My advise to you tonight was, before turning to critical theory, or attempting to do a Derridean deconstruction, hold onto the binary as long as you can.
Why?
Binaries can be erased too quickly.
Such erasure can lead to an empty equality, where the marginalized term of the other is simply colonized and assimilated into the center. In this way, a truth can be turned into a slogan that denies humanity: all lives matter.
Likewise, the binary can be erased by exclusion or succession, by an attempt to locate a pure otherness that transcends relationality of all sorts. In this way, we act as if we can’t really understand each other, saying either, you can’t know my reality, or, its flipside, I don’t care about your reality!
In Buddhism, we are reminded that “Things are not what they appear to be: nor are they otherwise.”
To borrow from Derrida, we must, therefore, live “under erasure,” understanding that the binaries we live by at are, at best, only sad proxies for the complexity and ambiguities that fill our lives (and that phenomenology seeks to describe and interpret).
The binaries are the poles from which we take our bearings and through the mediation of which we are given our birth.
Fatherhood is not motherhood.
Nor is it otherwise.
It’s only in the stories of everyday lived experience that such paradoxical language is affirmed in its truth.
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