tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4102092409620291902.post605948251095537669..comments2023-06-08T12:37:20.523+01:00Comments on All Things Made New: Masculine and feminineUnknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4102092409620291902.post-14076007493511801112013-08-18T11:38:25.279+01:002013-08-18T11:38:25.279+01:00You can't get away from 'norms', even ...You can't get away from 'norms', even if they are purely statistical. The question is what you do with them, and how you regard people who are 'abnormal' in some way. In the case of an athlete, or an artistic genius, we might celebrate the abnormal. Sexual abnormality has traditionally been treated differently. That is because sexual behaviour involves ethics in a way that athletics does not. But I am concentrating on whether the norm is caused by an archetype or not. (A bit more about this on my education blog.) As for the second question, I moved a bit too quickly from Ockham to Nietzsche, but I still think the position can be argued. Maybe not in this little box! Stratford Caldecotthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05239053224257881002noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4102092409620291902.post-11630751636849458752013-08-17T14:09:20.965+01:002013-08-17T14:09:20.965+01:00This is interesting, Strat, but seems to me proble...This is interesting, Strat, but seems to me problematic. I detect two issues. First is the idea that gender archetypes are simply given – which is a possibility, but even so they are still forms of understanding enmeshed in secular power structures (I mean this in the sense that the Church is a secular power). Furthermore, you quote Evdokimov (whose work I don't know) as stating that "gifts and charisms of the Spirit determine and are *normative* for the psychic and the physiological." I don't see how this squares with the *celebration* of difference. Doesn't this cast individual variation from the norm in a negative light? And therefore, the secular power of the Church (and state, depending on their mutual relations) is directed towards monitoring and disciplining abnormalities. So somebody born with a transgender condition is assigned a gender (which, incidentally, is based on an increasingly complicated range of factors). The only difference celebrated is the fundamental m/f distinction. (Susanna Cornwall is interesting on this stuff.)<br /><br />The second problem I have is your characterisation of the truth/power nexus in a materialist/nominalist ideology. Certainly, there are those who take the Nietzschean position you set out; but there is another way. Truth is not necessarily displaced by power, because there remains the (small 't') truth that all claims of privileged access to the (capital 'T') Truth are enmeshed in power structures. Therefore a multiplicity of narratives, interpretations and subject-positions can co-exist. The Nietzschean position (the decision is everything) is the logic of the exception (as with Carl Schmitt) – either/or logic. The latter is what Lacan called the logic of the not-all (i.e. a category that can accommodate more, but is not therefore lacking), or both/and logic. (Lacan actually characterises these as masculine and feminine logics, but I don't feel able to go into the significance of that. Also, I know that Alain Badiou has developed this through Cantorian set theory, but I'm not the person to articulate it adequately.)<br /><br />I'm aware that the problem with the not-all logic I've set forth is that it can be argued that, in a juridical context, there still must be a 'higher power' which adjudicates over the competing truth-claims of rival ideologies and subject-positions, and therefore it doesn't escape the logic of the decision. But I don't think that this undermines what I'm trying to argue about the problematic nature of secular power enforcing a normative archetype asserted as a transcendental given.Henryhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16094740961722725543noreply@blogger.com