Otherness and Wonder

A long, fantastic trip to the beautiful Northern Seashores and the land of the Turkmen. Felt like a liberated zone. Much more later. Here is another piece I finished before leaving in response to this. A couple of excerpts:


To insist on the "discursive production of reality", she correctly insists, is not to "deny its materiality." At issue is how one understands the fragmentation and diffusion of power--a power that in subtle or blatant ways exerts violence on "gendered, sexualized, and racialized bodies." Politics for her is "coming to terms with fragmentation."

She and I use a different language, but the problem as always remains with the assumptions. The danger in an obsession with the discourse of "Otherness" is the risk one incurs in underestimating the callous "I" and the marvelous "This." What may appear as the crudeness of a binary inside/outside paradigm is in fact the mediating link between "I-ness" and "This-ness." At issue is what the ancients called "Wonder."