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I want to begin with a reading but first there is a need to concern ourselves with what a reading is. A reading may be either a commentary or a supplement.l All readings in the Western tradition move on the space of representation. All commentaries are supplements to that upon which they comment. In traditional criticism commentaries have served to close off and determine meanings. They signal the limits of a text and centre the possibilities of that text. In this sense the traditional practice of commentary in Western philosophy has been to colonise texts by claiming for them imminent meanings. The commentary then stands as a secondary, lesser text claiming only to reproduce, represent the meaning of the text on which it comments whilst constituting a determinative frame for that text. The traditional process of commentary, then, assigns meaning whilst disempowering the text to which it assigns meaning. Such a process is an aspect of the phallogocentric organization of Western discourse, a discourse which privileges the presence of the word, the logos, and privileges the phallic male as the speaker of that word.2 It is a discourse of centres and limits of a systematic planitude of authority such that power, one aspect of which has been the panoptic surveillance of which Foucault wrote3, is so pervasive that the experience of domination, of being determined in one's space is felt as natural. I use the term "felt" here with deliberation because this essay, this commentary, is concerned with experience and the politics of experience.
I am concerned not so much with the constitution of a speaking position but with how one can speak against the grain of phallogocentric discourse, against... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline