POLITICS OF SEPARATISM CANNOT LIBERATE WOMEN

POLITICS OF SEPARATISM CANNOT LIBERATE WOMEN

1. WOMEN NEED NOT SEPARATE THEMSELVES FROM MEN TO BE LIBERATED

Simone DeBeauvoir, French philosopher. THE SECOND SEX, 1989, p. 686.

The fact is that men are beginning to resign themselves to the new status of women; and she, not feeling condemned in advance, has begun to feel more at ease. Today the woman who works is less neglectful of her femininity than formerly, and she does not lose her sexual attractiveness.

Simone DeBeauvoir, French philosopher. THE SECOND SEX, 1989, p. 678.

Mystical fervor, like love and even narcissism, can be integrated with a life of activity and independence. But in themselves these attempts at individual salvation are bound to meet with failure: either woman puts herself into relation with an unreality: her double, or God; or she creates an unreal relation with a real being. In both cases she lacks any grasp on the world; she does not escape her subjectivity; her liberty remains frustrated. There is only one way to employ her liberty authentically, and that is to project it through positive action into human society.
3. “FEMININE” DOMAINS OR VALUES SIMPLY REINFORCE INEQUALITIES

Simone DeBeauvoir, French philosopher. THE SECOND SEX, 1989, p. 65.

In truth women have never set up female values in opposition to male values; it is man who, desirous of maintaining masculine prerogatives, has invented that divergence. Men have presumed to create a feminine domain--the kingdom of life, of immanence--only in order to lock up women therein.
THE MYSTIFICATION OF WOMEN PERPETUATES THEIR OPPRESSION
1. HOLDING UP MYSTICAL “WOMAN’S IDEALS” ENTRENCHES MALE OPPRESSION

Simone DeBeauvoir, French philosopher. THE SECOND SEX, 1989, p. 77. Condemned to play the part of the Other, woman was also condemned to hold only uncertain power slave or idol, it was never she who chose her lot. “Men make the gods; women worship them,” as Frazer has said; men indeed decide whether their supreme divinities shall be male or female; woman’s place in society is always that which men assign to her; at no time has she ever imposed her own law.

Simone DeBeauvoir, French philosopher. THE SECOND SEX, 1989, p. 75.

The devaluation of women represents a necessary stage in the history of humanity, for it is not upon her positive value but upon man’s weakness that her prestige is founded. In woman are incarnated the disturbing mysteries of nature, and man escapes her hold when he frees himself from nature.
3. THE SO-CALLED MATRIARCHAL “GODDESS” PERIOD IS A MYTH

Simone DeBeauvoir, French philosopher. THE SECOND SEX, 1989, p. 70.

But in truth that Golden Age of Woman is only a myth. To say that woman was the Other is to say that there did not exist between the sexes a reciprocal relation: Earth, Mother, Goddess--she was no fellow creature in man’s eyes; it was beyond the human realm that her power was affirmed, she was therefore outside of that realm. Society has always been male; political power has always been in the bands of men

Jacques Derrida

Jacques Derrida, the French philosopher most commonly associated with the term “Deconstruction,” calls into question much of what we take for granted about writing, reading, and philosophy. The ideas presented in his groundbreaking 1966 lecture at Johns Hopkins University, “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” shook the foundations of the Western philosophical tradition, caused an uproar, and spawned countless interpretations and criticisms. Since 1966, Derrida has published more than twenty books and now lectures in France and the U.S.⁵¹ Deconstruction has become widely influential with important ramifications for many of the ideas presented in Lincoln Douglas debates.

WHAT IS DECONSTRUCTION?

The very question “What is Deconstruction” defies answer. The point of deconstruction is that it "deconstructs itself." It is self reflexive and enigmatic. In a letter to a Japanese professor, Derrida advises a friend about translating his texts. Derrida tells his friend what deconstruction is not. Deconstruction is not analysis nor is it critique, because “the dismantling of a structure is not a regression toward a simple element, toward an indissoluble origin. These values, like that of analysis, are themselves philosophemes subject to deconstruction.”⁵² Deconstruction invites us to question whether there is a simple origin or element behind language. Deconstruction isn’t about digging up the “true meaning” of texts, philosophies, or ideas, because it questions the very idea of true meaning.

