14 FEMINIST LEGAL STUDIES 3, 271-291, 2006

BEFORE
IDENTITY, GENDER AND HUMAN RIGHTS
ANDREAS PHILIPPOPOULOS-MIHALOPOULOS UNIVERSITY OF WESTMINSTER
andreaspm@westminster.ac.uk

ABSTRACT. This is the beginning of an exploration of before as the thesis before (temporally) and be-fore (spatially) difference. Before denotes the origin and the desired destination. Before (in the double sense of before and be-in-the-fore) opens up a space of pre-difference, of origin and of forgotten memory, as well as a space of desire, objective, illusion of teleology, unity, completion. Applied to the two domains of Human Rights and Sex/Gender, the space of before yields two slightly different vistas: in human rights, a premodern, functionally undifferentiated society which had to invent human rights as its safeguards of functional differentiation. In Sex/Gender, before brings a self-referential construction: that of ipseity, as the form of identity beyond comparison that does not play with id but with ipsum. Ipseity is inoperable but not useless. It is inoperable because it cannot be observed from anywhere without suffering rupture. It is not useless because it offers a ground for the reconceptualisation of difference, both through awe and desire. KEY WORDS: identity, gender, human rights, ipseity, Luhmann, difference, utopia, paradox

I. BEGINNING Every beginning is arbitrary, since there is nearly always something before the beginning that the one who begins ignores or chooses to ignore. A small, self- indulge nt example: I had a dream of my mother (in a red dress) just before I woke up this morning. Now that I am having my breakfast, mother, dress and dream are already behind me. Mother is always before my breakfast. But as I gulp noisily my morning tea, Mother (wearing nothing that remotely resembles a red dress) stands before me, dis/approving of my breakfast habits. Mother is in front of me, stands before me reminding me of my dream. Whatever I have for breakfast, Mother remains before me. Mother aside, the focus of this article is precisely an exploration of the arbitrary but necessary rupture between the two meanings of the word before: on one hand, what can be prima facie viewed as its temporal dimension, which denotes that something has come before me and indicates a certain relation of temporal priority (has come before me in a generation, in a queue, in a bidding); and on the other, what is readily described as its spatial dimension, which refers to something that stands be- fore me, that is ahead of me, in front of me, facing me, and to which I wish to arrive.

I employ these two seemingly antithetical meanings of before together in an attempt to conflate, on the one hand, the origin of memory, as expressed by the before that is prior to me, and on the other hand, desire as the result of the priority of origin (but also the origin of priority) in the sense that whatever I desire and seek is always situated in front of me, before me. While this is done to some extent in abstracto, the focal point of the essay is the application of before in the two domains of Human Rights and the sex/gender division, with an aim to revisit the present prioritisation of a male discourse within and outside the confines of human rights. The journey before human rights and sex/gender leads to the discovery of an atopic (in the sense of unclassifiable and perpetually self-renewing) space of identity. For this primordial form of identity I use the term ipseity and I link it with the totality of nondifference. In its inobservability, the space of absolute and originary annihilation of difference becomes a space of production of awe, which shakes up any identity formation. This totality is further conceptualised as the origin of desire, in the sense of tautology between before and be- fore. For relative claritys sake, before here stands for the temporal aspect of the concept, the one that lies behind me; be-fore, the spatial, the one that stands in front of me; and before signifies the utopian unity of both aforementioned meanings. The total space of awe (schematically: before) and desire (schematically: before), namely the totality of before (as the space that lies before not just difference but before the difference of difference), shakes up the prioritis ing methodology and opens up an opportunity to abandon existing distinctions and resemiologise gender and human rights discourse. The purpose of this journey is to introduce a pre-ontological space of utopian dimensions, which will operate as a canvas on which further reconceptualisations can be projected more meaningfully. My methodology is eclectic: I am using (and twisting) Luhmanns theory on human rights in order to gain a conceptual understanding of a space before human rights. I am also employing deconstruction, identity politics, Hegelian synthesis, psychoanalysis, all in various forms and levels of obviousness, in order to construct a theory of paradox within the specific context. The eclectic use of the references is a reflection of the poetics of reading: the reader is invited to construct a path, parallel to the one described here, based on personal associations and references which are hinted at but not exhaustively consolidated in the text. The reason for this is manifold: in a bout of performativity, the text itself sheds away any need for epistemic categorisation, and looks for its identity in the leaps between the various methodological positionings. In so doing, the text sets the map for the journey in the space of before, pointing out in advance that any theoretical stability is simply an illusion of comfort shattered before the pre-ontology of before. By not succumbing to one epistemic paradigm and by purposefully confounding the boundaries between systems theory, psychoanalysis, identity politics and deconstruction, the text desires to melt its epistemology and ontology in one incestuous embrace, as part of an attempt to augur the collapse of existing prioritisations after the encounter with the space of before. 1
1

