SUNITI NAMJOSHI'S BUILDING BABEL: The Resignification
of Babel’s Resistant Subjects
SIPHIWE IGNATIUS DUBE
(Siphiwe Ignatius Dube is a Doctoral Candidate at the Centre
for the Study of Religion, in University of Toronto. He is pursuing
his PhD in Religion and Literature and specializes in Critical
Theory, Feminist and Postcolonial Theory.)
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Introduction
In the conclusionary remarks of her study on Suniti Namjoshi subtitled
The Artful Transgressor, C. Vijayasree argues that in Namjoshi’s
writing transgression is used as a mode of articulating resistance (158).
Trangression as opposed to aggression, according to Vijayasree, affords
Namjoshi’s fiction a transformative role rather than just a polemic
one. The implication of course being that it is more useful to transform
than to reject completely and start afresh. This theme of transformation,
which Namjoshi addresses in her work Building Babel, is also present
in the original myth of the Biblical narrative from which Namjoshi’s
work is based: “Now the whole earth had one language and the same
words…. Then they said, ‘Come let us build ourselves a city,
and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for
ourselves;’… Therefore it was called Babel, because there
the Lord confused the language of all the earth;” (Gen. 11:1,
4, 9). Other than the fear of being scattered upon the face of the earth,
no other reason is given for the endeavor of building the tower in the
Biblical narrative. Apparently transformation is just good and that’s
that.
Similarly, in Namjoshi’s Building Babel there is no reason given
for embarking on the building project except “perhaps an urgent
need,” as one of the narrators suggests at the beginning (Namjoshi
30). This essay will be arguing that part of Namjoshi’s concern
in Building Babel is with the notions of subjectivity and resistance,
dealt with via a reworking of a familiar myth. My driving question will
be this: How can one escape the strictures of a prior myth whilst trying
to forge a new one without being totally overwhelmed and achieving nothing
in the end – or confused as were the initial Babel builders and
the women of Namjoshi’s new Babel? That is to say, how does subjectivity,
and consequently myth, as an oppressive mode relate to subjectivity
as a mode of transformative resistance, or myth as transformable and
transforming? I will deal with this question via a reading of Namjoshi
through Judith Butler’s ideas on subjectivity.
Subjectivity and Naming
In the chapter entitled “Subjection, Resistance, and Resignification:
Between Freud and Foucault”, Judith Butler asks the following
question: “What do we make of a resistance that can only undermine,
but which appears to have no power to rearticulate the terms, the symbolic
terms – to use Lacanian parlance – by which subjects are
constituted, by which subjection is installed in the very formation
of the subject? ” (88-89). Her answer, teased out via a Foucauldian
analysis, which she offers at the conclusion of the chapter, is that
“any mobilization against subjection will take subjection as its
resource, and that attachment to an injurious interpellation will, by
way of a necessarily alienated narcissism, become the condition under
which resignifying that interpellation becomes possible” (104).
That is to say, only by occupying and being occupied by that injurious
term is resistance to it possible; meaning, resistance is the self-subversion
of power. A resistance that only undermines is capable of only half
the project of subjectivity. What kind of staying power, then, does
a resistance achieved through resignification, as opposed to merely
rejection, have?
Through the characters in Building Babel, Namjoshi suggests that such
a resistance offers a subjectivity that is outside the terms of the
dominant discourse. Namjoshi demonstrates that, “agency and victimhood
are not mutually exclusive, … victims are also agents who can
change their lives and affect other lives in radical ways,” as
Obioma Nnaemeka argues with respect to current feminist analyses of
African Literature in general (3). In the act of presenting to her readers
familiar characters with defamiliarized traits and characteristics in
their present reincarnation, Namjoshi affirms the possibility of re-reading
myths without jettisoning the truths they embolden. Even though we know
that characters such as Alice, Cinders, Little Red, Rap Rap, Lady Shy,
and Snow White all belong to a generation of literature which limited
their roles only to representing the ideal subjected (victim) woman
in patriarchal discourse, at least in their present reincarnation they
are able to escape being typecast and they define who they are for themselves.
Hence the building of Babel is symbolic of the act of self-definition.
This self-definition is not solipsistic though - it is only achieved
through engagement with others.
This self-definition is articulated well at the end of the “Piece
for Soloists” by all the sisters together: “‘The Sisterhood
of Women will mean something!’ ‘We will bring our own words.’
