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An excerpt, still in draft, of “The Household Frontier,” written with Melinda Cooper:

Apropos previous notes on passing:

Just over a decade after the conditional abolition of slavery in the US, laws were passed in many states prohibiting black people from using the same public accommodations as whites. Known as Jim Crow laws, they stipulated the demarcation of “separate but equal” spaces. That much is well-known, even if it remains important to underscore the sense in which racism – both here and in Australia – coincided with and was shaped by egalitarianism. There is more to be said about this but, for the moment, some notes on Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), as a prelude/footnote to a longer/later discussion on ‘passing.’

From Ann Smock’s “Sarah Kofman’s Wit”:

[…] she was always looking for a way out, a poros. She was always inventing and borrowing good expedients, for - this is my hypothesis - she was unwilling to lament her fate, but was also disinclined to be consoled by illusions. She did not believe there was a way out, ultimately. She was unwilling to believe, then, or not believe, I’d say - unwilling to be duped or disillusioned either, and so she played, to use an expression she herself often employs - on two terrains at once: the terrain of confidence and the terrain of despair, uncompromisingly.

In this respect she resembled Eros, the child that Penia, who got left out on the doorstep like a beggar when the gods gathered to feast, cleverly contrived to conceive with Poros as he sleepily luxuriated, drunk on nectar. Eros, Kofman wrote, inherited the contradictory characteristics of both his parents - those of his female parent, Penia the indigent, and those of his male parent, Poros, rich in resources. Eros himself is neither rich nor poor, female nor male, but rather just apt to let slip through his fingers all the gains his cleverness wins him as he is fertile with clever stratagems whenever hardship grips him. Eros is a daimon, Kofman writes, in Comment s’en sortir; he is an intermediary being, foreign to the logic of identity and a stranger to simple oppositions. Neither mortal nor immortal, neither a fool nor a sage, he spends all his life philosophizing. […]

From Sarah Kofman’s Corpus, eds Chanter and De Armitt. The rest of Smock’s essay onscreen.

Meme-wise, and to celebrate my escape, if only temporary, from Manticor. (Ok, that final denouement is not from the film (stoopid remix), but everyone knows how it goes The Manticor reference is, of course, from elsewhere, but not at all unrelated.)

The first paragraph, in late-running final draft, of a collaborative text-image project with Bryan of subtopia (and it may explain something more of this recent cryptic post):

The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it. - Marx, “Theses On Feuerbach”.

Thesis Eleven – what is ‘the point’? What is at stake? Eleventh - that moment beyond the neat ten, in excess of the theological commandments. Karl Marx’s eleventh comment on Feuerbach, while very far from being, as it is so often read to be, the purportedly a-theoretical pragmatic command which forestalls asking any significant or difficult questions about ‘how things are’ or, even less, amounting to a dialectics which seeks to project idealised versions of what exists into an infinite future, is nevertheless equivocal enough to have enabled interpretations of such varieties. Such are the contingencies of writing and reading, to be sure.