ATROPOS PRESS new york • dresden © 2013 by Cara Judea Alhadeff Think Media EGS Series is supported by the European Graduate School ATROPOS PRESS New York • Dresden 151 First Avenue # 14, New York, N.Y. 10003 all rights reserved Cover Photograph by Cara Judea Alhadeff ISBN 978-0-9885170-6-6 General Editor: Wolfgang Schirmacher Editorial Board: Pierre Alferi Giorgio Agamben Hubertus von Amelunxen Alain Badiou Judith Balso Judith Butler Diane Davis Chris Fynsk Martin Hielscher Geert Lovink Larry Rickels Avital Ronell Michael Schmidt Victor Vitanza Siegfried Zielinski Slavoj Žižek Viscous Expectations Justice, Vulnerability, The Ob-scene By Cara Judea Alhadeff Reviews by Avital Ronell, Lucy R. Lippard, Alphonso Lingis, Sigrid Hackenberg y Almansa and Robert Mailer Anderson ATROPOS PRESS new york • dresden “The pride of the European Graduate School, Cara Judea Alhadeff breaks new ground with her first book. Devoted to a radical engagement with embodied democracy, the work offers wide-ranging insight into precarious textual adventure and the artistic intercept. A bold and remarkable boundary-crossing on a number of crucial levels.” — Avital Ronell, Professor of the Humanities, New York University, Jacques Derrida Professor of Philosophy and Media, European Graduate School Switzerland, author of Loser Sons: Politics and Authority “In Viscous Expectations , Cara Judea Alhadeff offers an innovative hybrid of complex theoretical discourse, performative photography, and timely political analysis. Her treatment of vulnerability is particularly provocative, as are her analyses of the collision of the hyperphysical with the hyper virtual. Alhadeff opens up new ways of thinking about contemporary life and sexuality, while delving deep into myriad subjects. Everything is embodied, endowed with a sensual visual or verbal presence-- from dreams, to pregnancy and motherhood, to Occupy Wall Street. Alhadeff ’s work is a fascinating fusion of art and scholarship. Intricate theoretical text is paralleled by unexpected photographic imagery – sensuous, enigmatic, and layered. The book extends into new and fluid realms the still valid idea that ‘the personal is political.’ Intellectually rigorous and esthetically daring, the book is hard work, and worth it.” — Lucy R. Lippard, art writer, curator, and activist. Author of 22 books on art and cultural criticism “...With enormous energy and theoretical appetite, her thought exposes itself to the most difficult and most radical contemporary thinkers, contesting them with her own experience and insights...[Alhadeff ’s] thought is unlimitedly ambitious and vulnerable. It issues in putting vulnerability central, rather than individual autonomy or collective enterprise, rather than the subject of rights or the construction of institutions; and, opens a new perspective on justice and democracy.” — Alphonso Lingis, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy, Penn State University, author of Violence and Splendor, Dangerous Emotions, Trus t v “A radical provocation envisioning a ‘collaborative emancipatory project’ based on a ‘dialectic of the unresolvable’ and the ‘becoming impossible.’ Alhadeff ’s Viscous Expectations: Justice, Vulnerability, The Ob-scene, presents the work of an extraordinary individual whose fascinating auto-biography—an American, Spanish/Turkish Jew—breathes a renewed sense of urgency into a lived philosophy, ‘perceiving the world through possibility rather than prescription.’ Intimating an ae(s)thetics of contestation, intercession, resistance, and outrage, Alhadeff ’s project reinvigorates the scandal that is philosophy. A tour de force, whose intellectual and aes _(t)(h)etic bravura will stun the reader.” — Sigrid Hackenberg y Almansa, Assistant Professor of Art and Philosophy, European Graduate School Switzerland, Chair of Independent Studies, Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts, Portland, Maine, author of Total History, Anti-History , and the Face that is Other “Viscous Expectations: Justice, Vulnerability, the Ob-scene by Cara Judea Alhadeff is exactly what an ‘art book’ should be, it offers a unique and singular world view, posing more questions than answers, but advancing lines of thought and arguments into uncomfortable territory in the form of photos and text to create a further understanding of ourselves. The first impressions of her