Monday Memos
“…the requirements are of academic intelligibility, in the service of which we write for publication. I must first show how the frame and the point of genesis are themsevles contested, and then remind myself that within the frame, and after the genesis, is a patchwork of which I have not yet learned to speak (for ethnography/sociology must be unlearned here) without the legitimation-by-reversal of mere admiration.”
– Spivak, ‘French Feminism Revisited’, in Outside in the Teaching Machine, 1993, p. 142.
“…may I not forget to question: what is it to assume that one already knows the meaning of the words; something is taught by me and learned by others…
…the most urgent political claims in decolonized space are tacitly recognised as coded within the legacy of imperialism: nationhood, constitutionality, citizenship, democracy, socialism … “Feminism”, the named movement, is also part of this so-called heritage of the European Enlightenment, although within the enclosure of the heritage it is often inscribed in a contestatory role.” (144)
“To fix it in paint is to efface as much to disclose.” (145)
“…the cultural politics of asking Marie-Aimée Hélie-Lucas to listen only to purely “traditional” Algerian things comes quite often from the most Frenchified…in decolonization, she has to negotiate actively with the trace of the French until it becomes unrecognizable as such and useful …” (157).
“The task of a feminist political philosophy is neither to establish the proper meaning of “true”, not to get caught up in a regressive pattern to show how the proper meaning always eludes our grasp, nor yet to “ignore” it … but to accept the risk of catechresis.”
“…how can I be certain? And what is to know, or be sure that a knowing has been learned? To theorize the political, to politicize the theoretical, are such vast assymetrical undertakings; the hardest lesson is the impossible intimacy of the ethical.” (171).
*/Ana adjusts beret*
*pulls out cigar*