Feminism Beside Itself by Diane Elam Diane Elam

Author:Diane Elam, Diane Elam [Diane Elam, Diane Elam]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780415910415
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 1995-03-30T00:00:00+00:00

BEGINNING AGAIN: A DIALOGUE

The liar uses the valid designations, the words, to make the unreal appear as real; she says, for example, “I am rich,” when the word “poor” would be the correct designation of her situation. She abuses the fixed conventions by arbitrary changes or even by reversals of names. When she does this in a self-serving ways damaging to others, then society will no longer trust her but exclude her. Thereby people do not flee from being deceived so much as from being damaged by deception: what they hate at this stage is basically not the deception but the bad, hostile consequences of certain kinds of deceptions. In a similarly limited way people want the truth: they desire the agreable life preserving consequences of truth, but are indifferent to pure knowledge, which has no consequences; they are even hostile to possibly damaging and destructive truths. And, moreover, what about these conventions of language? Are they really products of knowledge, of the sense of truth? Do the designations and the things coincide? Is language the adequate expression of all realities?

—Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lie in the Extra-Moral Sense”33

Q: You have asserted several times that the crisis of value which consideration of Stein seems to have provoked in certain feminist critical circles has something to do with the attempt to establish and assess a proper—or “pure”—feminist inheritance. Could you explain what, if anything, such an inheritance has to do with your interest in and call for a feminist genealogy? What do you mean by genealogy, and how do you understand it to be a critique of notions of or claims to inheritance?

A: I borrow my particular use of the term “genealogy” from Nietzsche and from Foucault, although the critical practices that the two of them associate with genealogy are not entirely foreign to feminism—in fact, one could argue that genealogical thinking is at the root of feminism. I’ll be happy to make such an argument later on, but for now I’ll try to answer your first question.

In particular, I have found provocative and useful Nietzsche’s suggestion that any given assertion of value or values (as, for example those given in the MLA panel) calls for an investigation. For contrary to some very cherished beliefs about values (beliefs that one might even call religious), values are not inherent, self-evident, or transcendental, and each particular expression of or call for particular values (including my own here) may be traced historically, logically, and rhetorically. As Nietzsche describes the task: “the value of these values must first be called into question—and for that there is needed a knowledge of the conditions and circumstances in which they grew, under which they evolved and changed (morality as consequence, as symptom, as mask, as tartufferie, as illness, as misunderstanding; but also morality as cause, as remedy, as stimulant, as restraint, as poison)...”34 In effect, Nietzsche argues that a genealogy is a special kind of history, a mode of reading that allows one to reflect critically upon modes

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