work always offer uncertain footing, causing one to find their own balance of previously conceived notions and context, and then challenge them with the new information Judea Ahadeff offers with her sensual, beautiful and often disturbing pictures. This is important work by an artist that is unflinching with her camera and pen.” —Robert Mailer Anderson, author of Boonville, producer of “Pig Hunt” vi vi Table of Contents Philosophical Congruencies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . viii List of Abbreviations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xi INTRODUCTION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 PART I EMBODIED ENERGIES: CONVENIENCE CULTURE AND THE VIOLENCE OF THE EVERYDAY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39 Chapter 1 The Illusion of Neutrality in 21st Century Democracy 41 Mediocrity, Morality, and The Sanctity of Normalcy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43 Self-Censorship: Toxic Mimicry, Internalized Fascism, and Phallic Norms . . 55 Internalized Apartheids . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67 Institutionalized Anti-Intellectualism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79 Chapter 2 Entitlement and Equality as Submission 91 Difference as Contamination: The Insinuating Body . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 92 Post-Humanism: Digital Visualizing Technologies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 108 Irrational Wombs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 123 Fictional Bodies: Probing The Private and The Public . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 134 Prostheses and Parasites . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 140 PART II INTERMEDIALITIES: DE-SOLVING THE TYRANNY OF NORMALCY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 165 Chapter 3 Vulnerability and the Politics of the Imagination 167 Becoming-Vulnerable . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 169 Audre Lorde’s Erotic Politics: The Erotics of the Uncanny . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 174 Inhabiting Ambiguity and Contradiction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 187 Chapter 4 Violence and the Sacred: Julia Kristeva and George Bataille’s Archeologies of Prohibition 199 Entropic Excursions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 201 The Spectacle of the Invisible: Ob-scenity and The Explicit . . . . . . . . . . . . . 209 vii The Passion According to Teresa of Avila . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 222 Digesting The Stranger Within: The Dialectics of Self-Sacrifice . . . . . . . . . . 234 Practicing the Abject: Molecular Meat Round One / First Course . . . . . . . . . 249 “Articulations of the Unconscious” / le monstre du carrefour . . . . . . . . . . . . 267 PART III EMBODIED DEMOCRACY: VULNERABILITY AND THE POTENTIAL OF SOCIO-EROTIC ETHICS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 285 Chapter 5 Rhizomatic Vulnerabilities for Radical Citizenship 287 Practicing (Anti-)Critique: Emancipatory Pedagogies and Becoming the Impossible . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 288 The Scandal of Ekphrasis: Transfiguration, Collaboration, and Transdisciplinarity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 303 Unfixed: Anomalies and Aporias . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 315 Pedagogical Promiscuities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 334 Coercion of the Real: Détournement and Unrepresentability . . . . . . . . . . . . . 345 Protean Sexualities: Spinoza’s what a body can do? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 360 Female Ejaculation as Social Emancipation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 375 A Pedagogy of Trauma: Visualizing the Uncanny Ménage à Trois: ars erotica, ars theoretica, ars politica . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 385 Chapter 6 Dis-figurement: Somatizing Our Liberation 393 Aesthetic Obscuratism: The Ineffable, The Incomplete, L’Informe . . . . . . . . 395 Anxious Interventions and Uncanny Improvisations: Molecular Meat Round Two /Second Course . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 406 (De)Construction of Sight: (Dis)Assembling (Un)Becoming-Animal . . . . . 419 Gestating the Unknown . