Had I not created my whole world, I would certainly have died in other people’s.

We who are blasted apart, de-person-ed, detached from “being,” if we are looking toward that throne of universality to consolidate and stabilize us as subjects, to make us whole as people, to bestow upon us, finally, a political agency that we can call our own, in that we can own it like a possession, then we are looking in the wrong direction. The place to begin is by turning our backs on that throne, and toward an agency that doesn’t depend on enlightenment humanism, on the universal, on the self-determined subject of a rational mind, on the hegemonic figure who has power over himself and others. Such an agency can only function by constructing against its human, the monster, the monstrosity of the Other. If our kind of agency depends on anything, it will depend on recognizing and honouring that we are all of us disordered, messy, incorrigible, that we are in relationship to others and interdependent on each other, as much as we are each of us different—and that is fine.

“I see them standing at the formal gates of their colleges, I see my father strolling out under the ochre sandstone arch, the red tiles glinting like bent plates of blood behind his head, I see my mother with a few light books at her hip standing at the pillar made of tiny bricks with the wrought-iron gate still open behind her, its sword-tips black in the May air, they are about to graduate, they are about to get married, they are kids, they are dumb, all they know is they are innocent, they would never hurt anybody. I want to go up to them and say Stop, don’t do it–she’s the wrong woman, he’s the wrong man, you are going to do things you cannot imagine you would ever do, you are going to do bad things to children, you are going to suffer in ways you never heard of, you are going to want to die. I want to go up to them there in the late May sunlight and say it, her hungry pretty blank face turning to me, her pitiful beautiful untouched body, his arrogant handsome blind face turning to me, his pitiful beautiful untouched body, but I don’t do it. I want to live. I take them up like the male and female paper dolls and bang them together at the hips like chips of flint as if to strike sparks from them, I say Do what you are going to do, and I will tell about it”