What is the relation between deconstruction and the truth? To get an idea of how the Western philosophical tradition construes the idea of truth, it is useful to examine Plato’s philosophy, specifically, his ontology. Ontology is philosophy that addresses questions of being, or what “is.” For example, for Plato, there are actual tables, and there is the form of the table. The form of the table is the idea of a table that guides us in understanding which objects are tables. This form is “table-ness:” it is what makes a table a table. For Plato, there are invisible yet underlying ideas and meanings that give structure to all words and representations. Furthermore, these invisible yet underlying forms are superior to their manifestations in the world. The ultimate forms are of beauty, truth, and the good. The ultimate life is the life spent in philosophical contemplation of the forms.
Derrida turns this conception on its head. Derrida asks whether there really is “table-ness.” There is no universal idea of a table that everyone has in mind when the word “table” is said. Some people might be thinking of their dining room table, some people might imagine a coffee table, some people might think of a nightstand. The only way to think about the form of the "table" is to contemplate particular tables. Derrida questions the idea that any words have fixed and certain meanings behind them. Anagrams, which are single words that signify multiple ideas, are an example. An English example is the word “sound” which can signify a body of water, stability, or noise.
In his book, Dissemination, Derrida gives the example of the Greek word “pharmakon.” Derrida discusses the problems of translating pharmakon, a word that can mean " 'remedy,' 'recipe,' 'poison,' 'drug,' 'philter,' etc."⁵³ Derrida describes the loss of a "malleable unity" that is inherent in translation. The word pharmakon demonstrates related yet opposing meanings all linked to the same signifier (word). This example demonstrates that words and phrases, as “signifiers” don’t neatly match up with transcendental “signified” ideas or objects. Translation involves the important choices of which meanings to include and which to exclude. The situation parallels philosophy, in that philosophers must decide what to include and exclude in the category of philosophy, for example, Plato includes logos, reason, and rationality, while excluding myth, writing, and metaphor. This is why Derrida writes, “With this problem of translation we are dealing with no less than the problem of the very passage into philosophy itself.” ⁵⁴
Just as deconstruction is not analysis nor critique, nor is it a method. Derrida is frightened that the term “method” has “technical and procedural” connotations. Deconstruction can’t be transformed into a set grouping of standards, rules, or procedures. You can’t put a text into one end of the “Deconstruction Machine” and see a deconstructed version come out the other side. Deconstruction, rather, involves a relationship between a reader and a text that is open to spontaneity and never before seen connections. Derrida fears the label “method” will have a domesticating effect on deconstruction. However, just as deconstruction is not a method, nor is it a singular “event.” It is not an “act or an operation” because these terms presuppose that a reader performs operations on a text, from a standpoint above and outside of the text.⁵⁵
Derrida uses the analogies of weaving and a game to describe the relationship between a reader and a text. Derrida writes that a text “hides from the first comer, from the first glance, the law of its composition and the rules of its game.” These laws and rules might be described as contexts or grounding. The use of the words “laws” and “rules” seems at first to be confusing way to describe grounding, in that we generally consider laws and rules to be explicit, universally known, and understood, for example, the U.S. Constitution or the Bible’s Ten Commandments. However, the laws and rules that inform a text’s content, format, and structure are not laid out. Derrida writes that they “can never be booked, in the present, into anything that could rigorously be called perception.”
These rule of a text may not be explicit, however, nor are they “secret.” Their accessibility opens the possibility for a good deconstructive reading. Derrida uses the analogy of undoing and reconstituting a web to describe any reading. The text is not the web and the reading external to it; rather, each reading is part of the web; it pays attention to certain threads in the text as well as adding its own. Derrida writes that no criticism can “master the game” and “survey all the threads at once.” Criticism is deluded when it attempts to look without touching. Derrida writes that the web will catch fingers, even if the reading attempts not to lay a hand on the “object.” Object is placed in quotation marks to indicate that the idea of a text as an “object” obscures the “(con)fusion” between a text and a reading.
This however, does not give license to bad readings and criticisms that are not attentive to the threads of a text. Derrida writes that a person who adds “any old thing” to a text is undertaking just as foolish a reading as the person who thinks she can read from an objective standpoint. This type of reading “adds nothing” because “the seam wouldn’t hold.” A good deconstructive reading, therefore, is self-aware: willing to risk the addition of a new thread while remaining attuned to the laws and rules of the text. This type of reading is "double" in that it pays attention both to the text and the reader; it reads itself.⁵⁶