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 427 CONCLUSION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 439 EPILOGUE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 470 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 472 BIBLIOGRAPHY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 476 FILMOGRAPHY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 500 INDEX . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 502 Table of Contents viii Philosophical Congruencies Gloria Anzaldua’s Mestizaje Roland Barthes’ Rhetoric of Supremacy George Bataille’s Festival ; Cosmic Circuit of Energy Gregory Bateson’s Aesthetics of Ecological Survival Walter Benjamin’s Aura Murray Bookchin’s Social Ecology Hélène Cixous’ Coming Home Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s Rhizomatic Taoist Sexuality; Schizo-Analysis Jacques Derrida’s Pharmakon; Mi-Dire Michel Foucault’s Principals for Political Desire Paulo Freire’s Dialogue as Love Edouard Glissant’s Poetics of Relation Elizabeth Grosz’s Continual Non-Arrival G.W.F. Hegel’s Cunning of Reason Martin Heidegger’s Alētheia Ivan Illich’s Conviviality Luce Irigaray’s Desire as the Interval Franz Kafka’s Wounds Julia Kristeva’s Écriture; Carrefour; The Abject Emmanuel Levinas’ Interhuman Intrigue Audre Lorde’s Erotic Politics Trinh T. Minh-ha’s Third Interval Friedrich Nietzsche’s Chiasmic Unity; Eternal Return; Verhängnis Jan Patočka’s Life in Amplitude Jacques Rancière’s Being Together Apart Avital Ronell’s Deception; Playful Deviance Chela Sandoval’s Methodology of the Oppressed Ferdinand de Saussure’s Linguistic Differentials Wolfgang Schirmacher’s Homo Generator Baruch Spinoza’s Scientia Intuitiva; Fabrica Teresa de Avila’s Orison Hayden White’s Power of the Middle Voice Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Immortality of the Never-Ending Moment ix List of Abbreviations AOed Anti-Oedipus AS 1 Accursed Share, Vol 1 AS 2,3 Accursed Share, Vol 2,3 APGD An Apprenticeship in Philosophy: Gilles Deleuze BD Blind Date: Sex and Philosophy ES Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative DS Deleuze & Sex DE, DB Deviant Eyes, Deviant Bodies KKT King Kong Theory LF Legends of Freud LL Lust for Life: On the Writings of Kathy Acker MO Methodology of the Oppressed NAF “Nietzsche’s Amor Fati” ON On Nietzsche PL Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence STP Space, Time, Perversion TE Tears of Eros TP Thousand Plateaus VE Visions of Excess ZMERS “ Zarathustra, the Moment, and Eternal Recurrence of the Same” x To my mother, Micaela Amateau Amato, my collaborator, editor, and co-conspirator, you labored with me over every last word, again and again I am forever grateful for your astounding clarity and your sense of the absurd From you I learned the courage to trust my intuition I treasure our intimacy To my baby boy, Zazu, joy beyond anything I could have ever imagined You remind me in every moment where I can find home I thought your life entering mine would be the culmination of this work; it turns out we are only the beginning A xi Acknowledgments I am indebted to Avital Ronell’s playful wisdom and the vulnerability we have shared, to Elizabeth Grosz’s provocations, Julia Kristeva’s spontaneous collaboration with me incorporating word and image, and to Margit Galanter for her extraordinarily stimulating perspectives during our somatic conversations. My educational opportunities at The European Graduate School, learning ethno-botany from the Quijos-Quechua through The School for Field Studies, working with Murray Bookchin at The Institute for Social Ecology, and studying at Sarah Lawrence College and Penn State University have all been critical to the formation of this project. I must thank Sigrid Hackenberg y Almansa for her comprehensive readings and responses to my writings, and to Fred Ulfers for the tremors of joy and satisfaction his lectures at EGS and NYU gave me. I am grateful to Tom Zummer, Sam Weber and Don Kunze for their constancy and trenchant feedback, Al Lingis for mirroring how to inhabit the outrageous, and to Joel Sternfeld for (as he phrased it) “holding my coat.” Early on, Audre Lorde, my xii VISCOUS EXPECTATIONS: Justice, Vulnerability, The Ob-scene mother Micaela Amateau Amato, Henry Giroux, Betsy Shally-Jensen, Gayatri Spivak, Lucky Yapa, Ivan Illich, Celeste Fraser-Delgado, Trinh T. Minh-Ha, and Michael Taussig