THE
UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO
NON-ESSENTIALLY
OCCIDENTAL:
HETEROGLOSSIA
IN THE WESTERN DISCOURSE ON ISLAM
MASTER’S
THESIS
MASTER
OF ARTS PROGRAM IN THE SOCIAL SCIENCES
BY
JEFFREY
C. ARCHER
CHICAGO,
ILLINOIS
JUNE
1996
In the past few decades, a number of critical
works have appeared dealing with the nefarious “Orientalism” and
other such Western discourses on “others.” While serving to
bring up a great many important issues about ethnocentrism,
colonialism, postcolonialism,
and
relations of power in general, many of these critiques also seem to
implicate the West
as
a whole as subsumed within a homogenous, essentializing discourse
when engaged in writing about these “others.” From Edward
Said’s famous (or infamous) work Orientalism
to
the recent proliferation of a self-reflective discourse in
anthropology and in the history of the “non-West,” “the West”
has begun to appear as the only topos where it is legitimate to
speak of a unitary discourse or, to use Foucault’s term, episteme.
Indeed, the metadiscursive practices which have become en vogue of
late seem so concerned with the tropes of representation used to
discuss the world of the “outside” that they have been largely
blind to the effects of their own simultaneous essentialization of
the “inside.” It seems this oversight has done a small but
significant disservice to those encompassed in “the West”
(whatever exactly that term designates); for to critique a singular,
homogenous discourse of “the West” is indeed as much a
misrepresentation as it is to critique as homogenous the societies
of “the East.”
I do not intend to imply that these
metadiscourses are not necessary (at least provisionally), that
there is no real disparity in the way this “West” has related to
the “outside”--especially in material terms. Yet it might serve
“us” to note that when “we” talk about a Foucaultian type
discourse which encompasses all attempts at the representation of
the “other,” the “outside,” of “them” that we are in
fact reifying these distinctions. Even if this discourse is
limited, as a neo-Marxian reading would dictate, to the bourgeois,
the male, the academic, the official, the dominant media, etc., and
excludes the most obvious “others” within “the West” itself,
a significant “self” is nevertheless constituted, and one which
contrasts in its singular force, dynamics, and indivisibility, to
“the rest.”
Again,
I must assert that a critique of “the West” as an agent of
unparalleled exploitation carried out on “others” is not without
merit. It is also not unfounded to argue that this exploitation was
and is vitalized by the use of language in a certain way--“power
in discourse”--and
that this inadvertant usage of language has a significant genealogy.
Indeed, it is vital to attack the abuses which have been carried
out in the name of “the West.” Yet we must acknowledge that
this “West” (capitalized, signifying a proper noun; an entity)
is itself a construct; indeed, the “reality” of which has
allowed for the very designation of the “other”--”barbarian,”
“infidel,” “savage,” “primitive,” etc. And despite the
efforts of many conscientious scholars, this “West,” whose
penetrating gaze has looked down from the towering heights of its
monolithic edifice to survey the rest of the globe’s inhabitants
yet stands.
To
invert a category of “the other” found in a western mythological
discourse on the other,
this “West” might be compared to a cyclops, with but one eye to
survey its surroundings. Its (or it might be said, “his”)
monocular gaze scans the horizon with no sense of depth, only able
to make out the surface of all he sees. Yet one other likeness
between this cyclops and “the West” which must not be overlooked
(or, perhaps more accurately, left “unspoken”) is that the
latter is a myth just as the former; the latter inscribed with such
potency in the imagination that its reality is rarely brought into
serious question. The sense of a unity which is produced in any
such discourse on “the West” in which “West” is capitalized
(in all senses of the word)
and left out of quotation marks--whether it be a “critical”
reading or a self-indulgent--leaves this monster alive, albeit
perhaps not completely unfettered.
In
discussing the all-important distinction between “self” and
“other,” Tzvetan Todorov points out in his book The Conquest of
America: The Question of the Other that “We can discover the
other in ourselves, realize we are not a homogeneous substance,
radically alien to whatever is not us: as Rimbaud said, Je est un
autre.”
Indeed, to categorically situate a homogenous discourse of the West
against a plethora of unessentializable “others” still maintains
the distinction of an “us” and a “them” with no in-between.
