Re: <documenta X><blast>Words Wearing Us
Bracha Lichtenberg - Ettinger (bracha@easynet.fr)
Mon, 28 Jul 1997 00:09:31 +0200
The memory of words, not ours but looking at us, breaking my breath as
encounter-things.
In Hebrew, words speak like bodies, sexuality is engraved in the
signifiers, there is no 'universal' child, you are either a waiter or a
waitress, a he-cat or a she-cat. Even the poetess can only change sex, but
not neutralize it, even when s/he despoils the human and the animal. Even
the stone is a male or a female. Even the verb designates sex, and subjects
- even in I-you relations - adress each other shamelessly as female or male
and speak theirselves from a masculine or feminine stance. Each "I love
you", even each "you take care", Clifford, wear different words with
regards to whether it is said by a woman to a man, by a man to a woman, by
a woman to a woman or by a man to a man. In the transition to English sadly
each text I am sending have to go through neuteralization, de-sexuation,
de-genderization and de-eroticization, for Hebrew, as the poet[ess] Yona
Wallach puts it, is "sex maniac[ess]al".
So across the ocean, this 'person' issue doesn't make any sense - 'sense'
is male in Hebrew - and it has no meaning - 'meaning' is female. Here, you
cannot achieve the neutral, you must work with-in the difference, you have
to cross the
words as bodies
and as oblivions
as well.
Bracha