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figuration within the polarities of female evaluation. Or is this instability itself just the exemplary trope of misogyny  a trope that reminds us that punishment is not the only normative/narrative response to transgression? |
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My second exemplary text has demonstrated, then, a difficulty in patrolling the polarity of example/counter-example (as the question of what counts is opened). The hierarchical opposition of 'good woman'/'bad woman' (and attendant oppositions e.g. 'pleasing song'/'hateful song') inverts and 'discomposes'44 around the figure of Helen (and her songs . . .). This is how Derrida describes a strategic move in what he calls, with characteristic hesitation, '''deconstruction"': 'In a traditional philosophical opposition we do not have a peaceful co-existence of facing terms but a violent hierarchy. One of the terms dominates the other (axiologically, logically etc), occupies the commanding position. To deconstruct the opposition is above all, at a particular moment, to reverse the hierarchy'.45 There is a further necessary step, however: one must put into 'practice an overturning of the classical opposition and a general displacement of the system. It is only on this condition that deconstruction will provide itself the means of intervening in the field of oppositions it criticizes and which is also a field of non-discursive forces'.46 Elsewhere Derrida talks of the need 'to work through the structured genealogy of [a philosophical discourse's] concepts in the most scrupulous and immanent fashion, but at the same time to determine, from a certain external perspective that it [the philosophical discourse] cannot name or describe, what this history may have concealed or excluded, constituting itself as history through this repression in which it has a stake'.47 Derrida's treatment in De la grammatologie of speech and writing in Rousseau is the best known working through of such a set of ideas, where the privileging of speech (as presence, as direct communication) over writing (as secondary, flawed, dangerous) is shown to depend on the repression of a shared structuring of difference and deferral inherent in the signifying processes of both speech and writing: the delays, absences and gaps that are used to characterize writing in the privileging of speech are shown to be integral to speech also. This argument is also aimed at Saussure and structural linguistics: the term 'post-structuralist' is coined specifically for Derrida's work because of its challenge to the binarism of the structuralists Saussure and Lévi-Strauss (as much as their commitment to the privileging of 'voice' over 'writing' 'phonocentrism'). This challenge is |
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44 'Discompose', although awkward, seems a better translation than 'decompose', the term that Richard Howard adopts. The term is taken from Barthes (1975b) 'décomposer', (1977) 63: as Barthes says (1977) 69: 'what matters is not the discovery, in a reading of the world and of the self, of certain oppositions but of encroachments, overflows, leaks, skids, shifts, slips . . .'. |
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45 Derrida (1972) 392, translated by Culler (1983) 856. |
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46 Derrida (1982) 329. |
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47 Derrida (1981) 1516. |
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