Experiencing the Postmetaphysical Self: Between Hermeneutics and Deconstruction

Experiencing the Postmetaphysical Self Between Hermeneutics and Deconstruction Fionola Meredith Experiencing the Post...

Author: Fionola Meredith

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Experiencing the Postmetaphysical Self Between Hermeneutics and Deconstruction

Fionola Meredith

Experiencing the Postmetaphysical Self

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Experiencing the Postmetaphysical Self Between Hermeneutics and Deconstruction

Fionola Meredith

© Fionola Meredith 2005 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2005 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world. PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN 1–4039–4447–4 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Meredith, Fionola, 1973– Experiencing the postmetaphysical self : between hermeneutics and deconstruction / Fionola Meredith. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1–4039–4447–4 (cloth) 1. Feminist theory. 2. Subjectivity. 3. Experience. 4. Self. 5. Self (Philosophy) I. Title. HQ1190.M47 2004 305.4201—dc22 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 06 05 Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham and Eastbourne.

2004050539

To Aaron, Cait and Robbie

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Contents Acknowledgements

viii

Introduction: Difference Unleashed

1

1 Difference and Undecidability: Post-Saussurean Thought

5

2 Woman as Text: The Influence of Post-structuralism on Feminist Theory

41

3 The Post-structuralist Erasure of Experience

80

4 Frameworks for Experience

111

5 ‘It’s me here’: Writing the Singular Self, Writing the Postdeconstructive Female Self

157

Conclusion

197

Notes

201

Bibliography

233

Index

245

vii

Acknowledgements I am indebted to friends, family and colleagues for their encouragement during the writing of this book. In particular, Hugh Bredin and Jennifer FitzGerald provided invaluable intellectual guidance, as well as affection and support far beyond the call of duty. It is deeply appreciated. Thanks also to Sioban Harth for her long and generous friendship, and to Janice Hoadley for feminist hilarity which kept me sane. My children, Aaron and Cait, are an enduring source of wonder to me. They pop up occasionally in this book, and I thank them for the joy and inspiration they continue to provide. Thanks to Robbie Meredith, dear partner, friend and co-celebrant of many sublime Saturday nights. (Who said philosophers can’t dance?) Thanks to my parents Yvonne and Michael McCaughan, whose unwavering love and support have always sustained me. Thanks to all at Palgrave for their assistance and professionalism. I am grateful also to the British Academy for a research grant (1997–2000) which enabled me to begin the philosophical journey which has resulted in the publication of this book. Thanks are due to Routledge for permission to reproduce material from my essay ‘A Postmetaphysical Approach’ in Pamela Sue Anderson and Beverley Clack (eds.) Feminist Philosophy of Religion: Critical Readings, London and New York: Routledge, 2004, pp. 54–73.

viii

Introduction Difference Unleashed

it is a dead world [the post-structuralists] are building.1 The currency of post-structuralism is alterity. Otherness, absence, difference, lack, non-identity, misrecognition, incommensurability, discontinuity, simulacra stand in opposition to ‘bare pure being’,2 the originary presence of the self to itself. As Gianni Vattimo observes, with Heidegger ontological difference emerges as ‘the denial and de-stitution of presence, an “ungrounding” of any claim of presence to definitiveness’.3 With Saussure’s assertion of difference as the absolutely final law of language, the principle of semiological difference forms a major tributary to structuralist and neostructuralist thought: In language there are only differences … without positive terms. Whether we take the signified or the signifier, language has neither ideas nor sounds that existed before the linguistic system, but only conceptual and phonic differences that have issued from the system. Language is a form, not a substance.4 Yet with Derrida and the post-structuralists, the notion of difference becomes différance and reaches its zenith with ‘the delirious production of more and more simulacra’ and the acknowledgement that ‘every alleged immediacy is always already a duplication, the duplication of an original that is not there’.5 Moreover, with Derrida – ‘the thinker of uncancellable difference’6 – pure system becomes the celebrated antithesis to pure being, while alterity provides the very condition of

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our being-in-the-world: In the beginning was the trace … and never a presence to which the trace can be related; for the differences that structure the field of human experience originate from the start in a difference.7 The post-structuralist promotion of alterity (and denial of flesh and blood presence) manifests itself in many ways. For example, Roland Barthes remarks that ‘language knows a “subject”, not a “person” … only language acts, “performs”, and not “me” ’.8 Jacques Lacan views the human subject as a product of misrecognition, scored by absence and lack: That where it was just now, there where it nearly was, between the extinction which still glows, and this blossoming forth which comes to grief, I can come to be by disappearing from what is said by me.9 For Derrida, la vive voix [the living voice] operates as the ‘lived reduction of the opacity of the signifier’,10 the suppression of différance. It symbolises the entire history of Western metaphysics as an exclusionary continuum that privileges presence. This excision of “the lived” in favour of the negative play of différance resonates throughout a multiplicity of texts on the post-structuralist spectrum, and it forms a primary focus of my analysis. It may be argued that the post-structuralist theorists examined and critiqued in this book – Derrida, Lacan, Kristeva, Althusser and others – are yesterday’s thinkers, already dispatched to the hinterlands of philosophical discourse. Yet their influences are still strongly felt in contemporary (mis)understandings of the categories of experience and self-presence. Therefore, I believe it is essential to re-engage with the work of these theorists in order to move towards an understanding of the experiential which evades the ultra-negativity of post-structuralist thought. This book is an attempt to reconsider the categories of experience and self-presence after their erasure by post-structuralist thought. In reconsidering these categories, I maintain a conscious awareness of the difficulties involved in such an undertaking. The categories themselves are open to diverse and often contradictory interpretations. For instance, the notion of experience may be considered as either a duplicitous tool of ideology or the unquestionable and authentic source of my subjectivity, while the concept of self-presence may be regarded either as the pure and unmediated presence of the self to itself (asemic consciousness)

Difference Unleashed 3

or as an illusory function of the play of language. This book begins with a broadly based exposition and critical discussion of post-structuralist principles, using the work of Derrida and Lacan as paradigm examples. Although I offer a tightly focused critique of the post-structuralist denial of the necessity of the experiential in Chapter 3, my approach to theorising experience ‘post’ post-structuralism is not an oppositional one. Rather, I attempt a reappropriation of the category of experience in dialogue with post-structuralist thinking. Indeed, a recurrent theme of this book is the constraints that poststructuralist thinking places on the subject with a series of oppositional alternatives which I term ‘either/or’s. A significant example of such a delimiting situation is presented by Derrida’s belief that our only choice is between [either] a view of the subject as an immobile centre, a core of selfcertainty, or the acceptance that there is no subject at all, except as an ‘effect’ of the play of the text.11 [emphasis added] Therefore, in Chapter 4, I explore the phenomenological hermeneutics of Paul Ricoeur and Hans-Georg Gadamer, which provide an alternative way of thinking about subjectivity which avoids such ‘double-binds’. These thinkers, like the post-structuralists, understand language as the scene of the subject’s finitude, the most fundamental mode of realisation of the subject’s being-in-the-world. As Ricoeur notes, there is no self-understanding that is not mediated by signs, symbols and texts; in the last resort understanding coincides with the interpretation given to these mediating terms.12 Yet hermeneutics, unlike post-structuralism, privileges the living word of dialogue over the aridity of the concept of the sign. The hermeneutic approach decentres, but does not dismiss the subject. It retains a focus on the interpretive activity of a thinking subject which turns back and reflects on itself in the aim of achieving a heightened selfunderstanding.13 Moreover, language and world are mutually constitutive: not only is the world ‘world’ only insofar as it comes into language, but language, too, has its real being only in the fact that the world is re-presented within it.14

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Therefore, postmetaphysical hermeneutics appears to offer an anti-foundational approach which moves beyond both metaphysical objectivism and deconstructive relativism. Following the insight that mediated subjectivity need not mean alienated selfhood, the culmination of this book is a postmetaphysical model of the experiential based on the interpenetration of post-structuralist thinking and hermeneutic phenomenology. In this book I make special reference to the extensive influence poststructuralism has had on the field of feminist theory, colouring feminist conceptions of subjectivity, agency and power. In Chapter 2, I examine the impact of post-Saussurean thought on contemporary feminist approaches, providing an exposition and critical discussion of Julia Kristeva’s theories of subject formation by way of example. In the field of feminist literary theory, the post-Saussurean antirepresentationalist aesthetic has resulted in the attempted excision of what the feminist literary theorist Domna Stanton calls ‘the facile presumption of referentiality’15 from the analysis of women’s accounts of their lives. Therefore, in Chapter 5 I return to the need to relocate women’s lived experiences and (partial) self-presence at the core of theories of subjectivity via an analysis of feminist accounts of autobiography. I attempt a theoretical rehabilitation of the female autobiographical subject by applying the hermeneutic/deconstructive dialectical model of the experiential developed in Chapter 4 to the issue of the representation of women between the poles of textuality and referentiality. Moreover, in Chapter 5, I return to the issue of alterity through the perspective of narrative theory. Here I argue that the unique and unrepeatable identity of each ‘flesh and blood’ female existent16 must not be excluded from theories of women’s autobiography. To do so is to reduce the ‘psycho-biographical signified’ of each woman’s ‘life-withmeaning’17 to pure performance.18 I posit a constitutively sexed but ontologically incomplete ‘I’ who may be posited between textuality and referentiality, a singular self who is nonetheless traced through and through by otherness. This book advocates an understanding of lived experience, selfpresence and singularity not as the function of a transparent self, nor as an effect of wholly determinative language, but as an anticipatory and necessarily incomplete process. ‘Taking the risk’ of experience, throwing it open to the contingencies of our situated being, avoids both the stasis of post-Saussurean reductionism and the Aristotelian reification of experience as immediate presence. It affirms that ‘there is no discourse so fictional that it does not connect up with reality’.19