all infused me with the language to encounter the infinite possibilities of theory becoming practice. They helped me recognize how to live ambiguity not as a lack of clarity, but as a multiplicity of clarities. While Wolfgang Sachs’ Development Dictionary: A Guide to Power and Knowledge laid the foundation for my commitment to question everything, unlimited access to Ronell’s personal library while writing my thesis provided me with vast treasures. Judith Lasater’s commitment to teach the sacred continues to guide me today. I am infinitely grateful for her compassion. My Iyengar and prenatal yoga students have ignited my understanding of the dense, rich relationships among social and individual bodies; and, the contradictory responses from my photography viewers and models have been catalysts of consciousness during the realization of this book. I must repeatedly thank all of my models; and, in particular Julia Davenport, my photographic muse, for surrendering her body to my camera. Additionally, I have deeply appreciated Maria Margaroni’s encouragement to theorize the “I”, Judith Butler’s reminding me to recognize the difference between obligation and passion, and Wolfgang Schirmacher’s illuminating support. I am tremendously grateful to Paul Forrest Hickman, Grace Johnson, Candice Ng, Hank Willis Thomas, and Vanina Doce Mood for their endurance as they helped me navigate through the morass of technological challenges, and in particular, I would like to thank Rich Heeman for his unrelenting stamina while fielding my onslaught of questions. During the final stages of publishing, my steadfast managing editor, Peggy Bloomer, shared her consummate expertise with alacrity. Finally, I must recognize my parents for living art and teaching me that work is love, Darrah Danielle for the exquisite depth of our wabi-sabi friendship, Nicole Sumner for compelling me to think through my art, and Kent Craig Racker for hanging on to the wild bucking bronco disguised as being a new parent, while writing a doctoral dissertation. Viscous Expectations Justice, Vulnerability, The Ob-scene Reviews by Avital Ronell, Lucy R. Lippard, Alphonso Lingis, Sigrid Hackenberg y Almansa and Robert Mailer Anderson By Cara Judea Alhadeff “I wanted to make an object that was indestructible, so I made an object that was completely vulnerable ” Gabriel Orozco quoting Donald Judd I 1 1 Initially, I refer to the “we” as a US citizen-subject and later, as one who surpasses inertia—a citizen-warrior (Chela Sandoval’s phrase). The latter “we” seizes our agency as cultural workers in order to engage in a collaborative citizenship as a radical democracy. Introduction Disentangling the roots of systemic psychic and social violence, “Viscous Expectations: Justice, Vulnerability, The Ob-Scene ” investigates how the forces of body-phobia, misogyny, racial hygiene, and anti-intellectualism both undermine and produce conscious, holistic social relations. By scrutinizing the relationships among unchallenged assumptions of how we 1 are socialized, this project reconfigures how perception and choice frame freedom. Political and ethical analyses of the interstices of cultural studies and corporeal politics enable a rhizomatic re-conceptualization of community rooted in difference and vulnerability. This research offers a constructive strategy to challenge the inertia that perpetuates insidious 2 VISCOUS EXPECTATIONS: Justice, Vulnerability, The Ob-scene body-phobic, convenience-culture hegemonies inscribed in the current crisis of agency in the US, and lays the groundwork for an emancipatory, performative pedagogy. 2 A radical democracy requires that theory becomes practice. By examining the lived intersections of technology, aesthetics, eroticism, and ethnicity through the lens of vulnerability, my position offers citizen-subjects an opportunity to recognize their potential for transformative resistance. Although vulnerability is conventionally understood to mean being susceptible to harm , the foundation of this practice is rooted in encountering vulnerability and difference as physical and emotional strength—a roiling of ambiguity, the unknown, and the uncanny. Artists, scientists, and philosophers, ranging from Heraclitus to Elizabeth Grosz to Edouard Glissant, have explored this condition of becoming 3 In the context of multiple constituencies, creativity becomes a political imperative in which intellectual and aesthetic risk-taking gives voice to social justice—a collaborative becoming- vulnerable. I am proposing an embodied democracy in which social models become a practice based on recognition of the absolute necessity of difference: an infinite potential of our bodies as contingent modes of relation. By challenging how we internalize binaries and taxonomies, I investigate lived empathy 4 within a matrix of an erotic politics—not a unified merging which dissolves into an amorphous normativity, but as the fluid exchange of autonomy and interconnectedness. 