Patriarchy / Marxism

When my mother started reading Foucault she began trumpeting 'There is nothing outside of discourse!' and this troubled me very much for some months because I didn't like the idea that everything was always already subsumed into a construction of power, and I eventually hit on the idea that to engage in discourse was itself a choice of modality - I thought for a while that this was a way out of the bind that Foucault set up. I was going to say that this might point a way out of these binaries - simply to refuse to engage in binary choosing - but now that I sit down to write this I'm not so sure.

Anyway, I had to look up Danger, Will Robinson, and - ouch. But I don't agree that the patriarchy invites you to try to love your way out of it - or at least that this is the patriarchy's only trick. I think that the patriarchy aims to be invisible, or, better, a joke: certainly that is the treatment that other men give it to me. (Also, I don't think that loving your way out of the patriarchy would work - you have to act against it and still know that it'll probably always contain you.) (I worry about the patriarchy a lot (like the Johnny Cash song, The Beast in Me.)) But what I meant to say here is that setting up these binaries (patriarchal-not patriarchal) is always a doomed endeavour because, as you say, it is systemic - the context in which you make those choices is a patriarchal one. So there is no set of choices or actions that will produce a consistent "not-patriarchal" life because in between all those choices and actions are all the things that you overlook to chose - and those gaps are where you (I) are (am) patriarchal. So it's asymptotic, I guess I am saying. Is this why it breaks you? Explain to me the gap between this and despair.

So should I resign myself to a wrong life, enmeshed in systemic wrongs, nonetheless aiming to be as unwrong as I can? This is such a hopeless prospect that I don't think it is glib to be uninterested by the possible - the possible offers such a small view. And sure - the main danger is a good way to look at this. But my main dangers are all (I think, at least) so personal - I'm so afraid of things about me - that I don't know how determining my But I still think that the main dangers are systemic - ecological damage, global mechanisms of economic and social injustice - that addressing myself to them would mean making sacrifices in uprooting my life that I am too self-absorbed to want to make. (This is my question from before, really - doesn't admitting these problems mean admitting their priority?)

And always this feeling as when talking to the religious - mostly clergy, really, of one stripe or another - of empathy and also despair born of my inertia. Can you forgive my incalcitrance? - I am saying that yes, you are probably right, but I don't have the courage to be that right.