1 Difference and Undecidability Post-Saussurean Thought

I

After Saussure There is nowhere anything lasting, neither outside me, nor within me, but only incessant change. I nowhere know of any being, not even my own. There is no being. I myself know nothing and am nothing. There are only images: They are the only thing which exists … I myself am only one of these images: indeed, I am not even this, but only a confused image of images. All reality is transformed into a wondrous dream, without a life which is dreamed about, and without a spirit which dreams; into dream which coheres in a dream of itself.1

Post-structuralist, or post-Saussurean theory has had a vast impact on contemporary ideas of the nature of reality, language, truth, meaning, consciousness and identity and the relations between them. How can we explain the pervasiveness of this dominant school of thought which has so coloured modern understandings of the relationship between self and world? Post-Saussurean arguments are notoriously difficult to attack: they are often deliberately obscure, verbally cavorting in the ‘free play of the signifier’, so that systematic empirical observation and evaluation becomes virtually impossible. In some quarters, post-structuralism’s assertion that we are trapped in our own discourse, unable to make meaningful contact with reality, seems to have reached the status of incontrovertibility. From the most detailed anthropological description of the Kalahari bushmen to the declaration ‘I love you’; all, according to post-structuralism, fail to connect with extra-linguistic reality, amounting to no more than a chaotic play of signs. In a now infamous passage

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in Of Grammatology (1976), Jacques Derrida argues that we cannot legitimately transgress the text toward something other than it, toward a referent (a reality that is metaphysical, historical, psychobiographical etc.) or toward a signified outside the text whose content could take place … outside of language … [T]he methodological considerations that we risk applying here … are dependent on … the absence of the referent or the transcendental signified.2 As the literary critic Terry Eagleton famously remarked, this position ‘allows you to drive a coach and horses through everybody else’s beliefs while not saddling you with the inconvenience of having to adopt any yourself’,3 while the philosopher Richard Harland uses the term ‘outconsciousing’ to highlight the post-structuralist tendency to win theoretical battles by speaking from a superior level of awareness which encompasses previous conceptual frameworks.4 Moreover, any hostile anti-post-structuralist arguments can be easily dismissed as resistance to the radically new, mere ‘bleating’ by the conservative bourgeois intellectual, or the political reactionary, clinging nostalgically to notions of absolute truth, unable to cope with the suspension of definite meaning. The origins of post-structuralist thinking may be traced most directly to Ferdinand de Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics (1960). Saussure argues that words are arbitrary signs. For example, ‘fish’ does not derive its name from a spatio-temporal connection between the sound-image of its token instances (the signifier) and the concept ‘fish’ which the sound-image signifies (the signified). For Saussure, ‘the linguistic sign unites, not a thing and a name, but a concept and a sound-image’.5 Linguistic signification is not a matter of natural association between sound-image and pre-existent entity; rather, each sign in the system has meaning only insofar as it is different from all other signs. Saussure remarks that Concepts are purely differential and defined not by their positive content but negatively by their relations with the other terms of the system. Their most precise characteristic is in being what the others are not.6 Indeed, Saussure argues that difference permeates both signifier and signified: … in language there are only differences … Whether we take the signified or the signifier, language has neither ideas nor sounds that existed before the linguistic system, but only conceptual and phonic differences that have issued from the system.7

Difference and Undecidability 7

If a sign can never be based on anything except its non-coincidence with all the other signs in the system – that is, if it is a purely negative and relational entity – then the extra-linguistic reality of the signified is radically undermined. Saussure observes that ‘language is a form and not a substance’.8 From here, it is a short step to Derrida’s assertion that There is thus no phenomenality reducing the sign … so that the thing signified may be allowed to glow finally in the luminosity of its presence … The represented is always already a representamen … From the moment that there is meaning there are nothing but signs. We think only in signs.9 The dissolution of the connection between language and extra-linguistic reality is fundamental to post-structuralist thinking. Saussure’s arguments are appropriated to support the assertion that reality is differentiated only in or through language, that meaning is merely an effect of language, rather than a product of its relations to things: hence Jacques Lacan’s assertion that ‘it is the world of words that creates the world of things’10 and Derrida’s equally famous observation that ‘there is nothing outside of the text’.11 II

Derrida

Jacques Derrida is perhaps the most prolific figure in the post-structuralist sphere. Here I examine his work as a paradigm case illustrating the nature of the radical deconstructive surgery performed not only on the meaningful existence of extra-linguistic reality, but also on the unified, knowing subject. Derrida has been described as the instigator of ‘one of the most stunning adventures of modern thought’;12 his writings have been characterised as ‘imperious, pleasurable, unfathomable’,13 as ‘an affront to every normal and comfortable habit of thought’.14 The influence of Derridean deconstruction colours a vast range of contemporary literary, architectural, psychoanalytic, feminist and sociopolitical theory. Derrida’s texts are notoriously difficult, dense and resistant to interpretation, seeking as they do to reactivate lost meanings, to draw on the resources of undecidability inherent in syntax, morphology and semantics. This is a deliberate strategy on Derrida’s behalf, an attempt to expose the mimetic ‘illusion’ of the transparency of words to thoughts, and the invalidity of the knowledge constructed on this ‘naive’ belief. In this chapter I delineate the most significant strands of Derrida’s work; beyond this, I consider the broad span of

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criticisms which have been applied to Derrida’s thought, with a view to establishing viable strategies for moving beyond post-structuralist positions. Derrida’s approach to the Western tradition of thought seeks to undermine this tradition’s dependence on the ‘logic of identity’ primarily derived from Aristotle. Bertrand Russell offers the following features as a summary of this position: (i) The law of identity: ‘whatever is, is’. (ii) The law of contradiction: ‘nothing can both be and not be’. (iii) The law of excluded middle: ‘everything must either be or not be’.15 Not only do these laws of thought assume logical coherence but they also presuppose the existence of an essential reality or origin to which these laws refer. In order to maintain logical coherence, this origin must be simple (or free of contradiction), homogeneous (of the same substance or order) and present-to-itself or self-identical (conscious of itself without any gap between origin and consciousness). Derrida attempts a thorough-going critique of the Western metaphysical tradition and its basis in the law of identity through an approach called deconstruction, a provisional system, bristling with paradox and confusion, operating on the boundaries of the sayable. III

Deconstruction, structural linguistics, metaphysics

It has been argued that to present deconstruction as if it were a method, system or settled body of ideas would be to falsify its nature, to perform an act of reductive misunderstanding. Indeed, Derrida often seeks to dismantle restrictive concepts of structure which he believes immobilise the ‘play’ of meaning, thus reducing the text to a manageable state. Nonetheless, if one is to attempt a description and analysis of Derridean thought at all, it is essential at least to employ provisional definitions. Therefore, I suggest that deconstruction be regarded as a method of reading a text in such minute detail that the author’s conceptual distinctions on which the text depends are demonstrated to fail on account of the inconsistent and paradoxical use made of these very concepts within the text itself. In other words, the text is shown to ‘fail by its own criteria’,16 undermining itself from within; the definitions and standards which the text deploys are used reflexively to unsettle and dismantle the original distinctions. In A Glossary of Literary Terms (1990), M.H. Abrams


describes deconstruction as [a] theory and a practice of reading which claims to ‘subvert’ or ‘undermine’ the assumption that the system of language provides grounds that are adequate to establish the boundaries, the coherence or unity, and the determinate meanings of a text. Typically, a deconstructive reading sets out to show that conflicting forces within the text itself inevitably dissipate the seeming definiteness of its structure and meanings into an indefinite array of multiple, incompatible, and undecidable possibilities.17 In Derrida’s own words, deconstruction ‘designate[s] the crevice through which the yet unnameable glimmer beyond the closure can be glimpsed’:18 moreover, deconstruction ‘inaugurates the destruction, not the demolition but the de-sedimentation … of all the significations that have their source in the logos’.19 Derrida’s primary objective is to use deconstruction to expose the supposed confusion and inadequacy of the entire Western metaphysical tradition. Derrida labels ‘metaphysical’ any thought-system which depends on a first principle or unassailable ground upon which an allencompassing structure of meanings may be erected. If one subjects such first principles to close examination, according to Derrida, it is possible to see that they are ‘products of a particular system of meaning, rather than what props it up from outside’.20 Moreover, first principles are often defined by what they exclude. In the well-known example, masculinist society regards ‘man’ as the founding principle and ‘woman’ as the excluded inferior opposite of him. Deconstruction is a critical operation which claims to allow the theorist insight into the workings of such binary oppositions; furthermore, it seeks to demonstrate how such oppositions work to undermine each other in the process of textual meaning. For instance, man maintains his status as the subject, the absolute, the ‘I’, only by ceaselessly excluding the ‘defective’ non-man or ‘other’ that is woman, defining himself in antithesis to her. A deconstructive reading would attempt to demonstrate that man’s entire identity is invested in his opposition to ‘woman’. Moreover, man’s identity is exposed as parasitically dependent on women; it is necessary for him to exclude and subordinate her precisely because of this vulnerable dependence. Before attempting a summary of Derrida’s critique of the Western tradition, I want to elaborate on the brief exposition of deconstruction’s origins in Saussurean linguistics given in the Introduction. Derrida seeks to wrench structuralism away from its residual attachment to a Western ‘metaphysics of meaning’. He sees an inherent ‘blindness’ in Saussure’s

