ritual circumcision, sodomy, Derrida

[jbor]

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>From: Terrance <lycidas2 at earthlink.net>
>

> 
> Most relativists quickly become absolutist
> when it comes to pet moral principles, like sodomizing boys
> or circumcising girls.

This is actually a gross oversimplification of these issues. Pet moral
principles (i.e. opinions) have absolutely no bearing on cultural
relativism. In one culture female ritual circumcision is both legally and
morally OK. In another it isn't. Is one or other of these cultures "wrong"?

What's interesting is that the derogatory phrase "genital mutilation"
(rather than the usual denotation "ritual circumcision") is used in
societies where the practice is outlawed, showing just how far language is
exploited to construct such "moral principles".

The legal age of consent for sexual activity varies from country to country
and province to province in Western society. Currently in some states here
the legal age of consent for females is 16, while the legal age for males is
18. This creates the extraordinary possibility that a 17 year old girl can
be prosecuted for having sex with a 17 year old boy! Human rights groups
have been lobbying against this discriminatory law for some time, and
several of the state laws have been brought into line. Neither the type of
sexual act, nor the gender of the participants, is specified in these laws.

Derrida's familiarity with philosophers such as Plato, Kant, Hegel,
Kierkegaarde, Nietzsche, Freud, Heidegger, Husserl, Benjamin, Levinas, and
more, has been established beyond dispute and, as such, this critical
intimacy -- rather than the usual critical distance -- is a mark of
affirmative deconstruction. In his writings from about the time of his
participation at the conference entitled 'The Ends of Man' at
Cerisy-la-Salle in 1982 there is a turn in his own philosophy -- as
significant as that turn in Heidegger's thought of the 1930s which Derrida
critiques in 'Violence and Metaphysics: An Essay on the Thought of Emmanuel
Levinas' (1964, in _Writing and Difference_) and later in 'The Ends of Man'
(1968, in _Margins_), continuing through into _Of Spirit_ (1987) -- and
Derrida in fact focuses more and more on ethics and its relationship to the
political.

Many of his texts from the late seventies explore those aporias between
justice and law, ethics and politics, gift and responsibility. The first
item in each pair here -- an absolutely relative construction, and thus
unfixable -- is allowed into play as an "experience of the impossible", and
thus his brand of deconstruction is transformed into what he describes as a
"setting-to-work" mode.

See:

Derrida, 'Declarations of Independence' (1976, tr. 1982, in _New Political
Science_ 15)

  ----   'Force of Law: "The Mystical Foundation of Authority"' (1989)

  ----   _Given Time_ (1991)

  ----   _The Gift of Death_ (1992)

  ----   _Aporias_ (1993)

best