Modernity's Ear by Roshanak Kheshti

Author:Roshanak Kheshti [Kheshti, Roshanak]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Music, Ethnic, Social Science, Gender Studies
ISBN: 9781479867011
Google: vewWCgAAQBAJ
Publisher: NYU Press
Published: 2015-10-23T03:21:21+00:00

Aural Incorporation and Invagination

In his essay “The Law of Genre,” Derrida deconstructs genre/gender as inherent to taxonomic ordering, whether it be an ordering of a biological nature or an ordering of a literary type.18 From this premise, Derrida develops what he calls “the law of the law of genre,” which is the paradox at the heart of the law that simultaneously prohibits mixture while also depending on it for a generic distinction to be maintained (illustrated by the “hymen” or wedding ring of the matrimonial bond). Thus, the “law of the law of genre” is in fact a law of contamination and mixing, which (and this is the most critical aspect of this formulation for the purposes of this chapter) Derrida presents through the notion of “invagination,” employing a feminized anatomical metaphor to represent this law:

The law of the law of genre . . . is precisely a principle of contamination, a law of impurity, a parasitical economy. In the code of set theories, if I may use it at least figuratively, I would speak of a sort of participation without belonging—a taking part in without being part of, without having membership in a set. With the inevitable dividing of the trait that marks membership, the boundary of the set comes to form, by invagination, an internal pocket larger than the whole; and the outcome of this division and of this abounding remains as singular as it is limitless.19

Playing on this feminized anatomical representational schema for “the law of the law of genre,” Derrida emphasizes the process of “the fold,” which he argues is an essential component in the construction of boundaries and borderlands. Hence, the pure, structural taxonomic order that informed the non-Darwinian revolutionary logic of adaptability and blending through natural selection is for Derrida rooted in a structural order always already contaminated. Natural selection is thus a symbolic reordering rather than a biological one. And we must pay heed to Derrida’s word choice here as no mere accident or pseudofeminist aping but one that keenly picks up on the feminization of the process he describes. It is precisely this feminization that genders modernity’s ear.

In a lecture delivered at the University of Montreal and later published and translated as The Ear of the Other Derrida relates the ear through the same metaphor of the fold, emphasizing the ear’s universality across bodies, “You must pay heed to the fact that the omphalos that Nietzsche compels you to envision resembles both an ear and a mouth. It has the invaginated folds and the involuted orificiality of both.”20 Noting the homophonic similarity between auto and oto, he contends that hearing is the key process in autobiographical discourse and the site at which the signature is made.21 Just as the recipient of a check must endorse it with a signature in order to redeem its value, he explains, it is through the addressee’s ears that meaning is made; it is, as Derrida asserts, “the ear of the other that signs.”22 It is this

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