10 Experiencing the Postmetaphysical Self

argument, a failure to confront the problems engendered by its own mode of discourse. The critique revolves around Saussure’s attitude to the relative importance of spoken as opposed to written language; indeed, Derrida locates this dualism at the centre of the Western philosophical tradition. According to Derrida, Saussure treated writing as a merely derivative form of linguistic notation, inevitably dependent on the ‘primary reality’ of speech and the sense of a speaker’s presence behind her or his words. This privileging of speech – parole – sits uncomfortably with Saussure’s parallel commitment to the prior significance of the general system of articulate relationships from which speech-acts derive – langue. While other critics such as Roland Barthes have regarded this as a difficult but unavoidable paradox, Derrida contends that it suggests that repressed within the Saussurean text is the idea of language as a signifying system which exceeds all the limits of individual ‘presence’ and speech. Indeed, Derrida claims to observe an entire metaphysics at work behind the privilege granted to speech in Saussure’s methodology. ‘Voice’ becomes a metaphor for truth and authenticity: ‘the voice stimulates the conservation of presence … the history of spoken language is the archives of this stimulation’.21 Moreover, ‘voice’ operates as the ‘source of self-present “living” speech as opposed to the secondary, lifeless emanations of writing’.22 Speech supposedly supplies an ‘intimate link’ between sound and sense, an immediate realisation of meaning which smoothly enables absolute, transparent understanding. In contrast, writing undermines this ideal of clear self-presence. It casts a ‘deceiving shadow’ between intent and meaning, utterance and understanding. Writing poses a threat to the link between truth and selfpresence and the seemingly natural language in which it finds expression. Thus writing is systematically degraded in the Saussurean project, contends Derrida; the repression of writing is inherent in Saussure’s methodology and is reflected in his refusal to consider any form of linguistic notation outside the phonetic-alphabetic script of Western culture. Derrida describes Saussure’s apparent animus against writing in strong terms: it is less a question of outlining than of protecting, and even of restoring the internal system of the language in the purity of its concept against the gravest, most perfidious, most permanent contamination which has not ceased to menace, even corrupt that system.23 Against this ‘phonocentric’ thesis, Derrida contends (rather surprisingly) that writing is actually the precondition of language and should be


conceived as prior to speech. It is writing that is the primary manifestation of language. He argues that if ‘writing’ signifies inscription and especially the durable institution of a sign (and that is the only irreducible kernel of the concept of writing), writing in general covers the entire field of linguistic signs. In that field, a certain sort of instituted signifiers may then appear, ‘graphic’ in the narrow and derivative sense of the word, ordered by a certain relationship with other instituted – hence ‘written’ even if they are ‘phonic’ – signifiers. The very idea of institution – hence of the arbitrariness of the sign – is unthinkable before the possibility of writing and outside of its horizon.24 Writing, in Derrida’s conception, is the ‘free play’ or element of undecidability within every system of communication. Its operations escape the self-consciousness of speech and its deluded sense of the mastery of concept over language. Furthermore, Derrida argues that writing is paradoxical in nature. It embraces the endless displacement of meaning which both governs language and enables it to elude static, self-authenticating knowledge. Therefore, Derrida maintains that the apparent ‘natural bond’ between sound and sense, the guaranteed ‘self-knowledge’ of speech, is simply an illusion engendered by the ancient repression of a mistrusted and subversive writing. He writes that Speech and the consciousness of speech – that is to say consciousness simply as self-presence – are the phenomenon of an auto-affection lived as suppression of difference. That phenomenon, that presumed suppression of difference, that lived reduction of the opacity of the signifier, are the origin of what is called presence.25 For Derrida, writing is ‘that which exceeds – and has the power to dismantle – the whole traditional edifice of Western attitudes to thought and language’.26 Derrida argues not for a strategic reversal of the categories of speech and writing which otherwise remain distinct and unchanged. Rather, he strives both to undo a given order of priorities and the very system of conceptual opposition which makes that order possible. Derrida’s investigation into the nature of the Western metaphysical tradition and its basis in the law of identity appears to reveal many gaps and impasses or ‘aporia’. We have examined already Derrida’s attempt to ‘deconstruct’ Saussure’s thought; in addition, Derrida has applied this


technique to Husserl, Rousseau, Plato, Freud and others. It is Derrida’s contention that almost all philosophers rely on the assumption of an immediately available area of certainty; moreover, he argues that the origin and foundation of most philosophers’ theories is presence. His claims about the status of presence throughout the history of Western philosophy are large: he contends that he has discovered the systematic solidarity of the concepts of meaning, ideality, objectivity, truth, intuition, perception, expression. Their common matrix is being as presence.27 What does Derrida mean by the term ‘presence’? Again, his definition of the term is strikingly broad: presence denotes the meaning of being in general … with all the subdeterminations which depend on this general form and which organize within it their system and their historical sequence (presence of the thing to sight as eidos, presence as substance/essence/existence [ousia], temporal presence as point [stigme], of the now or of the moment [nun], the self-presence of the cogito, consciousness, subjectivity, the co-presence of the other and of the self, intersubjectivity as the intentional phenomenon of the ego, and so forth).28 Derrida’s analysis and appropriative reworking of Saussurean linguistics enables him to argue that signs can never refer to something totally other than themselves. There can be no realm of meaning separable from the marks we use to point to it. Moreover, if a realm of the independent signified does not exist, Derrida concludes that no particular sign may be regarded as referring to any particular signified. He believes that we cannot escape the system of signifiers: ‘from the moment that there is meaning there are nothing but signs … we think only in signs’.29 We will return to Derrida’s notion of the instability of language later; for now it suffices to note that these conclusions imply that there can be no unqualified presence, whether presence is conceived as the self-presence of consciousness, or as the immediacy or transparency of objective meaning. Certainly, Derrida explicitly relates ‘phonocentrism’ (the priority given to speech over writing) to ‘logocentrism’, the belief that the first and last thing is Logos, the Word, the Divine Mind, the selfpresence of full self-consciousness – the unmediated presence of consciousness to itself. Derrida’s attempt to deconstruct the opposition between speech and writing may be seen as a paradigm for the exposure


of the ‘metaphysics of presence’ in its entirety. Indeed, the question ‘what happens when I speak?’ may provide a way into the darker obscurities of Derrida’s deconstruction of Western philosophy. Following Husserl, Derrida acknowledges that in the act of speaking one seems to ‘coincide with oneself’ more completely than when one writes. The words that I speak appear immediately present to my consciousness; whereas the meaning of the words that I write instantly slips beyond my control. Writing seems to ‘rob me of my being; it is a secondhand mode of communication, a pallid mechanical transcript of speech’;30 as such it is always at one remove from my consciousness. Derrida believes that this conception of writing explains why the Western philosophical tradition from Plato to Levi-Strauss has condemned writing as an alienated, constructed means of expression and promoted the ‘purity’ of the living voice. In Speech and Phenomena (1973), he notes that ‘consciousness owes its privileged status … to the possibility of a living vocal medium’.31 Moreover, Derrida believes that certain assumptions inform this ‘phonocentrism’: that ‘man’ is able to be in full possession of himself and his meanings, that language is a tool of man’s which he can dominate and utilise as a purely transparent medium of representation. As I have remarked already, for Derrida, the phonocentrism endemic within the Western philosophical tradition is complemented by the notion of ‘logocentrism’;32 the deep suspicion of script is associated with a commitment to the idea of some ultimate and necessary presence, essence or truth which will be the foundation and guarantor of all language, experience and thought. This is the sign which bestows meaning on all others, the ‘transcendental signifier’, and the answering, unimpeachable meaning to which all signs point, the ‘transcendental signified’: a ‘supraessential reality … beyond the finite categories of essence and existence’.33 Traditional examples of such signs include: the Self, the World Spirit, God and so on. It is obvious that if any one of these concepts is to anchor and structure our entire system of thought and language, it must exist separately from that system, untainted by its play of linguistic differences. It cannot be implicated in the medium it strives to govern. Anterior to these discourses, it must act in isolation as the fulcrum of the entire thought system, the Sign around which all others signs revolve. It is Derrida’s contention that such transcendental meaning is impossible, a fiction. As we have observed, Derrida applies the term ‘metaphysical’ to any thought system which claims to be rooted in unimpeachable ground upon which a structure of significance may be considered; moreover,