Lila
Abu-Lughod makes an argument in her recent writings which works to
pluralize the “lives” of her subjects, yet which maintains the
above distinction. By writing against even the taken-for-granted,
liberal humanist category of “culture” which has been used to
describe anthropology’s “others”
(and it must be added, to describe the “self” as well), yet
maintaining the use of what she terms a “tactical” humanism
(with its shades of a very “Western” attachment to the
self-actualizing individual), Abu Lughod goes only halfway toward
reducing the texual/discursive violence done. Her writing accepts
“the myth . . . of the self-constituting subject, that a
consciousness of being which has an origin outside itself is no
being at all.”
Rather, this must be erased from the text which endeavors to
represent the other without violence.
From
such a rejection, we can proceed to the idea that though histories
and identities are necessarily constructed and produced from many
fragments, fragments which do not contain the signs of any essential
belonging inscribed in them, this does not cause the history of the
subaltern to dissolve once more into invisibility. This is firstly
because we [ought]apply exactly the same decentering strategies to
the monolithic subject-agents of elite historiography;
Thus it seems even Abu Lughod’s assertions,
perhaps among the most radical of the self-reflective oevres in
anthropology today, fails to apply the same critical perspective
when discussing the discursivity of the “West”; and indeed, this
works to the detriment of the project’s coherence. Rather, we must
recognize the “other” in the “self”; that the “West” is
not so easy to distinguish, at least in some marginal realms of
discourse, from the “other,” and that the other is not always
placed into the confining categories of discourse in the course of
textualization.
As repeatedly stated above, there is a
substantial difference in the play of power in the discourses of
“West” on “the other” versus “West” on the “self”
(the very constructedness of these entities notwithstanding).
Europe and America have indeed been the exploiters; they have
largely controlled the various modes of production, whether one’s
vantage is from a materialist or discourse analytic perspective (or
both). It is perhaps less immediately important from the
perspective of a simple political justice, conceived in the most
colloquial terms, to treat the figure of “the West” with as much
self-reflexivity as the representation of those encompassed by the
“non-West.” And yet, if these various critiques of the
essentializing techniques of discourse are to maintain validity,
they must apply across the board--across the borders between the
constructs of “us” and “them”--and deconstruct the
discourses on “us” as well as those on “them.” Or at least
they must find discontinuities, ruptures, resistance, competitions,
and contra-dictions within the “discourse of the West,” and
specifically that realm discourse on “the other.” Indeed,
perhaps only when this is done can Abu-Lughod’s project of writing
against culture be accomplished. Only then can the field of
power-discourse be in some way leveled. The contention of this
paper is, then, that “the Occident” must be deconstructed in all
its fascets as well as “the Orient” and other “others”
created in the imagination of the dominant discourse of “the
West.” Indeed, if there is still a coherently constructed
“self”-consciousness remaining--even as an object of
critique--there will inevitably remain an “other” as the
“outside” and the definite opposite of this “self.”
James
Clifford, another important critic in the field of anthropology,
indeed does argume against “occidentalism,” as the inverse of
orientalism (in Said’s usage), but does not carry this criticism
down to the level of identity at its most fundamental level (i.e.,
the “ontological” or linguistic category of the “self”), and
often makes inadvertent reference to the “Western and
non-Western,” even if only referring to the realm of professional
academia.
His critique of Said’s Orientalism does sum up, with some
insight, the problems with the latter.
Indeed
Said’s methodological catholicity repeatedly blurs his analysis.
If he is advancing anthropological arguments, Orientalism appears as
the cultural quest for order. When he adopts the stance of a
literary critic, it emerges as the process of writing, textualizing,
and interpreting. As an intellectual historian Said portrays
Orientalism as a specific series of influences and schools of
thought. For the psychohistorian Orientalist discourse becomes a
representative series of personal-historical experiences. For the
Marxist critic of ideology and culture it is the expression of
definite political and economic power interests. Orientalism is
also at times conflated with Western positivism, with general
definitions of the primitive, with evolutionism, with racism. One
could continue the list. Said’s discourse analysis does not
itself escape the all-inclusive “Occidentalism” he specifically
rejects as an alternative to Orientalism (328).
This
very apt and insightful example notwithstanding, Clifford himself is
open to the criticism that he does not take this critique of a
critique of the critique of “the other” far enough. Perfectly
willing to disavow the use of dichotomizing concepts such as “the
West-rest (“Third World”),”
he does not carry out the necessary next step, which would be the
deconstruction of identity itself (both of “the West” and, as a
prior necessity, of even the individual as a bounded object).
Clifford also admits his inability to do without the concept of
“culture,” which he nonetheless admits is an essentializing
technique.
