Towards a Geometry of Economy and Differance

Abstract

This work evolved out of a short paper written for direct action group Queer Nation, in 1992, when its author was one of many activists busy lying down in middle of streets in San Francisco for die-in's with other members of ACT-UP to protest grotesque and hideous lack of funding for AIDS research and for memory of many friends and associates who had succumbed to ravages of this disease. The memory of such events and passing of so many people constitutes a haunting that possesses text, ghosts who hover on periphery of its silence, whose negative presence seethes in tapestry of its argument. It is a work of grief and remembrance. In this spirit one can agree with Adorno's statement that the only philosophy which can be responsibly practiced in face of despair is attempt to contemplate all things as they would present themselves from standpoint of redemption. It is for those who are gone that following argument unfolds. This essay charts in its outline a particular type of grief. It relies upon assumption that society is a formation designed and constructed to achieve power by elimination of difference (from very inception of its laws and codes founded in non-social realm of individual's sense stimuli, translated and twisted into concepts of legality, contracts, and morality1 all way forward to application of these socially accepted lies into exclusion of those who fall-and fall is appropriate verb-outside category of normality). The queer in this work is that which is posited as opposite of normality. Post-modern philosophy, following groundwork of structuralist analysis of linguistics, genealogies of power, and ruptures and hidden privileges of logocentrism unearthed by deconstruction, has examined this act of assertion of alterity as socially necessary other who is sacrificed for benefit of same. This expulsion and erasure, which has always been with us, has charted a history of mutilations, ranging from psychic to physical, spiritual to private. It is in large part an unwritten history, a great blank space emptied of content, actors and events made invisible by deliberate omissions by powers that be. Postcolonialism has attempted to reinscribe lost history and subjectivity of subaltern native informant, Other of colonialist enterprise. But there is no adequate parallel of reclamation for sexual other and there are reasons for this. In a sense geographic distance in post colonialist project has served as something of a wedge for those archivists revisiting terrain of conquest-a negative space of distance and deferral of time which has allowed colonized to speak back despite overriding voice and description of colonizer. In nineteenth century it would take months for letters to reach England from its colonies-the invention of telegraph accelerated hold of information by colonizer over colonized, but cultural hegemony of imperialism-given such vast geographic distances between home country and its satellites, conquered peoples had time and space to formulate consciousness of a response that would ultimately eject colonizers from their countries and begin process of reformation and national identity. This process still continues in post-colonial period, only with a new emphasis on question of how national governments repeat and mimic their colonial predecessors, continuing legacy of oppression but under name of independence. But no such distance exists for sexual other-this subaltern is everywhere, and yet nowhere-it has no decolonized colony to rearticulate against a Western canon that has colluded since beginnings of imperialism to demonize it. Its site of occupation is within family, school, church, army, government-but further it becomes other, further from these sites it is removed, closer it reaches a point where its history disappears and no archives can retrieve its existence or memory. …