The space of before, as opened by Walter Benjamins dealing with Kafkas short story Before the Law, has been visited by Derrida (1992) and Agamben (1999) in relation to the messianic. While I have refrained from

II. BEFORE The two dimensions of before, namely before and be-fore, work together in their antithesis. They determine the way the word before stretches from memory to desire and back, without losing track of its elusiveness. Before maps its dimensions and guides both utterer (the one before) and receiver (be-fore) deeper in its diffrance. This is because the word loses itself in its competing dimensions, and the signifieds mutually and circularly annul each other. The working of the word is a spanning of spatiotemporal dimensions which extends from the Socratic atopos as an originary moment, the always new and always unclassifiable origin (Barthes, 1978), to the Utopian topos as the place of no -place, the ever-receding end of the journey. The two topoi circularly feed into each other in a relation of paradox. Paradoxical or not, circular or not, one carries on along the same pattern. Thus (and this is the pattern), the two before are separated at conception, because otherwise (if one does not systematically disregard the tautology between before and be-fore), there could never be any question worth asking: one would know everything there was to know. Hence the arbitrary but necessary rupture between the two. Indefatiguably, origin inflates memory and memory breeds desire. Memory is the link between these, producing asymmetries while enabling being and becoming to flow within one another. 2 Thus, before constructs an edifice of memory, the locus of the absolute beginning, the primordial soup of my dream. In its turn, be- fore climbs on said edifice and erects on top of it a cathedral of utopian desire right in front of me. The journey from before to be-fore is a tracing of the memory from be- fore to before. There is a continuum between these seemingly opposing extremes. In that continuum, desire and its origin can be located and, should one wishes to, causally explained: for what is chemistry other than an inadequate term, which, nevertheless, seems more appropriate than the rather eccentric and possibly uncomfortable term familiarity? The unknowable of the link between lovers is reinforced by the generic and non-descriptive word chemistry, just as the knowable but possibly repressible reason for which we choose the lovers we do is illuminated by the term familiarity (I miss you but I havent met you yet sings Bjrk). Familiarity links precisely these two dimensions of before: the origin and the desire, the behind and the ahead of me, where I come from and where I want to arrive: I want you beca use you are

explicit references to it, the messianic in the Derridean sense of the thing that cannot wait, crops up everywhere in the text. For a differently de-contextualised analysis, see Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, 2006. 2 Any meaningful analysis of memory is practically impossible here due to the usual limitations and the different focus. For more, see Chapter 6 of my Absent Environments (2007), where a discussion on memory from an autopoietic point of view can be found. At this point, however, suffice it to describe memory as the present linking of a redundant and an imagined state of understanding the past (a sort of being and becoming), which begets a future-present desire. Memory is the production of difference between an obscure before and an equally obscure be-fore, which translates at present as the unity of intelligence (and one would be tempted to venture a construction of intelligence on the basis of before -but this is clearly beyond whatever this article is even imagining itself capable of doing).

familiar to me (because you remind me of someone/something that I have loved/hated; because you are before me and I want you to be-for-me, to be be- fore me); and even when you are not familiar to me, I want you precisely because of that but in every case, the measure for what will stand be-fore me is the before of my origin. So, why would one want to undertake the journey between the two sides of before? The flow is uroborous, and its only benefit seems to be a hermeneutic one, of why aim at the specific utopia. But isnt this best left to psychoanalysis? Even so, it seems that one has to undertake that journey, however backwards one seems to be heading. This is not about the importance of history, nor about the necessity of finding ones origin. This is sheer futurology: I carry on by going back, by revisiting the atopos anew and by baptising my utopia according to what I bring back from the origin. In other words, going before is a pragmatic step towards constructing a better be-fore. The question, thus, can be refocused: why is the present utopia that stands be-fore me inadequate? Why not choose a different utopia out of a fan of innumerable constructions that are equally possible although not necessarily equally probable? Why prioritise this over all those? This is the crux of the matter indeed: the rupture between origin and desire is the source of every (inadequate) prioritisation. The difference between Eden and End is the origin of prioritisation and the locus of responsib ility, blame and guilt. However, bridging that difference is not the purpose of this article: in fact, the purpose here is to go before the rupture and pose some questions: can there be End without Eden? Can there be humanity before the symbol? Can there be humanity without its being marked by and against itself? Can there be a space of no difference before the word? And can this space remain confined in the barbican of its unmarked utopia? The journey between the two sides of before entails a double cons truction. On the one hand, the construction of the memory of desire (which is the outcome of going backwards before me); and on the other, the reconstruction of desire on the basis of a prioritisation of origin (the outcome of envisaging what stands be- fore me in its utopian ideal). The journey that this article undertakes is one of constant return. I start from visiting the past. Which means of course that I remember (presently) the past (always in the present), and on its basis I construct a memory, a passing presence or simply the reinstatement of an impression. During this part (that of before), I construct the memory of desire (the latter already seeping in, a not-so-distant echo of the next part of the circularity). The locus of such memory is sought before two concepts: Human Rights, and the sex/gender difference. I end up at the atopos of the unmarked space, the luminous locus of ipseity as the forgotten and irrevocable mother of identity. From there, I return. In fear and trembling desire, I spread my findings be-fore me as a map that guides me away from ipseity and safely into the embrace of comparisons, horizons and choices. Illusions become my best friends while utopia looms in front of me, a mirror reflecting what lies behind me. But this utopia is a truly different space, an outcome of the encounter with the pre-ontological space of before, a locus of desire constructed on the basis of an origin without trace that resemiologises existing prioritisations, thereby escaping the usual fate of utopia as a simple critique of the present. But I can never dwell for long on this utopia that I have constructed be-fore me. The journey calls me back, to the space of before, and then expels me again back to be-fore. It is that journey between atopos and utopia that I reconstruct (the