To
quote P. Stephen Sangren on Clifford and the postmodern critique in
anthropology in general: “by making textual authority stand for
cultural authority in general, the literary critic, as fabricator
and deconstructor of that authority, places him-/herself in a
position of transcendent power--if not that of a king, at least that
of a high priest.”
Though I disagree with most of the rest of Sangren’s argument
against postmodern criticism, it seems this at least might be in
some way accurate. This chorus of critics seeking to right the
wrongs of their predecessors necessarily usurp their power, if not
to represent the “other” in a totalizing way, then to represent
the “West” in such a manner--or to stand as representatives of
“the West” themselves, i.e., as its self-conscience. In order
to complete the project of constructing a discourse in which the
other is no longer dominated or subjugated or placed under “the
West,” the existence of this very “West” as a construct must
be made known and shown inadequate or incomplete from its very
foundation.
The
bounded self has been a recurrent element of discourses in the west
(plural; lower case) from the earliest of texts, as has the call for
a self-critical discourse (“recurrent” emphasized because they
are not the only; are not always nor in all ways present). Bryan S.
Turner notes that the confessional manuals of the “Middle Ages”
“provided the disciplines whereby a new concept of the interior
self could flourish.”
Turner cites Caroline Walker Bynum’s contention that in the
twelfth-century “religious writing showed a specific interest in
the inner landscape of the psyche and a concern for the development
of models of moral consciousness and ethical behavior.”
Yet we may take this cursory genealogy further.
From the earliest Christian writings, the book
of I Corinthians exhorts, “But let a man examine himself”
(11:28); and Galatians, “But let each one examine his own work,
and then he will have rejoicing in himself alone, and not in
another” (6:4). Neither is the Torah/Old Testament without
statements which indicate a “self”-consciousness and
self-critical discourse. Proverbs 20:27, for instance, tells that
“The spirit of a man is the lamp of the Lord, Searching all the
inner depths of the heart.” Thus, as Jacques Derrida notes,
We
all know this program of Europe’s self-reflection or
self-presentation. We are old, I say it again. Old Europe seems to
have exhausted all the possibilities of discourse and
counter-discourse about its identification. Dialectic in all its
essential forms, including those that comprehend and entail
anti-dialectic, has always been in the service of this autobiography
of Europe, even when it took on the appearance of a confession. For
avowal, guilt, and self-accusation no more escape this old program
than does the celebration of self.
“The
West” can confess its sins against the rest of the world with the
sincerest of conviction, and yet the long-standing border--the
definite difference--still remains. The ontologically derived
notion that “the West” has a history (as opposed to histories,
perhaps) necessarily leaves the foundation intact which has led to
the racisms, colonialisms, and various other exploitations of the
world not-us. Conceding that the history of the West has produced
some good along with the bad, it remains that until “we” can
recognize how much this discourse is a construct, and not the only
one which might be used with coherence, “the West” will still
stand against “the rest,” and the latter as a definite,
essential entity. And as Derrida contends, “every reduction of
the other to a real moment of my [or “our”] life, its reduction
to the state of empirical alter-ego, is an empirical possibility, or
rather eventuality, which is called violence.”
What
can be offered as an alternative, then, to the history of “the
West”--a project which will always end at “violence”--which
would break apart this presumed whole, which might finally loose the
discourse of domination from its very ground? Certainly Foucault
might be of some use in this, except for his (later) critiques,
especially on power, which tend toward the totalistic--at least in
our area of concern, i.e., in discourse. Though his “archaeologies”
might look for ruptures, discontinuities, etc., and might be of some
promise to these ends,
Foucault’s later “genealogies” have been all too easily
appropriated by those who would construct a homogeneous
meta-discourse on “the West” (e.g., Said). The work of Jacques
Derrida and Mikhail Bakhtin, however, seems to offer the more
possible possibility (Derrida would see it possibility of the
impossible) of a basis by which this sort might be begun. In
Bakhtin’s dialogic and carnivalesque--the realm of laughter and a
“self”-contending discourse of parody and the grotesque, and in
Derrida’s juxtaposition and blurring of “self” and “other”
in the realms of the most fundamental levels of language and being,
there seems to be at least the possibility of other histories of the
history of “the other.”
________________________________________________________________________
This can be said, inversely or reciprocally, of
all identity or all identification: there is no self-relation, no
relation to oneself, no identification with oneself, without
culture, but a culture of oneself as a culture of the other, a
culture of the double genitive and of the difference to oneself.
