feminist non identity

A Feminist Politics of Non-IdentityAuthor(s): Leslie Wahl RabineSource: Feminist Studies, Vol. 14, No. 1 (Spring, 1988), pp. 11-31Published by: Feminist Studies, Inc.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3177996Accessed: 19/11/2008 10:46

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available athttp://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unlessyou have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and youmay use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.

Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained athttp://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=femstudies.

Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printedpage of such transmission.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit organization founded in 1995 to build trusted digital archives for scholarship. We work with thescholarly community to preserve their work and the materials they rely upon, and to build a common research platform thatpromotes the discovery and use of these resources. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

Feminist Studies, Inc. is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Feminist Studies.

http://www.jstor.org

http://www.jstor.org/stable/3177996?origin=JSTOR-pdf

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=femstudies

Ii ;

ir P

i;

Ewa Kuryluk, Face, 1981, from the Installation, Fall in Princeton, 1984. Kuryluk's works are drawings; they are installations; they are sculptures. The space and volume of the drawing is both illusory and real, both permanent and ephemeral; the draped cotton has a sculptural presence and inhabits our space.

A FEMINIST POLITICS OF NON-IDENTITY

LESLIE WAHL RABINE

Can feminists use deconstruction to deepen their own analysis? My essay explores this question through a reading of Nancy Chodorow's The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender1 and Zillah Eisenstein's "Developing a Theory of Capitalist Patriarchy and Socialist Feminism."2 These U.S. feminist essays are used because they achieve their extraordinary insights in part, I believe, from certain deconstructive elements already implicitly harbored within them, and because their familiarity to U.S. feminists can serve to make understandable the strangeness of deconstruction.

Space limits and the goal of explanatory clarity require an objec- tive tone to this essay, a tone that belies its author's profound and often enraged sense of insoluble ambivalence toward deconstruction. How could one not be ambivalent toward a theory that contains elements indispensable to the crucial task of deepening a feminist analysis and yet appropriates "the feminine" in ways that allow deconstruction to be integrated into the university for pur- poses inimical to feminism? While Jacques Derrida has himself been both antipathetic and sympathetic to feminism, many of his followers in U.S. universities have used deconstruction to trivialize and dismiss feminism, claiming that it reproduces the phallocentric modes of thought and institutional structures that, according to them, their own method deconstructs.3

The relation, both intimate and adversarial, between the second wave of feminism and deconstruction stems from the birth of these two movements out of the same general historical crisis of Western civilization in the 1960s. Different social groups-Third World people, women, intellectuals, etc. -each responded to particular symptoms most relevant to its own concerns within that

Feminist Studies 14, no. 1 (Spring 1988). ? 1988 by Feminist Studies, Inc.

11

12 Leslie Wahl Rabine

complex crisis. The result has been cross-pollinations between the concerned groups and also illusory similarities that hide conflicts. Here, I have chosen to focus not on the incompatibility but on some of the cross-pollinations in the hope that they can be fertile for feminism-as well as for deconstruction.4

HISTORICAL CONTEXT For French intellectuals, some symptoms of this general crisis were the Hungarian revolt of 1956, Nikita Khrushchev's critique of Stalin the same year, the Algerian war of independence, the U.S. war in Vietnam, the Czechoslovakian revolt of 1968, and May 1968. Profoundly shaken in their certainty of being able to know truth and understand history, French intellectuals of the Left began to call into question not only liberalism and Marxism, as it was then conceived, but also the very structures underlying and producing Western thought. They sought to distance themselves from the structure of their thought by, as Jacques Derrida said, thinking "the structurality of structure,"5 by questioning as ideologically determined not just thoughts themselves but also the operations that produce thoughts. The structures of Conscious- ness, Identity, Reason, and Logic were all subjected to an analytic light that showed them to be Western sociohistoric constructions, appearing universal and natural through ideological imposition, and all serving the political ends of Western and bourgeois mastery.

This massive critique and deepening of our understanding of ideology begins with the structuralist movement, inspired by the structural anthropology of Claude Lvi-Strauss and through him by the linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure.6 Culture and society were conceived of as closed systems of interrelationships modeled on systems of language. In a 1971 talk, "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences," Derrida connects the leading role of Levi-Strauss's anthropology in this critique to the historical crisis in Western culture: "One can assume that ethnol- ogy could have been born as a science only at the moment when a decentering had come about, at the moment when European culture..,. had been dislocated..,. and forced to stop considering itself as the culture of reference."' But Derrida also marked the

Leslie Wahl Rabine 13

need to go beyond structuralism, which was lending itself to a conservative formalism.

Former structuralists hastened to call themselves poststructuralists and developed a host of theories that have had ambiguous effects, both revolutionizing the humanities and also strengthen- ing conservative departments of literature. These theories in- cluded, along with Derridean deconstruction, the Marxology of Louis Althusser, the semiotics of Roland Barthes and Julia Kristeva, the historiography of Michel Foucault, and the psychoanalysis of Jacques Lacan.8 These writers criticized structuralism for presenting structure as a totality and focused instead on what structures exclude in order to institute themselves as fictive totalities, as organized, coherent, homogeneous, logical systems.

Some feminist critics adopted poststructuralist theories to analyze a culture that, since Plato and the Old Testament through contemporary literature, has made woman (both the concept woman and social women) the receptacle of Unreason, the Irra- tional, the Chaotic, the Improper, and the Unclean that structure has to exclude in order to institute itself.9 If woman is the necessary exclusion that allows the structure to function, then the structure's center, which functions, according to Derrida, "to orient, balance, and organize the structure" and to "limit the play of the structure," is masculine, "God, man, and so forth.