such first principles are often defined by what they exclude in a form of binary opposition, which is subject to unsettling and undermining by the processes of deconstruction. Binary oppositions represent a particular way of seeing typical of ideologies, which often erect rigid boundaries between such concepts as truth and falsity, sense and non-sense, reason and madness, central and marginal, self and non-self. Derrida urges the necessity of breaking down the oppositions that inhabit our modes of thinking and which perpetuate the survival of ‘metaphysics’ in our modes of thought. These ‘sedimented presuppositions of classical ontology, anthropology, the natural or human sciences’34 include subject/object, conscious/ unconscious, mind/body, text/meaning, representation/presence, appearance/essence and so on. Deconstruction agitates and disrupts these oppositions until ‘aporias’ (or self-engendered paradoxes) become apparent; it seeks out the textual workings that operate within every truth claim. The pursuit of these textual lacunae represents the possibility of overcoming philosophy’s alleged ancient repression of writing. Yet this prospect may be seized only briefly before the massive influence of the ‘logocentric’, ‘phonocentric’ Western tradition reasserts itself. Indeed, the deconstructive project remains inevitably and inseparably tied to Western philosophy; it is an activity of reading which can never set up independently as a ‘self-enclosed system of operative concepts’.35 Derrida himself concedes that deconstruction cannot claim to work ‘outside’ of the philosophical frameworks of the metaphysical tradition: The movements of deconstruction do not destroy structures from the outside. They are not possible or effective, nor can they take accurate aim, except by inhabiting those structures … Operating necessarily from the inside, borrowing all the strategic and economic resources of subversion from the old structure, … the enterprise of deconstruction always in a certain way falls prey to its own work.36 Derrida argues that phonocentrism/logocentrism is intimately related to the human need to posit a ‘central’ presence at beginning and end. For Derrida, all oppositions derive from this desire for a centre, an authorising, reassuring, enabling ‘transcendental signified’: the final destination of ‘onto-theology and the metaphysics of presence’.37 The superior term in these oppositions belongs to presence and the logos; the inferior defines its status and marks a fall. Derrida believes that this body of accumulating oppositions appears to have endured throughout the history of Western philosophy. In particular, he contends that the opposition


between speech and writing operates at the most fundamental levels of the Western metaphysical tradition: It is as if the Western concept of language (in terms of what, beyond its plurivocity and beyond the strict and problematic opposition of parole and langue, attaches it in general to phonematic or glossematic production, to language, to voice, to hearing, to sound and breath, to speech) were revealed today as the guise or disguise of a primary writing.38 An implication of Derrida’s stance on this issue is his refusal to allow philosophy the kind of superior status it has traditionally claimed as the arbiter and dispenser of reason. He speaks of the necessity that reading free itself from ‘the categories of the history of ideas and … above all, from the categories of the history of philosophy’.39 It is Derrida’s belief that philosophers have been able to assert their various thought-systems only by refusing to acknowledge the disruptive, subversive effects of language, the ‘points of indefinite pivoting [which] can never be mediated, mastered, sublated’.40 Deconstruction acts as a vigilant ‘whistle-blower’ to any perceived attempt to rely on transcendent ‘truth’, ‘method’ or ‘essence’, a constant reminder of language’s capacity to deflect or complicate the philosopher’s task. Most importantly of all, deconstruction strives to dismantle the notion which Derrida regards as the ruling illusion of Western metaphysics: that reason can ‘overstep’ language and arrive at pure, immediate and self-verifying truth. Indeed, Derrida argues that the history of truth coincides with, and is a result of, the repression of writing. In Derrida’s conception, truth can no longer be regarded as dependent on the Word (or logos41): A writing thus enlarged and radicalized, no longer issues from a logos. Further, it inaugurates the destruction … of all the significations that have their source in that of the logos. Particularly the signification of truth.42 Thus, as Peter Dews remarks, writing emerges as ‘both instituter and underminer of truth and meaning’.43 IV

Erasure, différance, protowriting

Before moving on to criticisms of Derrida’s thought, we will examine two key notions which he uses repeatedly within his work. These are the


ideas of sous-rature and différance. To put a term or ‘under erasure’ is to write a word, cross it out, and then print both word and deletion. Since the word is regarded as inadequate, it is crossed out; since it is necessary it remains legible. This strategically significant textual device is derived from Heidegger’s notation of the word Being:44 ‘Being’. Heidegger contended that Being transcends signification, operating as the final signified to which all signifiers refer, the ‘transcendental signified’. In Derrida’s terms, erasure effaces while still remaning legible, … destroy[s] while making visible the very idea of the sign … it de-limits onto-theology, the metaphysics of presence and logocentrism.45 In order to explain Derrida’s use of sous-rature, it is necessary to elaborate on his view of the instability of language. Within this theory, there is no self-evident interlocking one-to-one set of correspondences between ‘signifier’ and ‘signified’, the word as vehicle and the concept it evokes; the signifier does not reflect a signified directly, as a mirror reflects an image. Caught up in the play of differences, signifiers and signifieds occupy a fluid realm where they continually break apart and re-attach in new combinations; Derrida holds this view in opposition to the Saussurean model of the sign, according to which the signifier and signified relate as if they were two sides of the same piece of paper: separable only in theory, not in practice. Derrida contends that there is no fixed distinction between signifiers and signifieds. In Of Grammatology (1967), he quotes C.S. Peirce in support of his argument, Symbols grow. They come into being by development out of other signs … We think only in signs … If a man makes a new symbol, it is by thoughts involving concepts. So it is only out of symbols that a new symbol can grow. Omne symbolum de symbolo.46 Thus, Derrida argues, the chain of signs is without both beginning and end. Signs originate from other signs, and proliferate endlessly; one can never arrive at a final signified which is not a signifier itself. A dictionary may appear to offer the reader the meaning (or signified) of a particular signifier, but this meaning is illusory – all a dictionary can provide is yet more signifiers whose signifieds one can look up in a potentially infinite process. While structuralism divided the sign from the referent, Derridean post-structuralism moves a step further in its blurring of the boundaries between signifier and signified.


Thus meaning, for Derrida, is not immediately present in a sign; since the meaning of a sign is a matter of what the sign is not, the meaning is always in some sense absent from it too. Meaning is dispersed along the whole chain of signifiers: it cannot be captured and pinned down. It is never fully present in one sign, and, if it is to be glimpsed at all, can only be perceived as a constant oscillation between presence and absence, never entirely ‘there’. Derrida calls this diffusion of meaning dissemination. In ‘The Double Session’ (1981), he writes: summation is impossible, without however being exceeded by the infinite richness of a content of sense or meaning; the perspective functions as far as the eye can see, without having the depth of an horizon before which or into which we will never have ceased to advance.47 In Derrida’s terms, meaning can only be obtained at the cost of denying non-meaning; indeed, he regards the establishment of meaning as a repressive, restrictive and ultimately fruitless48 gesture. Derrida argues that the full implications of this view of language must include an admission that the projected ‘end’ of knowledge can never coincide with its ‘means’. He stresses the ‘impossibility that a sign, the unity of a signifier and a signified, be produced within the plenitude of a present and an absolute presence’.49 It is impossible, according to Derrida, to make the ‘means’ (the sign) and the ‘end’ (meaning) become identical. While semiology reads the sign as a homogeneous unit bridging an origin (referent) and an end (meaning), Derrida demands that the sign be studied under erasure, always already inhabited by the trace of another sign which never appears in its entirety. For Derrida, the structure of the sign is determined by the trace (track, footprint, imprint) of that ‘other’ which is always absent, never to be observed in its full being. The trace is a trace of something that can never be presented, that is, can never appear and manifest itself as such in its phenomenon … Like différance, the trace is never presented as such. In presenting it becomes effaced, in being sounded it dies away …50 In effect, Derrida seizes the clearly defined, symmetrically structures language envisaged by classical structuralism and transforms it into a vast, internally fragmented sphere spreading limitlessly in all directions, within which seethe constantly circulating elements of the sign. In this


realm, none of the elements is absolutely definable; every sign in the chain of meaning is ‘scored over’ or traced through with all the others in complex, never ending constellations. Moreover, if meaning is never fully present in signs, it follows from Derrida’s theory that it is illusory to believe that one can ever be fully present to another person, either through speech or writing, since to use signs at all draws us into a system where one’s meaning must always be partial, deferred, never self-identical. Furthermore, since for Derrida language is something which constitutes me, rather than a transparent tool which I knowingly use, the whole notion of stable, unified selfhood must also be a fiction. And if I can never be entirely present to others, then it follows that neither can I be fully present to myself. Derrida believes that it is impossible to experience ‘full communion’ with myself. Derrida’s view is at odds with the Husserlian notion of selfpresence which Derrida discusses in Speech and Phenomena: in Husserl’s conception, language and its representation is added on to a consciousness that is simple and simply present to itself, or in any event to an experience which could reflect its own presence in silence.51 Since I still need to use signs when I attempt introspection, I remain at the mercy of their shifting, elusive nature. I become a function of language and not vice versa. Derrida argues, We thus come to posit presence – and, in particular, consciousness, the being-next-to-itself of consciousness – no longer as the absolutely matrical form of being but as a ‘determination’ and an ‘effect’.52 As Terry Eagleton explains, it is not that I can have a pure, unblemished meaning, intention or experience which then gets distorted and refracted by the flawed medium of language: because language is the very air I breathe, I can never have a pure, unblemished meaning or experience at all.53 The Derridean notion of différance is a vital part of his critique of binary logic. He describes it thus: différance is the nonfull, nonsimple structured and differentiating origin of differences it is the determination of Being as presence or as beingness that is interrogated by the thought of difference …54


