The Body & Writing

My body was before the word. The reality of being a woman made me belong to silence, unacquainted with myself, unable to describe-inscribe my being in the Universe where man is the measure of all things. He set the norms, the terms of our human relations and has designed the frontiers to the flight of my thought.

The body restricted me within its properties, heightened by the dominion of the material. The condition: to be bonded to habit and custom, to become the embodiment of tradition. Absolute authority practiced in woman its power and rule. She was left in charge of disseminating its legacy using codes alien to her reality. She belongs to History (1).

Now I want to train the voix sauvage, the voice that cries out to claim the space that has been left void. A voice in search of signs that can fill the space from which woman has sprung voiceless (2). She cannot regain the past or control her present, she has though, a right to establish her space toward the future.

Woman seeks to open what Parmenides called eye of thought, to let the dazzling nous greet the silence in a language hitherto denied to us. Meanwhile, we have internalized the forms of "the other," consummated in the body. Woman stands at the crossroads and contemplates humankind making its way beyond the cosmic machine, towards rebirth or extinction. Woman is not a mere invention of grammar, she is quite able to create her own language. She has been long schooled in the use of symbols not her own, has experienced non-communication, terror and silence, she can aspire to cut a diamond with another diamond.

The human mind now rushes to discover what was held in those apparently empty spaces, to invade the space of silence which has been the dwelling space of woman (3). Man was the inventor of the image of the world. But, though woman has very little to do with that creation, she shares the responsibility for the effects of her non participation in the social system. Her role has been that of keeper and transmitter of the moral standards and became "efficient" in the praxis of the social values. Woman was written our of Metaphysics, such omission meant a slim possibility to understand her essence, to define her world and was outlined and enclosed within the social order, her freedom to interact with man at an intellectual level, remained undercut. Such spiritual deprivation reaffirms itself in the reality of the body which becomes part of the world of objects.

Woman can search for referential in time and space, but our ignorance-innocence, makes it hard to perceive these, for us, new dimensions of reality, and knowledge. Woman equals woman, she is her sign, indistinguishable from herself. Is her mind a tabula rasa?

Despite being an object of belonging in society, she is ignored in a general or selective fashion. So she finds herself displaced inside and outside the system. If we accept this condition as characteristic, she can with legitimacy seek for referential in both directions of the "time lost."

Woman is expected to perform a contribution concrete in nature, a production which is essential to the stability and endurance of the social system. But, if we try to equate it with the rewards of society, injustice will prevail.

We can prove omission from the economic models; besides discrimination from knowledge, we have also been absent in the distribution of wealth. Woman is, at a world level, in a condition of dependence and exploitation.

The language we use to describe our reality, the peculiar characteristics of being inside but excluded from the system, can be antagonistic. Her language itself is reacting to the ever-growing shock of scientific and technological advancement (4). As part of the underprivileged or despoiled groups, women see these achievements of contemporary science and technology as attained at the expense of great sectors of humankind. They experience injustice, inequality, instability. The present is the birth place of new definitions, the codes of the cybernetic era.

Woman, caught in these man-made conditions, is an element that has not been recognized as a key part in world development. Deprived of decision power, when she has set in motion some current of change, those projections have been controlled. She doesn't master her own destiny, she has not attained her total identity yet. How coherent and harmonious is this progress given the situation of women and the underprivileged? Does it posses legitimacy?

Amidst the constant change, woman is destined in time to be a decisive force of the process of becoming. Her time seems only Heraclitean, but science has gone forward and we need to know. Our time is irrecoverable in a sense, but because the new reality of time, we need to clarify our function, our place. I think it is a stabilizing one, with capability for displacement. This has not been taken into account, it is an evidence selectively discarded from the sphere of information and knowledge.

During periods of accelerated change, as the present, it is easy to perceive the imbalances in the hierarchical structures that sustain political and economic power. We can also observe the other hierarchy which is language: registering symbols, concepts, models, which rely for their effectiveness on a highly selective image of reality: the reality of the dominator. Its referential terms and codes carry discrimination and a segmental-selective representation of reality relevant to the final goal of maintaining the control of (political) power.

Such a language constitutes an aggression upon the individual and the society. It is so how language can prevent communication. It offers a distorted image