schaffer_the_colon_must_be_honored

As sort of a roundabout way of thinking about the gut (and the colon will be honored, don't worry) I'd like to start off with hands. Hands were central to Freud's account of conversion disorder; Anna O's hysterical mind treated her hand as though it didn't exist because it simply couldn't deal with the affective burden of having that particular hand.

The dissociation of somatic symptoms from anatomical constraint is central to this account of conversion—organs, limbs, and nerves are transformed according to a symbolic or cultural logic rather than according to the dictates of anatomy.

The hand was where Freud started thinking about the body as though anatomy didn't exist.

But that's not how hands have to be. Hands can be fleshy, they can be physical, they can lash out and crawl away. So let's start with hands. A few different hands. When we think about bodily autonomy, about the intelligence of flesh, hands often serve as a convenient stand-in. Especially in horror. Hands are what people use to do things! To have hands develop a mind of their own, no matter how it works, is to rob their owner of their autonomy. I'm going to throw in my own hands for good measure. media type="custom" key="24340644" But it's Orlac's hands that I'm going to stick with, the way that he's stuck with the them in the 1924 silent Austrian horror film, //Hands of Orlac.// That is to say, surgically, but also biologically and psychically.

In //Hands//, Conrad Veidt stars as the pianist Orlac, who loses his virtuoso hands in what must have been a very unlucky railway accident. His doctor, making the kind of decision that horror movie doctors have been making for years, replaces Orlac's hands with the hands of the recently deceased murderer Vasseur. The hands are a poor investment. Not only is Orlac no longer capable of playing piano, he starts to have these strange violent thoughts, and a knife //just like the one used by Vasseur// shows up in his house. How curious! And now this unexplained spate of murders, with the exact same M/O as was used by Vasseur. And with Vasseur's fingerprints! Could the hands have minds of their own? Spoiler alert! I know I waited 89 years but I figured I'd give it an even ninety. Still hasn't hit some theaters yet. Highlight to read: No. Some con-man used the highly-publicized hand transplant as a means of executing a series of bizarre murders and pinning it all on identity crises suffered by the melodramatic Conrad Veidt. I mean, look at him.

The hands are just hands. They're the hands of Vasseur, of course, but now they're Orlac's. They can't play piano because it's 1924, and hand transplants are only fiction until 1964, and still not all that successful until 1998. They're still not great. The fact that Orlac's hands can hold a cup of coffee without falling off his arms is actually pretty impressive, given the timeframe.

But for a minute they're not just the hands of Orlac, they are hands in-and-of-themselves! For a minute the Vasseur/Orlac hand things cary a terrifying and not-just-biological sort of weight. For a minute we're stuck wondering if hands //can// have minds of their own. Veidt sells it. You couldn't have this movie without Veidt, same way that nobody but Bruce Campbell could have a whole fight scene with his hands. But the tension of self(OTHER) on which Orlac's story is based needs the sheer acting talent of a Conrad Veidt to convince us that this sort of radical otherness of a body part is thinkable, that we might be able to talk about the motives of hands.

While Orlac stares his hands down, thinking they're the culprits, that's really not the horror of this at all. The real terror that Orlac experiences is the realization that even if the hands serve as a convenient symbol of action, it takes a whole hand-body-cognition machine to actually do actions. Even if Orlac's hands aren't Orlac's hands, but more properly the hands of Vasseur, Orlac's //arms// are his, aren't they? And his legs? Surely (and this is the comedy of my own hand problems) these evil hands didn't commit those murders //on their own//, did they?

After all, the title is //Hands of Orlac//, not //Hands of Vasseur//. The horror here isn't about having a murderer's hands grafted onto your own (that's why Idle Hands and the hand-horror in Evil Dead II fall flat on some level) but about having a murderer's hands //be identical and contiguous with your own hands//.

Orlac allows us to think hands in a way differently from the way Freud did. Orlac's hands are fleshy things, capable of action and reasoning. It's the very anatomical-cultural formation of hand-ness that makes the movie so horrific. They're organs for playing piano. They're organs for stabbing. In Orlac's troubled imagination, though, his hands possess some sort of biological unconscious, that allows them to stop being organs for playing piano and start being organs that want to stab.

Hands can get us some of the way in reconceptualizing the relationship between the self and its cognitive flesh, but they might be too convenient a metaphor for action. After all, Orlac's hands remain lopped-off synecdoches of Vasseur, rather than beings in their own right. When Orlac stares down his hands, it's a strange kind of battle, but it's a battle between two agents, as though Vasseur was there within those hands.

