Sixteenth lecture for my students in English 192, "Science Fiction," summer 2013 at UC Santa Barbara. Course website: http://patrickbrianmooney.nfshost.com/~patrick/ta/m13/

1. Lecture 16: The Dream of Integration
English 192
Summer 2013
29 August 2013
“We’re undone by each other. […] This seems so clearly
the case with grief, but it can be so only because it was
already the case with desire. […] As a mode of relation,
neither gender nor sexuality is precisely a possession, but,
rather, is a mode of being dispossessed, a way of being
for another or by virtue of another.”
— Judith Butler, “Mourning and Melancholia” (23-24)

2. The “face” as “catachresis” (133)
● “Catachresis” is a catch-all term from rhetoric
for many different figures of speech that “use
language wrongly”: paradox, highly
exaggerated euphemism, very mixed
metaphors, etc.
● For Derrida, “catachresis” denotes the originary
incompleteness at the root of any system of
meaning – that void which motivates language,
which demands a supplement that never fills it
or compensates for the lack that underlies our
ability to communicate in the first place.

3. ● For Derrida’s student, post-colonialist theorist
Gayatri Spivak, “catachresis” denotes those
“master words” that create apparent unities by
obscuring areas of vast and fundamental
difference underneath.
● Perhaps the most fundamentally fair summary
of all of these positions would be to say that a
“catachresis” is a word (or phrase) that has a
genuinely arbitrary relation to meaning.

4. Which is to say: the face is a structure
“the face, if we are to put words to its meaning, will
be that for which no words really work; the face
seems to be a kind of sound, the sound of
language evacuating its sense, the sonorous
substratum of vocalization that precedes and limits
the delivery of any semantic sense.” (134)
“The face of the Other comes to me from outside,
and interrupts that narcissistic circuit.” (138)
“To respond to the face, to understand its meaning,
means to be awake to what is precarious in
another life or, rather, the precariousness of life
itself.” (134)

5. The claims of unintelligibility
“The ‘face’ of the other cannot be read for a
secret meaning, and the imperative it delivers is
not immediately translatable into a prescription
that might be linguistically formulated and
followed.” (131)
“To respond to the face, to understand its
meaning, means to be awake to what is
precarious in another life or, rather, the
precariousness of life itself.” (134)

6. Representation as such
“It [the face of one of the Afghani women] became
bared to us, at that moment, and we were, as it
were, in possession of the face; not only did our
cameras capture it, but we arranged for the face to
capture our triumph, and act as the rationale for our
violence, the incursion on sovereignty, the deaths of
civilians. Where is loss in that face? And where is
the suffering over war? Indeed, the photographed
face seemed to conceal or displace the face in the
Levinasian sense, since we saw and heard through
that face no vocalization of grief or agony, no sense
of the precariousness of life.” (142)

7. “the human is not identified with what is represented
but neither is it identified with the unrepresentable; it
is, rather, that which limits the success of any
representational practice. The face is not ‘effaced’ in
this failure of representation, but is constituted in
that very possibility.” (144)
because:
“the human is not represented by the face. Rather,
the human is indirectly affirmed in that very
disjunction that makes representation impossible,
and this disjunction is conveyed in the impossible
representation. For representation to convey the
human, then, representation must not only fail, but
must show its failure.” (144)

8. Ai’s gradual enlightenment
“I remembered how he [Estraven] had stood
sweating on the parade-stand in Erhenhang in
panoply of rank and sunlight. I saw him now
defenseless and half-naked in a colder light,
and for the first time saw him as he was.” (201)
“On the other hand, if he [Estraven] could lower
all his standards of shifgrethor, as I realized he
had done with me, perhaps I could dispense
with the more competitive elements my
masculine self-respect, which he certainly
understood as little as I understood shifgrethor.”
(219)

9. “an old word for shadow” (248)
“the lords of Kerm Land are proud men and
umbrageous men, casting black shadows.”
(123)
Estraven: “The King shortens no man’s
shadow, though he try.” (273)
Ai: “It was, I thought, as if they [people of
Orgoreyn] did not cast shadows.” (146)

10. “potentials, or integrals” (94)
Tormer's Lay had been all day in my mind, and I
said the words,
Light is the left hand of darkness
and darkness the right hand of light.
Two are one, life and death, lying
together like lovers in kemmer,
like hands joined together,
like the end and the way. (233)