"Suicidal resistance"

Erin O'Connor at Cant Watch posted a dizzying piece that royally fisks translates the ravings at this conference in June at the University of Leeds. There's an email circulating that's drawn some attention to this particular meeting, which you can find here. Judith Weiss has also quoted it in full in the comments section on LGF, here (#45).

This is a nice example of postmodernist pseudobabble from the conference welcoming statement:

Our first theme for CongressCATH 2002 addresses the fractures of sociality and the injuries sustained by social subjects created by the potent and still critical social relation we inadequately and often uncomprehendingly name class. Conjoining this local and global relation of distribution and inequality with the social, ethical and philosophically complex notion of Hospitality addresses the wounds of solitude and human desolation inflicted on the stranger, and on the hybrid figures of movement and change, of encounter and difference that are, at the same time, the possibilities of a future world not phobically resistant to the inevitable relations to the others, no longer forced to bear the disfiguring mark of Otherness.

Erin does a magnificent job of interpreting this incoherence into English. And she has this comment.

We've seen all too clearly in recent months where this romanticized vision of violence-as-ennobling-resistance leads people--into irresponsible, often patently unethical positions on issues of pressing, planet-wide importance, among them global capitalism and terrorism. If September 11 has taught us nothing else, it has taught us about the terrifyingly sociopathic lengths to which academic theory-speak will go in the name of radical political critique. Or, at least, that's one thing it should have taught us.

But apparently not. This is an excerpt from the keynote speech of Columbia University professor and postmodern theorist Gayatri Spivak, which speech gave rise to the aforementioned email:

Suicide bombing--and the planes of 9/11 were living bombs--is a purposive self-annihilation, a confrontation between oneself and oneself, the extreme end of autoeroticism, killing onself as other, in the process killing others. It is when one sees oneself as an object capable of destruction in a world of objects, so that the destruction of others is indistinguishable from the destruction of self.

Suicidal resistance is a message inscribed on the body when no other means will get through. It is both execution and mourning, for both self and other. For you die with me for the same cause, no matter which side you are on. Because no matter who you are, there are no designated killees in suicide bombing. No matter what side you are on, because I cannot talk to you, you won't respond to me, with the implication that there is no dishonor in such shared and innocent death.

Well, even through that morass the basic point squirms through. As Erin points out, this is not fringe thinking within the ivory tower universe. It's more or less the dominant mode of discourse. It's the subtext in the curriculum over a wide range of disciplines in a vast array of institutions of "higher" learning. Institutions to which many of us (not me!) are in the process of packing off their kids at this very moment. Kinda scary.