never abandon ourselves to the "pride of being different"
All of us have an abstract idea of what being "human" means, even if what we mean when we say "human" is still potential and virtual... we need to do it, to see clearly, from an oblique point of view.
The situation of lesbians here and now in society, whether they know it or not, is located philosophically (politically) beyond the categories of sex. Practically they have run away from their class (the class of women), even if only partially and precariously.
It is from this cultural and practical site, both extremely vulnerable and crucial, that I will raise the question of dialectics.
ⅼ. Of the first Greek philosophers, some were materialists and all were monists, which means that they did not see any division in Being, Being as being was one.
Ⅱ. Then, philosophers introduced duality in thought, in the process of reasoning.
Consider the first table of opposites which history has handed down to us, as it has been recorded by Aristotle (Metaphysics, Book I, 5, 6): "Limited-Unlimited, Odd-Even, One-Many, Right-Left, Male-Female, Rest-Motion, Straight-Curved, Light-Dark, Good-Bad, Square-Oblong..."
We may observe that "right-left, male-female, light-dark, good-bad" are terms of judgment and evaluation, ethical concepts, that are foreign to the series from which I extracted them.
Ⅲ. As soon as the precious conceptual tools resting on division were created, they were immediately (or almost immediately by the successors of the school of Pythagoras) turned into a means of creating metaphysical and moral differentiation in Being.
Thus under the series of the "One" (the absolute being non-divided, divinity itself, in other words, god) we have "male" (and "light") that were from then on never dislodged from their dominant position.
Ⅳ. Every philosopher of our modern age will tell us that without these precise categories of opposition, one cannot reason or think or, even better, that outside of them meaning cannot shape itself.
Ⅴ. What has happened in history throughout the revolutions which we have known is that the Other (a category of others) has substituted itself for the One, keeping under it huge groups of oppressed peoples that would in turn become the Other of the ex-others, since the agency that was to break down the categories of the One and the Other, and to turn them into something else belonged to the parameter of the One.
Marxian dialectics imposed the demand of fighting itself and of reducing itself to nothing, through the reduction of both classes, could we expect them to do it? For the representatives of the Communist Party mostly did belong, did come from, the bourgeois class through its intellectuals.
Once all categories of others will be transferred onto the side of the One, of Being, of the Subject, will there be no transformation?
In terms of language, will we be able to keep the terms "humanity," "human," "man," "l'homme," "homo," even though all these terms in the abstract mean first the human being? Shall we keep these terms after they have been appropriated for so long by the dominant group?
At the level of philosophy and politics women should do without the privilege of being different and above all never formulate this imposition of being different (relegated to the category of the Other) as a "right to be different," or never abandon themselves to the "pride of being different."
There is no need when coming under the parameters of the oppressed to follow the Marxian design and to wait until the "final victory" to declare that women are human as well as men.
Where is the obligation for us to go on bearing with a series of ontological, etymological, and linguistic entourloupettes (direty tricks) under the pretext that we DO NOT have the power.
According to many of our contemporaries the only salvation is in a tremendous exaltation of what they call alterity under all of its forms: Jewish, Black, Red, Yellow, Female, Homosexual. Far away from Reason, "Different," and proud of being so: good is no more to be found in the parameter of the One, of Male, of Light. Never has the Other been magnified and celebrated to this extent.
I believe we have not reached the end of what Reason can do for us.
I do not know who is going to profit from this abandonment of the oppressed to a trend that will make them more and more powerless, having lost the faculty of being subjects even before having gained it.
No Thought of the Other or Thought of Difference should be possible for us.
