Derrida and Feminism: Recasting the Question of Woman

218 Pages·1997·12.485 MB·English

by  Ellen Feder, Mary C. Rawlinson, Emily Zakin (Editors)

Derrida and Feminism
Recasting the Question of Woman
edited by
Ellen K. Feder,
Mary C. Rawlinson,
and Emily Zakin
ROUTLEDGE
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Published in 1997 by
Routledge
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Copyright © 1997 by Routledge
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Derrida and feminism : recasting the question of woman I edited by Ellen K. Feder,
Mary C. Rawlinson, and Emily Zakin
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0--415--90916--3 (hc: alk. paper). - ISBN 0--415--90917-1 (pbk.: alk. paper)
l. Feminism. 2. Derrida, Jacques-Views on women. 3. Feminist theory. 1. Feder, Ellen K.
II. Rawlinson, Mary C. III. Zakin, Emily.
HQ1l54.D425 1996
305.42-d.c20 96--28730
elP
Contents
Acknowledgments VII
Abbreviated Citations for Derrida Text IX
Introduction
Ellen K. Feder, Mary C. Rawlinson, and Emily lakin
1. "Women" in Spurs and Nineties Feminism 7
Jane Gallop
2. Flirting with the Truth 21
Derrida's Discourse with 'Woman' and Wenches
Ellen K. Feder and Emily lakin
3. The Maternal Operation 53
Circumscribing the Alliance
Kelly Oliver
4. Levers, Signatures, and Secrets 69
Derrida's Use of Woman
Mary C. Rawlinson
5. On Not Reading Derrida's Texts 87
Mistaking Hermeneutics, Misreading Sexual Difference,
and Neutralizing Narration
Tina Chanter
6. From Euthanasia to the Other of Reason 115
Performativity and the Deconstruction of Sexual Difference
Ewa Plonowska liarek
7. Dreaming of the Innumerable 141
Derrida, Drucilla Cornell, and the Dance of Gender
John D. Caputo
8. Where Love Begins 161
Sexual Difference and the Limit of the Masculine Symbolic
Drucilla Cornell
Contributors 207
Index 209
Acknowledgments
The editors gratefully acknowledge Miami University, the State University of
New York at Stony Brook, and Vassar College for institutional support. We
thank Corinna Roth for her splendid work preparing the manuscript (and
index), and Dinh Tran for his assistance. Alison Shonkwiler and Laska Jim
sen at Routledge provided gracious and capable assistance at the project's
beginning and culmination, respectively. Finally, we wish to extend our
thanks to our editor, Maureen MacGrogan, for her patience and steadfast
support of this volume.
Abbreviated Citations
for Derrida Text
ANU "The Almost Nothing of the Unpresentable" (1995) Peggy Kamuf,
trans. in Points, Elisabeth Weber, ed. Stanford: Stanford Univer
sity Press.
A Aporias (1993) Thomas Dutoit, trans. Stanford: Stanford University
Press.
AT ''At This Very Moment in This Work Here I Am" (1991) Berezdevin,
trans. in Re-Reading Levinas, R. Bernasconi and S. Critchley, eds.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
CH "Choreographies" (1982) reprinted in The Ear of the Other.
CI Cinders (1991) Ned Lukacher, trans. Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press.
CS "Circumfession" (1993) in Jacques Derrida, Geoffrey Bennington,
trans. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
D "Differance" in Margins of Philosophy.
DI Dissemination (1981), trans. Barbara Johnson. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press.
EM "The Ends of Man" (1982) in Margins of Philosophy.
EO The Ear of the Other (1985), trans. Kamuf and Ronell. McDonald
and Levesque, eds. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
FL "Force of Law: The 'Mystical Foundations of Authority'" (1992) in
Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice, Cornell, Rosenfeld,
and Carlson, eds. New York: Routledge.
GE "Geschlecht Sexual Difference, Ontological Difference" (1983) in
Research in Phenomenology 13.
GD The Gift of Death (1995) David Wills, trans. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
G Glas (1986) Leavey and Rand, trans. Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press.
x Abbreviated Citations for Derrida Text
GT Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money (1992) Peggy Kamuf, trans.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
LG "The Law of Genre" (1980) Avital Ronell, trans. Critical Inquiry
17:1.