5 2 An emancipatory, performative pedagogy presupposes critical pedagogy. 3 “Becoming is defined as ‘extreme contiguity within a coupling of two sensations without resemblance’. Becoming refutes binary divisions and enables further transformations, melding subjects and objects in close proximity. The embodied consciousness of the spectator participates in the process of becoming” (Powell 211). 4 Converging with Samuel Weber, I embed my explorations of the uncanny within an empathic field: “What is at stake in the uncanny is nothing more nor less than the disposition to ‘put ourselves in the place of the other’ “ ( LF 31). 5 “The link of the chiasmic relationship maintains both the sameness and difference of the two...The power...of potentiality...the power or capacity of “both- and”...” (Ulfers, Nietzsche in Contemporary Thought seminar, EGS 2008). 6 Deleuzian tendencies only become actual during an encounter, an engagement with an other(s). I am explicitly expanding the concept of tendencies as a re-cognition to move beyond dichotomous language. 7 Henry Giroux illuminates the rhizomatic entanglement of power in the context of the Occupy Movement. “This task of delineation is not easy: the conditions of domination are layered, complex and deeply flexible” (truth-out.org). 8 Throughout Part II, I emphasize how the mother-body, as a source for f éminine écriture, is intimately interwoven 3 Introduction through contradictory definitions of sexual difference and sameness— for example, the absence or critique of female ejaculation in feminist discourse. 9 “A plateau is always in the middle, not at the beginning or the end. A rhizome is made of plateaus. Gregory Bateson uses the word ‘plateau’ to designate something very special: a continuous, self-vibrating region of intensities whose development avoids any orientation towards a culmination point or external end...[a] bizarre intensive stabilization” ( TP 22). 10 See Gregory Bateson, Steps to an ecology of mind: A revolutionary approach to man’s understanding of himself. New York: Ballantine, 1972: 461). 11 “Above all, the uncanny is intimately entwined in language with how we conceive and represent what is happening within ourselves, to ourselves, to the world...It ‘un-’ unsettles time and space, order and sense. The uncanny overruns, disordering any field supposedly extraneous to it” (Royle 2). Congruently, discussed throughout this thesis, Judith Butler theorizes censorship as producing speech. 12 “The rhizome [is].... without a General and without an organizing memory or central automaton...What is at question in the rhizome is a relation to sexuality— but also to the animal, the vegetal, the world, politics, the book, things natural and artificial— that is totally different from the arborescent relation: all manner of ‘becomings’... ‘Some sort Throughout my project, I undertake a homeopathic approach to this rhizomatic Ineinander (entanglement) of cultural conditions. A Deleuzoguattarian anti-critique allows me to simultaneously use the very tendencies 6 I am critiquing to more thoroughly scrutinize their multiple enfoldments— making a home in “enemy” territory— embodying the uncanny. I am explicitly choosing to examine the relationships among seemingly disparate subjects. As a practice of embodying theory, I simultaneously deploy a reticulated methodology of analyzing such an ensnarement, while striving to extricate the liberatory potential of this seemingly monolithic knot. 7 Rather than solely addressing my subjects as autonomous, my inquiry disentangles pivotal junctions, interstitial nodes of relation, and philosophical congruencies that engage a féminine écriture .8 Precisely because “...the works of Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray, and Hélène Cixous dramatize some of the contradictions that emerge when feminists seek to free women’s desires from the structures erected by psychoanalytic phallicism” (Bristow 104), they evert, thus defossilize, arborescent schema of filiation. Analogously, Gregory Bateson’s 9 “aesthetics of ecological survival” 10 calls for a meandering, non-linear social agency and a conscious dis-ordering of sanctified normalcies. 