... ."o

Although in "Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences," Derrida did not yet explicitly point out the masculinity of the center, nor discuss its significance, women theorists in France like Hel6ne Cixous, Luce Irigaray, Sarah Kofman, and Julia Kristeva,1x began to make it a foundation of feminist theories.

The notion that in Western culture, structures are inherently masculine and repressive of what French poststructuralists call "the feminine" can deepen immeasurably the examination and critique of what U.S. feminists call patriarchal ideology. By analyz- ing the symbolic structures of literary and philosophical texts, critics like Luce Irigaray and Sarah Kofman in France, or Jane Gallop12 in the United States, have been able to show how the very structures of "consciousness," of the "self," and of "identity," are historically produced to further masculine mastery and appear universal and total only through ideological exclusion of that which does not fit their coherence.

But the historical convergence between feminism and decon-


struction rests on an incompatibility between philosophers and members of a social movement dedicated to eradicating oppression through collective political action. The philosophical work of getting to the bottom of unjust power relations involves the desire to think outside the structures of thought and consciousness we have inherited. But because outside these structures there is no thought and no signifying language, the very thinking that deconstructs them must also inevitably reconstruct them, so that they "must continually, interminably be undone."13 Although this notion of the bottomless intellectual dismantling of oppressive structures can stulltify political action, it does suggest that the contradiction between feminism and deconstruction is also a contradiction internal to feminism itself. The women's movement con- fronts the double and circular necessity of developing a deep, long-term critique of structures that produce patriarchal injustice, while at the same time battling in an immediate way against the products of this injustice.14 This contradiction is really a vicious circle. On the one hand women's need to get to the bottom of phallocentric structures can lead to the endless deconstructing/re- constructing strategy that prevents action. On the other hand, patriarchal injustice produces and reproduces itself through the workings of phallocentric structure, so that the actions we take within sociopolitical and psychological structures toward making immediate and necessary reforms ultimately strengthen the very structures we need to dismantle. Because deconstruction could deepen our understanding of this circle, I will return to it after discussing some concepts.

THE DECONSTRUCTIVE CRITIQUE OF STRUCTURE

Deriving his critique of centered structure from Friedrich Nietzsche's critique of the concept of Truth and from Martin Heidegger's critique of Being in Western philosophy, Jacques Der- rida shows that metaphysical structure, centered on the notion of a firmly grounded Being as Presence ("God, man, etc."), consistently organizes thought into bipolar, hierarchical oppositions. All these oppositions-of which center and margin, speech and writing, truth and fiction, inside and outside, spirit and matter, man and woman provide privileged examples - are structured so


that the first term appears as primary, originary, full, complete, ex- cercising mastery over the second. The so-called second term appears as derived from the first, inferior to it, inescapably depen- dent upon it for its being. A pale imitation and reflection of the superior first term, it also threatens to adulterate the first term's purity. Organizing our language, thought, and social order, this structure also determines, according to deconstruction, all relations as political power relations. To illustrate this, we can substitute for Derrida's philosophical examples, based on the workings of language, the example of Adam and Eve in the Old Testament, where Adam the male is created first and complete. Eve, derived from his rib, is essentially relative to him, a supplement, a corrupt and corrupting version of him, and so necessarily under his rule.

Feminists unfamiliar with deconstruction and the philosophical or literary texts it analyzes can perhaps better fathom it if the concepts man and woman-as they operate not only in philosophy, literature, and the Old Testament, but also in ideology-are sub- stituted for other oppositions, principally concerning language, literature, and logic, that Derrida discusses. In De la Gram- matologie, Derrida shows that philosophical metaphysics is founded by the opposition between speech and writing, where speech appears as originary, its meaning fully present in it, and expressing the presence and mastery of the speaker. Writing appears a mere transcription or image of speech, an inferior imitation, corrupted by the absence of full meaning and of the speaker. Because Western philosophy, from Plato on, associates the full word of truth with Reason as Logos, De la Grammatologie refers to this desire to place speech before writing and to attain a "transcenden- tal signified" or "full word," as "logocentrism."5s And, because one substitute for the Logos is the phallus as center of our symbolic order, Derrida analyzes this structure as "phallogocentrism" in "Le Facteur de la Verite."16

Deconstruction, in thinking the "structurality of structure" beyond this fictive organization, operates a two-step process. The first step, overturning the opposition, shows the so-called secondary, derived term (e.g., writing) as actually constituting the apparently primary term (e.g., speech), and so, for example, shows "writing itself as the origin of language." The second step displaces the whole hierarchical system. This does not mean that writing in


a literal sense precedes speech but that the qualities of writing, like silence, punctuation, spacing, or the "regulated play" of presence and absence between the signifiers making up a language, inhabit speech from the beginning.17 Or, to give another example, the myth of Adam and Eve rests on the larger myth of an originary, self-sufficient Father, who in one stroke originates the human race, in order to repress the mother with her role in the process of gestation and birth, as well as Mother Goddess religions.18 One could show that patriarchal, monotheistic religion, with its notion of instantaneous, masterful, masculine creation, is inserted as a moment of a larger history that takes the form of "maternal" process.