Guts, o n the other hand.

[i got too excited about horror movies to respect the colon! whoops! i quote at length:] Neural Geographies:
 * "How can we respond to this powerful alloy of scientism and interpretation? What sense can be made of a text that so persistently invokes both our keen interest and our keen distrust?" (2)
 * "[Sedgwick and Frank] dispute the naturalized critical tendency that would force an orderly distinction between Tomkins's innate affect systems and his rich phenomenology. Once mobilized, such a distinction can only serve a number of suspect critical ends: to ascertain the extent to which phenomenology can be //rescued from// scientism, or the extent to which phenomenology has emerged //despite// scientism, or the extent to which phenomenology has been //compromised// by its juxtaposition with science. Betraying a zealous but disavowed moralism against the miscegenation between science and its others, readings such as these tend to deliver tired rearticulations of antiessentialist, anti biological, antiscientific axioms, and thus promote a kind of interpretative eugenics that breeds out the bastard children of any liaison with biological or scientific systems." (3-4)
 * "Brittleness is not a feature of human cognitive systems; they are remarkably resilient to all manner of lesions and alterations. When they are damage, they tend to decay gracefully rather than crash." (10)
 * [relations of neurological plausibility and connectionist models]
 * "There has been a persistent deflection of neurological explanations of psychological or behavioral attributes on the grounds that such explanations are a priori reductionist and apolitical. Neurological explanation is no simply anti psychological; it is reductively asocial and cultural." (13)
 * "My ambitions for reading neurology are different. Avoiding the correspondingly banal position that neurological theories of psychological or behavioral tendencies are liberatory, I will argue that the neurological facets of connectionism are indispensable to rethinking cognition, psyche, and biology. If neurology has been one of the vicissitudes that has been foreclosed in traditional psychological and computational theory, then its rein junction into that field, while risking a generalized reductionism, also promises to refigure and rejuvenate cognition. Rather than reducing the possibilities of thinking cognition and psyche, neurology may give access to an internal movement in cognition that has hitherto been foreclosed by traditional cognitivism. I will pursue the possibilities of this neurological interjection in the uncanny convergence around the question of neurology and psyche in Freud's //Project for a scientific psychology//, Derrida's reading of that project, and connectionist theory. Specifically, there is a formulation of neurology latent in all three projects that exceeds scientific and critical expectations of biological presence, political stasis, and psychical locationism." (13)
 * "Can we think the subtlety of neurology and cognition on their own terms? Can we read the internal machinations of traditional empiricism in ways that do not return us to the routinized accusations of essentialism, reductionism, and political stasis? Specifically, does connectionism offer a political reading of psyche, cognition, and biology not despite its neurocomputational inclinations, but //because of them//?" (14)
 * "If the brains of men and women are different, [Blesie and Rogers, feminist neurophysiologists] argue, it is because of postnatal, environmental influence." (16)
 * "For most feminist critics in the sciences, the force of the conjunction feminism-science operates in only one direction: feminism critiquing science. In a reversal of fortune, science becomes the object of feminism's masterful interrogations. Moreover, the ground from which such feminist critiques emerge is taken to be self-evident: the explicitness of a feminist signature guaranteeing the political and epistemological ambitions of such interventions. That the science (here neurology) could generate politically useful perspectives for feminism (as distinct from politically useful data) is unthinkable for both Bleier and Rogers. They are unable to think scientific politics outside the routinized critical expectation that the sciences are either objective sties of truth or oppressive forces of social control (or some schizoid combination of both). Specifically, they are unable to envisage the possibility that neurology may already enact and disseminate the malleability, politics, and difference that they ascribe only to non neurological forces." (16-7)
 * "My argument throughout will be that feminism needs to engage with scientific authority not simply at those sites where it takes women as its objects, but also in the neutral zones, in those places where feminism appears to have no place and no political purchase." (18-9)
 * "What is required most urgently from feminist criticism in the sciences is a clear demonstration that such neutral sites are no less implicated in the deployment of patriarchal presumption than are those sites marked as sexed. In psychology, then, we need to be able to ask feminist questions not only about women, but also about cognition, learning, the brain, statistics, the rat, the perceptual system." (19)
 * "In so positioning deconstruction, Spivak does not want us to presume that its analytic examinations operate from the outside of our political projects, in a simplistically parasitic or supplementary fashion. In the first instance, the notion of an unadulterated outside will have to be subjected to rigorous scrutiny. Moreover, this "parasitism" of deconstruction is enabling rather than leeching. The irreducible double binds that have been deconstruction's persistent concern (what Spivak calls the negotiation with structures of violence) are at the "origin" of every political practice. While a political project (in the classical sense) cannot occupy itself entirely with these deconstructive concerns, nonetheless any political project or system of analysis that shuns or forgets the effects of these double binds risks falling into political or analytical stasis." (22)
 * "If deconstruction is not an analysis from the outside, if it is not a non empirical endeavor that is brought to bear on empiricism from elsewhere (philosophy? literature?)--that is, if deconstruction and empiricism already cohabit or are mutually implicating and enforcing--then we will need to map this relation with great care." (23)
 * "Doubtless it is more necessary, from within semiology, to transform concepts, to displace them, to turn them against their presuppositions, to rein scribe them in other chains, and little by little to modify the terrain of our work and thereby produce new configurations." (Derrida 1981, 24, quoted on WIlson 1997, 25)
 * "These hinge terms to not provide a solution to the binary; they do not pursue synthesis. Instead they serve to inflame that binary. The undo the self-evident character of the binary division by manifesting the point at which such a division becomes unworkable or incoherent." (26)
 * [Implications of deconstruction:]
 * "Our relation to any metaphysical concept is complex: Neither able to rid ourselves of it (as it enables our very critique) nor able to accommodate its violences, we are forced into an endless negotiation with its constitutive and its constraining effects." (27)
 * "Specifically, deconstruction is wary of the desire in such classical projects to produce an empirical or theoretical solution, to articulate a final synthesis or definitive conclusion to a particular problematic. The search for solutions manifests politically as the demand for positive projects, clear programs, and blueprints for future work. Instead, deconstruction might be more concerned with the structure of solutions themselves." (28)
 * "…It is the very notion of a final resting point in knowledges that deconstruction disputes" (29)
 * "Deconstruction is always a politics that takes its effect from //within// (Derrida 1974): Deconstruction has effect by inhabiting the structures it contests." (29)