We have noted that for Derrida, signification (meaning) is not engendered in the closure of signifier and signified; it is achieved (albeit provisionally, transiently) through the ‘free play of the signifier’.55 While Saussure argued that language consists in the structure of differential oppositions which constitutes its foundational economy, Derrida uses the term différance to demonstrate that the interplay between absence and presence which produces meaning is a process of deferral: the potentially endless process of signifier referring to signifier ceaselessly defers meaning. Derrida remarks, Différance is what makes the movement of signification possible only if each element that is said to be ‘present’, appearing on the stage of presence, is related to something other than itself but retains the mark of a past element and already lets itself be hollowed out by the mark of its relation to a future element.56 The sense of the term différance – which Derrida maintains is neither a word nor a concept: ‘différance is not, does not exist’57 – is suspended between the two French verbs ‘to differ’ and ‘to defer’, both of which contribute to its textual dynamic but neither of which encompasses its meaning. By virtue of its own elusive meaning, différance – as difference deferred – graphically illustrates this process of deferred meaning in action. Derrida remarks, ‘here in the usage of our language we must consider that the ending -ance is undecided between active and passive … différance … recalls something like the middle voice, that it speaks of an operation that is not an operation’.58 Indeed, différance, according to Derrida cannot be understood according to the concept of the ‘sign’ at all, since ‘sign’ ‘has always been taken to mean the representation of a presence and has been constituted in a system … determined on the basis of and in view of language’.59 Indeed, Derrida’s entire project may be regarded as an exploration of the nature of writing as différance. In that writing always includes phonetic, pictographic and ideographic elements it is never ‘self-identical’. It must always be ‘contaminated’, its impurity challenging the notion of identity and simple origin. Moreover, writing is seemingly more ‘original’, more fundamental than the reality it supposedly describes; it is to be understood as the precondition of all phenomenal forms. Writing is not what is produced, but what makes production possible: To affirm … that the concept of writing exceeds and comprehends that of language, presupposes of course a certain definition of language and of writing … For some time now … one says ‘language’ for


action, movement, thought, reflection, consciousness, experience, affectivity etc. Now we tend to say ‘writing’ for all that and more: to designate not only the physical gestures of literal pictographic or ideographic inscription but also the totality of what makes it possible.60 Thus différance, as the ‘structured and differing origin of differences’ emerges as the negative trace which precedes all manifestations of presence; otherwise known as ‘protowriting’ [archi-ecriture] or supplement, différance is the primordial (non)ground of language: The living present springs forth out of its non-identity with itself and from the possibility of a retentional trace. It is always already a trace. This trace cannot be thought out on the basis of a simple present whose life will be within itself; the self of the living present is primordially a trace … Being-primordial must be thought on the basis of the trace, and not the reverse. This protowriting [archi-ecriture] is at work in the origin of sense. Sense, being temporal in nature … is never simply present; it is always engaged in the ‘movement’ of the trace, that is, in the order of ‘signification’.61

V

Questioning Derrida, questioning deconstruction

Derrida’s philosophical enterprise alerts us to the notion that everyday language is not neutral; rather, it is saturated with the presuppositions and cultural assumptions of tradition. Indeed, the practice of deconstruction enables us to perceive the contradictions, blind-spots and moments of rhetorical complication within philosophical texts, the instances of ‘aporia’ or undecidability which may allow us insights into philosophy’s encounter with the unresolved problems which may lurk deep within its own history. Yet the terms on which the deconstructive enterprise is founded and the implications of deconstructive practice are questionable. We have seen that Derridean deconstruction relies heavily on Saussure’s belief that ‘language is a form, not a substance’, that a sign’s value or identity is exclusively determined by relations. Yet Hugh Bredin (1984) argues that no relation can be intelligible unless the items related are already equipped with some properties. In his view, ‘a relation holds between, or among, things of a certain type, and it cannot be formulated … if the properties which make them belong to that type are not already known’.62 This explains why it is nonsense to state that a


football is more mellifluous than a stone: ‘the relation is simply not appropriate to the relata’.63 A relation must be at least partly determined by the things it relates. So Saussure’s example that a street is identified by its position relative to other streets, not by the material substance of which it is constructed is only partly true. Bredin remarks that if one rebuilds a street of houses with cardboard cut-outs that resemble houses, it is still not a street of houses, whatever relations it may have to other streets in the area. Material substance in conjunction with relations confers identity. So no linguistic relation can be formulated or understood unless the things among which the relation obtains already possess identifiable properties. Saussure’s vastly influential ‘differential relation’ is seen as an incomplete relation, completed only when one asserts exactly what the relata are and how they differ. For Bredin, ‘resemblance and difference tell us nothing because any two things are similar in some respect, and differ in some respect’.64 The fact that two things differ is insufficient to determine their value or meaning. This argument has considerable impact not only on Saussurean linguistics but also on structuralism, post-structuralism and Lacanian psychoanalysis. It opens up the possibility of theorising the interpenetration of linguistic and extra-linguistic reality (without resorting to naive objectivism) beyond the post-structuralist sphere. Before engaging with the poles of language and presence about which Derrida’s analysis circulates, it is important to question the authority they derive from being presented as consequences of a diagnosis reached by an exhaustive examination of the history of Western culture. A feature of Derrida’s writing is the way argument towards a conclusion is mingled with exposition of that conclusion as if it had already been established. Thus it is possible to present deeply counter-intuitive results as firmly established, even though adequate substantiation is absent. As Raymond Tallis and other critics have observed, in order to establish his diagnosis of Western culture as inextricably in thrall to the ‘metaphysics of presence’, Derrida seeks to present phonocentrism as both universal and irrational. His careful selection of ‘straw men’ (Saussure, Rousseau, Levi-Strauss, Husserl), combined with an often unscrupulous manipulation of their views, strives to portray phonocentrism as an unbroken and central tradition in Western philosophy. Indeed, Derrida’s deconstructive ‘close readings’ often focus on a small aspect of the text, perhaps a throwaway remark, and substantially enlarge its significance. For instance, he misrepresents Saussure’s fairly mild observation that ‘writing is not a guise for language but a disguise’ as an ‘hysterical


antipathy’ towards it. He contends that for Saussure, writing is even a garment of perversion and debauchery, a dress of corruption and disguise, a festival mask that must be exorcised … by the good word.65 Thus a few of Saussure’s minor comments are inflated into symptoms of a universal aversion to writing within Western culture. In Logics of Disintegration (1987), Peter Dews also draws attention to Derrida’s ‘astonishingly casual and unquestioning acceptance of certain extremely condensed – not to say sloganistic – characterisations of the history of Western thought, as if this history could be dismissed through its reduction to a set of perfunctory dualisms’.66 Anti-essentialism has been one of the defining notions of Derridean post-structuralism. Essentialism is classically defined as a belief in ‘essence’ as the unchanging and irreducible defining characteristics of a person, thing or species. This definition encompasses the traditional Aristotelian understanding of essence which has permeated the history of Western metaphysics. We have seen that Derridean deconstruction is articulated in opposition to essentialism and is concerned with its philosophical refutation. Derrida’s anti-essentialist polemic interrogates the complex processes which work together to produce all seemingly ‘natural’ or ‘given’ objects. Derrida is concerned with the production and organisation of differences, and therefore is steadfastly committed to the idea that no essential or natural givens can precede the processes of language. Earlier in this chapter, I described Derrida’s deconstruction of the binary opposition ‘man’/‘woman’. This deconstructive reading claims to undermine such oppositions, to place them sous-rature, to subject them to such intensive interrogation that they begin to dissolve. Yet as the feminist critic Diana Fuss remarks, the categories ‘man’ and ‘woman’ remain constant: ‘some minimal point of commonality and continuity’67 necessitates at least the linguistic retention of each term. It seems that deconstruction is far more deeply rooted in essentialism than its chief proponent can admit. In an attempt to elude unitary conceptual categories such as ‘Women’, ‘History’, ‘Text’ and so on, deconstruction often shifts from the singular to the plural, seeking to privilege heterogeneity. Yet this strategy cannot shift essentialism from its entrenched position within deconstruction. For example, the plural category ‘women’, although syntactically signalling heterogeneity semantically denotes a collectivity; ‘constructed or not, “women” still occupies the space of a linguistic unity’.68 It appears that essentialism is not so much eliminated as displaced. Indeed, it is arguable that essentialism subtends the very notion of deconstruction.


