aviatrixie

I doubt that work ennobles man and I absolutely rule out that it ennobles woman.

Daviel Shy: So the question is how to speak of or from or with a “we,” not about inclusion or exclusion, but how to speak with others and yet not for others… Hélène Cixous: It’s well thought. I think hospitality is very helpful you know, to think those mysteries. It’s really the secret of love. I think that I’ve said that hundreds of times in my seminars. Love is, first of all, a word that is used for everything. It’s like a piece of cloth, you wipe everything with love. And it really has to be developed and listened to. There are attitudes of sheer hatred that people call love, by mistake, of course. We see that in the newspapers every day. So, loving love, which is a special and rare type of relation. It is a love that I call it loving-love: the love that safeguards life, that entertains it, that watches over it, that labors to assure the other, a way of being, of enjoying life, being able to resurrect, and most of all lets the other free. Keeps and lets free. Keeps, and it might happen that if you keep too tight, then there is no freedom, you have to watch, to be a life keeper at the same time, leave it open and give the other all possibilities. When we come in the scene of love with somebody else, somebody can be anything, for instance, I with my cats (who unfortunately must have hidden) but I experience the mysteries of love every day with each of them and both. Then, you discover how other is the other, how different. how foreign, how un-understandable. It’s a perpetual surprise, I don’t understand you. This is part of love. Of course, if I understand you I swallow you, I eat you up. The truer is when i don’t understand you, I come very close to you, or I bring you very close to me, but not too close. It demands an attention. It’s a work. It brings new problems every day. In everyday life, since we have no time, then we explain, we are indignant or we disapprove, this is part of love too, you know it’s the funny way.

Audre Lorde argues throughout her work that we should not be protected from what hurts. We have to work and struggle not so much to feel hurt but to notice what causes hurt, which means unlearning what we have learned not to notice. We have to do this work if we are to produce critical understandings of how violence, as a relation of force and harm, is directed toward some bodies and not others.