Thursday, June 25, 2009

Now, I think that what women will have to do and what they will do, right from the moment they venture to speak what they have to say will of necessity bring about a shift in metalanguage.  And I think we're completely crushed, especially in places like universities, by the highly repressive operations of metalanguage, the operations, that is, of the commentary on the commentary, the code, the operation that sees to it that the moment women open their mouths-women more often than men-they are immediately asked in whose name and from what theoretical standpoint they are speaking, who is their master and where they are coming from: they have, in short, to salute…and show their identity papers.  There's work to be done against class, against categorization, against classification-classes.  "Doing classes" in France means doing military service.  There's work to be done against military service, against all schools, against the pervasive masculine urge to judge, diagnose, digest, name…not so much in the sense of the loving precision of poetic naming as in that of the repressive censorship of philosophical nomination/conceptualization.

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