If Derrida admits that despite the dislocating effects of deconstruction’s tactics of reversal and displacement we can never ‘get beyond’ metaphysics, then equally he must accept that we can never truly get beyond essentialism either. Despite Derrida’s relentless pursuit of binary oppositions and phenomenological essences, residues of irreducibility remain within deconstruction itself. Despite his determination to purge essence from his rigorous strategies, Derrida is forced to lean upon it heavily. For example, in Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles (1991), Derrida attempts a deconstructive reading of the inscription of woman in Nietzsche’s philosophy. According to Derrida’s reading of Nietzsche, woman embodies a contradiction: she represents both authenticity and simulation, truth and non-truth. Derrida blurs these categories still further with his assertion that ‘there is no such thing as woman, as a truth in itself of woman in itself’.69 He argues that woman operates as the very figure of undecidability. Indeed, he posits woman as the undecided variable who displaces the rigid dualisms of Western metaphysics; she acts as another figure for ‘différance’, that fluid mechanism which dismantles ‘ontological decidability’. Yet Derrida’s position is ambiguous: he does not dispute that woman has an essence; rather he believes that we can never rigorously define it. Indeed, with deconstruction, the undecidability of woman’s essence actually becomes the assertion that it is the essence of woman to be ‘the undecidable’. While Derrida erases essence with one hand, he reinstates it with the other. Diana Fuss contends that ‘contradiction’ emerges as the irreducible inner core of deconstruction, the ‘always already’ without which its operations would be immobilised. Contradiction, in fact, is essential to deconstruction; as such it risks reification, the possibility of solidifying into one more ‘self-identical’ concept. It seems that Derrida is prepared to accuse his critics of sloppy ‘monolithic’ thinking and naive ‘homogeneity’, yet he is unwilling to recognise the contradictions within his own discourse, perhaps in order to avoid addressing the essential space at the core of his thinking. Fuss remarks that the deconstruction of essentialism, rather than routing it out, simply elevates the discussion to a more sophisticated level, while keeping the sign of essence in play (albeit ‘under erasure’). To summarise, essentialism is unavoidably inherent within deconstruction, nimbly eluding Derrida’s most strenuous efforts to stamp it out as it constantly re-emerges in the parts of his argument where it is most vehemently denied. Having considered Derrida’s famous encounter with ‘essence’, I will attempt now to evaluate his notion of ‘presence’. Even more than ‘essence’, ‘presence’ is a notion of vast significance in Derrida’s project.


For Derrida, ‘presence’ denotes an unmediated relationship between consciousness and its object, pure and prior to contamination by language. For Derrida, linguistic signs are essentially, rather than accidentally, devoid of the presence of a signifying agent. We know that Derrida ‘discovers’ pure presence at the heart of Western metaphysics. Thus, for Derrida, presence is a fiction, since if there are signs, there is mediation and contamination, and if there is mediation and contamination then the pure, unmediated relationship which he labels ‘presence’ cannot exist. Our utterances do not embody, nor are they animated by, our signifying intentions; nor do they refer to a pre-existing extra-linguistic reality. We can neither say what we mean nor mean what we say; the meaning of our utterances cannot be said to lie outside the language in which they are embodied. Moreover, the presence of the ‘other’, as presence or the meaning of being, is simply an illusion, the ‘byproduct of hearing oneself speak’. In his essay on Derrida, ‘Philosophy as a Kind of Writing’ (1982), Richard Rorty distinguishes two traditions of philosophy. The first strand, Philosophy with a capital ‘P’, linked with such philosophers as Plato and Kant, seeks answers to the question, ‘How are representations related to non-representations?’ It deals in presence, things conceived as outside the text, ranging from the eternal to the temporal. This tradition conceives of truth as ‘a vertical relationship between representations and what is represented’.70 The second strand or tradition, philosophy with a lower case ‘p’, flouts the former tradition. It asks, ‘how can representations be seen as hanging together?’.71 Despite its nontraditional stance, Rorty contends that it depends for its very existence on tradition because it ‘thinks of truth horizontally – as the culminating reinterpretation of our predecessors’ reinterpretation of their predecessors’ reinterpretation’.72 Deconstruction and pragmatism are included within this strand, where philosophy is seen as a kind of writing; writing itself is understood as something that does not lead anywhere outside of itself. Two images emerge: that of the ‘Philosopher’ who imagines him or herself as functioning in relation to the world or perhaps an other world; and that of the ‘philosopher’, operating after the critique of presence, conceiving of her or himself as functioning only in relation to writing and texts. This strand assigns language a powerful foundational role, constructing a (prison)house of being. Indeed, this tradition posits the world as irreducible text; here, extralinguistic reality is an illusion.73 Derrida’s notion of presence is deeply coloured by that of Husserl: something that is given to, or returns to, itself without being ‘mediated’: a pure self-presence utterly devoid of non-presence. Husserl observes that


every experience generally (every really living one, so to speak) is an experience according to the mode of ‘being present’. It belongs to its very essence that it should be able to reflect upon that same essence in which it is necessarily characterised as being certain and present.74 Such a conception of presence requires absolute transparency of the self to itself, without mediation by any sign. Yet Derrida reads the impossibility of Husserlian metaphysical presence as denoting the impossibility of any kind of presence at all. Raymond Tallis contends that Derrida’s most celebrated positions derive from a confusion of Husserlian absolute presence with ‘everyday’ presence: The fact that we, objects and meanings are not present in the Husserlian sense does not imply that we are not present in our speech acts or that we are not their authors or that they do not embody a signifying intention on our part.75 It does not follow from the failure of phenomenology to locate absolute presence that ‘ordinary’ presence is haunted by contradiction or swaddled in myth. The fact that we are not present in the Husserlian sense does not imply that we are not present at least to some extent in our speech acts or that they do not embody a signifying intention on our part. For example, no-one could argue that the sentence ‘I love you’ effects closure on the sense of the world, bringing the chain of signs to an end as a transcendental signified so it is thus differentially defined; moreover, ‘I love you’ is an off-the-peg utterance rather than specially created for me to impart my affection with so it is ‘iterable’. Also, the context of my utterance is boundless and unspecifiable; it is impossible to chart the social framework of my declaration of love. Nevertheless, following Tallis, I am present in my act of declaration in a way that I am not present in a letter saying ‘I love you’ that I wrote five years ago, or my not saying it, or my mother saying it. It appears that, in ordinary experience, presence and self-presence are matters of degree. Presence for Husserl and Derrida is an all-or-nothing affair: for these thinkers, to say that one is present to a degree to one’s environment is akin to stating that one is pregnant to a degree. Derrida operates at a confusion of levels: between metaphysical absolutes and the everyday sense of words, the experiences of daily life. Peter Dews makes a related point when he observes that Derrida offers the reader a stark choice: either the subject [is] an immobile centre, a core of self-certainty, or … there is no subject at all, except as an ‘effect’ of the play of the text.76


Quentin Kraft agrees that this position offers more than a critique of presence, amounting to a denial of the possibility of presence at all. Kraft argues that if we follow Derrida, ‘we gain a sense of the “ubiquity” or omnipresence of language but we lose rather more’.77 For instance, not only does the world collapse into textuality but so does every distinction between one kind of text and another. All kinds of writing dissolve into ‘the one great all-embracing text of textuality’.78 If there is no literature, only writing, then we lose authors, works, characters, all distinctions between the literary and the non-literary. Indeed, the Platonic cave prisoners who see only the shadows of things are in a better position than the inhabitants of the post-structuralist world. In this realm, we are permitted to see only what our culture allows us to see; our fragmentary selves are at the mercy of dominant cultural discourses, For a theory which promotes play, difference and the subversion of authority, this is a remarkably passive, conservative outcome. Much of what Derrida terms ‘Western culture’ is evident in the writings of Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger and Sartre, and Derrida belongs within this tradition in that these philosophers’ writings conceal a yearning for an absolute coincidence of knowing and being. Indeed, the elusiveness of the present and the unattainability of undivided self-presence have been significant preoccupations of philosophers over centuries. Tallis believes that Derrida’s refusal to accept the reality of ordinary presence derives from his philosophically ingrained reluctance to settle for less. Derridean presence requires absolute self-knowledge, ‘a consciousness utterly turned over to explicit meaning, fully signifying itself to itself’;79 it mourns the lack of coincidence between word and self, word and world. With Derrida, language is seen to have failed twice over: as a ‘treasurehouse of being’ in which we can install and thus repossess ourselves; and as a reliable means of expressing extra-linguistic reality. Let us now consider Derrida’s claim that ‘there is nothing outside the text’.80 In Limited Inc. (1988), Derrida offers several ‘clarifications in the form of reminders’81 concerning the implications of this apparent denial of the possibility of reference to any form of extra-linguistic reality. He protests that his argument has been badly misunderstood. He states that the text is ‘not the book, it is not confined in a volume itself confined to the library. It does not suspend reference – to history, to the world, to reality, to being’.82 Elsewhere, Derrida tempers the force of his original claim still further. In ‘Deconstruction and the Other’ (1986), an interview with Richard Kearney, he is careful to point out that It is totally false to suggest that deconstruction is a suspension of reference … I never cease to be surprised by critics who see my work