‘We will own our own words.’” (30). There is transgression
of the normative discourse via self-definition. To be sure, the change
is not always positive, for Lady Shy eventually mutates into the all
too familiar Lady Shylock, and Alice turns out to be a power-hungry
despot who takes control of language (108-109). What implications do
such transmutations have then? What makes possible the fusion when there
is so much difference? What makes possible the resignification when
the signifieds are supposedly already concretely determined? And yet,
what makes possible the transgression, or the resistance, or the subversion
of the symbolic system of subjectification? These questions becomes
even more interesting in light of the consideration that the symbolic
system being challenged, reoccupied, and transformed represents the
Name of the Father – at least as it is patriarchally constitutive
and constituted. For the Biblical myth of Babel belongs to a tradition
of the patriarchs in both its Jewish and Christian renderings.
Subjectivity and Change
In the same article referred to earlier, Butler suggests, along the
lines of Foucault’s analysis of power, that the means of subversion,
of resistance, or resignification are already present at the moment
of production. Butler argues that “in Foucault the possibility
of subversion or resistance appears (a) in the course of a subjectivation
that exceeds the normalizing aims by which it is mobilized, for example,
in ‘reverse discourse,’ or (b) through convergence with
other discursive regimes, … Thus resistance appears as the effect
of power, its self-subversion” (92-93). This understanding of
the ambivalence of power, which is also its erotically seductive element,
is what Butler transposes to the concept of subject. Butler argues that:
disciplinary discourse does not unilaterally constitute
a subject in Foucault, or rather, if it does, it simultaneously,
constitutes the condition for the subject’s de-constitution.
What is brought into being through the performative effect
of the interpellating demand is much more than a “subject,”
for the “subject” created is not for that reason fixed in
place:
it becomes the occasion for a further making. (99)
In other words, the subject is a site of ambivalence “in which
the subject emerges both as the effect of a prior power and as the condition
of possibility for a radically conditioned form of agency” (Butler
15). Power, then, is both constitutive of and constituted by the subject.
The subject acts as it enacts; the subject acts as it activates. Such
an understanding of power and subjectivity suggests that the meaning
of subject rests on - depends on – which one of the sites of subjectivity
one attaches oneself to. One can either be a subjected subject or one
can be a subjecting subject. Yet, at the same time, the alterity of
either of these is already present. Understanding subjectivity as ambivalent,
therefore, might, perhaps, help us understand the kind of transmutations
and transformations that the various characters go through in Building
Babel. This in itself, in turn, might offer partial answers to the questions
posed at the end of the preceding paragraph – questions of possibilities
in light of impossibilities.
Namjoshi takes it for granted that her characters need to reinscribe
the discursive norms that have hitherto defined their existence. For
even from the start the sheer idealism of building Babel is destabilized
by the multiple points of view articulated by the various characters,
thus calling into question the notion of sisterhood as stable and universal
vis-à-vis differing and different individual interests. Instead
of accepting their predefined roles, Namjoshi’s characters mutate
and change depending on circumstance and need. For example, Alice, who
prefers to be called Queen Alice or nothing (106), turns out to be the
very embodiment of everything wrong with the current state of affairs
in a patriarchally defined world. Coups and factions, nationhood and
bloodshed are what one associates with her, such that the Cat finally
condemns Babel saying, “Babel was no longer distinguishable from
any other city. Perhaps it would disintegrate, perhaps not. Who cared?”
(140). What’s noteworthy here is that Namjoshi does not delve
into a criticism of her characters as morally despicable or any such
legalist argument, but, instead, the argument we are left with at best
has to do with the entrapping nature of language. Language is what traps
Alice as much as it traps the author of the text. Therefore, the only
way out of this is to re-charge language with new meanings and subvert
its normativity. This is possible only through fluidity and openness.
By leaving the text open to as much interpretation as possible, Namjoshi
offers the readers and the characters an opportunity to escape the normative
definitions of roles - the possibility to be active subjects who exercise
power.
Consequently, it is this act of faith, in turn, which affirms that,
“no subject is its own point of departure” (Butler 635).
