File spoon-archives/french-feminism.archive/french-feminism_1996/96-07-07.000, message 150


Date: Mon, 1 Jul 1996 01:45:11 -0500 (CDT)
From: Nancy Ann Nield <nanield-AT-midway.uchicago.edu>
Subject: Re: de(con)struction


Dear Diane,

	First let me thank you for your thoughtful and insightful posts 
on Butler's notions of performativity and now your welcome additions to 
this ongoing thread on the intersections of poststructuralism, 
deconstruction, and feminism.

	Now for my question: what happens to the "unglimpsable" once it 
has been glimpsed, the silent or unspeakable once it been heard and 
spoken, the unthinkable once it has been thought?  You speak of (in 
Derridean terminology) of the excess or supplement which cannot be 
apprehended or comprehended by phallogocentric discourse, the remainder 
which cannot be subjected to an ostensible whole (which in fact can only 
be perceived as whole b/c of the existence of the supplement, etc.)  But 
what happens to the affirmative power and promise of these "dangerous 
supplements" once they have been written and spoken about in scholarly 
and/or political discourse?  Do they not become assimilated to the 
homm(e)osexual economy and language in which we all, as subjects of the 
(Lacanian) symbolic, participate?  I don't have the exact reference in 
front of me, 
but somewhere in one of the essays in _This Sex Which Is Not One_, even 
Irigaray bemoans the impossibility (at least at this point in history) 
of truly creating and speaking a _parler femme_ which would in no way 
function as a reaction or reaction-formation to the bounded realm of 
phallogocentrism.

	Well, I'll stop now and look forward to this list's responses to 
my query.

Nancy A. Nield
University of Chicago
nanield-AT-midway.uchicago.edu


On Sun, 30 Jun 1996, D. Diane Davis wrote:

>... affirmative feminism can be defined, loosely, as that which EXscribes 
> itself from phallogocentric orderings...
> 
> What ecriture feminine did for us, affirmatively, as it unfolded as a 
> third term, was expand our imagination exponentially...was offer us a 
> line of flight from "the [phallocratic] order of things."  
> n 
> With this unfolding, we began to re-cognize what was excluded and 
> silenced by our logocentric (and so phallocentric) structurings...what 
> those structurings made unthinkable, unspeakable, unhearable.
> 
> And, for me, THAT's what affirmative feminism seeks. Those moments of 
> glimpsing the previously unglimpsable. ;] It's from there that things 
> will have begun to shift.
> 
> ddd
> -- 
> 



   

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