as a declaration that there is nothing beyond language, … that we are submerged in words – and other stupidities of that sort. Certainly, deconstruction tries to show that the question of reference is much more complex and problematic than traditional theories supposed.83 If we are to accept both the claim that there is nothing outside the text, and the claim that the text does not suspend reference we are forced to acknowledge that although there is nothing outside the text, reality, being, a world with a history still exists. This paradoxical contention may only be resolved if the ‘outside’ (the world and its history) exists in the ‘inside’ of the text, and if the text is self-referential. Derrida remarks, ‘one cannot refer to this “real” [whether world or history or being] except in an interpretive experience’.84 So interpretation and experience are on the inside; they become processes of the text. As Kraft notes, ‘what appears to be on the outside is actually on the inside: the world takes shape and place within the text’.85 Moreover, concerning the actual phrase ‘there is nothing outside the text’ itself, Derrida asserts that the phrase which for some has become a sort of slogan, in general so badly understood, of deconstruction … means …. there is nothing outside context. In this form, which says exactly the same thing, the formula would doubtless have been less shocking. I am not certain that it would have provided more to think about.86 So Derrida asserts that his ‘badly misunderstood’ slogan merely means that there is nothing outside ‘context’. What does Derrida mean by ‘context’? He writes What is called ‘objectivity’, scientific for instance … imposes itself only within a context which is extremely vast, old, powerfully established, stabilized or rooted in a netweork of conventions (for instance, those of language) and yet which still remains a context. We can call ‘context’ the entire ‘real-history-of-the-world’.87 If ‘nothing outside the text’ signifies ‘nothing outside context’, and therefore ‘nothing outside history’ and ‘nothing outside the world’, then we approach the realm of the trivially true. As John Searle glosses it, ‘so the original preposterous thesis that there is nothing outside of texts is now converted into the banality that everything exists in some context or other’.88 Indeed, Searle detects a problematic repetition of this strategy in several of Derrida’s other striking contentions, particularly his claims that


written language precedes spoken language, and that meanings are inherently undecidable. Searle characterises this strategy as ‘from the exciting to the banal and back again’.89 In Of Grammatology, Derrida asserts, ‘I shall try to show … that there is no linguistic sign before writing’.90 Searle claims that all this contention boils down to is the platitude that many of the features of written speech are also features of spoken language. Yet when this point is made and acknowledged, Derrida assumes that its acknowledgement constitutes an acceptance of the original exciting thesis. The same rhetorical manoeuvring, the same redefinition of words that would seem not to require definition in the first place, may be observed in Derrida’s discussion of the ‘relative indeterminacy’ of meaning. This view has the consequence that all readings are to some extent misreadings, all understandings partial misunderstandings and so on. Yet when challenged, Derrida protests that he meant to state only that ‘the essential and irreducible possibility of misunderstanding … must be taken into account in the description of those values said to be positive’.91 So the original, daring thesis amounts to no more than the platitude that misunderstandings are always possible. There are further difficulties with Derrida’s contention that ‘there is nothing outside the text’ (a statement which he leaves standing despite his explanation of how one can ‘refer’ to the ‘world’). For instance, his stance commits him to a passive contemplation of degrading circumstances such as poverty, oppression, racism and disease as merely formulations of the text, not actual conditions in a world external to the text. Certainly, the obscurity and elitism of deconstruction has repelled many African-American critics who argue that ‘it is insidious for the Black critic to adopt any kind of strategy that diminishes or (through an allusion to binary oppositions) negates his [sic] blackness’.92 Furthermore, if ‘the text’ is all we know, then there is no more evidence that there is nothing outside the text than that there is something outside the text. One must choose one’s view ‘on the basis of the same lack of convincing evidence’.93 Indeed, Derrida’s attempt to destabilise and blur notions of reality and textuality raises other peculiar implications. As Peter Dews notes, for Derrida, différance cannot be defined in simple oppositional relation to identity, since it must be viewed as the non-full, non-originary origin of presence and identity, and as such cannot be dependent on either presence or identity in any way for its determination. But if différance is the very possibility of conceptuality, then neither can it differ absolutely from identity. As Dews observes, ‘absolute difference … necessarily collapses into absolute identity’.94 According to Dews, Derrida has failed to


appreciate that we cannot ‘interpret the same as the non-identical without also interpreting the non-identical as the same’.95 In contrast to the notion of language as prisonhouse, web, labyrinth, screen is another idea of language which stresses its enabling qualities. It is only by means of language that we can see ‘things’ at all; indeed, language is all we have to make sense of the world. As well as limiting and constricting us, it simultaneously liberates us: ‘it is our primary means of egress, our way out of ourselves, our means of directing ourselves to others and to the world’.96 If language is a stifling web, it is also a glass, however dark and distorted, a pathway, a door. We can celebrate and employ these capacities without recourse to traditional ideas of language as a purely transparent medium, or art as simply mimetic. Albert Camus’ notion of the absurd sheds light on a way out of the limiting/liberating paradox of language. Camus argues that signs inform and take priority over all but the most rudimentary experience of presence: ‘this heart within me I can feel, and I judge that it exists; this world I can touch and I judge that it exists [there] ends all my knowledge’.97 For Camus, absurdity consists of self, world and their encounter. He believes that presence exists, however mediated and adulterated, however removed from the traditional notion of presence as pure, self-identical relationship. Salvaging some remnant of this much maligned relationship, this difference between human and world, opens up a space not wide enough for an entire metaphysics, but one which allows us to believe that we are thinking about a world and its inhabitants and not merely a text. Without presence, everything collapses into the indifferent abyss of textuality. The acceptance of the duality of world and conscious living agents, the ‘acceptance of the desperate encounter between human inquiry and the silence of the universe’98 is necessary if referentiality, intentionality and subjectivity are to survive their encounter with the Text. VI

Lacan: language, consciousness, subjectivity

The work of Jacques Lacan is an attempt to ‘rewrite’ or reinterpret Freudianism in the light of post-structuralist theories of language. He occupies a position second only to Derrida in the world of poststructuralist thinking; the influence of his work on the question of the human subject, selfhood and language remains considerable, particularly in the field of literary theory. Lacan’s Ecrits (1966), the volume in which his major papers are collected, has been described as a ‘bafflingly opaque, enigmatic body of work’,99 as well as ‘unnecessarily obscure,


self-indulgent to the point of narcissism and even fraudulent’.100 Nonetheless, a brief examination of his theories may serve to illuminate the intersection between psychoanalysis and post-structuralism, necessary in order to understand the ways in which these approaches have inflected contemporary understandings of selfhood and self-presence. Lacan’s writings on human development appear to have profound implications for the philosophy of consciousness, linguistics and literary and feminist theory. Central to his project is his theory of the mirror stage in infant development, and it is this thesis which supposedly underwrites his radical nominalism while simultaneously discrediting ‘realistic’ understandings of self and world. It is a well-known Freudian belief that the infant perceives no clear distinction between itself and the external world, between subject and object. Lacan labels this state the ‘Imaginary’, a condition in which we lack ‘any defined centre of self, in which what self we have seems to pass into objects, and objects into it in a ceaseless, closed exchange’.101 In this pre-Oedipal state, the child experiences a ‘symbiotic’ relationship with the mother’s body; that is, there are no boundaries between the identities of child and mother. It is within the Imaginary that the mirror stage, the theoretical cornerstone of Lacan’s oeuvre, occurs. Lacan himself remarks that the mirror stage marks one of the ‘critical moments that mark the history of man’s mental genesis’,102 that it reveals an ‘ontological structure of the human world’, illuminating ‘the formation of the “I” ’.103 From the age of about six months, the child is capable of recognising its own image in the mirror. It is this seemingly trivial event that heralds the movement from the ‘imaginary’ state of being towards the development of an integrated self-image. According to Lacan the reason that the child takes great pleasure in the correspondence between its own movements and those of its mirror image derive from ‘a moment of identification’, ‘the transformation which takes place in the subject when he [sic] assumes an image’.104 That is, the mirror offers the child a pre-social, pre-linguistic self. The physically uncoordinated child delights in the satisfyingly unified image of itself. Although its relation to this image still operates within the Imaginary, characterised by a blurring of subject and object since the image both is and is not the child, the process of constructing a seamlessly unified self has begun. The infant is delighted because it observes the felt fragmentation of its existence – its lack of physical co-ordination and excess of emotion and uncontrollable fantasy – transformed into the reassuringly unified, stable image of its body. Yet while the image institutes the ‘mental


permanence of the “I” ’, it simultaneously ‘prefigures its alienating destination’.105 The image in the mirror is in some sense an alienated one in that the unified ‘I’ with which the child identifies is the first in a series of fictions: it is the inaugural moment of a narcissistic process which allows us an apparently authentic sense of self. In fact, this process characterises the Lacanian imaginary as a sphere of images with which we make identifications which in the act of soothing us simultaneously cause us to misrecognise ourselves. Indeed, in this way the child’s ego is constituted; as the child matures, it will repeat this pattern of identification/misperception of objects. Thus ‘the succession of phantasies that extends from a fragmented body-image to a form of its totality’106 is the drama from which the illusory self emerges. As Peter Dews notes, for Lacan, the ego is a form of estrangement, a mirage of coherence and solidity through which the subject is seduced into misrecognition of its own truth.107 So the specular ‘I’ is a product of misrecognition; as such it remains a fiction despite the deluded subject’s fantasy of stable, coherent personal identity. Lacan remarks that it is in this erotic relationship, in which the human individual fixes upon himself an image that alienates him from himself [sic], that are to be found the energy and the form on which this organization of the passions that he will call his ego is based.108 For Lacan, the ego is this narcissistic process whereby we prop up an alienated, fictive sense of unified selfhood by locating objects in the world with which we can identify. The jubilation of the totalising mirror image gives way when at the age of about eighteen months the specular ‘I’ is deflected into the paranoia of the social ‘I’: the price to be paid for the alienation implicit in the act of referring oneself to something one is not. According to Lacan, at this point the child will begin to exhibit ‘primordial jealousy’ and the phenomenon of ‘transitivism’. This occurs in the context of the Oedipal events. Indeed, the Oedipal complex may only be resolved through the passage from the realm of mirror images to the realm of words, from the Imaginary to the Symbolic sphere. The dyadic structure of mother and infant, in which the child cannot differentiate itself from the Other with which she or he identifies, nor from the mother who holds it up to the mirror, is, according to


