La Dividua--A Gendered Figuration for a Planetary Humansim

This essay coins the hybrid and sexed figuration (Donna Haraway) of la dividua, to think about the human, humanism, and human rights within the friction (Kamau Brathwaite) between the theories articulated by Edward Said and Jacques Derrida and the social unevenness of globalization in feminist terms. By acknowledging philology (Said) and friendship (Derrida) as the means by which democracy can be constructed, it privileges the literary capability of fusing thought with poetry as the means to pave the path for framing the question of the human in terms of an encounter, a temporary colloquy. It entertains questions such as: How to represent and access a more hospitable human? How to represent and access a human that is gendered and plural? How to represent and access a human that is not grounded on the exclusion of the animal and earth? The means to show the way to reflect upon these issues are provided by D. Haraway, L. Irigaray, J. Butler, G. Spivak, A. Rich, A. Lorde, L. Gandhi, E. K. Sedgwick, A. Ronell. The articulation analyses both literary texts and political associations that represent dynamics in which humanity acts as that which does not exclude—beyond the limits of identity and individualism, beyond the exclusion of the animal and earth—as collective life is lived in conversation and dialogue, the shared communication that, even between an animal and a person, is a gift. It argues that thinking through poetry is more promising of transformation than thinking along the lines that power and history have drawn and enforced. The reading of Tony Morrison’s The Bluest Eye attests that the literary as a human production may give us the site of seeing another way of being and thus creating the potential for an ethical relation to the other, for articulating a hospitable, gendered, racialized, and plural human that is not grounded on exclusion and is a community builder. This is embodied by the figuration of la dividua who is beautiful because she is just; her beauty belongs to the realm that simultaneously dwells among and gives dwelling to difference, where historicism is not divorced from aestheticism, and where dreaming the impossible but necessary dream of engaging an ongoing conversation with the world is compellingly pursued.