Although Derrida's deconstruction of the man/woman oppositions, in such works as "The Double Session," Glas, or Spurs: Nietzsche's Styles have tended to absorb the feminine into a reuniversalizing of the male subject,19 women theorists have been influenced by his philosophy to deconstruct gender in a more feminist way. In these three Derridean essays, the feminine or woman comes into play but serves to make the male hero (Paul Margueritte in "The Double Session," Jean Genet in Glas, and Friedrich Nietzsche in Spurs: Nietzsche's Styles) bisexual or multi- sexual, in a move that continues to exclude and marginalize women. In contrast, Sarah Kofman, who sees the masculine/feminine. opposition as the "best paradigm" for metaphysical opposition in general, connects the feminine to women as actors in the deconstructive drama. She emphasizes the "essential virility of the metaphysical logos" in contrast to the link between woman and writing: '"Writing, a form of disruption of presence, is, like woman, always degraded, lowered to the last place."20 Similarly, He61ne Cixous's notion of "6criture feminine," as a writing that subverts the phallocentric structure of meaning by turning it against itself, owes much to deconstruction.21

Instead of reading these authors, however, to explore the relation of feminism to deconstruction, I will instead refer to the work of Nancy Chodorow. Her theory, which many of us have been using for years to analyze literature, psychology, and social issues, already contains the seeds of a deconstructive critique and analysis. My examination of the implicit deconstructive notions in Chodorow's work suggests a double conclusion. It suggests, on the one hand, that certain deconstructive concepts and strategies might lead us to new and deeper insights in feminist analysis. It


also, on the other hand, raises questions about our academic and intellectual institutions, in which deconstruction and other male poststructuralist theories receive general credit and recognition for discoveries when parallel discoveries, developed in feminist theory, but couched in a different code and, more pertinently, written by women, go unnoticed and unknown. Neither of these conclusions precludes the other.

Chodorow sees gender identity as "neither a product of biology nor of intentional role training"22 but of asymmetrical parental bonding. Girls and boys achieve different structures of personal and sexual identity, because in our social order, girls bond with the same-sex parent, whereas boys bond with a different sex parent. To achieve his personal and sexual identity, the boy must radically break his primary identification with his mother and achieve secondary identification with the father as a distant, in- tellectualized representative of the masculine role. Girls, on the other hand, break the primary bond with the mother late and in- completely. Their adult identification with the mother is continuous with their infantile primary identification and is also based on day-to-day intimate contact with the female parent.

As a result of these different processes, men achieve an ego structure that defines itself "as more separate and distinct, with a greater sense of rigid ego boundaries." Women, on the other hand, achieve a structure of the self with "more flexible or permeable ego boundaries" and define themselves "more in relation to others."23 This differential structure of the self permeates gender difference, determining that women and men will have different ways of relating to themselves, to others, and to the outside world.

To achieve the difficult "sense of secure masculine identity," the boy "represses those qualities he takes to be feminine inside himself and rejects and devalues women and whatever he con- siders to be feminine in the social world."z4 His ego thus defines itself not only by solid, impermeable boundaries but also by an in- ner content of homogeneity, an affirmation of Oneness, a fear of invading difference. In contrast, the woman's relational ego leads her to define her identity in relation to others or, in other words, in relation to what she is not. Because her ego is also more permeable to her own pre-Oedipal attachment to her mother and her Oedipal oscillation between mother and father, it also tends her toward a more accepting relation to her own bisexuality. Thus, masculine


identity strongly protects and emphasizes its self-identity and self- presence and fears losing an essential oneness, whereas women's "identity" is not really one, not really self-identical, but seeks fulfillment through the loss of an essential oneness.

Chodorow's description of the male self as outlined here re- sembles what poststructuralists (deconstructionists but more so Lacanian psychoanalysts)25 call the "phallocentric subject," structured to find the centered structure of metaphysical opposition its natural habitat. Through Chodorow's model we can follow Der- rida's critique of hierarchical oppositions to his critique of presence, unity, and identity.

Hierarchical opposition follows from the phallocentric subject's need to protect its unitary oneness, its pure self-identity and self- presence. Threatening difference within itself is projected outside onto a denigrated other, perceived as inferior. Thus, Derrida says of speech that "a force in the form of writing inferior to speech and essential to it has been contained outside speech."26 In the case of gender opposition, we can say that men repress the internal difference and bisexuality that threatens their self-identity and project it outside onto women. The male subject's imaginary status as a unified and total One demands strong ego boundaries that estab- lish not only the opposition between masculine and feminine but also between inside and outside. "The opposition of inside and outside," says Kofman, "is constitutive of the logic of identity, of logic itself,"27 on which rests phallocentrism, as well as patriarchy. This logic makes the phallocentric subject find all difference threatening, and he represses not only internal difference but also the other as qualitatively different from himself. In other words, he can see woman as quantitatively different, as an inferior or lesser man, but not as having a qualitatively different form of development, psychic structure, and relation to the world. The philosophy, literature, and ideology of phallocentric culture repress woman as different -qualitatively different from man, as well as different within herself-and transforms her into someone identical. Paradoxically, she is identical yet inferior, because lacking independent existence, she mirrors the autonomous male self. From Plato to modern thinkers like Lawrence Kohlberg,28 woman exists only as a reflection of man.

Phallogocentrism requires the repression not only of sexual difference but of cultural difference as well. As a result, our legal


ideology conceives equality for Afro-Americans and Latinos only if they mirror Anglo culture. Political ideology cannot imagine that people of Third World nations could reject the "American way of life" and choose to live according to their own definitions of freedom and independence or even that Third World feminists would choose to define feminism differently from and even in conflict with Anglo-American feminism. Ideology thinks of equality only in terms of sameness. That women can be different from and still socially equal to men remains unsymbolizable within a phallogocentric symbolic order.