Gut Feminism:
 * "//the lesion in hysterical paralyses must be completely independent of the anatomy of the nervous system, since// in its paralyses and other manifestations hysteria behaves as though anatomy did not exist or as though it had no knowledge of it. (SF 169, quoted on 67)
 * "The idea that psychic or cultural conflicts could become somatic events was one of the central organizing principles of feminist work on the body in the 1980s and 1990s. This model allowed feminists to think of bodily transformation ideationally and symbolically, without reference to biological constraints. That is, to think about the body as if anatomy did not exist." (68-9)
 * "What this approach does not pay attention to, however, is the role played by biology that is not damaged; that is, how the everyday, minute-by-minute, routine action of biological systems (e.g., surges of biochemicals; metabolic activity; synaptic communication; muscular contractions) might be caught up in, and contributing to, hysterical symptomology." (69)
 * "...we have come to be astute about the body while being ignorant about anatomy and that feminism’s relations to biological data have tended to be skeptical or indifferent rather than speculative, engaged, fascinated, surprised, enthusiastic, amused, or astonished." (69)
 * "The aid given by the musculature of the intestines is not that of passive substrate awaiting the animating influence of the unconscious but, rather, that of an interested broker of psychosomatic events." (73)
 * "If biological substrate was studied dynamically, the excessive concern with the utility (rationality) of organs that characterizes traditional biological knowledges could be supplanted with a more intricate account of their capacity for pleasure, for the expression of wishes, and for complicated thought." (76)
 * "Behind what he calls the facade of conventional biological description there is a biological unconscious. This biological unconscious motivates all organic activity; in certain (usually pathological) circumstances the phylogenetic and ontogenetic capacities that compose the biological unconscious come to “dominate the vital activities with their archaic impulses in the same way as the normal consciousness is inundated by psychological archaisms in the neuroses and psychoses” (Thalassa 83)." (77)
 * "The vicissitudes of ingestion and vomiting are complex thinking enacted organically: binging and purging are the substrata themselves attempting to question, solve, control, calculate, protect, and destroy." (82)
 * "It has been my argument, via Ferenczi, that these Boolean demarcations among organs and between psyche and soma are intelligible only within a conventional (flat) biological economy." (83)
 * "Perhaps the lability of eating and mood—their tendency to align and dissociate under the influence of certain medications—speaks to an ontological organization that is at odds with organic rationality." (83)
 * "The gut is sometimes angry, sometimes depressed, sometimes acutely self-destructive; under the stress of severe dieting, these inclinations come to dominate the gut’s responsivity to the world. At these moments any radical distinction between stomach and mood, between vomiting and rage is artificial. Here, a clear indication of what is meant by radical (pertaining to the root: foundational, essential, originary, primary) is important. I am not arguing that organs are indistinguishable from one another, or that psyche and soma are the same thing. Rather, I am claiming that there is no a priori, fundamental demarcation between these entities." (84)
 * "The efficacy of antidepressant medications in the treatment of bulimia can best be explained in a conceptual field where the relations between head and gut; between thinking and eating; among serotonin, appetite, and mood; among disgust and antiperistalsis and the esopha- gus; among anger and hunger and loneliness and the stomach are more than juxtapositions or utilitarian relations of otherwise disjunct realms. Feminist theory is very well positioned to generate just these kinds of conceptual models—if only it could be in a more open and generative relation to biological data, if only it could allow a less antagonistic, a more amphimixic relation between itself and the life sciences." (85-6)

