World of Philosophy

Author(s): Christopher Key Chapple, Intaj Malek, Dilip Charan, Sunanda Shastri, Prashant Dave
Publisher: Shanti Prakashan

Page 194

then the notion of self.? Is it possible to be an atheist in this culture when conceptions of self are integrally intertwined with a cultural-spiritual world view? Or is it that the "other" of western discourse on identity and religion as distinct from personhood cannot find coherence or correlation to the world view of a self not defined by religion but by symbol systems imbued with symbolic constructs in relation to the divine? The juxtaposition of the language of cultural difference in relation to the tropes of western feminist theological arguments on gender inequities highlights a contrast of concepts on gender itself.
The descriptions by Katherine Mayo and Mary Daly of cultural practices, while important in the illumination of arcane cultural practices such as dowry and sati, do not go far enough to examine the very practices from a structural basis. This insufficiency leads not only to condemnation but a continued incomprehension of cultural differences. Buimillar repeats this kind of shock tactict analysis more recently in her novel. In contrast, more recent analysis such as by Sundar Rajan point out these ambivalences, and repressed analysis on the notions of pain, agency and other sorts of attendant emotions that this sort of cultural analysis invokes. It is perhaps also Judith Butler's work on the body that holds most hope for the development of perspectives on areas of seeming cultural diversity yet perhaps most needful of new ways of analysis.
The ironic location of the traditional texts in postmodernist perspectives that encompasses the premodern as well as the postmodern location of cultural studies that offers hope for a rounded understanding of gender and cultural difference. If in a Foucauldian light, religious experience can be constructed by epistemes, in a further deconstruction are there essential biological phenomena in the lives of women such as birth and menstruation that can be interpreted differently according to episteme as quantifier of knowledge, yet remains constant? In defining bodies and selves, does deconstructionism as a political enterprise do justice to or help to decenter the bodily location of self? A radical departure would be to conjecture a cultural reading of body and its functions as a basis for women's spirituality. Thus the disembodiment (starvation, homelessness) of the bhakti women poets can be read as resistance, somewhat akin to that of Simone Weil and Gandhi, both also embarked on enterprises of a kind of 'subversive spirituality' and resistance through fasting, writing, and solitude. This act inverts the master slave relationship to produce a freeing of ability within restrictive and oppressive spaces.
Ricouer's reading of the phenomenology of the body is illuminating in its complexity of meanings. In his reading of the transcendental philosophy of Husserl he locates the juxtaposition of body corporeality with intersubjectivity, the relational self as the space of intentionality, moving
145