Jean-Franscois Lyotard’s early work, Heidegger and “the jews”, takes on the issue of the Other, the Stranger, the Foreigner, however, you choose to label this group, specifically as it pertains to the Holocaust, so that he can then take his findings and apply them on a broader scale. For the past week or so, I have been slowly making my way through the dense, reader-unfriendly, yet terribly fascinating text, but Chapter 6 in particular caught my eye.
In this chapter, Lyotard takes on sexual difference. He provides a brief, yet detailed examination of the subject by calling attention to what it is not, rather than popular conceptions of what it is, in order to arrive closer to a true definition of the term “sexual difference.” This method, in my opinion, is because the very nature of difference is what it is not. It is not representable, because in representation, definition and categorization, one would be choosing one method of judgment, therein silencing and devaluing others. His discussion calls attention to the problems of binary gender constructions in that as long as we attempt to organize, divide and rationally conceptualize gender, we are forgetting and excluding entire groups as “others” (or in Lyotard’s terminology: “jews”) faster than we can begin to understand all that we are destroying.
A new gender system that would allow for just representation of a myriad of varied and often opposing histories and accounts, would require dissolving the rigid boundaries between imagination and rationality, because sexual difference exceeds both of them and lies at the foundation of human identity. It could not, however, be a system in the traditional view and use of the term, because in doing so, it would fall victim to a whole new set of standards for ‘otherization’ and humiliation.
Some interesting quotes from this section:
On extermination and forgetting of “the other”
“One converts the Jews in the Middle Ages, they resist by mental restrction. One expels them from the classical age, they return. One integrates them in the modern era, they persist in their difference. One exterminates them in the twentieth century.
But this slaughter pretends to be without memory, without trace, and through this testifies again to what it slaughters: that there is the unthinkable, time lost yet always there, a misery; and, that this misfortune, this soul, is the very motive of though, of research, of amanesis—of the culture of the spirit as Freud said: Fortschritt in der Geistlichkeit. ["Progress in the Clergy'] A motive lost in the very principle of progress, soul lost in the spirit.” (p. 23)
“The solution was to be final: the final answer to the ‘jewish’ question. It was necessary to carry it right up to its conclusion, to ‘terminate’ the interminable. And thus to ‘terminate’ the term itself. It had to be a perfect crime, one would plead not guilty, certain of the lack of proods. This is a ‘politics’ of absolute forgetting, forgotten. Absurd since its zeal, its very desperation distinguishes it as extrapolitical. Obviously, a ‘politics’ of extermination exceeds politics. It is ot negotiated on a scene. Tis obstinacy to exterminate to the very end, becase it cannot be understood politically, already indicates that we are dealing with something else, with the other.” (p.25)