Grosz:
 * "Instead of affirming the absolute specificity of our sexual and social identity, its unique particularity, through a concept of "diversity"--that is to say, through the ways in which recognizable and mappable characteristics are distributed through a population to render its members comparable and ultimately analyzable--I am more concerned with destabilizing identity, and addressing social and political problems. I intend to do so not with the (poor) resources of the past and present--the very resources patriarchy, racism, religious zealotry, and class privilege have elaborated and maintained for their privileged subjects--but with the most underdeveloped and immanent concepts, concepts addressing the future and presenting a new horizon in which to dissolve identity into difference." (88)
 * "…[the search for identity] may be problematic and could be displaced by other concepts that more adequately convey both the cohesion and the open-endedness of acts that have been defined through the consistency of subject-agents." (89)
 * [identity ==> individuality alone (Iris Young)]
 * "But if subjectivity, or rather the reduction of subjectivity to identity, is to be overcome in feminist thought, then we need other terms by which to understand these categories of oppression, terms other than those which converge and find their unity through the subject." (89)
 * "Difference is what underlies identity. Perhaps identity is the misunderstood concatenation and congealing of the unstable play of differences //without// positive identity." (90)
 * "…Saussurian semiology, coupled with Freudian psychoanalysis, enabled Lacan to understand the subject's identity as a kind of illusion of the ego, one of the psychical agencies which mistakes itself for the whole of the subject." (90)
 * "What I am interested in is an understanding of difference as the generative force of the world, the force that enacts materiality (and not just as representation), the movement of difference that marks the very energies of existence before and beyond any lived or imputed identity. It is the inhuman work of difference -- rather than its embodiment in human "identity," "subjectivity," or "consciousness," rather than its reflection in and through identity--that interests me now, the ways in which difference stretches, transforms, and opens up any identity to its provisional vicissitudes, its shimmering self-variations that enable it to become other than what it is. I am more interested in now in those differences that make us //more than we are//, recognizable perhaps for a moment in our path of becoming and self-overcoming but never fixed int arms of how we can be read (by others) or how we classify ourselves, never the basis of an identity or a position, even a fractured identity and multiple positions." (91-2)
 * [oppression doesn't work thru matrices of domination, "a hierarchy of misery"]
 * [Deleuze: diff. is "aligned, repressed, and evaded in the history of Western thought" "nevertheless a monstrous, impossible, unconstrained difference is implicated in all concepts of identity, resemblance, and opposition by which difference is commonly understood." (92)]
 * Deleuze: difference is "the state in which one can speak of determination as such." (92-3)
 * "Difference in itself must be considered primordial, a non-reciprocal emergence, that which underlies and makes possible distinctness, things, oppositions…" (93)
 * "Difference is internal determination. Difference is the point at which determination, the lightning, meets the undetermined, the black sky. This difference in itself is continually subjected to mediation, restructuring, to reorganization--to a neutralization--through being identified with entities, things." (93)
 * "…Deleuze claims that representation is the limit of difference rather than its privileged milieu or its mode of expression. Difference abounds everywhere //but// in and through the sign." (93-4)
 * "Indeed, in spite of its claims to proliferate and to acknowledge differences, such intersectionality actually attempts to generate forms of sameness, similar access to social resources, through the compensation for socially specific modes of marginalization (for migrants, access to translation services; for battered wives, access to shelters, and so on). For Deleuze, in contrast, difference cannot be equalized, and social marginalization cannot be adjusted directly except through the generation of ever-more variation, differentiation, and difference." (94) {except wait; i was pretty sure intersectionality was a mode of feminism that attended to the production of different kinds of oppression within these intersections…}