circularity of before), a paradox that revolves around itself without respite, and stands before me as burden, choice, horizon, limitation, destiny, authority.

III. BEFORE HUMAN RIGHTS A society prior to the invention/discovery/recognition of human rights is not simply a society without human rights. Although human rights could not have been described as rights or human at a time before the ability to describe them as such had emerged, societys turning to ward itself at a moment of functional differentiation, resulted in the semantic recognition of human rights. Indeed, if human rights are given simply on the basis of their subjects being human, then one can only talk about recognition (Douzinas, 2002) in the sense of something that has been (latently or visibly) present all along. In this respect, human rights have always already been around, certainly with no attachment to humanism or to rights discourse as one would be inclined to describe them nowada ys, but with a view to a retroactively sanctioning universalisation. It remains, however, that a society before human rights is a society linked with a fearsome lack of onomatology: lack of name is, in this case, lack of the named (Villey, 1983). The fear originated in the individual, and extended to the rest of society who was facing itself in all its monolithic displacement. Until the arbitrary point of modern differentiation, where society was epistemologically observed to be separated into different sys tems with different functions (law, religion, politics, and so on), society was a primordial soup where only segmentary and hierarchical divisions could be observed (Luhmann, 1995). At the height of modernity, law, religion, politics, economics, science etc. were to recognise their limits (while, arguably, at this instance of postmodernity, the same systems recognise their limitations. While the latter may belong to the psychologically projected sphere of systemic awareness, the former is a fact.) Functiona l differentiation is the bastion of contemporary societal organisation, and a basis for any expectation of reliability on behalf of the system: it is because we can reasonably expect that civil law will not normally succumb to religious beliefs or economic manipulation, that we can still trust the court to come up with a legally enforceable judgement (however satisfactory or unsatisfactory this may be to us). Society before human rights is an object of schematic description, which makes sense only after (be- fore) human rights. The two before enable one to construct a relatively insular idea of what society must have looked like at the time before human rights. Niklas Luhmanns (1995) arbitrary point of societal differentiation into separate function systems is a good point to launch both a perambulation in the before and a utopian stare into the be-fore. Luhmanns sociology marks societal continuity with a division between the premodern and the modern. The former is characterised by a hierarchical organisation of compartmentalised subjective status, whose overcoming was practically impossible. One remained in the social position in which one was born, melting away in the hierarchical delimitation of ones origin and, hence, ones future. Subjective rights, in the sense of of, and because of, the subject, were superfluous in such immovable social conditions since individuality and social position were identical (Luhmann, 1999; Verschraegen, 2002). The passage from premodern to modern society is cha racterised by an obligatory abandonment

