Think things as themselves

Helen Cixous: The ideal or the dream would be to arrive a language that heals as much as it separates. Could one imagine a language sufficiently transparent, sufficiently supple, intense, faithful so that there would be reparation and not only separation?

D: What about a language that comes from within, a language that expresses 'my' needs, wishes and desires. A language that comes from the knowing of myself. And this knowing comes from the relationship (marriage) between 'I' and 'Self'.

Virginia Woolf: I went on amateurishly to sketch a plan of the soul so that in each of us two powers preside, one male, one female; and in the man's brain the man predominates over the woman, and the woman's brain the woman predominates over the man. The normal and the comfortable state of being is that when two live in harmony together, spiritually cooperating (...) Coleridge perhaps meant this when he said that a great mind is androgynous (...) Perhaps the androgynous mind is less apt to make these distinctions than the single-sexed mind. He meant, perphaps, that the androgynous mind is resonant and porous; that it transmits emotion without impediment; that it is naturally creative, incandescent, and undivided (...) one must be woman-manly or man-womanly.

I need not hate any man; he cannot hurt me. I need not flatter any man; he has nothing to give me (...) I found myself adopting a new attitude towards the other half of human race.
They are bred of the conditions of life; of the lack of civilization....

Drucilla Cornell: Inevitably, we code ourselves, and are coded, along the lines of race and class (...) it is an orientation that mistakes itself as the state of human being because it has historically been identified as such.

(...) we have been compelled to be 'happy' in ways that we have not wanted to be.

(...) Women, on the other hand, have for too long been judged capable only of passive imagination and the ability to mimic the persona deemed proper for women.

I am arguing that if we are not equivalently evaluated as free persons as an initial matter, we will be unable to fairly correct that definitional inequality; our life chances and prospects will be limited by the very definition of our inequality.