The grammar of the double genitive also signals that a culture never
has a single origin. Monogenealogy would always be a mystification
in the history of culture.
Jacques Derrida, The Other Heading
Thanks to the duality of tone, the laughing
people, who were not in the least concerned with the stabilization
of the existing order and of the prevailing picture of the world
(the official truth), could grasp the world of becoming as a whole.
They could thus conceive the gay relativity of the limited class
theories and the constant unfinished character of the world--the
constant combination of falsehood and truth, of darkness and light,
of anger and gentleness, of life and death. The dual tone of the
people’s speech is never torn away from this whole nor from the
becoming; this is why the negative and positional elements do not
seek a separate, private, and static expression. The dual tone
never wants to halt the spinning wheel, to find and outline the top
and the bottom, the front and the back; on the contrary, it marks
their continuous change and fusion. In popular speech the accent is
always placed on the positive element (but we repeat, without
tearing it away from the negative).
Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World
A
“gay relativity”--not relativism. Gazes into the past that
would not find one discourse dominant, nor all discourses
(separately) equivocal--i.e., on a metaphysical level. For indeed
the function of a still-constituted-being extant in the modernist
rhetoric of relativism is still well within the “self”-reflective
discourse which Derrida finds in the official language of “Old”
Europe.
As Dominick LaCapra points out in a discussion of Bakhtin,
extreme
documentary objectivism and relativistic subjectivism do not
constitute genuine alternatives. They are mutually supportive parts
of the same larger complex. The objectivist places the past in the
“logocentric” position of what Jacques Derrida calls the
“transcendental signified.” It is simply there in its sheer
reality, and the task of the historian is to use sources as
documents to reconstruct past reality as objectively as he or she
can . . . The relativist simply turns objectivist “logocentrism”
upside-down. The historian places himself or herself in the
position of “transcendental signifier” that “produces” or
“makes” the meaning of the past (LaCapra 1985: 137-8).
Indeed,
Bakhtin’s “gay relativity” is caught up in his notions of the
dialogic, the polyphonic/heteroglot, and the carnivalesque and the
grotesque as fields which destroy the boundaries of the subject
itself--much like Derrida’s “supplementarity” or “differance.
Bakhtin’s “dialogic” is the realm of an open-ended discourse,
the place of speech between opposing
sides. Constituted in this dialogue the language is not owned by
either speaker, as in a monologic discourse, but indeed constitutes
both the voice of the speaker and of the “other” of the specific
utterance. As LaCapra points out,
Bakhtin
insisted instead on the dual reference of language or discursive
practices. The problems of reported speech in all its
variants--from direct quotation through indirect discourse to modes
of quasi-direct or free speech--were for him the crux of a theory of
language in both literature and life. Especially significant for
him was that it did ‘not at all contain an “either/or”
dilemma; its specificum
[was] precisely a matter of both
author and
character
speaking at the same time, a matter of a single linguistic
construction within which the accents of two differently oriented
voices are maintained.
Thus
Bakhtin’s dialogic can be understood as deriving from a critique
of both Hegelian/Marxist dialectics, as there is never the violence
of the synthesis, and Sausseurian linguistics
emphasizing the overlapping of any binary opposites, and thus
blurring the distinction between such things as “self” and
“not-self” as definite categories.
Bakhtin’s heteroglossia or
polyphony is the space where these voices, past and present, contend
with a dominant (“official”) discourse. This takes place most
succinctly in the realm of the “carnivalesque” or “grotesque,”
and has no resemblance to the pathetic “points of resistance” in
Foucault’s power relationships
For Foucault, resistance can never escape the dominant discourse of
power, but rather constitutes opposites within it
In the polyphony of the carnivalesque, the resistance is not only
to the hegemony of the official discourse, but to its whole
ontological basis of the “self” or any unit of speech as an
essentializable entity (i.e., set in a solid, boundaried opposition
to “not-self” or any opposites). Thus “the carnival attitude
generates an ambivalent interaction between all basic opposites in
language and life--a ‘jolly relativity’ in which poles are taken
from their pure binarism and made to touch and know one another.