MP Margins of Philosophy (1982) Alan Bass, trans. Chicago: The
University of Chicago Press.
M Memoirs for Paul de Man (1986) Lindsay, Culler, and Cadava, trans.
New York: Columbia University Press.
NY ''A Number of Yes" (1988) Brian Holmes, trans. Que Parle 2.
OG Of Grammatology (1976) Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, trans.
Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press.
ON On the Name (1995) Thomas Dutoit, ed. Stanford: Stanford
University Press.
o "Otobiographies" in The Ear of the Other.
PA "Passions: 'An Oblique Offering'" (1995), David Wood, trans. in On
the Name.
PF "The Politics of Friendship" (1988) Gabriel Motzkin, trans. The
Journal of Philosophy 85.
P Positions (1981) Alan Bass, trans. Chicago: The University of
Chicago Press.
PC The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond (1987) Alan Bass,
trans. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
PR "The Principle of Reason: The University in the Eyes of its Pupils"
(1983) Diacritics 13:3.
PS "Psyche: Inventions of the Other" (1989) in Reading de Man
Reading, Waters, Godzich, eds. Minneapolis: University of Min
nesota Press.
SN "Saufle nom" (1995) John P. Leavey, Jr., trans. in On the Name.
S Spurs: Nietzsche's Styles/Eperons: Les Styles de Nietzsche (1979)
Barbara Harlow, trans. Chicago: The University of Chicago
Press.
SSP "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences"
(1978) in Writing and Difference.
UG "Ulysses Gramophone: Hear Say Yes in Joyce" (1984) in James
Joyce: The Augmented Ninth, ed. Bernard Benstock. Syracuse:
Syracuse University Press.
WM "White Mythology" (1982) in Margins of Philosophy.
WB "Women in the Beehive" (1984) reprinted in Men in Feminism,
Jardine and Smith, eds. New York: Methuen, 1987.
WD Writing and Difference (1978) Alan Bass, trans. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press.
Introduction
Ellen K. Feder, Mary C. Rawlinson, and Emily Zakin
I
n philosophy the history of the question of woman is an ancient one. Plato
broaches it in his discussion of the ideal state when he includes women as
members of the guardian class. The inclusion is equivalent to an abolition of
the social roles of gender among philosopher-rulers, constituting a political
indifference to the biological difference of sexual reproduction. Children
would be reared in common, each related to the other so that the differences
of male/female and man/woman would make no difference. The mother,
along with the family, disappears in the ruling element of the state.
It is Aristotle, however, who decides the question of woman by placing
her and figuring her in a way that continues to hold sway. In Aristotle's text,
woman is rendered, literally, as the nourishing medium which receives the
enformed sperm, and figuratively, as the body, nature, or unformed and
irrational matter; she functions as the other to man and his rational activ
ity. Aristotle elaborates spheres of politics and friendship in which woman
is not naturally suited to participate. As Irigaray remarks, woman supplies
the "place" for man's reproduction and creative act: he works on/in her. This
decision of the question is disseminated in (Judeo) Christianity in a profu
sion of highly differentiated images, from Eve to the Holy Family and the
marriage of the female saints to Christ.
In philosophical modernity this decision acts on the question of educa
tion and on the problem of the relation of sexual difference to concrete
social institutions. In the works of Kant and Rousseau, for example, the for
mation of human subjectivity is said to be marked by this difference, and
each elaborates practical plans which might guide the institution of this dif
ference. Both assign certain kinds of formative activity as proper to one sex
or the other, and insist that the rational order of society requires this insti
tution. They thereby advance a division which excludes women from the
realm of political action.
Hegel makes this decision of the question intrinsic to the self-unfolding
2 Introduction
of Absolute Spirit: both to its self-reflection in language and to its embodi
ment in practical activity and social forms. To the woman belongs the care
of the body and blood, the domain of the family and funeral rites. To the
man, whose body the woman properly tends-as Antigone tends first her
father, then her brother-belongs the public domains of action, science,
politics, and philosophy. Even language, the universalizing medium, is said
to be foreign or opaque to her. The system of Absolute Spirit depends upon
this division of labor and life.
