Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-t5tsf Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-19T08:16:19.524Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Moving Beyond Us and Them? Marginality, Rhizomes, and Immanent Forgiveness

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 March 2020

Abstract

Here, I offer a candid response to bell hooks's call for a testimony to the “movement beyond a mere ‘us and them’ discussion” that purportedly informs contemporary radical and feminist thought on difference. In alignment with a tradition that includes bell hooks, Audre Lorde, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Aurora Levins Morales, I offer a personal testimony to the ways in which I—a middle‐class, French, immigrant, continental‐philosophy‐bred incest survivor—envision both that movement and its limits. To establish these alliances means forming necessary (if only momentary and unlikely) communities. I call on the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari to propose an account of the production of such communities that does not depend only on shared lived experience, but also on shared marginal spatiality (rhizomes), temporality (trauma), and “medicinal history” (nomadology). I suggest that on the one hand, Deleuze's philosophy of immanence may indeed find apt expression in the politics of integrity that hooks, Lorde, and Morales call for. On the other hand, a genuine politics of integrity may benefit from drawing on the philosophy of immanence, which alone offers alternatives to the traditional, oppositional models of difference informed by transcendence. Finally, I propose the concept of “immanent forgiveness” to capture the movement at issue.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © 2012 by Hypatia, Inc.

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Anzaldúa, Gloria. 2007. Borderlands/la frontera. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books.Google Scholar
Callaway, Ewen. 2008. Orchid's sexual deception triggers ejaculation. New Scientist. http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn13642-orchids-sexual-deception-triggers-ejaculation.html (accessed May 10, 2011).Google Scholar
Cash, Johnny. 1968. The Green Green Grass of Home. On Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison. Sony. Written by Curly Puttman in 1965.Google Scholar
Deleuze, Gilles, Guattari, Félix. 1980. Mille plateaux. Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit. Trans. Massumi, Brian. 1987. A Thousand plateaus. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar
Deleuze, Gilles, with Parnet, Claire. 1996. L'Abécédaire de Gilles Deleuze. Filmed by Pierre‐André Boutang. Sodaperaga, vidéo éditions Montparnasse. http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=438091653681675611# (accessed May 10, 2011).Google Scholar
Herman, Judith Lewis. 1992. Trauma and recovery. New York: Basic Books, Harper Collins.Google Scholar
hooks, bell. 1981. Ain't I a woman: Black women and feminism. Boston: South End Press.Google Scholar
hooks, bell. 1989. Talking back. Boston: South End Press.Google Scholar
hooks, bell. 1990. Yearning. Boston: South End Press.Google Scholar
hooks, bell. 1995. Killing rage. New York: Henry Holt and Company.Google Scholar
Kornfield, Jack. 2007. Guided meditation: Six essential practices to cultivate love, awareness, and wisdom. Boulder: Sounds True.Google Scholar
Lorde, Audre. 2007. Sister outsider. Berkeley and Toronto: Crossing Press.Google Scholar
Morales, Aurora Levins. 1998. Medicine stories: History, culture, and the politics of integrity. Cambridge, Mass.: South End Press.Google Scholar
Morales, Aurora Levins. 2001. Remedios: Stories of earth and iron from the history of puertorriqueñas. Cambridge, Mass.: South End Press.Google Scholar
Moulard‐Leonard, Valentine. 2008. Bergson‐Deleuze encounters: Transcendental experience and the thought of the virtual. Albany: State University of New York Press.Google Scholar
Proust, Marcel. 1999. A la recherche du temps perdu. Paris: Quarto Gallimard.Google Scholar