For, one has to be always thinking about how one’s exercise of
power affects others around – a real concern for the Other. Therefore,
affirming that there is no universal and unified subject that lies beyond
the shifting temporal and spatial varieties of subjectivity. There is
no unchanging Alice, Black Piglet, etc. eternal, but all these characters
are already and always in the making. There is no fixed subject, however
much myth might try to construct such a subject – the sand is
always shifting. The Black Piglet’s constant change of abodes
as well as her/his spirit’s restlessness are already an affirmation
of a subject that seeks an identity, yet at the same time a subject
that has an identity. The Black Piglet’s already given identity
as a piglet is disturbed by its feminine character that forms bonds
of sisterhood with the women of Babel – The Pig-Princess (82),
and also by its masculine character as The Black Pig-Princeling (83).
In addition, the transgression of the boundary between animal and human,
as well as the gender transgression all attest to the challenge being
posed to subjectivity as set and predefined. All the characters undergo
a transcendence of the predefined roles, whether as characters from
other myths or as participants in the building of the new Babel, they
become part of the past, but are also more than their present incarnations
as they hold the possibility of a different and an other future.
Displacement and Myth Reinscription
Elsewhere Butler argues the following in relation to materiality, in
particular the body: “To deconstruct the concept of matter or
that of bodies is not to negate or refuse either term. To deconstruct
these terms means, rather, to continue to use them, to repeat them,
to repeat them subversively, and to displace them from the contexts
in which they’ve been deployed as instruments of oppressive power”
(642). The displacement of body is not the same as a complete rejection
of the body. Thus the remythification that occurs in Namjoshi’s
text, through repeating a familiar myth on different terms, is the beginning
of a different (re)-conceptualization of the Biblical myth of Babel.
The remythification, and the character transformation/transmutation,
is possible because meaning is not arrested in an unchanging symbolic
system. It is precisely because within what the sign symbolizes is embedded
that which it de-symbolizes, such that meaning is made in context, hence
making possible the process of renegotiation of the terms of production
– a kind of discursive reinscription.
Butler attests in the same aforesaid article that “the position
articulated by the subject is always in some way constituted by what
must be displaced for that position to take hold,…, by a set of
exclusionary and selective procedures” (634). That is to say,
as she argues further elsewhere in light of Foucault:
the subject who is produced through subjection is not
produced at an instant in its totality. Instead, it is in
the process of being produced, it is repeatedly produced
(which is not the same as being produced anew again
and again). It is precisely the possibility of a repetition
which does not consolidate that dissociated unity, the
subject, but which proliferates effects which undermine
the force of normalization. (93)
If we accept this constant indeterminacy of the subject suggested by
Butler, we have to ask how does liberation figure into it? Who is liberated?
Who or what must be displaced for subjectivation to occur? If myth can
be destabilized, what gives staying power to the reengaged myth, and
how does the new myth guard itself against negative remythification?
These are important questions to consider in light of a project such
as Namjoshi’s. For building culture requires this possibility
of displacement and fluidity – what I refer to in this essay as
reinscription – while simultaneously seeking a resting place.
Within the field of postcolonial theory, other scholars have identified
this renegotiation of the terms of production as catachrestic reinscription
– with a focus on the question of whether Eurocentrism is escapable
within postcolonial theory. Gyan Prakash, using Gayatri Spivak’s
terms, defines catachrestic reinscription as the process whereby the
apparatus of value-coding used by the European centres are seized, reversed
and displaced (491). I would argue that this definition could be extended
beyond just the colonial/postcolonial debate into a more general discussion
of seizure, reversal, and displacement of the apparatus of value-coding.
Since I argue that this process is similar to the process of subjectivation
suggested by Butler, and illustrated by Namjoshi’s text, I think
it is imperative to offer a discussion of how this works within postcolonial
theory, or at least as presented by Leela Gandhi. This is especially
important since Namjoshi uses a western religious myth to deal with
a universal theme of meaning-(re)making and myth-(re)making, as well
as approaching her project from the vantage point of a pantheistic Hindu
(Namjoshi ix-xv). That is to say, both approaches seem set on their
own signification systems, but Namjoshi tries to engage them in dialogue
without essentializing or co-opting either, and this is what is demonstrated
by postcolonial theory on a larger scale.