Psychoanalytic theory supplements and extends the tradition's decision
of the question of woman by demonstrating how gendered subjects are pro
duced in and through the family. Moreover, psychoanalysis explicitly devel
ops the concept of normalization, of, for example, "normal" female
sexuality. Articulating the conditions for the formation of a "normal"
human subjectivity, psychoanalysis mediates between the regulatory force
of social practices and institutions, such as medicine and law, and the philo
sophical tradition within which the program of subjective constitution is
laid down. Through it the philosophical decision is deployed on actual
human bodies.
It was our gamble, the gamble that inaugurated this collection, that Der
rida-following certain clues in Nietzsche-had undecided all this and put
woman into question again. The results of that gamble, this collection, have
not proved us wrong. Derrida has certainly not been alone in reopening this
question; however, his practice of reading and writing have made it possible
to articulate the logic of this move in a particularly clarifying way. Derrida's
reading/writing is a "strategic science" which operates upon a text so as to
expose how its own limits and margins are inscribed within it, how the
decision of the other or the exterior is intrinsic to and marked within the
system of identity or logic of concepts. Derrida advances, then, not con
cepts, which would grasp the truth of some preconceptual given in a word,
but "levers of intervention" which assist in the text's subversion and trans
gression of itself. Woman is an exemplar of such a lever, and is measured
by/manifest in her effects.
Reopening the question of woman releases a whole program of ques
tions: If "woman" is not a concept, i.e. refers neither to actual women, nor
to the practices and institutions by which they are formed, then how does it
operate? Does it refer at all, or is it, rather, an undecideable figure, an apo
ria that will not let us decide the question and put woman in her place?
What difference does it make to philosophy and its archive of concepts that
the question of woman has been undecided? What effects does this opera
tion have upon concepts of the other, ethics, responsibility, subjectivity,
agency, and decision? What is the relation, then, of such a practice of read-
Introduction 3
ing and writing, to the domain of life and the formation of women? What
might this practice contribute to the practical struggles that have gone on
under the heading of "feminism"?
Derrida himself remarks that the "practical struggles" of feminism have
resulted in a shaking and loosening of the decisive logic of identity and the
concept, making possible a multiplication of possibilities in the field of sex
ual difference, and providing an opening for interrogations of closure, pres
ence, and truth. To what extent, then, is Derrida indebted to feminism, both
theoretical and practical, as that which has given him the gift of this open
ing? And what ironies and impossibilities lurk within Derrida's desire to
"write with the hand of a woman" and his inscription in his texts of explic
itly female interlocutors, who appear to write the text? Does Derrida fall
prey to the danger he himself identifies, namely that in attempting to inter
vene in the language of metaphysics and disrupt it, one risks merely repeat
ing? Is Derrida's use of woman one more appropriation in philosophy's long
history on this question?
The papers collected here are only more or less decisive and operate more
to complicate and amplify these questions than to close them down. Jane
Gallop's essay establishes the scene in which feminist theorists engage with
Derrida. Gallop reads Derrida "in history:' to note his engagement with a
certain essentializing feminism characteristic of the Second Wave, or what
she calls the "era of'women:" In "Women in Spurs and Nineties Feminism:'
Gallop argues that "[als Derrida dreams of 'sexual difference' which would
not be contained within a binary opposition, of 'sexual differences' which
would not be singular, his text trips over, catches in passing only to quickly
forget other 'sexual differences,'" i.e. the differences among the formulations
of "woman" in Nietzsche's work rendered femme in Derrida's text. Reading
the mark of property in the possessive use of frau, or "wife:' or the distinc
tion between frau or "lady," and the base weib or "female" in Spurs, Gallop
dates Derrida's text, marks it as invested in the assumptions of the 1970s
feminism of which it is critical. If seventies feminism "envisioned a singular
unity which could be collectivized under the name of woman:' Gallop offers
what she identifies as a nineties gloss on the figuration of Derrida's 'woman:
recognizing that "these sexual differences which cannot be called gender
construct 'women' in diacritical distinction not to the opposite sex but to
another class or sexuality or age."
Ellen Feder and Emily Zakin propose a reading of Spurs which attempts
to occupy a dual, perhaps even "undecidable" position. In "Flirting with the
Truth," they recognize both Derrida's betrayal of, and his participation in,
the structures of masculinity which perpetuate the sexual violence of
philosophy. The equation of Truth and Woman makes of both possessions