 * "Difference is the acknowledgement that there are incomplete forces at work within all entities and events that can never be definitely identified, certainly not in advance, nor be made the center of any political struggle because they are inherently open-ended and incapable of specification in advance. Although they may appear to be static categories and are of course capable of conceptually freezing themselves through various definitions for various purposes, race, class, gender, and sexuality are precisely those differences that cannot be determined in advance. **What sex, gender, and sexuality mean for, say, a poverty-stricken woman in Sri Lanka, or a working-class lesbian in Japan, or a single mother in Nigeria is in the process of being determined, and it is wishful thinking on the part of the analyst or activist to believe that these differences can be represented by first-person voices, or measured by any "objective" schemas.**" (94-5)
 * "…difference as potential, virtuality, or the possibility of being otherwise." (95)
 * "[not utopian] Rather, it is about the future to be made and not the past and the present in idealized form; it is about ensuring that the future is different from the past and the present, that those subjects and social categories privileged or subordinated in the past or present have a future in which that social status has no guarantees." (95)
 * "First among these [implications] is that by focusing on difference rather than identity, on constitutive rather than comparative differences, feminist theory in its alignments with the struggles of peoples of color, ethnic and cultural minorities, and movements of post colonialism and antiracism, can bring new questions to bear on social and policy questions. Instead of asking how to equalize differences, supplementing the least privileged through compensations sought from the most privileged, so that all subjects have access to the rights of the most privileged, we need to address the question of whether a plurality of subject positions can be adequately accommodated by the ideals represented by the able-bodied, white, middle-class, Euro-centric, male heterosexual subject. **That peoples of color seek the rights of whites, and gays seek the rights of heterosexuals is, it seems, a highly contestable claim.**" (96)
 * [difference links together subject positions in opposition to subhuman and superhuman groups, too] (96)
 * "The second implications of using the indeterminable concept of difference is that this perspective, which inserts cultural and political life in the interstices between two orders of the inhuman--the pre-individual and the impersonal--provides a new framework and connection, a new kind of liberation for the subject, who understands that culture and history have an outside, are framed and given position, only through the orders of difference that structure the material world." (96-7)
 * "Difference means that the constraints of coherence and consistency in subjects, and in the identity of things or events, is less significant than the capacity or potential for change, for being other." (97)
 * **"Oppression is made up of a myriad of acts, large and small, myriad and collective, private and public: //patriarchy, racism, classism, and ethnocentrism// are all various names we give to characterize a pattern among these acts, or to lend them a discernible form.** …I am simply suggesting that they are //not// structures, //not// systems, but immanent //patterns//, models we impose on this plethora of acts to create some order.**"** (97)
 * "There is thus no self-contained system of patriarchy that is capable of being connected to a self-contained system that is racism to form an intersectional oppression. **There is only the multiplicity of acts, big and small, significant and insignificant, that make up racist and patriarchal networks; regimes of acts, including those acts which constitute knowledges as well as those acts which make up institutional practices.** Patriarchy, racism, heteronrmativity, and other forms of oppression consist in these various acts." (98)
 * "If we understand that this multiplicity configures in unique ways for each individual ye enables shared patterns to be discerned for those who share certain social positions, then we will not confuse these acts for a latent order or, worse, for a coercive system. Instead, we will be able to see, not just how socially marginalized groups are discriminated against, but also the agency and inventiveness, the positive productivity, that even the most socially marginalized subjects develop or invent through the movements they utilize and the techniques that marginalization enables them to develop." (98)
 * "…identity cannot be understood as what we are, the multiple, overlapping categories that make us into subjects; rather, we are what we do and what we make, we are that we generate, which may give us an identity, but always an identity that is directed to our next act, our next activity, rather than to the accretion of the categories that may serve to describe us." (98)