of such stratification, and the construction of separate function systems. The said abandonment has been facilitated by the absence of an overarching authority of legal, political or divine calibre. Subjective rights emerge as a vehicle that enables the subject to pick and mix social positions, thus reinstating the universal impact of human rights while emphasising the possibility of subjective differentiation. Human rights appear as the compensation for the loss of a relatively stress- free yet claustrophobically fixed social position (Luhmann, 1993). At the same time, human rights are the mechanism that maintains functional differentiation by preventing any one system from colonising another say, politics colonising law and dictating legal decisions that cannot be accommodated by a legal system complying with the rule of law and respecting human rights. In other words, human rights can be seen both as the grid that separates systems and keep them this way, and the vehicle that moves along the lines of the grid and allows for the individual to alight at any of the said systems without being fixed to any of them. Luhmanns theory of human rights is an appropriate outsider to the usual discussions on human rights, mainly on account of its recasting the issue in a fundamentally differentiated manner. Looking at human rights from a systemic perspective, which internalises hierarchy, power and responsibility (Schtz, 1994), entails a resemiologisation of the habitual issues of universal/particular, empiricism/constructivism, social/individual, and so on. The above discussion, although oversimplified, reveals several points of interest to the present analysis. First, it depicts society before human rights as a functionally undifferentiated organisation that relied on a randomly inherited subjective positioning, and an entirely mapped out history and potential of personal identity. Premodern society features as an amorphous mass of religious, scientific, political, legal and economic mlange that makes any movement impossible. The space of before looks daunting, impermeable, obscure, unenlightened. Interestingly, and this is where the second point of relevance arises, this mass is only shaped (even in its amorphous state) by the epistemological transition from the undifferentiated to the differentiated. The relative line that separates them is a moment of epistemological necessity (hence, arbitrary) that divides an otherwise unified space into two. Thus, the state before difference is entirely dependent on the state after difference, for it is only after the foray into difference that Luhmann, or anyone else for that matter, would possess the epistemological tools and methodological suspicion to revisit the space before difference and describe it through the glass of difference. To put it otherwise, the first part (that of the undifferentiated) can only be brought forth after a dip into the second part (the differentiated). And while the undifferentiated is what has happened before, the differentiated is the space that stands be- fore us, an ideal positioning where, not only all systems are securely differentiated, but also systemic colonisation is (ideally) kept in check through the versatile operation of human rights. It is clear that before and be-fore come together in one space of undifferentiated ideality (before), where the terror/desire of what has been, is transposed to the desire/terror towards what may be in the future-present. It is only through the primord ial marking of the space in before and be-fore that the present arises as a fleeting, arbitrary and always deferred demarcating line. And if one (contra Luhmann, 1998) accepts the further division of postmodernity, then modernity is always

the demarcating line of limits, while postmodernity remains the utopian be- fore as the epiphany of limitations. The last point to which I would like to draw the attention of the reader is that of the paradoxical appearance of human rights as both separating grid and connecting vehicle. Of course, there is nothing especially new to this paradox. Human rights discourse has been characterised by the utopian echoing of the universal into the particular (Douzinas, 2000), and this is exactly what the metaphor of grid and vehicle expresses. What is new here is the contextualisation of the paradox as the demarcating act that splits the undifferentiated into two. Seen in this way, human rights retain their relevance but conditioned by their two extremes of a dystopian universality that materialises in undifferentiated uniformity, and a utopian particularism which ideally (but not feasibly) enables everyone to reach ones full potential mobility. The three points, namely the daunting space before difference, the epistemological connection between before and be-fore, and the paradox, will return shortly. But the voyage into another before has priority: the space before sex/gender differentiation will be visited in the next section, and the above three points will be seen in an altogether nottoo-different light.

IV. BEFORE SEX/GENDER The importance of reaching before the division sex/gender is exemplified by the problematic endeavour to conceptualise any significant difference between the two. This does not mean that they are the same. It simply denotes the conceptual futility of a meaningful division that could go far enough into the exploration of difference and be of some use. No doubt, historically, the trajectory from one to the other, and then back via the backdoor, has been both instructive and arguably necessary. And there is little doubt that the itinerary has had several seminal stops: first, sex as the universalising difference (in the sense of Atkins and Hoggett, 1984); then, gender as the vehicle for multiple social positioning (e.g., Bartlett and Kennedy, 1991); and now, the unfolding of gender, as either simply one out of an array of categories (Spelman, 1990); or as a power offspring (MacKinnon, 1994); or indeed as a deconstructible signifier that variably operates together with a space of orientation or a sexed language (e.g., Cornell, 1998; Olsen, 1990; Irigaray, 1994). This development of notions and their application has served, and still does, various purposes in the theory. But there is nothing especially constructive about this anymore: the question whether the compared quantities are same or different is obsolete. The division itself between sameness/difference has reached an unproductive impasse, since it is transparently couched in the discourse of sameness. This can be observed both in the strict ambits of the feminist theory, as has been convincingly shown by Cornell (1999, esp. chapter 3) and Butler (1990, 2004), as well as in the greater identity/difference discourse, which, itself being significantly fed by its subset, i.e., the feminist sameness/difference discourse, finds itself in comparable need of rethinking. But such rethinking cannot come from the existing terminology. Any attempt to a reconceptualisation will have to admit its

