JZ: Your concept of the ‘spider of otherness’ evokes associations with both weaving and networking. Do you see the concept of cyberspace with its discourse of webs and networks as opening up a new space for different, illicit connections? Or is it a mere copy of what 'real life' can offer?

SG: The notion of ‘the poor copy’ comes from Walter Benjamin. In his celebrated essay, ‘Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, Benjamin was trying to get to the notion of an authentic first position by rejecting the relationship to photocopy, that is photography, and he was truly the first to see it as a problem. I do think that the copy is in fact the basis of identity. To me it’s not true that men do men things and women do women things, but it is worth noticing how amazing ideology is that has made us think so, and that has to do with copying. It’s like someone saying to me: My daughter is just one month old and she is already choosing pink over blue, etc. I had very interesting talks with different feminists who were saying to me: Boys know how to speak in front of groups because they learn it very early, at the age of two. In the military environment I grew up in everybody was treated equally, trashy, as a soldier, and then we all learned equally how to, say, peel potatoes. Which is not to say that there are no sexist things going on here, but that a different kind of mimetic relation is taking place. I read a piece a long time ago called ‘James Dean: the Almost Perfect Lesbian Hermaphrodite’, which was criticising the feminist and the lesbian community for being dishonest about masculinity and for saying, no, we hate men, and meanwhile wearing black leather jackets, riding motorcycle bikes and taking on that fantastic James Dean image. And the article was saying: Let’s call it a dyke image. Whether or not it is simply a mimetic copy, it’s an icon, and we take these icons, and use them, playing with them and claiming them as our own. In that sense the relationship between a cyborg and virtual reality is helpful, forcing one to rethink what it means to be real, because what is being copied in a virtual copy are other virtual copies. That to me is a political move, and whether or not that becomes a fascistic closed moment is another question. I am posing democracy versus fascism, but it could be named something else altogether.

JZ: How does the Net redefine the notions of distance and proximity? Would you see the concept of proximity that necessitates distance as an ethical alternative to the desire for possession, engulfment and appropriation?

SG: It’s utterly ethical, and I want to distinguish that from moral. My work is all about that. These are not neutral things I am saying, they take a position. When we learn to speak and think in terms of degrees and movements - these things that have edges like stars, as opposed to squares - we believe we are better off. I think that the kind of distance and proximity that a star speaks of, or gestures toward, is a different kind of thinking than one which zeroes in on some games with closed parameters - in which you have either push or get shot, this kind of notion of violence, domination and power. It’s a different way of thinking about power - how to embrace power that would take the form of these non-bounded positionalities, and to have a positionality within a non-structured terrain is to present an ethical take. I do believe that one type of life, or a way of living, is better than another, and it annoys me that there are a number of intellectuals who often are not quite straightforward about this, feeling wary to comment on what goes on in other countries and limiting their judgements to their own milieu. I actually think that, for example, slicing off a clit is wrong, for the purposes of no purpose, and so there is something I am putting forward, and some of it has liberal drippings to it, in the sense that I do think that the person owns their body, but I don’t agree with that part of the liberal thought which says: if these people want to go on doing it in their own country, it’s fine. I want to live in a world that has amenities to it, not in a forced concentration camp. The kind of democracy I am speaking about is one that we can only have in an urban setting, which I think is also a problem, because of what happens in the countryside or in the suburbs. This democracy is still stuck in modernity, and I think that rethinking questions of proximity will yield a better kind of ethical system.

JZ: I’d like to ask you about the relationship between the concepts of nomadism and postmodernism: is nomadism part and parcel of ‘the postmodern condition’?

SG: I am writing a book right now which speaks of the way in which these spider legs move in a nomadic way, sometimes within oneself, when one is travelling within one’s body, changing genders, for instance, or they move nomadically from city to city, country to country, or culture to culture. Whichever way it is happening, this movement is to me a kind of poesis, a very specific form of poetry, which is an aesthetic remark as well as re-marking, in the sense of re-touching. That re-marking is to me the primary condition of postmodernism. We are both forced into it and held accountable to it. One is caught by or in this spider-leg/web.

JZ: This leads me to another of the spider’s legs that you mentioned in your book, that is curiosity. Can curiosity be lethal?