Women out of Place: The Gender of Agency and the Race of Nationality Book

Although eight years separate one's two readings of this book, one found in its second reading a greater navigational aid in one's intellectual explorations than in the first. For example and fittingly, one found oneself at sea with Moby-Dick, and intrigued or rather confused by the binary constellations of Locke/Kant and the swirling Milky Way of Cartesian Vortices, one followed (after reading about the philosophies of Locke, Kant, and Descartes) Ishmael's advice and dumped these "thunder-heads" into the sea. That left the stars of Emerson and his essay, "Experience", and Stanley Cavell's collection of essays on Emerson gathered in a volume titled, "Emerson's Transcendental Etudes" to steer by. And appropriate to the notion of experience (and navigation) it was the sense of sight that proved crucial here. On the cover of Cavell's collection there appears a blurry, vague humanish image walking on a sea shore (perhaps). Citing Cavell citing Emerson's "Experience" the cover image illustrates Emerson's phrase, the "evanescence and lubricity of all objects." (Cavell, 146) So, one leaps to link this suggestive phrase with Ishmael's, "the ungraspable phantom of life." (Melville, Ch 1) So, to the point, "Where do we find ourselves?" After reading "Process Philosophy" one finds oneself, as the rapture of the particulars in Ishmael's cetology chapters suggest, always becoming, always weaving oneself.