The question whether postcolonial and post-patriarchal worlds can be
envisioned without being caught in the traps of Eurocentrism, is somewhat
different from the question that asks whether postcolonial and post-patriarchal
worlds can be envisioned without reference to Europe. Whereas it is
possible for the postcolonial subjects to refrain from Eurocentrism,
and the feminist subjects to refrain from Western androcentric rationality,
it is not possible for them to refrain from referring to Europe in their
discourses. For theorists such as Homi Bhabha, Gyan Prakash, Gayatri
Spivak, and Robert Young, the postcolonial subjects cannot write without
referring to Europe’s role in forming the very colonial histories
that they seek to challenge. Similarly, for feminists such as Musa Dube,
Julia Kristeva, and Chandra Mohanty, because of feminism’s Western
origins it too cannot escape referring to its homeland, even if it is
in the negative. For all these theorists, the reference to Europe’s
centrality and patriarchal rationality is not to give either of these
its self-assumed superior status, but rather to challenge and reinscribe
these self-assigned roles. This is what Prakash, using Gayatri Spivak’s
terms, defines as catachrestic reinscription, as I have argued above.
Leela Gandhi’s catachrestic reinscription is illustrated by her
insistence that postcolonial theory is a negotiated discourse between
Marxism and poststructuralism, whereby both theoretical models are challenged
and changed to suit the specificity of the discourse called postcolonial.
As Gandhi puts it herself:
In the main, the intellectual history of postcolonial theory is
marked by a dialectic between Marxism, on the one hand,
and poststructuralism/postmodernism, on the other…. Neither
the assertions of Marxism nor those of poststructuralism, how-
ever, can exhaustively account for the meanings and consequences
of the colonial encounter. (viii-ix)
Gandhi’s final observation is that postcolonial theory needs both
the poststructuralist critique of Western epistemology and the materialist
politics of Marxism in order to make formidable sense.
On account of Gandhi’s insistence that postcolonial theory is
a negotiation between two Western systems of analysis, and her insistence
that the current mood of postcolonial theory addresses largely the needs
of the Western academy (ix), it could be argued that her text demonstrates
very starkly how Eurocentrism cannot be escaped. Alternatively though,
it could also be argued that this negotiated terrain is no longer purely
European. That is to say, catachrestic reinscription has taken place,
and the emergent discourse, called postcolonial, has traces of its origins,
but is not defined by them ultimately. As I argued earlier, the focus
on Europe in postcolonial theory is not to ascribe it its formerly self-assigned
role as superior, but rather to challenge this self-ascription. This
argument can, therefore, be extended to Gandhi’s argument, and
made to read that, even though postcolonial theory uses Marxism and
poststructuralism, it is not because these theories are in-and-of-themselves
postcolonial, but rather because they are useful tools, and tools are
to some extent adaptable even though not so much changeable.
I think that it can be argued that this is exactly the kind of discursive
reinscription that Namjoshi seems to be concerned with in Building Babel.
Of particular interest is the question of men in Babel. How are men
to be treated in Babel? The only way that men earn any status is through
toil and dedication to the ideals of Babylon (Vijayasree 149). As Vijaysree
aptly notes, this “is an inversion of what goes on in the male
dominated world, only the gender roles are reversed” (149). Defamiliarization
is Namjoshi’s choice of reinscription. Since women’s bodies
are usually construed, patriarchally, as objects of desire, and this
objectified desire is fulfilled through either the economy of prostitution
or that of the institution of marriage, it is only through a rejection
of both of these constructions that liberation is possible. It is through
a rejection of the dream of the androcentric family and the androcentric
woman (whore) that the women can emerge as subjects who exercise their
agency. Namjoshi achieves this through a deliberate objectification
of men in Babel, as well as giving choice to the women who choose to
have men in their lives. That is, in the lives of those women where
men are present, viz., Cinders and Rap Rap, men play a very minor role
in the everyday life of Babel. At the same time though Namjoshi is not
willing to jettison them completely. Queen Alice raises the question
of men a number of times throughout her reign, and Lady Shy admits to
the Cat at one point that men are useful for the production and propagation
of genes, for the building of Babel perhaps even necessary (118). Be
it so, they still occupy a reinscribed role, and an inferior one at
that. For the sake of transformation this reinscribed role is necessary
if Babel is going to be built. Therefore, in order for a different subjectivity
to be conferred, the patriarchally constituted body has to be rejected.
This is not the rejection of body qua body, but body as perverted body,
just as remythification is not rejection of myth but a reworking of
it so that it has relevance for the one who is engaging with it. For
Namjoshi displacement is not dismissal and reinscription is not jettisoning.
