ABSTRACT
This essay takes as its starting point Dipesh Chakrabarty’s provocations concerning the terms of translation of critical difference. It turns to medieval Japanese texts, in order to enquire about the possibilities and limits of reading such writings – that come out of rather particular temporal and cultural contexts – by using the categories of body, gender, and agency as these have emerged within the context of modern Western philosophical, religious, and (more recently) feminist debates. What does it mean to render utterances and apprehensions far removed in space-time and subjectivity into idiom(s) and language(s) that are intelligible to us, distinct kinds of modern subjects? Can an encounter with the strangeness of these terrains lead to an unsettling of inherited-acquired modes of reading, such that the exact otherness of these worlds stretches modern categories not only to their constitutive limits but their unanticipated ends? Thinking through the presence and absence of distinctions such as sex/gender and body/mind across cultures, traditions, and histories allows the essay to turn to the “performativity” of gender. Specifically, it asks: If “man” and “woman” in medieval Japanese texts were not realized primarily through their bodies then how was gender difference produced? Through close textual analysis, the essay answers that instead of entailing the sexual attributes of the body, gendering was a process that materialized through specific modes of comportment, patterns of speech, and stylized performative modes, which made the categories of “male” and “female” intelligible. (While aspects of Buddhism reveal ostensible ambiguities about the hierarchically lower status of women, there is possibly little doubting the instability of “man” and “woman” as fixed and enduring entities in these traditions, which are further foregrounded by the mutual entanglements and common interpenetrations of the human and the non-human in such terrains.) Building on these discussions, the essay turns finally to the acute limits of liberal conceptions of agency and their radical incommensurability in terrains occupied by the practices and meanings of spirits and sensibilities, gods and demons, dreams and piety, desires and objects, the different dead and all the living.
