MARKHA G. VALENTAsyncretism and multiple contestation, they become fodder for these larger national, conti-
nental, and global debates concerning the relation between the West and the Rest. These
debates, in turn, not only erase much of the local politics involved but then themselves
become the terms within which, at crucial moments, the local debates are conducted. The
crucial point here is that the local and the global are not discourses and developments
that can be isolated from each other, as if they took place in different locations at different
moments, cleanly separated—the local city council and CNN news; the sidewalk, migrant
cafe ́, and the world’s great halls of power; the line at the cashier and (inter)national policy
statements. No, they flow through each other and become each other, one after another
after another, as we shift from word to word, moment to moment, place to place. We
take them from each other’s mouths, give them shape, and pass them on.
The discourse concerning the veil within the West, then, is hardly about the veil itself. Or,
rather, the veil is continuously postponed and interrupted—as it has been within my own
essay in its attempt to clear the ground for a constructive, critical consideration of its
object.
And there is still so much more to tell. What about the veil’s centrality to modern
Western epistemology itself, how it is that in placing man where God had been, we took
as our task the unveiling of reality. Is this not the central trope of modern thought, of
science, of politics, of our work as scholars and intellectuals? Going one step farther, when
we realize the complexity of the world and the limits of our human mind, is it not again
the veil to which we refer—as do, not surprisingly at all, He ́le`ne Cixous and Jacques
Derrida in their collaborative bundling of ‘‘loosely’’ autobiographical/confessional texts
under the titleVeils,reflecting on the obscured and obscuring nature of vision, identity,
and knowledge?^52
And what about the beginnings of modern philosophy, of Kant, who called up the
veiled goddess Isis to visualize ‘‘the moral law within us,’’ to which we listen and whose
command we understand, though ‘‘we are in doubt whether it comes from man, from
the perfected power of his own reason, or whether it comes from an other, whose essence
is unknown to us and speaks to man through this, his own reason.’’^53 It is the question of
the metaphysical itself that is veiled, its existence at once unresolved and other. Here, too,
the veil is a medium of translation, not only between self and other, between me and the
law, between reflective and active being, between man and spirit, but also, as Hent de
Vries points out, between the extremes of philosophy and obscurantism—pedagogy and
mystagogy, in Kant’s own words—as these touch one other.^54
Going back further still, what are we to make of the homeward-bound Odysseus
putting on the sea goddess Ino’s veil in order to keep from drowning, a magical transves-
tism (the only one in the Homeric world) that aligns the hero with the feminine, both to
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