JZ: In your book The Eight Technologies of Otherness you describe otherness as ‘simply and only a cosmetic wound; a very thin, virtual, and in this sense "impossible" limit.’ How does otherness inscribe itself in and on the body? I’m also interested in the problem of pain that seems inextricably linked with the question of otherness - does alterity have to hurt, or do we perhaps need to rethink the notion of pain itself?
SG: I think we have to rethink the notion of otherness. All concepts are up for negotiation, for rethinking, including pain and pleasure. The thinking behind The Eight Technologies was to send up in a certain way the notion of otherness. A lot of people hold the view that the other, or otherness, is something that does not fit in technically. But then they make a slide, and that slide becomes a human object, so otherness becomes, for example, woman or Jew - the group that doesn’t fit in. I profoundly disagree with that. In The Eight Technologies of Otherness what I and a lot of the theorists I had brought in to that book were trying to talk about was otherness as a surface, and that surface is both the expression of the object and the thing that is not part of the object. To say that it has pain in it is only accurate in as much as the thing you are dealing with has pain in it, and the thing that is otherness, the other entity, is really only sensical in as much as it is related to, in this case, a body. Otherness thus has this peculiar property to it, which is that it both frames something and at the same time has no life of its own. It’s one of the crucial concepts I’ve been working on with respect to the Information Age and the difference between an atom and a bit. Up until very recently most political philosophers were looking at otherness very much in the way that scientists or physicists would look at atoms. We need something different for the Information Age, which has more to do with bits, being a weightless thing still able to carry information. That to me is what otherness is about, and I am just naming that as a kind of frame. These technologies, of which I consider pain to be one (named cruelty in the book), both fit in to the being, the entity, and could also be perceived as something that is traversing the thing. They are part of the excess, and at the same time make up the thing itself. But they could equally well be broken off, and so again the question which you asked and the either/or answer has to be betrayed, because you have to break it or shift it.
JZ: What technologies of otherness can be reenacted on the skin? Is it still possible to speak about ‘transgressive’ bodily practices?
SG: The answer is yes and no. I am working on a paper right now called ‘Why a City Is Not a Web-site’. Part of it has to do with the physicality of the body that seems to be forgotten when we talk about cybersex and this kind of thing. I have just come back from Sydney, Australia, and one of the things I realised as to why a city is not a web-site is jetlag. If one thinks of the notion of the transgressive as something that does not get absorbed by the law in a sort of Bataillian sense, but is elevated outside the dialectical frame, then a transgressive scenario is not always possible because there are worlds - those on large levels like society, and on smaller levels like families or relationships - that absorb all sorts of reactions against them into themselves. Lyotard’s notion of the differend is crucial in pointing out how one can’t really stand up, as this gesture already gets absorbed. It is the way racism works, for instance. You can’t really fight against racism because anything you do, whatever you say, just gets absorbed, and thus you can’t transgress it. Having said that, I also think that there are political moves that do allow one to push the limits beyond themselves, beyond the law. And this transgression, as a result, only becomes permanent when it is attached to the body, because unless bodies are going to become obsolete - which could happen, but which would be a real tragedy - all of us can come up with notions of change that won’t get absorbed, and whether we call them transgressive or not is only part of the question. I don’t find transgression for transgression’s sake all that interesting, but that begs the question of who are you in a certain sense to set what it is that one transgresses for. If we get the sense of the transgressive as that which does not get absorbed, and we think of a system that needs to be thought through, that we may call democracy, as an entity that proliferates difference that cannot be absorbed by the law, then what we have is ‘a system of transgression’ as it were, which yields a certain kind of creativity. That’s better than some other system of just rearranging materials.
JZ: If alterity is not to be defined in binary terms, what other possibilities are we left with, if we do not want to risk the erasure of all traces of otherness and, consequently, return to the previously sustained homogeneity?
SG: I’m asking people, including myself, to start thinking in a multidimensional patch. The reason I am attacking binaries is that I don’t think they work, which is a useful reason to get rid of something. They only work if you are in a two- or maybe three-dimensional world, but not if you go further than that, into a spherical world including the fourth, fifth and sixth dimensions. My understanding is that there are up to ten dimensions, although some say there are more. When you are thinking of alterity as a surface, and this surface is linked to the objects it is expressing and also frames, and you think of a different level of time and speed, you should not worry about whether or not it is still producing multiplicity, because the actual question is about the spatiality of dimensions and the fibres of space, which keeps getting depleted into time. Another way of looking at it is concerns situations in which time is spatial, or when space becomes only temporal. A good example of when you are not in the spatial dimension any more is when you are in the airport: you could be anywhere then, you are just living temporally. Whereas sometimes, when you are lost in the city, and you are wandering around with your map, time gets shunted aside, and you are configuring the spatiality of it. How to think these things and how to put them together - airports and maps, for example - is a different dimensionality. Someone whose work is very good on that is Doreen Massey. If you think of alterity as a naming process, it’s naming the kind of unsayable something that becomes a marker; it works as a sayable something for some other relation. They are real events that are configured within that moment. It’s a different thinking of time, different thinking of history, of process, event, signature.