DECONSTRUCTING METAPHYSICAL STRUCTURE Chodorow's analysis of gender can offer a path into one of the key concepts of deconstruction-that of diff~rance. Because metaphysical structure produces thought, language, and all symbolic activity, it cannot, according to Derrida, simply be transcended. But one can continuously undermine bipolar oppositions by ac- tivating the play of what Derrida has named diffdrance invisibly at work in them.

Diff~rance is not simply a synonym of "difference," although this word enters into its multiple meanings. A noun composed from the French verb "diff~rer," which means both to differ and to defer, diffprance means literally a "differing" in space and a "defer- ring" in time. A word that hovers between a noun form and a verb form, between a spatial and a temporal reference, it signifies a productive energy and force that produces and continues to work invisibly within the apparently stable and self-identical entities at each pole of an opposition. By this process, each apparently self- identical entity differs from itself within itself and continuously puts off, or defers, the plenitude of its self-presence. A further elaboration of this concept can be clarified with reference to Chodorow's theory of gender development.

The masculine ego structure emerges as a seemingly unified entity, according to Chodorow, through a rejection of internal and external femininity. It emerges as the boy moves to secondary identification with the father from primary identification with the mother. But within the relation of primary identification, the little boy has no consciousness of self and other, so that neither identity, identification with an other, nor the feminine exists for him.


Therefore, when he enters the stage of secondary identification and represses the feminine, this feminine is different from the feminine of the primary identification. The first is an immediate bodily presence with which he is fused; the second is an intellectual construct. But-and this is where the concept of diff~rance begins to come into play-it is only this second instance of the feminine that brings the first instance into being and gives it meaning, because at the time of his fusion with the first instance of the feminine, it had neither existence nor meaning for him. It gains its existence for him retrospectively, by a temporality which Derrida calls, in other contexts, an "originary repetition."29 Thus, the feminine he rejects and represses to form his identity is neither the feminine as immediate bodily presence nor the feminine as intellectual construct but the difference, in space and in time, between them.

His masculinity is not a pure essence but originates through the exclusion of this feminine diffprance. Furthermore, the repression of the feminine that founds his masculinity is not an isolated event but an ongoing and continuous process. In other words, his apparently stable, self-identical ego rests not on a solid foundation but on this unstable process. And, as Julia Kristeva has shown, this process does periodically stop, giving way not to stability but to an eruption of feminine diffprance, in the form of his own unconscious drives, into the ego, momentarily dissolving its boundaries.30 An apparently stable entity, enclosed in solid boundaries, the ego really lives only as an alternation between (or a difference between) the process of repression and the eruption of its other, its not-self into itself. In other words, it exists as a seemingly self- present entity only through a process that in multiple ways defers its self-presence. Self-presence would be the death of the self.

Not an essence with its own content, masculinity depends fun- damentally on feminine difference. But what about femininity? Again, implicit in Chodorow's theory, one can find the notion that in our present gender system, femininity is not an essence in opposition to masculinity. Feminine identity structures itself through a later and incomplete repression of primary identification with the mother-in other words, through a more muted and diffuse form of the masculine process that incorporates a greater acceptance of feminine diffjrance. Thus, masculinity and femininity are not opposed essences but differences created by spacing on a con-


tinuum. Moreover, Chodorow shows that women repress less their Oedipal "bisexual oscillation."1

All these ways of seeing diffprance working within gender opposition could lead, if not to a deconstruction, at least to a rethink- ing of the opposition between two feminist theories of gender. One theory seeks the development and recognition of a feminine essence; the other seeks to overcome gender in favor of some kind of androgyny.32 Both of these positions rest theoretically on the metaphysical structure of gender opposition, and both would be changed by taking into account the idea that, in our present gender system, masculine and feminine are already produced by a more originary bisexuality. The "two" of sexual difference actually precedes the "one" of each gender. This theoretical change would require an analysis of how our gender system is structured to hide this diff~rance at work within it and to present gender as a set of opposed homogeneous entities, so that even Chodorow explicitly conceives of gender as a bipolar opposition to be resolved by equality-as-sameness, even though her theory implicitly contradicts this view.33

Implicitly, Chodorow's theory complicates the notion of a masculine essence opposed to a pure feminine essence in at least three ways. First, both masculinity and femininity as entities or iden- tities are produced by a more originary play of masculine/feminine difference within both men and women. Second, for both genders within our gender system, gender identity continues to exist after its production only because each gender partakes of the other gender. Third, the two different interplays between masculinity and femininity that produce each gender are not opposed to each other but asymmetrically different.

These three elements of gender difference correspond to three elements of diffprance in general. First, diff~rance, as an originary duality that precedes any unity, is a productive energy that brings into being any seemingly unified entity and belies the illusion of a unitary origin in the developmental history of any phenomenon. Diffirance, says Derrida, is not "derived from an original plenitude."34 There is no first, originary term. Second, the terms of a binary opposition are not, as Andrew Parker says, "fully homogeneous, identical to themselves in their antithesis."35 They have no fixed content but gain their content from their diacritical relation, in which each term exists only through what makes it dif-


fer from the other. Third, diff~rance works not only between terms but as a spacing within each element that sets it into movement and makes it differ from itself. This spacing as "'productive,' 'genetic,' 'practical' movement"36 paradoxically preexists the structure and produces it.

