In thinking about the terms of your very stimulating conversation about inside and outside, confinement and liberation, the following occurs to me–which may simply be a clarification for myself of what you guys have already said: ‘inside and ‘outside,’ are, as Rachel points out in her first blog entry, modernist categories, in fact, I would say, the foundational categories of modernity. I am thinking here of Descartes’ cogito, which was his real legacy to all modern European thinkers from Hobbes to Marx: the ‘I think’ constitutes, for him, subjective interiority. In the argument he develops in the “Meditations on First Philosophy,” ‘I think’ is the first certainty, the ground of knowledge, experience, and identity.

But paradoxically, that very starting point for Descartes’ reflection (it is his first principle) is also what makes it impossible for him to ever reach any conclusion about the outside: his own body, other bodies, etc…

Interiority is always a prison, precisely because of the way it divides itself from the outside. There can never be a bridge between inside and outside, or at best that bridge can only be an illusion, as Descartes’ non-sensical theory that the pituatary gland is the gate between soul (inside) and body (outside).

Perhaps that is why Stein’s project in “The Making of Americans” is so fascinating–because taking Descartes’ project against the grain, she begins with the inside but all the while treating it as an outside (Americans) which she is trying to escape. In this way, one might say that Stein is the last modernist, trying to respond to Descartes’ challenge by so complicating and blurring the boundaries between inside and outside as to make them collapse.