(Agamben’s treatment of light and darkness seems amenable to a critique of Western Enlightenment, thematized for instance by Fontanier: “Light [is] for clarity of spirit, for intelligence…for enlightenment; Blindness for troubling or clouding of reason.” Irigaray in Speculum of the Other Woman observes that this chromatic metaphor of light maps onto a gender economy, in which woman is darkness: “She [woman] lives in darkness…She makes no show or display. For if she were to shine, then the light would no longer, simply, belong to sameness. The whole of the current economy system would have to be re-calculated. And if she is granted the life of appearance [actuality], it will be a darkling affair.” For a future post, in what way is the subsumption of potentiality into actuality also a gendered process?)