defeat, suspend itself, and search elsewhere: The identity is in suspense(T)he utopian element is ultimately a component of identity (Ricoeur, 1986, p. 311). Utopia, however, requires an understanding of its paradox (an ideality, which is lost as soon as fo und). Any comparison, any parallelism, any mutual exploration of even multiple aspects of difference are attempts to inscribe afresh the terrific paradox of same because different and vice versa (Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, 2005a). Regardless (or precisely because) of the impasse, the need for the discussion to carry on is indisputable and I would not dream of offering an end to it; but perhaps a new beginning in the form of, what else, a looming return. This fusion can be sought before the difference of difference. The move before the relatively narrow ambits of the sex/gender difference has already been performed a few times (e.g., Butler, 1990; Berlant & Warner, 1999), and can be without too much trouble construed as a move beyond sex difference, gender difference, or even societal prioritisation of the existing binarisms between woman and man, female and male or straight and gay; thus, the term difference is now to be read as the limited signifier of an elusive signified: to put it in Derridean parlance, the diffrance of gender includes and precludes its difference to sex, and its deferral with regard to all the other candidate categories (race, age, sexuality, ethnicity, class, etc). While it can be convincingly argued that the above has been conceptualised successfully, the present project sets for itself a slightly more adventurous goal: that of looking for the space before the difference of difference, a space beyond the superimposition of dialectics, and well within the inoperationality of negation of identity. The difficulty and novelty of the present endeavour in relation to previous attempts to go before difference is that here one is required to think beyond the usual pre-gendered/sexual/etc., and into the pre-subject, prealter, pre- invitational, pre-observational, pre- linguistic, pre-evolutionary, pre-theological, pre-theic, pre-thetic. The quest for such a space presupposes a semi-epistemological level of exploration, conditioned indeed by its very impossibility and its inbuilt promise of return to the habitual difference/non-difference discourse (which is subsequently constructed as the space before difference, e.g., the pre-gender/sexual/sexuate etc.). But just as before leads to before, in the same way before difference leads to before difference of difference. This means that, although the quest goes before and beyond theories and politics of difference (even before difference), it does not constitute a criticism of them, since their contribution is essential to the endeavour, both in their role as launching pad and next destination. What is there before? In the human rights part of the quest, and according to Luhmann, the amorphous mass of a (functionally) undifferentiated society defined individual identity as a fixed social position. Likewise, the space before difference reveals an individual identity conditioned by its fixity as absolute in the sense of incomparable, unobservable, unmarked. The space before difference of difference is an uncontainable void that escapes description or comparison, and lends itself only to banal metaphors. Going before uncovers the impossibility of observation: the space of before is one, undivided, absolute, without a vantage point from which it could be observed. No one can open the door (to use a banal metaphor) and look into it: no one can introduce the outside to it, or indeed step in it and observe it. Lacking the line that would divide it into observer and observed, the space

remains inaccessible to any observation. In this sense, the space before difference is an absolute space, whose deferral is immobilised by the diminution (to the point of total, vertical and irretrievable erasure) of the spaces between the elusive signifieds. In such a pre-edenic space, no line can be marked and no observatory can be delineated; for then, the voyager will be turning her back to the space of before and will be instituting difference/similarity, observation, description, blind spots that can never be observed, object and subject divisions, even desire, maps, direction, teleology, divine berobservers and hierarchies of truth: in short, the mechanics of identity. But this is exactly what is missing here, with a vociferous absence that swallows any macho name - giving capacity (Dworkin, 1997): there is no one to assume or confer identity. Identity designates as well as categorises (Bucholtz et al., 1999). Identity denotes who I am, but also where I belong. Having an identity means that I am part of the recognisable unities of a discourse, I have a name and I can be called by that name: identity is the name I call myself. Etymologically, identity derives from the Latin pronoun is-ea-id, which translates as he-she-it: a point of identification, both by the subject herself, but also, and perhaps decidedly, by the other (Hegel, 1967; Taylor, 1994). It is a personal as well as a deictic pronoun, a marking line of connection and division, a border between uniqueness and acknowledgement of commonality: a faint line that fluctuates between, on the one hand, the obsolescence of identity in the absence of the other, and on the other, the obsessive desire for self-definition. Above all, identity is the rupture between the self and its selfdescription, and for this, the very possibility of descriptio n of any sort, the tool of observation, the line that marks the abyss from its mirror. Is-ea-id become idem-eadem idem: a reflection of itself in an elevated marriage between the self and its self-description: I am me, and however different, I cannot be without me. In a space where there is no one to observe me and confer identity, no mirror on which I can admire its reflection, identity is devoured by ipseity: a monad of self-definition, a unique beyond comparison, a self-constructing, self-perpetuating and self-referential construction that would bring awe and trembling if it could ever be observed. Ipseity draws from the self-referentiality of ipse-ipsa-ipsum as the ultimate self-affirmation (ego ipse: I myself), the uncontrollable and incomparable expanse of the absolute unity. 3 Before difference of difference, before humanity, before the beginning, the origin that is not origin since nothing of it can be remembered, dreamt of or reconstructed. The premodern space encountered before human rights reappears here in its daunting unobservability. Mere contemplation of ipseity resuscitates the solitude of the moribund, and before death (indeed before the union between awe and desire, the ultimate moment of satiety) prioritisations are shaken, homologation is demorphologised (Irigaray, 1984), subjected and subjugated become triumphant tentacles of an ipseity that can never look at itself in the mirror. Precisely on account of their unobservability, these spaces (before the
3