Conceptualising a New Identity/Myth
If one takes remythification prima facie as a positive process, what
implications does this have for both the prior myth and the resultant
reworked myth? What kinds of subjects emerge as a result of the transformation?
Were these subjects already there, i.e., merely waiting to be recovered,
or are the transformed subjects a discovery in the strictest sense of
the word as something new? The answers to these questions have serious
implications about the role that the recipients of myth play in response
to the myths themselves. Namjoshi’s project, I would argue, has
to do with letting readers take responsibility for the meaning-making
process that arises out of reading a text. This is more than just the
appeal to readers to make up their own endings. As Vijayasree puts it:
“Implied in such a position is the assumption that the reader
is no passive recipient of meaning, but an active participant in the
making of meanings” (143) – in the Derridean deconstructionist
sense. As subjects who both receive and consume myths, how do readers
place themselves vis-à-vis the myths once they are reworked?
Regardless of whether the different subject that arises via the remythification
process is being recovered or being found as new, what is important
in both notions is the emergence of something different. In both cases
there is a different subject, thus indicating explicitly and implicitly
a sense of displacement of sorts. What I am arguing is that this reinscription
or remythification can take either of two forms, that of recovery or
that of discovery.
If the emergence of the different subjectivity were to be conceived
teleologically (discovery) as something new, that is, having not existed
before, by what means do readers, as consumers (subjects) of myths,
come to know that the new subjectivity is not just another subjected
subjectivity? What guarantees are there to ensure that the new subject
will not fall prey to similar, if not the same, conditions of subjection
as before? It seems that conceiving of subjectivity in this teleological
manner offers false hopes about some change in the future. The characters
of Namjoshi’s Babel reject this way of thinking very sternly.
By rejecting the ideal dream of a trouble-free Babel, and holding on
instead to part of their past identities (however troubled) and the
possibilities offered by the new identities, they are able to deal with
the tension of transformation as recovery versus transformation as discovery.
Rather than remain essentialist, they opt, instead, for a rather complex
resignification process (recovery). The kind of resignification that
affirms both possibilities of subjectivation - subjecting and subjected
- a resignification that affirms the subject as both creator and recipient.
That is to say, out of the deadened spheres of myth consumption emerge
radicalized forms of resistance that utilize their objects of oppression
as tools of liberation. The masters’ tools are reinscribed with
a new utility, thus able to destroy the masters’ houses. Affirming,
therefore, that tools do not just build, they also destroy. In the context
of Building Babel, Namjoshi wants to affirm that the myths that precede
the remythified ones are not desirable and need to be changed, but this
change is not to be located outside these myths, but within them. Her
logic is Adornian in its insistence that the process of change is guided
by its own constitutive cognition, which at the same time cannot be
totally removed from the context from which it arises. Namjoshi offers
a process of subjectivation that mimics as it transforms. For, the limited
and limiting myth has to be affirmed at the same time as it is displaced,
and through its displacement a resignified myth and subject emerge.
This rather complex reconstitution of a myth can be compared to what
Pamela-Sue Anderson elsewhere refers to as mimetic re-figuration.
Mimetic Refiguration
Mimicry, in its most basic understanding, can be referred to as mimesis,
that is, the act of imitating. Mimicry, though, does not just imitate
to merely reproduce the exact same replica of what is being imitated.
Instead mimicry mocks or ridicules what is being imitated, with the
aim of showing how the original is much more than (or less than) what
it is perceived to be. In this sense mimicry is subversive and never
passive. Anderson is concerned with this subversiveness of mimicry,
and how it has been and can be used to disrupt so-called authentic identities
and configured myths. As Anderson notes, quoting Irigaray, “to
play with mimesis is thus, for a woman, to try to recover the place
of her exploitation by discourse, without allowing herself to be simply
reduced to it” (144). Obviously I am suggesting that the remythification
that Namjoshi’s characters engage with, can and should be understood
as a form of mockery of so-called authentic identities. The aim of course
is to demonstrate how mythic identity is inconsistently shifting, thus
continuously forcing the forging of different senses of myths and identities.
