That Future Just Keeps Coming

So I'm off to Asia again. I haven't been blogging for various reasons, but hopefully those will go away now.

I've decided to see if I can build a readership. As an experiment. I'm going to sell out and do a few things I swore I'd never do - for example, criticize people. That's how the blogosphere goes 'round and 'round, right? That's how you get the trackbacks.

Two other plans. I *will* finish off that comic series. I'm also going to blog about Alain Badiou's Being and Event, when I get around to reading it. Perhaps one chapter ("meditations," scream the purists!) a week, skipping the math chapters, 'cause transfinite set theory hurts.

For cute stories and updates on Korea, see Facebook.

Correction

Back in October of 2005, I posted a quote from Alexandr Solzhenitsyn. Inexplicably, I said "rest in peace." I don't know why I thought he was dead. I was wrong. But now I'm right. Nowadays, I might have endless problems with his perspective, but it still must be said: rest in peace.

Thieves! Thieving thieves!

My laptop has been stolen. I'm online now changing passwords, even though I know they'll have formatted the computer first chance.

I'm A Barbie Girl, In A Barbie World

"Let us note in passing that in none of these discourses we are analyzing here does the moment of death give room for one to take into account sexual difference; as if, as it would be tempting to imagine, sexual difference does not count in the face of death. Sexual difference would be a being-up-until-death."

- The Gift of Death by Jacques Derrida

This quote was brought up near the end of a recent class, and we ended up discussing what was going on here. The general consensus seemed to be that Derrida was basically saying "In all these ways of talking about death, we're not bringing up gender - but we could."

Well, ok... I guess. Once that discussion wound down, I said that every time gendered language comes up, I am hopelessly confused. I simply don't see how a concept could be gendered. As if there was a male temporality, and then a female temporality. A male finitude, and a female finitude.

My confusion basically comes down to this. I understand that various contingent factors affect the possibilities that are closest to me as a man. A women will have other possibilities lying closest to her. But this is all contingent; aside from anatomy, there is nothing about me as me that is essentially "masculine." Sure, there are situations in which I have to take up a masculine position - a certain amount of aggression and confidence is required to get a woman to look twice at you - but this is all contingent, unessential. It does not touch on my own, personal existence.

And I think most of my comrades would agree with me. I have a few friends that are very concerned with gender and whatnot; they've done Women's Studies, they march in Pride Parades, etc. They'll be the first to insist on the contingency of gender. At least, I think they would.

If gender is entirely contingent, then it seems to me that concepts - specifically structures of existence - must be gender neutral. I would insist that my own ecstatic temporalizing is no different from a woman's.

So this is what I said in class. Unfortunately, the discussion was derailed a bit. It was pointed out that that exact words I used were "How can temporality be gendered? What would a female temporality look like?" My friend then correctly pointed out that I was using "male" as a default baseline; it was the unspoken assumption. When I wanted to ask about a different temporality, I immediately jumped to the feminine.

Well, ok, but so what? That still doesn't mean that temporality is gendered. A little bit of reflexivity on my part will excise that sort of prejudice for the next time.

I just don't understand how a concept can be gendered, without relying on some sort of essential gender. As if there was an essential masculinity, and so things could be essentially masculine, rather than just being viewed as masculine by a culture. It just strikes me as a bullshit idea. Concepts are gender neutral.

I suppose this might come back to my own antipathy to gender discourses in general. First, because I think gender is so contingent that it is beneath serious thought. Secondly, I don't understand the value of a political project based around gender. Feminism, for one. Maybe I'm too much of an economic reductionist, but I see the suffering of women as almost always being based in material circumstances - circumstances that the men around them fundamentally share. And no, I'm not saying "what about the men??"

As an example of my apathy, last year the UWO student newspaper published a April 1st spoof issue that became notorious. In one article, a satire of the Vagina Monologues, a group of walking, talking vaginas were protesting something or another. A police officer, "polishing his night stick," took one into an alley to "teach her a lesson."

Ok, rape jokes suck. But this became an epic struggle on campus.

I don't know. The 20th century saw striking miners face down military units. Civil rights workers faced down Jim Crow's fire hoses and attack dogs, and cut his head off. Mid 20th feminism finally forced Liberal Democracy to honour its promises to women. Are we really so comfortable that our greatest enemy is now that trivial little rag The Gazette? It seems to me this is what gender based politics in our time and place has been reduced to.

Ethical Disruptions, Part 1: The Issue at Hand

There tend to be two elements of the common sense idea of ethics and morality. The first boils down to "what must I do, and what do I deserve to expect from other people?" In other words, the question of morality is about choosing between possibilities. Doing X is good, while doing Y is bad.

The second element is that of justification. There is a persistent search for some way to justify moral judgments and acts. Probably the most common justification has been the afterlife; be "good" or you'll suffer punishment after death. Other common justifications involve human solidarity, or God's holiness and authority.

So the standard moral discourse asks, what should we do, and why should we do it?

Between the 19th and 20th centuries, these questions ceased to be serious philosophical themes. The first question is dismissed as instrumental thought - ie, the insistence on making pure thought "practical" and "useful," as if thinking were nothing other than a factory for producing goods and services. The second question - why should we act in such and such a way? - is dismissed as slavish and repetitive. Acting because of another being's power is the very definition of passivity.

The old categories of ethics and morality have fallen into disrepute. Yet, the 20th century demanded a response from those that lived it, and the 21st century demands a response from us. Viciousness and exploitation were, and are, rampant. If the shining beacon of morality is discarded, than do all conceptions of justice, courage, wisdom and truth follow closely behind?

We must hope not. Alain Badiou, writing decades after the "death" of philosophy was declared, has said that the world (not God, not philosophers - the world) is telling philosophy to get up and walk. We must say the same to ethics.

And yet, we cannot pretend that Nietzsche did not write. We can't go back to the old way of doing things. New concepts must be created. I think the thinkers of the 20th century - and now those of the 21st - have had a common ethical project, and I think this project can be summed up in terms of the disruption of the totality. The disruption - and remaking - of the world. From Heidegger's call of conscience, to Levinas's encounter with the Other, to Lacan's traumatic encounter with the real, to Badiou's fidelity to the event - the common thread is the traumatic disruption of everyday life.

Ethics is coming back, and it will have no truck with humanism (reach your inner potential!) or liberalism (choose what you like, just don't hurt anyone else!) or theology (bow!).