Despite all of the above analysis, all of the above words about what deconstruction is and what it is not, we have not captured (and cannot capture) the full force of the term (if such a thing exists). Derrida is not satisfied with the word, "deconstruction" although it might be the least bad option. Derrida writes that deconstruction "deconstructs itself" It's reflexivity "bears the whole enigma." At the end of his letter to a Japanese friend Derrida writes, "All sentences of the type 'deconstruction is X' or 'deconstruction is not X' a priori miss the point, which is to say they are at least false."⁵⁷ This is an interesting revelation, in light of the fact that Derrida spent most of his letter constructing sentences just like that. Does his letter deconstruct itself at this point? Apparently, that is what Derrida is trying to get at. Derrida writes, "What deconstruction is not? Everything of course! What is deconstruction? Nothing of course!" ⁵⁸
Derrida concludes that deconstruction has meaning only in the context of a chain of significations, which Derrida says is the case for all words. John Caputo, in the book, Deconstruction in a Nutshell, comments about the irony of trying to fit deconstruction into a nutshell, when "the very meaning and mission of deconstruction is to show that things--texts, institutions, traditions, societies, beliefs, and practices of whatever size and sort you need--do not have definable meanings and determinable missions."⁵⁹ Nutshells are just the "least bad" way to define. As far as I can tell, the difference between a deconstructive nutshell and the traditional sort is that the deconstructors understand the trouble with nutshells.
In her essay, “Teaching Deconstructively,” Barbara Johnson writes, "Deconstruction has sometimes been seen as a terroristic belief in meaninglessness. It is commonly opposed to humanism, which is then an imperialistic belief in meaningfulness. Another way to distinguish between the two is to say that deconstruction is a reading strategy that carefully follows both the meanings and suspensions and displacements of meaning in a text, while humanism is a strategy to stop reading when the text stops saying what it ought to have said." ⁶⁰ Johnson asks the question “could we have chosen to read literally?”⁶¹. A purely humanistic, literal reading strategy is impossible. Deconstruction pays attention to the limitations inherent in any reading. It pays attention "to what a text is doing--how it means not just what it means" (141). This is not nihisitic destruction of meaning and texts, rather, it is a more careful way to attend to texts and meaning.
In response to a question at a roundtable discussion, Derrida commented that the hallmark of his work is "respect for the great texts." Deconstruction is "an analysis which tries to find out how their thinking works or does not work, to find the tensions, the contradictions, the heterogeneity within their own corpus"⁶². Deconstruction pays attention to the tension between disruption and attentiveness to a text. However, Johnson concludes, "no matter how rigorously a deconstructor might follow the letter of the text, the text will end up showing the reading process as a resistance to the letter." A certain blindness, or humanism, accompanies any reading. This, however, does not deter Johnson: "it is precisely as an apprenticeship in the repeated and inescapable oscillation between humanism and deconstruction that literature works its most rigorous and inexhaustible seductions."⁶³
Deconstruction is often a playful approach to texts. The philosophical tradition construes “play” as outside of philosophy, along with myth, "magic," and emotion. In the tradition, philosophy must take itself seriously. This is also a notion Derrida would like to call into question. His own writing is playful; it acts out. He includes plays on words, puns, creative hyphenations to call attention to the parts of words or suggest other meanings (con-text, where the prefix "con" means "with"), brackets and parentheses that suggest ambiguous readings (for example, "(t)here:" is this word here or there?), and marking out words with X's to put them "under erasure" in order to question the notion of fixed concepts.
Derrida views language and texts as always in play, and not governed by rules and structures. Powell writes, "He says we should continuously attempt to see this free play in all our language and texts--which otherwise will tend toward fixity, institutionalization, centralization, totalitarianism. For out of anxiety we always feel a need to construct new centers, to associate ourselves with them, and marginalize those who are different from their central values."⁶⁴ The philosophical tradition has always tried to turn free play into games with rules. This implication of this free play is that if you come away from this explanation of deconstruction with more questions than answers you just might be on the right track. Answers constitute mastery, understanding, and regulation that is impossible.
Another key Derridean idea/non-idea is "Différance." The term is not the same as the French word "Différence," with an "e," although the two are pronounced in the same way. The term is meant to connote both and neither a deferring and a differing. Like "pharmakon" it cannot be pinned down and defined. The "a" in "Différance" is meant to be disruptive, because when we see the "a" we are understanding nothing. It shakes the division between signifiers and signifieds. Différance is meant to resist this opposition between the "sensible," the words on the page, and the "intelligible," the ideal forms. Derrida explains, "Différance is not only irreducible to any ontological or theological--ontotheological--reappropriation, but as the very opening of the space in which ontotheology--philosophy--produces its system and its history, it includes ontotheology, inscribing it and exceeding it without return."⁶⁵ By this he means that différance is prior to God and metaphysics and ontology, all the systems used answer questions about how and why we exist in the world, because différance is what allows you to separate the categories of presence and absence in the world in the first place.

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