thinking difference

i was mesmerized when i first read hegel. the idea of ourselves as constructed through another (the idea of the self as constituted by the other) - that it is never simply "I" or "You", but the space in-between that defines us - this elated me. yes, i said, it isn't about monadic individuals who are self-contained and make choices and live their lives by their own accord. hegel, to me, spoke of interconnectedness and the ways we collectively define the world and each other. when i read haraway, i was blown to bits by her rendering of the dominant self - the One that relies on the Other, but negates the Other to assure an autonomous Self. "One is too few, but two are too many." that was 5 years ago. i am now trying to reengage. these ideas lost hold of me for a time, yet their crucial importance to me never fully abated.

In Yegenoglu's book, Colonial Fantasies, this quote caught me, "The Hegelian assumption is that the other shares the same universe with the subject." it caught me because all of a sudden difference was too different to be held within the self-other dialectic. i am thinking about the relation of self and other in Hegel as one constituted by (again) a certain way of knowing - a Western/European, White, Male configuration (of course). But what is beyond this? Can we only find ourselves within this relation to the dominant? How do we get out of the relationship that binds us here? - binds us to a dominant idea of success, of meaningfulness, of the value of our lives? this is where difference is needed, yes? but two things may happen that trip us up: 1. we recreate and reinforce the self/other binary by flipping it -- 'since we are other, we will be the other that is not the self,' 2. by our attempts at reconstructing a language that defines us differently, we lose the ways in which difference has been constructed and utilized by the dominant . but how then do we move? for we can never take it all into account because accounts aren't finite. difference can never be accounted for because it is a process of posing, positioning always in relation to that which itself is not finite. there are clues in these books i am reading, clues in the language that they are utilizing, the spaces they inhabit. but they are only clues (often incomprehensible) and i am left with shifting sand.