Arguing on a different front, but with a similar spirit, Anderson notes
the following about mimetic refiguration:
My contention is that mythical configuration of human
and divine reality should be accompanied by their
mimetic refigurations, and that the mimetic refigurations
can enable us to recognize what content has been
excluded from the formally rational constructions of
religious beliefs…. Disruptive miming is necessary
for the successful transformation of patriarchal myths
and theistic beliefs. In particular, this miming offer
the possibility of disrupting the hierarchy which continues
to be dominant in western philosophy of religion. (153-154)
Anderson sees in mimetic refiguration both the continued valuing of
some patriarchal myths as well as their reinscription through being
challenged and changed. She realises that there is a problem that the
initial imitation might just mime the symptoms of oppression, hence
she insists that this initial stage of miming be supplanted by the second
stage. This second stage is one that “takes on the role of miming
in order to subvert the economy of the same which has relied upon the
feminine for its power to master and control,” as Anderson explains
later (154). In Building Babel, before sisterhood can be proclaimed
victorious and Babel built, the variety of and differences in perspectives
have to be acknowledged. The patriarchal myth of Babel as a myth about
confusion has to be acknowledged, and subsequently challenged. The privileged
status of sisterhood has to be examined for its own oppressive and exclusionary
tendencies. For even within sisterhood there exists hierarchies, as
we are aptly reminded that “The cat is a cat// Cats eat mice,//
sneer at girls….// Queens kill people.// Maids scrub floors”
(Namjoshi 168).
For Anderson, mimesis allows for the possibility of subject-role reversal,
whereby one has to think from the position of the other thus imitating
this position, but also moving on to the next step, which is subverting
such hierarchical subject positions. Mimetic refiguration dislodges
the configured identities of the economy of the same, and stresses how
the construction of these identities is not as solid as it might have
always imagined itself to be. In this sense, the different other is
shown to be the self-same, but not with the intention of assimilating
this different other into the economy of the same. Rather the aim is
to embrace this different other as equal.
Arguing the same point, but locating the issue within the debate on
sameness and difference in feminist discourse between “Western”
and “Third World” feminists, Susan Arndt notes that:
as far as their gender-specific experiences are concerned
– all women face similar forms of discrimination and
oppression…. the parallels in the situations, problems
and concerns of women across the globe make an inter-
cultural, international solidarization among women who
want to attack the patriarchal status quo of society and
claim more social spaces and freedom for women not
only possible in theory, but in a way almost inevitable.
(176)
This does not mean that Arndt, and consequesntly Namjoshi, are therefore
not aware of the implications and weaknesses of such a stance. Quite
the contrary is true. Babel has to be built still, and this is why it
is crucial for her as the author to leave the conclusion to a variety
of perspectives and possibilities. Difference is very crucial, but not
definitive. The possibility for mimetic refiguration lies in the seeming
impossibility of the reinscription of the original myth. The subjects
that emerge out of the reconfigured myth constitute the prior subjects,
but in a refigured and reinscribed form. In this sense, the act of building
Babel is not just name transposition, but it is a working out of the
terms of meaning that this act conveys, thus granting the women the
kind of power previously not afforded them by their precedent identities
– the ability to build and self-define. As I have argued, this
is the power offered by Namjoshi to her readers to exercise as well
– for this ability is inherently contained in the very act of
creating an artwork ala Adorno.
Conclusion
In answer to the questions posed at the beginning of this essay, I have
argued that through catachrestic reinscription and mimetic refiguration
it is possible to escape the strictures of a prior myth whilst trying
to forge a new one without being totally overwhelmed and achieving nothing
in the end. I have also argued that the subjects that emerge are different
from the prior ones because even though they contain elements of former
subjects, these are catachrestically reinscribed and mimetically refigured
in the emergent subjects. What remains to be conceded is that subjectivity
is not an easy process, but a painful ambivalence of both subjection
and subjecting, where both loss and again are of equal value. In losing
the pervertedly embodied selves of patriarchal discourse, Namjoshi’s
characters find agents that are subjects embodied in other selves that
are reinscribed differently, even as animals. To get there they have
to pursue paths (or processes) that lie outside the dominant discourse
that had painted them otherwise as incapable muses. Thus, as Butler
attests, subject is indeed neither ground nor a product, but the permanent
possibility of a certain resignifying process (639). And, it is through
this re-signification process that the possibilities for new configurations,
re-figurations, and reinscriptions emerge – a new Woman emerges
(a new Babel). A remythification without universal bondage becomes possible,
resulting in a myth that will not always remain rooted in limitation,
but takes limitation into itself, thereby reforming the limited myth
as a renewed and renamed one.
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