Chodorow's analysis implies that our phallocentric gender system makes woman, both as concept and as a real person, into the locus of the diffprance that man excludes. For sociological and historical reasons, the feminine self finds fulfillment in that differance, in terms of her bisexuality, in terms of defining her self by relation to an other, in terms of accepting into her ego structure its process of production. And for ideological reasons, our gender system presents man, the first term of the opposition, as the universal human subject, outside of gender, while woman appears as inherently gendered, essentially part of the couple man/woman, and marking the difference from man.

This necessity of bearing difference which contributes to woman's oppression in the social world of patriarchy becomes an advantage in the conceptual world of deconstruction. Although this theoretical privileging of the feminine ends up appropriating certain aspects of femininity isolated from the subordinate social situation of women, feminists can turn the tables. Deconstruction is interested in "using the feminine force, so to speak" in the "deconstruction of phallogocentrism"37 but generally neglects talk- ing about that which goes along with being feminine in our society: vulnerability to male violence, powerlessness, and low pay and status. But we too can incorporate into feminist theory those aspects of deconstruction we find useful and leave the rest. This selectivity is necessary because, even if we can deconstruct gender oppositions theoretically, we must still live within structures of social and political opposition.

And so the question still remains, Can deconstruction help feminists not only in deepening our critique of patriarchal ideology but also in forging strategies for action? To explore this question, I will turn from a focus on the concept of hierarchical opposition to the concept of the center that organizes structure, and from Nancy Chodorow's book to Zillah Eisenstein's essay. But in order to read a deconstructive political strategy through Eisen- stein's work, I need first to introduce it by a Marxist text to which, although written after her essay, Eisenstein's essay could have been a response.


THE CENTERED STRUCTURE OF PERRY ANDERSON'S MARXISM

Perry Anderson's In the Tracks of Historical Materialism demon- strates certain areas of affinity between feminism and deconstruction by its resistance to both. His negative critique of poststructuralism doubly marginalizes feminism. First, in a gesture shared by other male theorists,38 Anderson rigorously excludes feminism (and feminist authors) from his examination of the relation between Marxism and contemporary critical theory. He then mentions feminism in the conclusion and in a supplementary "Postscript," within a list of topics that lie "largely outside the ambit of socialist discussion proper," and asks: "Could this struggle against sexual domination ever provide the main impetus for a wider human liberation?. .. The answer is plainly no." He con- cludes that "only the modern 'collective laborer,' the workers ... of any industrial society ... can furnish the central contingents of an organized army... ." The center, which organizes the unity, totality, and solid closures not only of the working class but also of Anderson's theory-and his subjectivity-is what he seeks to protect from feminism: "Women do not possess either the same posi- tional unity or totalized adversary .... Their forces are generally more molecular and dispersed, the point of concentration of their effort as liable to be a particular partner as a general gender. There is never any overall centralization of the structures of women's oppression: and this diffusion of it critically weakens the possibility of unitary insurgence against it."39

Anderson's version of Marxism is very different from that found in poststructuralist writings like Michael Ryan's Marxism and De- construction: A Critical Articulation40 and from Zillah Eisenstein's feminist Marxism. A deconstructive critique would have predicted that Anderson's marginalizing of feminist struggle as secondary to class struggle flows from the notion of working-class structure as having "central contingents" and a "totalized adversary." The elements of center, unity, and totality are precisely those that organize any structure into hierarchical oppositions-in this case, class versus sex and "main impetus" versus supplementary impetus. The center acts to organize the structure into "decidable poles" and "independent, irreversible terms."4'

To protect the systematicity of Marxism from the feminist threat to dissolve it, Anderson calls upon a self-present, fixed center to


the social structure and makes feminism into a supplement, marginal to both the social system he envisions and the closed system he sets up in his book. This opposition between center and supplement can be deconstructed through the concept of "supplementarity," one of Derrida's many variants of diff6rance. Taking his definition from the authoritative Dictionnaire LittrU, Derrida defines the supplement as both an excess added to an already existing plenitude and as something added to make up for ("supplier") a lack. In De la Grammatologie and elsewhere, he analyzes the use of this contradictory meaning in literature and philosophy. The centered structure seems an essential totality, while the supplement seems exterior, an inessential addition but also a needed completion or replacement for what is lacking in the whole. Yet, according to Derrida, this irresolvable contradiction arises because in order to become a totalized, centered unity, a structure must project into an exterior "supplement" that which would disturb its purity. Because its fictive totality is founded on a lack, and because its "supplement" is really interior to it, supplement is both a necessity and a threat to structure. Thus, just as Anderson's male Marxism protects the identity of the working class by ejecting outside it a struggle against sexual domination, which is also internal to it, the masculine ego analyzed by Chodorow protects its identity by ejecting the feminine to its exterior and oppressing it.

Derrida's notion that structure really works as a network of supplements without center owes much to Ferdinand de Saussure's theory of language as a system of signs, where each sign exists only in relation to all other signs: "Its [the sign's] content is really determined only by the concurrence of that which exists outside of it."42 Each sign must refer to another in a network of diacritical relations, in order to express meaning. A sign's meaning is never wholly present in itself. As another example, the gendered subject, masculine or feminine, can only exist by incorporating the in- terplay of the other gender. It is the interaction between supplements that produces structure and the effect of a center. Like the feminine self analyzed by Chodorow, who needs a relation with an other in order to be a self, supplementarity is what Ryan calls "the differential relation to an other which is necessary for the constitution of a proper thing or present moment."43

Socialist feminists have responded to their marginalization by


male Marxism by trying to show the integral and essential role of sexual oppression and sexual struggle within this centered structure. But we could instead adopt a strategy, adapted from deconstruction's notion of the supplement, demonstrating that what Anderson decries as the lack of "centralization of the structures of women's oppression," the "diffusion" of feminist oppression, and the impossibility of "unitary insurgence"-in short, the supplementarity of feminism - is actually its strength in relation to male Marxism.

This is what Eisenstein's essay implicitly does. She does not say that women's oppression is central to the social structure, but she does show that it is precisely through this lack of unity, totality, and centralization that feminism could most deeply challenge and threaten our social order. Eisenstein's analysis of social structure from a woman's point of view dissolves the Marxist categories sep- arating commodity production from domesticity and putting commodity production at the center of capitalism. Because "women are implicated on both sides of these dichotomies," the struggle for control over production refers both to industrial production and the family, but the two could not be put into a hierarchical opposition, "where dichotomy wins out over complexity."44 In order to gain freedom and control over private and domestic life, women would need to gain more control over commodity production and vice versa. The two struggles are in a constant state of exchange and mutual ramification with each other. Issues raised in one area of struggle constantly refer to the other area. No single, central struggle against a totalized adversary could by itself overturn the old order and cause a dialectical transformation into a new one.

Drawing out the implications of Eisenstein's analysis of feminine struggle as layered, branched, without primary and secondary contradictions, but also without a stable inside and outside, one could also show that women must engage in a multitude of struggles that conflict with each other. On the one hand, women ally with men in national liberation, union, or peace movements, but within those movements they engage in feminist struggles where their male allies are at the same time their enemies. On the other hand, women of different races and nationalities ally with each other in feminist movements, but at the same time engage in struggles for racial justice or national liberation where white feminists or feminists from imperialist countries can be the enemy. Adver-


saries are untotalizable not only because they are diffused but because an ally in struggle X can also represent the patriarchal, racist, or imperialist power in struggle Y internal to or contiguous with struggle X. In other words, as ally or adversary, any individual or group is internally different. This is because the social order functions not as a unified structure centered around a primary contradiction but as a tissue of interwoven contradictions, each of which supplements and contradicts the others. Feminism, as a self-identical, unified entity, does not exist, nor does any feminist exist as a self-identical individual.

FEMINIST STRATEGY Drawing on deconstruction for feminist strategy, however, would require, I think, modifying it quite a bit. In order to undermine metaphysics and bring into play diffirance, Derrida and other deconstructionists engage in a strategy guided by "indeterminacy" or "undecidability." This strategy of textual reading and writing evades the "metaphysical nature of taking a yes-or-no position," by writing itself into an "abyss" where "substitution games are multi- plied ad infinitum."45 But the women's movement has no choice but to take yes-or-no positions on specific issues and to communicate them as unambiguously as possible. Yet we could adapt to the taking of those positions a modified version of deconstructive strategy.

Once again, this version can already be found implicit in existing feminist texts. In reading Minnie Bruce Pratt's "Identity: Skin, Blood, Heart," in Yours in Struggle: Three Feminist Perspectives on Anti-Semitism and Racism,46 Biddy Martin and Chandra Talpade Mohanty find a feminism "without claim to wholeness or finality." But, the writers point out, instead of "an insistence on 'indeterminacy' which . . . denies the critic's own situatedness in the social," Pratt adopts a narrative that "forces her to reanchor herself repeatedly in each of the positions from which she speaks, even as she works to expose the illusory coherence of those positions."47 Although it is necessary for feminists to take positions, every position can be analyzed as lacking a full truth or a fully correct politics.

Over the past several years we have debated positions on many


issues, so that they now fall into familiar patterns of opposition. Should women celebrate a marginal discourse, a woman's language, or should we take over the existing language and make it express our own experience? Should women become adept at playing the male political game in the dominant political arena, or should we build our own specifically feminine culture? Should we form separate women's studies departments or feminize the general curriculum? Should feminist intellectuals claim our place within the humanist tradition, or should we adopt poststructuralist critiques of humanism?

The list of examples could go on indefinitely, but they tend to fall into the general opposition of integration versus separatism, which itself rests on the opposition inside/outside, an opposition which both Chodorow's analysis of gendered subjectivity and Eisenstein's analysis of sexual struggle implicitly but radically call into question. Over the past several years, feminists have found, when we have attempted to put these positions into practice, that each one is somehow unsatisfactory and incomplete. Yet no syn- thesis between the positions can form a complete and total answer, because they also exclude and threaten each other. Even together, they lack a complete solution, a totally accurate repre- sentation of the political situation, not because we haven't formulated the right position but because the nature of the sociopolitical order as an interwoven tissue of conjoining and conflicting contradictions, as a tissue of supplementarity and differance, cannot be represented by stable positions.

If, as Chodorow has shown, the feminine self has no unified identity, then neither do feminist positions. Following the model set up by Pratt, a feminist strategy could think the relation between these positions, not in terms of a stable opposition but in terms of an oscillation between several positions, in which the necessity of adopting a position in a given situation would include simultaneously calling it into question.

According to a deconstructive critique, every position that con- tests or challenges our sociosymbolic order must do so incom- pletely because it must be formulated in the very language and logic of the order it wishes to overturn. Derrida has said that "we have no language-no syntax and no lexicon which is foreign to this history [of metaphysics]; we can pronounce not a single destructive proposition which has not already had to slip into the


form, the logic, and the implicit postulations of precisely what it seeks to contest." Yet on the other hand, "we cannot give up this metaphysical complicity without also giving up the critique we are directing against this complicity."48

This paradox applies to feminists perhaps even more than to a deconstructive philosopher, because we must not only write but also act within the metaphysical logic of patriarchy in order to dismantle it. Effective action for social change requires, for example, claiming to oppose lies with truth in political situations. It also requires complicity with the very patriarchal structures that must be dismantled for equality to be even possible. Women have to be ac- tive in electoral campaigns, political parties, legislative bodies, and universities. But without adapting a deconstructive strategy to the task of calling into question these activities even as we perform them, the very activities necessary for equal rights are guaranteed, in spite of immediate, specific victories, to plunge women deeper in structures of inequality.

But, by the same token, a wholehearted, unquestioning adher- ence to deconstruction can have the same harmful effect. If feminists have an undecidable relation to every position, if every male philosophy has a contradictory relation to feminism, then deconstruction is no exception. Just as the poststructuralist concepts "woman" and "the feminine" oscillate between empowering real women and excluding them even further by substituting a male- defined concept for them, strategies based on diffdrance and supplementarity can both help and hinder feminism. If the metaphysical oppositions and the imposing of a single phallocentric truth can be oppressive, the bringing into play of bottomless deconstructive strategies can in certain situations be equally so. The deconstruction of metaphysical oppositions always takes place in a context of social hierarchy where speaker and listener, writer and reader, are placed in power relations with each other, no matter what the content of the text. Whether this play is progressive depends on who does it to whom, what is its historic or institutional context, and who makes the rules.


NOTES

1. Nancy Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978). 2. Zillah Eisenstein, "Developing a Theory of Capitalist Patriarchy and Socialist Feminism," in Capitalist Patriarchy and the Case for Socialist Feminism, ed. Zillah Eisen- stein (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1979). 3. For a more detailed analysis, see Cary Nelson, "Men, Feminism: The Materiality of Discourse," in Men in Feminism, ed. Alice Jardine and Paul Smith (New York: Methuen, 1987), 168. For analyses of feminism's ambivalent relation to deconstruction, see Alice

Jardine, Gynesis: Configurations of Woman in Modernity (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985); Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, "Displacement and the Discourse of Woman," in Displacement: Derrida and After, ed. Mark Krupnick (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983), 169-96; and "Love Me, Love My Ombre, Elle," Diacritics 14 (Winter 1984): 19-36. 4. The hope that feminism can be fertile for male theory is viewed pessimistically by feminists who have studied male writings on the subject. See Jane Gallop's comments on Jean Baudrillard's work in "French Theory and the Seduction of Feminism," esp. p. 115: "It is usually felt that [French theory] has much or all to teach us about [feminism], whereas [feminism] has little or nothing to teach us about [French theory]" (brackets in original); and Elaine Showalter's reply to Terry Eagleton in "Elaine Showalter Replies," 15, both in Men in Feminism. 5. Jacques Derrida, "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences," in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 278-94. Derrida has consistently associated himself with the French Left, and deconstruction has in general been seen as a subversive strategy. 6. See Claude Levi-Strauss, The Elementary Structures of Kinship, trans. Harle Bell, John Richard von Sturmer, and Rodney Needham (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), and Struc- tural Anthropology, trans. Claire Jacobson and Brooke Grundfest Schoepf (New York: Basic Books, 1963); and Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, trans. Wade Baskin (New York: Philosophical Library, 1956). 7. Derrida, "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences," 282. 8. Louis Althusser, For Marx, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Pantheon Press, 1969); Louis Althusser and Etienne Balibar, Reading Capital, trans. Ben Brewster (London: Ver- so, 1979); Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill & Wang, 1975), and S/Z, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill & Wang, 1974); Julia Kristeva, Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, trans. Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine, and Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), and Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Margaret Waller (New York: Columbia Univer- sity Press, 1984); Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Pantheon Press, 1977), and Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Pantheon Press, 1965); and Jacques Lacan, Ecrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977). 9. Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985); Julia Kristeva, About Chinese Women, trans. Anita Barrows (New York: Urizen Books, 1977). For the influence of poststructuralism on feminist criticism in French studies in the United States, see Naomi Schor, Breaking the Chain: Women, Theory, and French Realist Fiction (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), ix-x. 10. Derrida, "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences," 278, 280.


11. H616ne Cixous, "The Laugh of the Medusa," in New French Feminisms, ed. Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron (New York: Schocken, 1981), 345-64, and The Young First-Born (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986); Irigaray; Sarah Kofman, The Enigma of Woman (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985); and Kristeva, About Chinese Women. 12. Jane Gallop, The Daughter's Seduction: Feminism and Psychoanalysis (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982), and Reading Lacan (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985). 13. Jacques Derrida, Positions, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 25. 14. For discussions of similar issues in feminism, see Naomi Schor, "Dreaming Dissym- metry: Barthes, Foucault, and Sexual Difference" (110); and Alice Jardine and Paul Smith, "A Conversation" (250-51), both in Men in Feminism. 15. Jacques Derrida, De la Grammatologie (Paris: Minuit, 1967), 71. 16. Jacques Derrida, "Le Facteur de la Verit6," in The Post Card, trans. Alan Bass

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 473. 17. Derrida, De la Grammatologie, 64, 65-66. 18. See Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born: Motherhood As Experience and Institution (New York: Norton, 1976), 70-97; and Merlin Stone, When God Was a Woman (New York: Harcourt, Brace Jovanovich, 1978). 19. Jacques Derrida, "The Double Session," in Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 173-286, Glas, trans. John P. Levi, Jr. and Richard Rand (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press), and Spurs: Nietzsche's Styles/ Eperons: Les styles de Nietzsche, trans. Barbara Harlow (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979). 20. Sarah Kofman, Lectures de Derrida (Paris: Galil6e, 1984), 69, 26 (my translation). 21. See Cixous, "Laugh of the Medusa." 22. Chodorow, 7. 23. Ibid., 169, 93. 24. Ibid., 165, 181. 25. Lacanian psychoanalysis is, I think, of greater interest and use to feminist theory than Derridean deconstruction, and, not surprisingly, feminists have a much more in- tense relation of ambivalence and outrage to this theory. 26. Derrida, "Freud and the Scene of Writing," in Writing and Difference, 197. 27. Kofman, Lectures de Derrida, 19. 28. The psychological theories of Lawrence Kohlberg assume in this context a

paradigmatic position because of Carol Gilligan's critique, based on Nancy Chodorow's work, of his fundamental male bias. See Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice:

Psychological Theory and Women's Development (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982), 1-23. 29. Derrida, "Freud and the Scene of Writing," in Writing and Difference, 197. 30. Julia Kristeva, The Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 1-16, and Revolution in Poetic Language. 31. Chodorow, 168. Sarah Kofman elaborates a psychoanalytic theory of women's

bisexuality in Enigma of Woman. 32. For a discussion of these theories of gender, see Alice Echols, "The New Feminism of Yin and Yang," in Powers of Desire: The Politics of Sexuality, ed. Ann Snitow, Christine Stansell, and Sharon Thompson (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1983), 439-59. 33. See Judy Houseman, "Mothering, the Unconscious, and Feminism," Radical America 16 (November-December 1982): 47-62. 34. Derrida, "Freud and the Scene of Writing," 203. 35. Andrew Parker, "Futures for Marxism: An Appreciation of Althusser," Diacritics 15 (Winter 1985): 63-64. 36. Derrida, Positions, 94. 37. Derrida, "Women in the Beehive: A Seminar," in Men and Feminism, 194.


38. Tania Modleski analyzes this practice whereby "man thus once again achieves universality at the expense of women," in her critique of Jonathan Culler, On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982). See Tania Modleski, "Feminism and the Power of Interpretation: Some Critical Readings," in Feminist Studies/Critical Studies, ed. Teresa de Lauretis (Bloomington: In- diana University Press, 1981), 121-38. 39. Perry Anderson, In the Tracks of Historical Materialism (London: Verso, 1983), 104, 91, 92-93, 92. 40. Michael Ryan, Marxism and Deconstruction: A Critical Articulation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984). 41. Derrida, "The Double Session," 210. 42. Ferdinand de Saussure, Cours de linguistique geindrale (Paris: Payot, 1969), 160 (my translation). 43. Ryan, 66. 44. Eisenstein, 6, 19. For a more recent socialist feminist critique of the Marxist theory of production, see Linda Nicholson, "Feminism and Marx: Integrating with the Economic," in Feminism as Critique, ed. Drucilla Cornell and Seyla Benhabib (Min- neapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 16-30. 45. Derrida, Positions, 104, "Double Session" 265, 268. 46. Elly Bulkin, Minnie Bruce Pratt, and Barbara Smith, Yours in Struggle: Three Feminist Perspectives on Anti-Semitism and Racism (New York: Long Haul Press, 1984). 47. Biddy Martin and Chandra Talpade Mohanty, "Feminist Politics: What's Home Got to Do with It?" in Feminist Studies/Critical Studies, 194. 48. Derrida, "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences," 280-281.


38. Tania Modleski analyzes this practice whereby 'man thus once again achieves universality at the expense of women," in her critique of Jonathan Culler, On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982). See Tania Modleski, 'Feminism and the Power of Interpretation: Some Critical Readings," in Feminist Studies/Critical Studies, ed. Teresa de Lauretis (Bloomington: In- diana University Press, 1981), 121-38. 39. Perry Anderson, In the Tracks of Historical Materialism (London: Verso, 1983), 104, 91, 92-93, 92. 40. Michael Ryan, Marxism and Deconstruction: A Critical Articulation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984). 41. Derrida, "The Double Session," 210. 42. Ferdinand de Saussure, Cours de linguistique gin6rale (Paris: Payot, 1969), 160 (my translation). 43. Ryan, 66. 44. Eisenstein, 6, 19. For a more recent socialist feminist critique of the Marxist theory of production, see Linda Nicholson, 'Feminism and Marx: Integrating with the Economic," in Feminism as Critique, ed. Drucilla Cornell and Seyla Benhabib (Min- neapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 16-30. 45. Derrida, Positions, 104, 'Double Session" 265, 268. 46. Elly Bulkin, Minnie Bruce Pratt, and Barbara Smith, Yours in Struggle: Three Feminist Perspectives on Anti-Semitism and Racism (New York: Long Haul Press, 1984). 47. Biddy Martin and Chandra Talpade Mohanty, 'Feminist Politics: What's Home Got to Do with It?" in Feminist Studies/Critical Studies, 194. 48. Derrida, "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences, 280-281.

feminist non identity

Documents