Derrida and Feminism Recasting the Question of Woman edited by Ellen K. Feder, Mary C. Rawlinson, and Emily Zakin ROUTLEDGE New York and London Published in 1997 by Routledge 29 West 35th Street New York, NY 10001 Published in Great Britain in 1997 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane London EC4P 4EE Copyright © 1997 by Routledge Printed in the United States of America Design: Jack Donner All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without permission in writing from the publishers. 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