Again, Bakhtin:
The
ancient dual tone of speech is the stylistic reflection of the
ancient dual-bodied image. As the ancient image disintegrated, an
interesting phenomenon in the history of literature and spectacle
took place: the formation of images in pairs, which represent top
and bottom, front and back, life and death . . . The dialogue
of these pairs is of considerable interest, since it marks the as
yet incomplete disintegration of the dual tone. In reality, it is a
dialogue of the face with the buttocks, of birth with death
And
thus of “self” and all that is “not-self.” Seen in this
way, the polyphony of the carnival, the dialogic of the grotesque,
serves to realize Derrida’s project of “supplementarity”:
finding in the “remainder,” the unaccountable left-over of any
system of “analytic or polar opposites,” the “undecidable
interplay of excess and lack between the same and the other
This deconstructed self in Derrida is derivative of a critique of
Sausseure, as well. In “differance,”
a Derridaian
neo-logism working at the level of structural binaries, “one
(e.g., one pair of opposites) is the same as the other but as
differed or deferred.
To limit the other to the circumscribed space of a binary
correlative is as much a potentiality for violence as it is to view
the other as completely unrelated.
The implications of these modes of
blurring the self/other distinction applied to the history of “the
West,” or more specifically, the histories and other modes of
representation of the west on the other, are radical. Though Said
and many other critics have called for “the West” to re-evaluate
its discourse as has been used to enclose and essentialize “the
Orient,” a carnivalesque reading of “Western” discourse would
find the breaks, ruptures, and discontinuities in this supposedly
all-encompassing discourse--i.e., the impossible possibility of the
other-in-self in the remnants of past discourses. Only in this way
could the polyphony of voices stand to counter the official
construction of “others”--not so completely other, nor
same, after all--and
a hegemonic “self” which is the construct constituting “the
West.”
This “historical” project would
have radical implications for a majority of the “disciplines” in
the university as it is structured today. The seemingly solid
distinction between the fields of literary criticism, history and
cultural anthropology, for instance, would become unrecognizable.
For not only would the study of “other” cultures as
such be called
into question, but the “West” as a coherent, essentializable
historical object as well--and all the disciplines constituted by
such objectifications to study, dissect, and taxonomize. There
would remain no epistemological-ontological borders between the
traditionally constituted fields of inquiry of the “one” and
“the other.” A perspective which would look for discourses
without the usual identifying practices of the social sciences would
transcend the distinctions of bounded fields in all senses, and
would look for the “other” in the “self”--whether this
“self” as one’s own or as the other’s. Closed systems, or
as Bakhtin calls them, “-isms,” would thus be questioned at
their most foundational level:
“Reason
(ratio) itself,”
the practice of dividing, categorizing, opposing, “might be seen
as an attempt to ration and limit the play of supplementarity.
Analysis provides clear and distinct ideas which define boundaries
and confine ambiguity or overlap to marginal, borderline cases.
Insofar as analysis defines polar opposites, it constructs ideal
types of heuristic fictions
Thus
the very basis of “the West” as it has often been imagined; of
positivism; of the “scientific” practice of dividing, limiting,
defining; of logic; would be found lacking in their attempt to
describe the human situation. The imminence of the “dominant
discourse” could thus be laughed at in a Bakhtinian sense, and
perhaps finally made impotent to commit further violences within
such a discourse of “jolly relativity.”
Rather than dissecting,
differentiating, delimiting the other, the approach I have been
advocating would look for what anthropologist Unni Wikan calls
“resonance” to find its impetus to inscribe
This practice of “feeling-thought” which Wikan translates from
the Balinese word “keneh”
is understood by Wikan’s informants to stand for the empathetic
union of things, ideas, etc., which would “rationally” seem to
be contradictory
One of Wikan’s informants notes, “But Westerners have no
resonance . . . because they use their thoughts only, and so ideas
and understandings do not spring alive.
What we must do is to look for our thoughts to “spring alive,”
and look for the margins of discourse where they always do. To find
“other voices” from our past with “the other” means to look
beyond the “rational” distinctions social scientists have been
trained to uncover. This does not mean to reduce the other to its
common denominators, to what is its easiest synonym in the familiar
language. Rather it is to harmonize with alterity, to let it sound
chords on the very sinews of the self.
In the western relationships with
Islam, the great majority of textual remnants extant from the
archives of the former are
either polemic or essentializing or about the different nature of
“the infidel,” “the Turk,” and the European. Yet there are
also significant traces where ruptures occur of so easy a
generalization. Even within the oevres of particular authors who
may generally show contempt for Islam, one can often find traces of
admiration, and even self-identification.
