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Throughout ‘Grace and Innocence’, Cixous explores the relationship between effort and grace, and alerts her principal speculation that, what matters is not knowledge as such, but our way of living knowledge: ‘One has to know how not to possess what one knows’. To the extent that the problem of self-sacrifice is what marks the rejection of agapic love in much of feminist theology, the text has argued throughout that Cixous's conception of divine Promethean love addresses this issue at the level of the structure of subjectivity itself. The very notion of self-sacrifice, the study suggests, is dependent firstly upon a notion of self that is indebted largely to the Enlightenment, hence masculine ideals about what a subject is in the first place. Cixous acknowledges that, in a patriarchal world, one continues to be interpolated into the discourses of subjectivity which privilege notions such as individuality and autonomy, and which assume the subject to be a self-subsisting phenomenon. If the masculine subject is constituted against the threat of difference, Cixous inscribes in feminine flesh the possibility that this is not the only possible relation to difference. In a feminine relation to difference, one finds the possibility of living a dispossessed, rather than sacrificial, relation to self, in which otherness becomes the occasion of a generous, excessive, abundant birth into life and love.

The chapter examines, compares, and contrasts the views on self-knowledge developed by Schopenhauer and Freud because they display some broad, if superficial, similarities. Both philosophers reject the Cartesian notion that self-knowledge—primarily, the knowledge of one’s own mental states—is immediate and indubitable because of the existence of unconscious mental states. They therefore take self-knowledge to be a genuine achievement. They also accept the broadly Socratic idea that self-knowledge is an ethical imperative, insofar as it is necessary to achieve a desirable existential state, which they both describe as a kind of freedom. They argue that self-knowledge is not just a necessary means for achieving freedom, but is also in some sense constitutive of it. Finally, both take self-knowledge to be constitutive of freedom only if it is living self-knowledge.

This chapter considers how a coproduced approach to research could enable an understanding of how communities might be different. Engagement with communities at all stages of research places collaborative and participatory research methods in a central role to widen the ways community partners and universities can work together. The chapter analyses the methodologies that can be used to think about accommodating diverse opinions and tacit knowledge within communities, as well as what this reveals about processes of exclusion and integration in local communities. It also shows how universities work collaboratively with community partners to shape or construct research together. Universities can be seen as spaces where people can think, they can provide funding for innovative research projects, and they can support ways of knowing and reflective practice, creating 'living knowledge' in the process.

This chapter examines the prospect or outlook of Fourth Cinema—the future past of place—as a radical rethinking of law, knowledge, and property in terms of the long history of first peoples by focusing on New Zealand and Barry Barclay’s work. Barclay was a rare filmmaker, writer, and thinker whose seminal filmwork makes him a founding figure of Indigenous cinema. His own underexamined films, alongside those of Merata Mita, establish a template for thinking about Fourth Cinema as a distinct filmic mode of address. Fourth Cinema is the eye of a Fourth World of history. It is a portal to another world, Te Ao Māori (the Māori world) in New Zealand. This chapter also considers what Barclay calls the “national orthodoxy”—the perspective to which first peoples are subject in settler societies. Finally, it discusses the image-sovereignty of film, along with properties of place considered as living knowledge.