11 Systems of production maintain their interpenetrating oppressive influence because they are so insidiously interconnected. I identify an “acentered, nonhierarchical nonsignifying system” ( TP 22)—that of the rhizome 12 —as a raison d’être of féminine 4 VISCOUS EXPECTATIONS: Justice, Vulnerability, The Ob-scene écriture I recognize the intellectual risks I take by committing to the strategic practice of féminine écriture : ...it is worth asking if Cixous’ model of feminine sexuality does not reduce women to precisely those qualities that have long been stigmatized in a patriarchal order. Consigned to the uncon- scious, to instinct, to the body, even to irratio- nality, this feminine libidinal economy bears an uncanny resemblance to familiar stereotypes of women (Bristow 114). By reorienting these essentialized characteristics through a homeopathic rubric, I am embarking on this project of feminine libidinal economy in order to draw wider attention to our internalized insidious layers of complicity with the forces of academic, institutional, and corporate coercion. This investigation of “co-implication” 13 disengages how our bodies and psyches are embedded in contradictory social constructions that strip our identities of relationality, thus shackling our potential accountability to others and ourselves. Undecidability, like co-implication, “harbor(s) within itself (a) complicity of contrary values... prior to any distinction-making...” It has “no stable essence, no ‘proper’ characteristics, it is not, in any sense of the word...a substance ” (Derrida 1981: 125). My project is intricately rooted in the potential of a rhizomatic uncanny— ” reducible neither to the One nor the multiple” ( TP 22). By incorporating dates and geographical locations, I ground my theoretical investigations within of continuing plateau of intensity is substituted for [sexual] climax, ‘ war, or a culmination point. It is a regrettable characteristic of the Western mind to relate expressions and actions to exterior or transcendent ends, instead of evaluating them on a plane of consistency on the basis of their intrinsic value” ( AOed 21-22). 13 In Sex Time Perversion, Grosz explores the idea of co-implication in both a sexualized somatic sense and in the sense of community. 5 Introduction narratives of personal experience. In her exposition of her friendship with the late Kathy Acker, and of the problematic of friendship itself, Avital Ronell self-interrogates: I have to interrupt myself here and confess my uneasiness as I write: in the first place, so unaccustomed to saying “I” in my texts, so comfortable in the practice, nearly Zen, of the attenuation of the subject, the effacement of self and the radical passivity exacted by writing—it is very shocking to me to have to include myself in this unnuanced way. I could handle myself as a barely audible trace in the service of some alter- ity to be addressed, but saying, for me, brazenly, “I” makes me shudder. ...“I” is vulgar, or so goes my prejudice and practice ( LL 26). In Chapter Five, I revisit Ronell’s “I” in her investigation of philosophers’ self-censorship within historical intertwinings of philosophy and sex. Grosz praises the “rare combination of openly expressed personal obsession and scholarly rigor, the rigorous reading and analysis of [Roger Caillois’ and Alphonso Lingis’] driving personal preoccupations” ( STP 189). Grosz continues, “[w]hat seems rare is not the combination of scholarship and personal obsessional—this could be said to characterize much if not all theoretical and scientific discourse—but the open acknowledgement that the research is based on personal concerns” ( STP 246, nt. 2). Both the process and content of my photographs and of the writing of this dissertation demonstrate an uncanniness that marks the confounding of this polarity: of first-person and third-person discourse. But the instability is not just between narrative positions: