Brief summary of Derrida’s essayCritique on the basis of its failure to include feminism

Feminist psychoanalysis offers a deeper analysis of the monolingualism of the otherWhy? Because she has been historically situated to the lesser position; in Irigaray,

she reads the half-fishLanguage is an inherently masculine figureThe masculinity of language denies women participation, and with it her proper subjectivity

The two tricks playedUltimate alienation

Though Derrida’s monolingualism is an objective subjectivity, and so he must speak from his experience as a Franco-Algerian, his silence on the negative other of the gender binary cannot be justified by his subjectivity (in some ways, it’s made worse; re: two of his notes to the writing); in many ways, the woman, speaking most wholly in a language not her own, one in battle with her inherent human power to create, could, hopefully, or at least, if only still, provide a more informed voice to his questions at the start of the bookDerrida offers no solution to his monolingualism, for it is not as if he’s speaking about a foreign language (language is inherently faulty); in many ways, there is not anything that can be done immediately in the ways of ridding language of its sexualizing subversion, but to take a hint from Derrida’s essay on différance: we could perhaps start with minute changes in orthography, subverting language itself to a more pronounced neutrality; by taking these steps toward language, to affirming more of its play than the rigid structure it is normally held to, we might ultimately conceive of a less patriarchal tongue; by rooting these new pronominal forms in the feminine, we might even retrace a new history (for as does gender, as it is constructed by and for language, it operates on two axioms: that as we understand today, and that of its history)

Académie Française