The Art of Dissent from the Rhetoric of Silence: the Terror and Promise of Dao and Khora

Goh, Hui Peng Constance (2008) The art of dissent from the rhetoric of silence: the terror and promise of Dao and Khora. PhD thesis, University of Nottingham. Access from the University of Nottingham repository: http://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/10524/1/The_Art_of_Dissent_ii.pdf Copyright and reuse: The Nottingham ePrints service makes this work by researchers of the University of Nottingham available open access under the following conditions. · Copyright and all moral rights to the version of the paper presented here belong to the individual author(s) and/or other copyright owners. · To the extent reasonable and practicable the material made available in Nottingham ePrints has been checked for eligibility before being made available. · Copies of full items can be used for personal research or study, educational, or not- for-profit purposes without prior permission or charge provided that the authors, title and full bibliographic details are credited, a hyperlink and/or URL is given for the original metadata page and the content is not changed in any way. · Quotations or similar reproductions must be sufficiently acknowledged. Please see our full end user licence at: http://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/end_user_agreement.pdf A note on versions: The version presented here may differ from the published version or from the version of record. If you wish to cite this item you are advised to consult the publisher’s version. Please see the repository url above for details on accessing the published version and note that access may require a subscription. For more information, please contact [email protected] 1 The Art of Dissent from the Rhetoric of Silence: The Terror and Promise of Dao and Khra 2 Abstract This thesis reworks the idea of Chineseness as a translational point in its exploration of the intricate knot of nothingness, a sublimity which makes Chinese culture irreducible to the postcolonial, postmodern or poststructuralist movements because what the West arrogates from Eastern philosophy or contrariwise is simultaneously an interrogative advancement and a detour to selfsameness. Derrida’s deconstructive absence in Chinese writing may be surprising to those acquainted with his eloquence on phonetic writing and the Egyptian hieroglyphs. By (dis)locating the commentaries revolving around Derrida’s reticence on Chinese inscriptions, I shall launch the argument from what most have put down merely as a “lack” of knowledge, inverted here to expose the always already missing link between the articulator and reality. Derrida’s cryptic remark about Chinese writing as “the testimony of a powerful movement of civilization developing outside of all logocentrism” can be read as a suggestion of a certain parallelism between deconstruction and Eastern philosophy, accidentally encountering in this paper. The signifying dissemination within writing is most advantageous to the reading of dao and khra as synonymous sites and only meeting with a supplementary inversion, an ironic twist, at the divide between the East and the West. This Lacanian knot, a result of the encore of centres, is reconciled provisionally with a deus ex machina, the “parallax view” of Slavoj Žižek, the interpretative (l)ink. As part of the many chiasmic encounters, it is the assertion here that Derrida’s rewriting of the Heideggerean Dasein, “There is nothing outside the text”, signals the revolutionary aestheticisation of the ontological contours which gives to a replete subjectivity, political or otherwise. Inversely, the ontological disclosure in and through aesthetics provides impetus to epistemology. And the circular relations between aesthetics and existential ethics are that which provides the possibility of reconciliation with alterity, the trace that inevitably keeps 3 reading open. Given that we can relate the ethical only to the contextual, the contingency underlying its very definition discloses an indeterminacy that ensures openness to the future, and, coupled with the readiness to respond to the call of the other, prompts a re-reading as reading irresponsibly. In other words, the semiotic coming-to-be reciprocates the coming-to-be of the human entity. Derrida’s silence about Chinese writing may be a gesture to the signifying reticence at the heart of discourse, simultaneously the poetic place and moment, which enables this critical traversal, a wayfaring entailing the bearing of the past so that alterity can be imag(in)ed, the “supernumerary” of both dao and khra, with the disablement of a fixed discursive trajectory. 