Ricoeur (1992) employs idem-identity and ipse-identity as the concordance between identity of the self and identity of the same. Ricoeur sees an overlap between them here the overlap has been reduced to a constantly deferred tautology between the two. See also Nancys (1999), following Bataille, plural ipseity, and Henrys (2000) theo-phenomenological ipseity.

difference of difference) bring with them a foundational questioning of prioritisations. What is there to prioritise if there is only one, and this one is never in par with itself, it is never one as absolute or one as other or one as self, but one as no-one? What is there to do in a space with no shadows? Indeed, how can such a space operate or be operated? The answer is simple: it cannot. This inoperability is less of a disadvantage than it may initially appear. This will become clearer after I have spelt out what the space of before is not. To start with, it is not an essentialist space, because its very inoperability renders it inessentialist: thus, the notion of before can escape to a utopian realm, deprived of any essentialist pretence that would be remindful of a supposed shared core of personhood, of which radical feminism has been criticised (Spelman, 1990; ONeill, 1993). Indeed, any essentialist streak runs dry with the fugue to identity as the necessary return to operability. As such, before is inoperable, ineffable, indescribable, unsynthesisable: a Hegelian Sittlichkeit with nowhere to look back from. If such is our common core (if the destiny of the core is to be common, if common is a withdrawal from community), it is perhaps destined to remain a tautology which no metaphor can break open, no signified can describe, and no prayer can reach. Its meaningfulness remains fallibly unreliable. Likewise, the space before difference does not promote a pre-social idea of the individual in the way liberal feminism seems to be doing (Nussbaum, 2000). Although the direction in both cases is, as it were, backwards in time, before difference does not lead to any formal conception of equality that operates regardless of power structures. In fact, it does not refer to any idea of equality, or indeed power. The space before difference is a necessary stage of abstraction, which only after and precisely because of its being escaped, does it allow the trait-attaching process (inevitably in its turn imbued in social significations). But until then, the space of before offers nothing socially meaningful. Its meaningfulness arises in absentia as the shadow cast over gender prioritisations after ipseity has been encountered and deferred. Finally, before neither degenders, nor revalues the feminine, as Kate Nash (2002) has eloquently put the liberal/radical dichotomy. Agreed, if seen in isolation, before seems to have nothing to do with gender thus, one could assume that it is closer to a liberal idea of resemiologising the gender dichotomy, or even advocating some sort of gender neutrality (Lacey, 1998). However, before can never be considered in isolation and this is where the second point of the human rights expos becomes relevant again. Before and be- fore occupy the opposite ends of the same spectrum, and the oscillation between them is the inevitable return to the escape of before. The space of be-fore emerges as the nest of desire, but only through and after the escape from the origin, the awe of before. It may initially seem that the escape from ipseity leads to identity; but identity (itself a prioritisation) is of the present, in the middle as it were, of the trajectory between the two extremes. Identity is the line that demarcates the rupture between before and be- fore, and, as demarcations go, it also enables continuity between them. Both continuity and rupture are epistemological tools of rapprochement. On the basis of these, appearing as a boundary between the extremes, before and be-fore come together in an arbitrary marriage of before. It is to this fragmented unity that the text now turns.