Fragmentary sources such as these,
though most often hidden under the mass of the “official”
discourse, indicate at least the undercurrent of diffused inversions
or blurrings of the succinct bounds of European self-identification
and self-enclosure. To find such a history or “archaeology of
subjugated knowledges and practices
or “genealogy” of these marginalized realms of discourse would
be to find in our own past a ground for building a more ethical
response to supposed others--that is, a “culture of
oneself as
a culture of the
other . . . and as the difference
to oneself.
Thus the goal of this study will be to uncover just such ruptures,
inversions, and blurrings in the diversity of discourses on the
“other” of Islam.
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
She
was dressed in a caftan of gold brocade, flowered with silver, very
well fitted to her shape, and showing to advantage the beauty of her
bosom, only shaded by the thin guaze of her shift. Her drawers were
pale pink, her waistcoat green and silver, her slippers white,
finely embroidered, her lovely arms adorned with bracelets of
diamonds and her broad girdle set round with diamonds; upon her head
a rich Turkish handkerchief of pink and silver, her own fine black
hair hanging a great length in various tresses, and on one side of
her head some bodkins of jewels. I am afraid you will accuse me of
extravagance in this description. I think I have read somewhere
that women always speak in rapture
when they speak of beauty, but I can’t imagine why they should not
be allowed to do so. I
rather think it virtue to be able to admire without any mixture of
desire or envy.
Lady Mary Wortley Mantagu, desription of an Ottoman
official’s “Lady,” Turkish Embassy
Letters (emphasis mine)
“To admire without any mixture of
desire or envy.” Perhaps the “impossible possibility,”
expressing the liminal space between sameness and difference. For
envy must
maintain a definite “other”; desire,
an object. The body, experienced sensually as
if desired; taken
into the eye, but not consumed. Perhaps something
“feminine”--wanting of the desire to penetrate, yet gazing
beneath the outer layers: “her shape, only shaded by the thin
guaze of her shift.”
When “Europe” is supposed (by
many recent critics) only able to figure the other one
dimensionally, as a target of contempt, or as an object of
possessive desire, Lady Montagu’s letter to Lady Mar leads the
reader to discern an alternative. The recognition of alterity--an
identity not bound by the limitions of linguistic representation,
i.e., here as one encountered in “rapture,” as inexpressible,
the “unlimited
Desire” Levinas
associates with the “absolutely other,--that
is, that which remains unknown even under the direct gaze of
passion--and without the base, lusting desire to captivate, to use
for selfish pleasure, to “know,” reduce, own, or control.
Lady Montagu’s representation of
Fatima may fall short of the ideal lower-body stratum in
Bakhtin--still too refined, masked in propriety. Yet it does locate
in her body and dress (or rather, in the gaze which falls upon the
body and dress) a space which might serve as an opening for the
texts which will follow. The appreciation which is expressed by
numerous European authors for Islam is indeed often sensual, exotic,
and even erotic without necessarily being imbued with a penetrative
intent. The Romantic is never necessarily
reduced to Neitzche’s Apollolian, or to a closed
system of discourse as Foucault would have it. Rather, as Bakhtin
noted, strands of the carnivalesque still resonate in some spaces
within expressions of the Romantic, releasing the body from the
bonds of essential description.
“Rapture” opens in the text the
possibility of uncoercive description. Rapture shuns closure, as it
evades the compulsion to commit the being of another entirely into
the text without the possibility of escape. The unutterable Saying
opposing (while not lieing
opposite
to) the Said
Here Fatima is freed from the enclosure the previous sentences of
description would command. The other remains other--but not
alien--in the encounter inscribed as “rapture.”
To return to the “something
feminine” from above, it is perhaps this inversion of the dominant
discourse which is in many ways the architypical other. As Levinas
contends, “I think the absolutely contrary contrary [ le
contraire absolutement contraire],
whose contrariety is in no way affected by the relationship that can
be established between it and its correlative, the contrariety that
permits its terms to remain absolutely other, is the feminine.
In spite of critiques condemning Levinas here for sexism, it seems
there is indeed something substantial in his discussion of “Eros,”
perhaps disclosing a realm of other not necessarily subjectable to
the simple binary relationship (rationalized, logified
if you will).
Levinas contends that there is an “absence of any fusion in the
erotic,
thus that there is no violence done the other in the act, in spite
of the metaphors which attempt to place intercourse in terms of
knowledge--”knowing” in the Biblical parlance, for example--and
thus in the position of the subject.
