lived experience of the black” (Frantz Fanon’s terms via Moten). As Moten posits, this fugitive case is the aperture of a para-ontological disruption: the dehiscence or puncture forced by the “air of the thing that escapes enframing.”13
Swerving back to the “case” or the “fact of woman,” who is “female because of a certain lack” – of her incompleteness, her “manifestation of [and as] absence,” it can also be said that it is “turned to the excessive, invaginative, more-than-fullness of impurity.”14 This ontologically incomplete, and thus “impure,” flawed subject has been the object of a pathologizing attention throughout the history of Western thought. Woman, as we have noted, is defined by her diagnosis; she is her pathology: a case of lack. As the theory-activity that contests phallogocentric philosophy’s circumscription (circumcision) of the female – not according to the terms of a discourse established by the pathologist but through its own fugitive movements – feminism takes on a deconstructive role.
To be disruptive of normative ontologies, however, feminism has to be figured within an economy of loss, as “a kind of chance, a kind of intellectual and social and moral and ethical force that accrues to people as a function of loss.”15 Which is why, as Louise Dupré writes, “Feminism can only survive by recognizing the feminine as difference.”16 Which is why, as Nicole Brossard asserts, “feminist consciousness, for its part, requires a continual movement towards the unknown.”17 Which is why, finally, what is necessary, what is indispensible to feminism, is that which makes feminism itself literally (or technically) indispensible: Accruing to individuals as a loss, feminism cannot be spent or paid out. It cannot be shared or held in common, it cannot be agreed upon, it neither can be written out discursively nor sung in poetic measures, nor can it draw itself up within or alongside any other binary. One admires the temerity of a group of women writers who set their “internal clocks and explorers’ watches” to the question “what is indispensable to feminism,” acknowledging all the while, and even reveling in the necessary, immanent dissolution of any such thing as a synchronized feminist time.
1. Nicole Brossard, “Foreword” in Theory, A Sunday (New York: Belladonna Press, 2013), 9.↩
2. “Indispensable” derives from the “late Latin dispendĕre,” meaning, “to weigh out, pay out, dispense” (“† di ’ spend, v.”. OED Online. December 2014. Oxford University Press).↩
3. Louise Cotnoir, “Dreams for Human Brains” in Theory, A Sunday, 112.↩
4. Nicole Brossard, “The Frame Work of Desire” in Theory, A Sunday, 29.↩
5. Maurice Blanchot, “The Negative Community,” in The Inoperable Community (Washington, D.C.: Station Hill Press), 5.↩
6. Ibid.↩
7. Louise Dupré, “Four Sketches for a Morphology” in Theory, A Sunday, 96.↩
8. The self-reflexive citational strategies in Theory, A Sunday are remarkable, as the authors frequently make reference to other works by their co-authors.↩
9. Gail Scott, “A Feminist at the Carnival” in Theory, A Sunday, 45.↩
10. Louky Bersianik, “Aristotle’s Lantern” in Theory, A Sunday, 70.↩
11. Fred Moten, “The Case of Blackness,” Criticism 50.2 (2008), 179.↩
12. Fred Moten, “Performance and ‘Blackness’,” recorded lecture, Musuem of Modern Art, Warsaw, 26 June 2014. <https://vimeo.com/100330139>. Emphasis mine.↩
13. Moten, “The Case of Blackness,” 179-180 and 182.↩
14. Ibid., 191. As Gail Scott writes, “woman, partly shadowed, often ends up in my and other prose as a semi-Gothic figure, a figure of excess, yet also of absence,” 47. Emphasis in original.↩
15. Moten, “Performance and Blackness,” n. pag.↩
16. Louise Dupré, “Four Sketches for a Morphology” in Theory, A Sunday, 95.↩
17. Nicole Brossard, “The Frame Work of Desire” in Theory, A Sunday, 29.↩