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V. BEFORE The space of before has been encountered elsewhere in the theory. 4 In its most generic form, it stands for the space of ignorance, any interpretation of which is based on a projected hypothesis in the form of demarcating line: either demarcating the space from other spaces, or attempting to demarcate the space itself into observer and observed. Transcendental or Cartesian, the space remains on the other side of any demarcation, a memento vanitas of human thinking, the echo of a collapsing Babel. In the form described here, namely as the continuous rupture between before and be- fore, before acquires a quality of future desire steeped into the awe of origin. The space of before remains inoperable, just like its two extremes contained within its span. Before is the locus where desire is satiated and awe is paralysing even before they are conceived; where life and death lose their illusionary polarity; where before and be-fore clash with disarming fervour, and before and after life melt into one solid ipseity. For, what is there before the first distinction (Spencer-Brown, 1979, p. 3), the rupture that marks continuum and difference against the primordial inoperability of chaos? What comes before the origin? One way -the easy way- of answering this is that any first distinction is arbitrary, any beginning is capricious. But this does not answer the question - it simply postpones it to another level of arbitrariness. Another answer usually comes from the Freudian idea of origin: who is the Father (and who is the totem -Fitzpatrick, 2001)? But again, this is simply another bifurcation: the Father needs the Mother (the savage, the son, the other, and so on). Finally, there is yet another answer, usually left out because of its unsatisfactory paradox: that the beginning is the end. Before the difference of difference (this time decontextualised) there is nothing to describe and nowhere to des cribe from. There is just an uncontainable flow towards the beginning, any beginning, a Kierkegaardian nothing in which knowledge and ignorance annul each other, where the whole actuality of knowledge projects itself in anxiety as the enormous nothing of ignorance (Kierkegaard, 2000, p. 141; for further analysis, Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, 2006b). The space of before is where beginning and end are fused in an undifferentiated nothing. The inoperability of before necessarily produces the rupture between before and before. 5 Expulsion from Eden is only an anagram in order to discover an End within. The rupture between origin and desire makes either of the two before inadequate on its own. One must always be measured in its antithesis to the other. Of course, neither constitutes a realisable position. On the side of before, ideality is revealed as a malign return to the Happy Days, as the awe before ipseity. On the side of be-fore, all utopias on human
4

To mention a few examples, Freuds uncanny, Lacans real, Luhmanns form, Platos whole as it appears in Aristophaness monologue in Symposium, Derridas aporia, and so on. These are neither syntheses nor fractures, but attempts to encapsulate both in a difference. 5 Inoperability is converted into something operable only through its rupture. Thus, before is divided into two fragments (before and be-fore), which, although equally inoperable on their own, they become operable through (that is, by revisiting and deferring) their initial form of unity.

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rights and equality of difference parade, the prioritisation of which would remain a subject of opposition, criticism, covered confidence, reliance or even indifference towards existing prioritisations, as defined at present in a society whose beginning has never been visited. However, the atopic space of before offers the opportunity for a prioritisation that would reflect the existential shock of ipseity. Thus, the version of utopia that rises on the antipodes of before is a socially baptised version of ipseity, one that accepts the unique as the elevated (and only) form of individual socialisation: an ipseity conditioned by a passage from identity. The origin of desire meets the desire for origin. Eden revisited. But not just once: again and again, the pendulum swings from before to be-fore. In this oscillation, a schizophrenic jigsaw puzzle is put together, where, although the pieces (before and be- fore) do not match, the puzzle (before) looks right. A malfunction? A paradox more likely. In order to look more closely at this paradox, the previous description of human rights can be of succour. Human rights were shown to operate both as the grid and the vehicle that guarantees systemic differentiation, while enabling individual access to societal echelons. This differentiated way of conceptualising rights attempts to reinscribe the habitual paradox in the heart of human rights, namely the antithesis between universal and particular. Lvinas (1987, p. 176) puts the latter lyrically: [Human rights express]the alterity of that which is unique and incomparable, attributable to the suspension of every person in humankind, which ipso facto and paradoxically, abolishes itself so as to leave each human being unique in their own genre. Uniqueness and incomparability which do not make a specific or individualising difference (1987, p. 176), but mark the ideality of ipseity while taking into consideration the fact that each one of such alterities floats in an environment of social interlocution (see also Derrida, 1987 and 1997). Thus, particular and (or even better, because) universal: this is the paradox of human rights at its best operational form. However, the exact same paradox has been described by Wendy Brown (2002) as problematic from the feminist point of view: if too universal, generic and neutral, human rights simply reinstate the status quo; if too specific and particularised, they maintain the fence around identity and discrete components of suffering, with which women identify and in which they remain immured. The same problema tic emerges when looking at the gender/sex difference. Even with meaningful entries such as sexuate beings (Cornell, 1998), or parler femme (Irigaray, 1985), the paradox between the useful and the detrimental effect that such discussion can have is rampant. If the discussion is too abstract and all- inclusive, specificity is left out and phalogocentric structures are maintained; if too specific, it is deprived of its summative force. Continuing the discussion is no longer a theoretically valid option; ceasing it is not yet a practically valid option. There are still tangible equality problems waiting to be addressed, thought of and dealt with, and the discussion on difference is one of the tools in which the issue is advanced -but, also, set back. The f that the paradox can be seen both as positive and negative is, facetiously, in its act nature. A paradox is the perpetual oscillation between doxa (belief) and para-doxa, a discussion that concludes nowhere but to the gap between the two extremes. One is at a loss as to how to deal with it and where to go from there: the paradoxical description of before