Levinas
concludes his discussion of Eros:
Can
this relationship with the other through eros be characterized as a
failure? Once again, the answer is yes, if one adopts the
terminology of current descriptions, if one wants to characterize
the erotic by “ grasping,” “possessing,” or “knowing.”
But there is nothing of all this, or the failure of this, in eros.
If one could possess, grasp, and know the other, it would not be
other. Possessing, knowing, and grasping are synonyms of power
Thus
the “other” from the voice of the official (in this case the
“phalologocentric” discourse) is not obtainable, not
subjectable, indefinable.
Furthermore,
the relationship with the other is generally sought out as a fusion.
I have precisely wanted to contest the idea that the relationship
with the other is fusion. The relationship with the Other is the
absence of the other; not absence pure and simple, not the absence
of pure nothingness, but absence in a horizon of the future, an
absence that is time
Above I wrote of the “sentences
of description” which would “command . . . enclosure.” In
what Levinas terms the “terminology of current description”
these sentences would indeed do just that. Yet it might be rendered
otherwise:
The
caress is a mode of the subject’s being, where the subject who is
in contact with another goes beyond this contact. Contact as
sensation is part of the world of light. But what is caressed is
not touched, properly speaking. It is not the softness or warmth of
the hand given in contact that the caress seeks. The seeking of the
caress constitutes its essence by the fact that the caress does not
know what it seeks. This “not knowing,” this fundamental
disorder, is the essential. It is like a game with something
slipping away, a game absolutely without project or plan, not with
what can become ours or us, but with something other, always other,
always inaccessible, and always still to come [à venir]
To
render the above “description” of Fatima otherwise, it might
rather be understood as a verbal “caress.” To read again,
She
was dressed in a caftan of gold brocade, flowered with silver, very
well fitted to her shape, and showing to advantage the beauty of her
bosom, only shaded by the thin guaze of her shift. Her drawers were
pale pink, her waistcoat green and silver, her slippers white,
finely embroidered, her lovely arms adorned with bracelets of
diamonds and her broad girdle set round with diamonds; upon her head
a rich Turkish handkerchief of pink and silver, her own fine black
hair hanging a great length in various tresses, and on one side of
her head some bodkins of jewels.
Not
quite drawing Fatima into the realm of the rationed, the
circumscribed, the subjected, this fragment speaks the movement of
the eye over the body: over, then under, the “thin guaze of her
shift” which only shades her figure; up the legs (“Her drawers
were pale pink”) to her waistcoat; on to her feet, her “lovely
arms,” her girdle, her “fine black hair.” This caress,
however, is no violation, no rape. A rape, figurative as well as
literal, seeks to subdue, control, and subject the other; to conquer
violently, to place her under the ownership of the violator, to
subject her to the categories of the “known.” The above is
rather an encounter between one “Westerner” and one
other-than-she, where the boundaries of self and other touch, not
to feel out the terrain of the unknown in order to make it known,
but to seek her unknowable self which will remain so even under the
caress, under the gaze of her
other.
________________________________________________________________________
Accompanied
by two young men, his son and nephew, he arrives with his hand
extended and a smile on his lips. He accepts a chair and takes his
seat with lordly grace--and I send the news to my two traveling
companions that I have the bogeyman of the desert in my tent
Thus
begins Pierre Loti’s account of Mohammed-Jahl, the Bedouin
bandit-sheik whose desert domains Loti and his pilgrim’s caravan
must cross in order to reach Gaza on their way to the Holy Land, as
is recounted in Le
Désert.
A
fine and superb old bandit’s face. Gray beard and eyebrows. A
cameo profile. Flashing eyes, which on the spur of the moment can
be imperious and cruel or else disarmingly gentle. He is dressed in
a red Brusa silk robe embroidered with yellow flames; its dangling
sleeves almost touch the ground; over this a generous Bedouin tunis.
On his head a veil (couffie)
of heavy Mecca silk, held in place by a crown of gold cords with
black wool knots. Tiny feet, bare in leather sandals; tiny child’s
hands playing with the traditional stick shaped like a lotus leaf
that serves as a camel whip.
This
“description” bears at least superficial resemblance to the Lady
Montagu’s text above: a sensually inscribed portrait of an
individual who is other
to the writer. Yet there are many “descriptions” offered by
travelers to the lands of Europe’s fascination--to the east and to
the west. Such writing understood as “description” would indeed
place the other within the perimeters of the sentence, between the
initial capital letter and the last mark of punctuation. But were
it to be seen otherwise, with a view to alternate readings, it might
be read as might the text of Fatima above: sensuality taken in with
a gaze, but not emptied of possibilities in this gaze; a figure
remaining free to surprise, to defy any bounds seemingly prescribed
by the text.