 * Determinism: all decisions can be known; Libertarianism: decisions open up spaces for totally free choice
 * Bergson: middle road: **free acts**: "Bergson's position is both alluringly metaphysical and strikingly simple: free acts are those that spring from the subject alone (and not from any psychical state of the subject or any manipulated behavior around the subject); they not only originate in or through a subject, they express //all// of that subject--in other words, they are integral to who or what the subject is." (64)
 * Psychical states have three characteristics:
 * "always qualitative, and thus incapable of measurement" (65) ==> determinism is untenable.
 * "function…through "fusion or interpenetration"…through an immersion or permeation that generates a continuity between states or processes and makes their juxtaposition impossible." (65)
 * "…emerge or can only be understood in duration rather than through the conventional modes of spatialization" (65)
 * "Thus, instead of linking the question of freedom to the concept of emancipation, or to some understanding of liberation from or removal of an oppressive or unfair form of constraint or limitation, as is most common in feminist and other anti-oppressive struggles and discourses, I want to explore concepts of life where freedom is conceived not only or primarily as the elimination of constraint or coercion, but more positively as the condition of or capacity for action." (60)
 * "Is feminist theory best served through its traditional focus on women's attainment of a freedom from patriarchal, racist, colonialist, heteronormative constraint? Or by exploring what the female--or feminist--subject is and is capable of making and doing? It is this broad and overarching question--one of the imponderable dilemmas facing contemporary politics well beyond feminism--that is at stake in exploring the subject's freedom through its immersion in materiality." (61)
 * "It entails that once the subject has had the negative force of restraints and inhibitions limiting freedom removed, a natural or given autonomy is somehow preserved. If external interference can be minimized, the subject can be (or rather become) itself, can be left to itself and as itself, can enact its given freedom." (61-2)
 * "Both perspectives [free will/determinism] presume the separation or discontinuity of the subject from the range of available options or alternatives; the subject's stable, ongoing self-identity; a fundamental continuity between present causes and future effects (whether causes are regarded as internal or as external to the subject are what tend to define the positions of the determinist and the libertarian, respectively); and an atomistic separation or logical division between cause and effect." (63)
 * "(Recent discourses on "the gay brain" [e.g., LeVay's //Queer Science//], the "gay gene," or the construction of queer through too close a "contamination" by queer lifestyles are merely contemporary versions of this ancient debate.) What lies behind each variation of this position is the belief that if one could know the brain's structure or genetic or behavioral patterns intimately enough, one could predict future behavior, whether criminal, sexual, or cultural." (63)
 * "With even this most constrained and manipulated of circumstances [hypnosis], when one person's will is imposed on another's without their conscious awareness, Bergson argues that there must nevertheless be a retrospective cohesion between the subject's current act and the previous chain of connects that prepared for it and made it possible." (64-5)
 * "Acts are free insofar as they express and resemble the subject, not insofar as the subject is always the same, an essence of identity, but insofar as the subject is transformed by and engaged through its acts, becomes through its acts." (66)
 * "Freedom is not a transcendent quality inherent in subjects but is immanent in the relations that the living has with the material world, including other forms of life." (68)
 * "Life is consciousness, though not always an active consciousness. Consciousness is the projection onto materiality of the possibility of a choice, a decision whose outcome is not given in advance; that is to say, it is a mode of simplifying or skeletalizing matter so that it affords us materialist on and with which to act. It is linked to the capacity for choice, for freedom." (68-9)
 * "It is this zone of indetermination that for Bergson characterizes the freedom representative of life, and the capacity for being otherwise that life can bestow on (elements, factors of) material organization. Indetermination is the "true principle" of life, the condition for the open-ended action of living beings, the ways in which living bodies are mobilized for actions that cannot be specified on advance." (69)
 * "But equally, Bergson argues, matter as a whole, the material universe, must contain within itself the very conditions for the indeterminacy of life which it generated, those mixtures or compounds which may yield memory, history, the past, and make them linger, press on, and remain relevant to the present and future. Matter must contain as its most latent principle, its most virtual recess, the same indeterminacy that life returns to it." (70)
 * "But the question of freedom for women, or for any oppressed social group, is never simply a question of expanding the range of possible options so much as it is about transforming the quality and activity, the character, of the subjects who choose and make themselves through how and what they do." (71)
 * "Being gay or straight, for example, is not a question of choice (of options already given in their independent neutrality--e.g. the choice of men or women as sexual objects, or masculine or feminine as modes of identification) but an expression of who one is and what one enjoys doing, of one's being. It is the expression of freedom without necessarily constraining oneself to options already laid out." (73)
 * "That is, the challenge facing feminism today is no longer only to give women a more equal place within existing social networks and relations but to enable women to partake int eh creation of a future unlike the present." (73)