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as both beginning and end is a non-descriptive, non-conclusive answer, which remains prima facie unsatisfactory. The obvious dealing with the paradox i , of course, that of s deparadoxification, which usually requires a prioritisation between the two values, and a decisive blow to the gordean complexity of the problem. But then, different sets of problems arise, all echoing the initial complexity. With this, I am not suggesting that one should surrender to the haziness of paradoxes. Nor am I suggesting that paradoxes are good (or bad for that matter); rather, what I am suggesting is that they can be put to use. Thus Luhmann (1998, p. 112): [the paradox] can be understood as an inducement, even a compulsion to solution. This means: as a challenge to reconstruction with the help of distinctions that enable stable identification. In other words, paradoxes keep us awake by relentlessly repeating the same question. The answer remains irrelevant (PhilippopoulosMihalopoulos, 2005a). Thus, the questions: how to begin in a space of absolutes, where beginning and end flow into each other while interrupting each other? What is the way in/out of a space of paralysing awe and desire? How can be- fore carry on existing in view of the luminosity of before? Is there any way to freeze the relentless oscillation between the atopic space of ipseity and the utopian space of an ipseity-baptised identity? In view of these, the irrelevance of the answer becomes obvious: the actual oscillation (in other words, the continuous questioning) is the only relevant move, taking place in the inescapable space of before. Before remains inaccessible except through its vinous shoots on the planes of before and be-fore, as nightmares of annihilation and presentiments of total nondifference. However, after the adumbration of before, the two (before and be- fore) can never be pulled away from their mutual rupture. The passing from cons tructed origin to reconstructed desire can be epistemologically sketched; but since the oscillation is continuous, awe is intertwined with desire, identity with ipseity, dystopia with utopia, pathos with pothos, paradox with its reflection. This paradoxical set of dyads becomes the very precondition of marking. The unmarked space of before, of pure ipseity and luminous futurity, is the means to the marked. With before, a mnemonic locus of negated theology is constructed, which resemiologises prioritisatio ns in the light of total non-difference. After the visitation to (and, significantly, the escape from) this space of the peculiar production of awe and desire, of the Lacanian real that reverberates both behind and in front of the visitor, the foundations of any method of prioritisation are shaken: different and same (identity), and one and none (ipseity) are neither ruptured nor continued. Humanity is defined by its escape from its total presence, and its awe in front of its total desire. The answer is in the question. The question is dipped in the claustrophobia of an unobservable, unvisitable, inoperable space. Its interrogatory tentacles appear in mnemonic and oneiric instances, and force a new ethics of marking. For, marking remains important. Every marking is a reluctant acquiescence to the illusionary stability of identity. But identity is no longer what it thought it was. Marked, it will remain. But this marking is now aware of its lugubrious contingency. Any stability is powerfully relativised by the passage from the hall of mirrors, where the paradox of ipseity remains unobservable in its blinding visibility.

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This text begins the present project. Nothing as admirably ambitious as Irigarays creation of a sexual difference politics, or Cixouss pre-exclusionary language; nothing as radical as Kristevas collapse of gendered subjectivity or Lacans reduction of difference to linguistic positions; not even anything as hands-on as Cornells recognition of the right to the imaginary domain. Nothing of the above, because the present project is destined to remain out of bounds. 6 Its only possible access has been eradicated by a fundamental paradox: that the project annihilates itself. If one were to look in the space of before, the space would shift and the observer would be blinded. Before can only be adumbrated via its extremities, namely before and be- fore. In its turn, the pre-ontological space before difference (of any difference) remains impossible to observe but through its diametrical reflection -that of be-fore, the locus of ideality, the desire for utopia. The two points of before and before are brought together in a fragmented topos of paradoxical self-perpetuation constituting the space of before. Before stands somewhere in the inner folds of the map to utopia, never to be reached and thus, always annulling any distinction, prioritisation, marking, utopia. The Sirens of before invite the utopist with their song, only to devour him later in a pool of contractual fatalism. Awareness, but not indulgence, is required. The space of before is available as a bracketed au-del that guides the utopists search for utopia, as long as the latter never approaches the boundaries of before. It operates negatively by bringing into perspective the futility of identity marking, the ridicule of ones smug stability of self, the passionate need for recognition, the despairing inadequacy of human rights. It operates positively by enabling the tracing of the epistemology between before and be-fore. But thats it. Once traced, the route has to be abandoned. What is left is the marks we carry around and believe them to be our rightful human identity. If this belief is shaken, then the present text will have begun its project.

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