4 Acknowledgements First, I would like to convey my appreciation and gratitude to my supervisor, Chair Professor Bernard McGuirk, for his unfailing encouragement during the writing process without which the writing of the dissertation might not have been possible. The thought-provoking exchanges we had under his supervisory guidance not only attest to his engaged attention but also his faith in my critical capability. I would also like to say many thanks to Professor Roger Bromley and Doctor Philip Leonard for their detailed reading of this dissertation. Their constructive comments have helped to shape the thesis presentation and their suggestions regarding readership and further research will aid in transforming this thesis to a book. In addition, I would like to express my acknowledgement to the Department of Cultural Studies and The University of Nottingham for the much-needed institutional support. And, most of all, the debt owed to my mother whose love and care has given me the strength to finish writing this thesis. 5 Contents Abstract Acknowledgements Afterword 6 Exordium 11 1. Dao and Khra: Chiasmic Encounters of the Third Kinds 24 2. Cracking the Cosmic Code: The Tw(o)o Twisted Tales 111 3. What is the X Factor of Chineseness?: The Myth of the Other as the Pivots of the Double Wheels 184 4. Politics as the Last Transcendence?: The Warriors of the Ring 255 Bibliography 332 6 Afterword As an afterword, the introduction encapsulates the various thetic arguments that constitute the thesis here. The first concerns the Western concept of the postmodern and whether China at the turn of the twenty-first century can be called a postmodern society. While various writers have written about Chinese postmodernity, noting, of course, China’s place in an international arena characterised by globalisation, this thesis calls to question the idea of a Chinese postmodernity not because China is not modernised in alignment to global capitalist economy but because the features of the postmodern, notably a Western term, are repetitions of Chinese heretical thought proposed by the Daoist masters, Laozi and Zhuangzi, albeit with a difference. Thus, this thesis argues for the chiasmic interface of the Western postmodern and Chinese high antiquity based on the transmigratory movements of signifying elements in cross-cultural translations whereby both the East and the West manifest characteristics borrowed from each other and subsequently transformed owing to their insertion into the specific cultural contexts. This introduction also takes issue with Michelle Yeh’s “Chinese Postmodernism” which speaks of the poststructuralists such as Jacques Lacan and Jacques Derrida as if they are responsible for postmodernism. Both Lacan and Derrida are not postmodernists and there were occasions whereby Derrida refused to be called a poststructuralist simply because their works are not that easily identifiable. The writings of both thinkers are responses to the metaphysical tradition they inherited, a legacy they have striven to take on although in different ways. At this late stage of postmodernity, the question that is in everyone’s mind is: “What’s next?” This thesis reworks Vladimir Nabokov’s notion of “the present past”, a personal memoir, to a memorious discourse that hopes to stimulate and encourage the thinking of, to borrow Rey Chow’s title, an ethics after idealism. The double chiasmic encounters of dao and khra depicted 7 in an awesome way by Jackson Pollock’s Lavender Mist prompt the other chiasmi in this dissertation. While the entourage of writers, thinkers I call “the warriors of the ring”, is called upon because of a certain fundamental in their works – the critical attention given to the historical trauma or, in other words, the structural problematic – there are theoretical or methodological differences and, sometimes, marked ones which I have attempted to address in the dissertation proper. If I have not done it in a more comprehensive fashion, perhaps, this is the space to do so. Slavoj Žižek’s parallax view is brought in to complement and boost Zhuangzi’s concept of perspective shifts, points of view that give us the parallax error which scientific objectivity itself does not escape. Derrida’s différance, aptly termed a non-concept, moves in a way that crosses Lacan’s psychoanaytic theory: the Lacanian hard kernel and Derridean fluid and feisty khra meet at the heart of a chiasmus. Whereas Lacan’s attention goes to the phallic signifier, Derrida’s critical engagement with metaphysics lies with the hymeneal ring, although it must be added that the former’s Seminar XX constitutes a pivotal turn that reinforces Derrida’s notion of the hymen as the liminary space for the contact with the other. Michel Foucault’s thinking on power is necessary for addressing the ethics of contemporary politics, the hegemonic underpinnings of which must first be exposed before we can move on to socio-political change, a mental decolonisation that will manifest hopefully in revolutionary performativity. Since the space of conflict, in this thesis, is the square, the thetic focus on Tiananmen Square evinces an instance where power relations are enacted and the dramatisation of the revolutionary activity is linked to its concomitant literary revolution not only because they always emerge hand in hand in China but also the fact that the literary square of the paper is metaphorically reminiscent of the physical square, interstitial spaces where the common can and 8 should have the freedom to speak and act.

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