In the following we “catch sight
of Mohammed-Jahl, holding his riding crop as if it were a scepter,
his eyes flashing with rage from under his beautiful veil tied with
gold cords. He is roaring like a lion, old but still frightening
and in charge”; where only four pages before he was “our guide
on his knees
[emphasis mine] before the governor. The guide has an attitude both
supplicant
[emphasis mine] and sly, watching and pressing for the definitive
yes
that would permit us to continue our trip.” Both on his knees and
donning a scepter; a supplicant and a king. The place which one
should assign this figure must be somewhere between the two, in the
space Derrida terms differance.
Neither
really
this, nor that; something truly other--but not altogether unfamiliar
or alien, either.
I might well point out that both
Loti and Lady Montagu were suspected of maintaining affections for
both sexes, a coincidence to be sure
But such biographical conjecture is out of place here. What is
not, however, is a discussion of the gendering
of a text.[{place
here a footnote to the appropriate texts: Jung on bi-sexuality}].
For it seems these two texts occur in a sort of liminal space, both
offering sexually ambiguous portrayals, leaving both the identity of
the imagined writers, and indeed of the subjects of the writing
(though not necessarily in regard to their sexual preferences), in
question. The effect, thus, is that there can be no
essentialization of these subjects who are other. They remain so by
the refusal of the text to define them once and for all--by their
occupation of a space emploted in ambiguity.
There is no essentialization, no
definite confinement of Fatima or Mohammed-Jahl. Their finitude,
their definition, is not assured by their placement in “dead
words”; for these texts leave them open to becoming whomever they
might later become, either later in the text or later in the
imagination [{Foucault on imagination in The Order of Things}].
This is perhaps an immanent function of sexually ambiguity--working
something like Bakhtin’s carnivalesque, but not falling into the
specificum of the space he plotted out as such--where the relation
of imagined writer and inscribed being are uncertain, where the
possibility of a “masculinity” and a “femininity” are
present in both. Especially for Loti, who belonged to time which,
according to Foucault, demanded of the scientific categories of
sexuality a definitive expression of one’s being, the portrayal of
a sexually ambiguous sensuality leaves the portrait with an
uncertain degree of precision--i.e., in that space so troubling to
the nineteenth century: that which defies a specific emplotment in
the grid of scientific knowledge, that which seems between
two opposite categories of the known--and thus free to complete
itself elsewhere, outside the bounds of possible description.
(feminine/inversion/etc
here).
[English
philosopher Roger Bacon, for instance, traces the revival of
philosophy to the Muslim Avicenna
One knight who had first hand experience with the Turks in the late
eleventh-century argues with great conviction that “they are of a
Frankish race.
This notion of a racial self-identity with the Turks is echoed in
the assertion that the Turks, whose name was supposed by some to
have derived from Teucri,
the descendants
of the Trojans. This assertion, strongly refuted by Richard Knolles
in the early seventeenth century
would both justify the Turkish conquest of Constantinople as an act
of revenge against the Greeks for their ancient trickery, and
recognize them as the kin of the Romans--i.e., contemporary
Italians. Such fragments, of which there are many more, indicate
that it is not so easy to do a mono-genealogy of Europe’s
self-closure to their most immanent “other.”
Boccaccio, a noted exemplar of the
carnivalesque during the Renaissance, recalls a story about a wise
Jew who tells a parable to escape a rhetorical trap set by Saladin.
The story equivocates Islam, Judaism, and Christianity as the
religions are represented as three beloved sons
The numerous courtly romances portraying Saladin as a heroic
figure, though most often in a European aristocratic guise,
occasionally give a glimpse of him as an authentically non-European
figure whom Europeans could admire. Travelers to the Ottoman lands
throughout the centuries of contact brought back varying accounts,
both positive and negative, which were consumed by the public with
much fervor. Many of the accounts either compare the Turks
favorably with their European counterparts, or identify certain
attributes of the latter with the former. In the
eighteenth-century, a tract was even published entitled Mahomet
no impostor, or a Defense of Mahomet.
Many other such sources and points of rupture exist in texts
throughout the European discourses on Islam, even in the century of
the most notorious “Orientalization” of the “Orient.”]
______________________________
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