philoSOPHIA

Abstract:

Han Bo’s 2011 China Eastern Railway nine-poem cycle begins and ends with the figures of two different women, initiating and then intensifying via the cycle’s structure of a circuit, or loop, a reading of the poems in which conceptual binaries are scrambled and undone. Gender binaries are at the root of the larger structure of binary pairs, and as such gender serves as a particularly intense site of a critique that may be read in coproductive terms by way of both contemporary critical theory and China’s deep philosophical traditions. In this essay’s reading of the poems, modernity—in both Western and Chinese forms—is deconstructed in ways that are legible in terms of aspects of 道 Dao as well as concepts drawn from the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Further in this regard, Kyoo Lee’s analysis of xuanpin (“dark female animal”) in the Daodejing helps bring this deconstructive critique into a space of “ontologically interfused or fermented thoughts” that challenge gender itself as a stable and stabilizing category, positing instead a “contemporized” conception of Dao as ceaseless dynamic flux and flow with respect to gender as well as all received and constructively “natural”-ized binaries. The poems gesture toward a dissolution of conceptual binaries, and further toward a state of generative flux, that is not only obliterative of “modernity” (with an emphasis on time and temporalities) but also radically productive of capacities for new, creative apprehensions and articulations of relations between humankind and nonhuman nature. This analysis has broad application ranging from concrete historical moments and events (the history of the 中东铁路, the China Eastern Railway) to ideological formations, national and civilizational projects and identities, and ongoing planetary ecological crisis. Finally, it points toward possible productive entanglements and fusions of lines of Chinese thought (Dao as an aspect not only of Daoism but also of Confucian thought and, in less direct ways, forms of Chinese Buddhism) with lines of Western philosophical endeavor.