Freudian/Lacanian thinking, destined to collapse into a triadic one with the intervention of the father. The father signifies what Lacan terms the Law, which is primarily the social taboo on incest. The child is interrupted in its libidinal relation to the mother, and is forced to acknowledge the existence of a wider social and familial network of which he or she is only a small part. The Father’s veto is the child’s most fundamental encounter with the Law: The father is present only through his law, which is speech and only insofar as his speech is recognized by the mother does it take in the value of the Law109 Moreover, the appearance of the father separates the child from its mother’s body, driving the child’s desire into the unconscious. So the initial appearance of the Law and the creation of unconscious desire occur simultaneously. One of the key terms in Lacanian theory is the phallus, denoting the signification of sexual distinction. The child’s socialisation may only be achieved once the ‘necessity’ of sexual difference is accepted. Lacan rewrites this Freudian process in terms of language. The infant contemplating itself in the mirror acts as a kind of ‘signifier’, a bestower of meaning, while the image it sees in the mirror acts a kind of ‘signified’. This sphere is characterised by plenitude, objects ceaselessly reflecting each other without difference or division. The child-as-signifier before the mirror discovers a ‘fullness’ in its calmly unified identity. Before the entry of the father, according to Lacan, all is serene: no abyss has yawned between subject and world, signifier and signified; language and reality appear unproblematically synchronised. With the intervention of the father, the child is ‘plunged into poststructuralist anxiety’.110 Here Lacan reveals his post-Saussurean credentials in his insistence that identities may only be derived from relational differences. (We may ask later if this is a justifiable appropriation of Saussurean thinking.) Lacan draws a parallel between language acquisition – where the child unconsciously assimilates the notions that signs only obtain meaning by virtue of their difference from other signs, and that the sign presupposes the absence of the object it signifies – and sexual identity. To enter language is to become decentred, to become a ‘substitute anyone’111 instead of the centre of the world. The presence of the father, symbolised by the phallus, demonstrates that the child must accept a position in the familial order which is defined by sexual


difference, by absence, requiring the relinquishment of its mother’s body. Language is the precondition of the process by which the child becomes fully aware of itself as a distinct entity, defined by sexual difference. As within the system of language, the child’s identity as a subject is constituted by perceived relations of difference to objects in its environment. The child’s acceptance of this state of affairs allows the shift from the imaginary register into the Lacanian ‘symbolic’ order: the pre-given structure of social and sexual subject-positions and relations which constitute both society and the family. The journey from the Imaginary to the Symbolic is a move from apparent certainties to the shifting ground of non-meaning, alienation and lack. While the specular ‘I’ of the mirror stage entailed a plenitude, a richness without lack, the self constituted through language is impoverished. Since linguistic signs are purely relational, constituted through difference, they are definitionally negative: an endless process of difference and absence. Instead of being able to possess anything in plenitude, in all its fullness, the child, having lost the object of its desire (the mother’s body) can only search fruitlessly along an endlessly proliferating chain of signifiers which never make contact with the signified. Meanings may be produced along this potentially infinite chain of signifiers, yet no object or person can ever be fully present in the chain. Lacan, like his fellow post-Saussurean, Derrida, believes in the capacity of language to divide and differentiate all identities. The ‘substitutable anyone’ who is the symbolic ‘I’ is therefore even more lacking than the pre-Oedipal ‘I’. Moreover, the self emerging into the Symbolic must contend with its dual or split subjectivity. The radical divide between the conscious and the unconscious or repressed desire allows the subject to become fully constituted. The Lacanian ego is an effect of a subject which is always dispersed, never self-identical. Lacan contends that a radical split divides these two levels of being. He believes that this gap is most fully illuminated by the act of referring to myself in a sentence. If I remark, ‘I’m going to make the dinner’, it appears that the ‘I’ to which I am referring is a reasonably stable point of reference. Not so, claims Lacan; the surface ‘I’ is merely a thin film over the writhing chaos beneath. According to Lacan, ‘I’, the ‘subject of the enunciating’, the speaking, writing human person can never represent myself in what is said. The pronoun ‘I’ can only designate, stand for the eternally absent subject. Outside of language, Lacan contends, there is only the nameless Real, the primordial chaos upon which language operates, radically extrinsic


to the proliferating chain of signifiers. For Lacan, it is the world of words that creates the world of things – things originally confused in the ‘hic et nunc’ of the all in the process of coming- intobeing – by giving its concrete being to their essence and its ubiquity to what has always been [emphasis added].112

VII Questioning Lacan Leaving aside the difficulty of Lacan’s weightily obscure style for the present, the initial impression one receives on reading his work is the lack of empirical evidence. If one pauses in an attempt to disentangle the stream of his text, it becomes apparent that little supporting evidence is given for empirical hypotheses. Systematic observation is scarce, and many of the cases cited in Ecrits are simply recycled from Freud. Indeed, little reference to clinical material is made at all, to the extent that is very difficult to assess Lacan’s interpretations of his own or Freud’s cases since insufficient information is given. Lacan’s work has been described as ‘a huge inverted pyramid of speculation built upon a tiny apex of fact’.113 Disciples of Lacan, and indeed Lacan himself, regard the search for factual truth with some contempt. Anika Lemaire remarks that ‘Some critics have seen fit to use the “factual” insubstantiality of, say, the mirror stage, as a weapon to invalidate it’.114 As we have already observed in our analysis of Derrida, the desire to validate hypothesis with empirical observation is derided by post-structuralists as an effective admission of conservative anxieties and prejudices. Beyond these fundamental difficulties, what are the implications of Lacan’s convoluted arguments? Aside from deconstruction, psychoanalysis is usually identified as the discourse potent enough to repudiate metaphysical idealism and its ‘crutch’ – essentialism. We have observed how Lacan abhors any suggestion that the subject possesses a self-evident, pre-given identity. Rather, he seeks to displace the classical humanist subject by demonstrating the production of the subject purely through language. Yet Diana Fuss questions whether an account of the subject based in language can fully detach itself from the essentialist notions which it so readily discards. Fuss suggests that Lacan relies heavily on essentialist ‘underpinnings’ while espousing a radically antiessentialist argument, particularly in his revision of Freud and in his emphasis on the ‘speaking subject’. As we have seen, Lacan sought to liberate Freudianism from its rather dubious biological foundations. For example, Lacan criticises his


predecessor for failing to make the vital distinction between representational symbol (the phallus) and anatomical organ (the penis). Freud conflates both terms, leaving himself vulnerable to charges of essentialism and biologism. Lacan stresses the separate nature of the phallus, which must not be considered as a fantasy, object or organ, but as a signifier, a privileged signifier of the symbolic order which may indicate the penis as the most visible sign of sexual difference but certainly cannot be reduced to it. Moreover, Lacan stresses that the non-coincidence of phallus and penis is crucial because the relation of the subject to the phallus exists regardless of the anatomical difference between the sexes. The phallus may be understood as prior to the penis; it is ‘the privileged mark through which both sexes accede to a sexual identity by a recognition and acceptance of castration.’115 Yet to the extent that the phallus inevitably conjures up images of the penis, the Lacanian division between these terms is continually undermined. Thus Lacan strays rather close to the essentialism he claims to disdain. While the phallus may indeed operate as a signifier in a signifying chain, as a metaphor and not as a natural fact of difference, it remains true that this metaphor derives its power from the very object it symbolises. Even if we allow that the phallus is preeminently a metaphor, it is metonymically closely associated with the penis and derives a large proportion of its signifying power to this non-arbitrary relation. As Fuss remarks, it is precisely because a woman does not have a penis that her relation to the phallus, the signifying order of language and law is so fraught with difficulties. As we observed in the case of Derrida, it appears that the very declaration of a pure anti-essentialist position ‘simply reinscribes an inescapable essentialist logic’.116 This consideration leaves us with an image of Lacan’s strategic appropriation of linguistics ‘clean[ing] Freud’s house of biologism, while essentialism quietly returns to post-structuralist psychoanalysis through the back door, carried on the soles of Lacan’s theory of signification’.117 Indeed, as we have commented, when Lacan refers to the ‘subject constituted in language’, he does not understand language as mere social discourse. Rather, he adopts Saussure’s image of language as a system of differential signs. Moreover, he appropriates Saussure’s distinction between parole (speech) and langue (language). Here the individual communication event of speech is seen as ‘accidental’, whereas language, the structural system of rules and code which govern speech, is ‘essential’. Lacan regards both speech and language as essential to the constitution of the human subject. Indeed, for Lacan, speech is viewed as a ‘discourse of truth’: ‘speech connotes truth’. Therefore, Fuss argues, what is most


irreducible and essential to the discourse of psychoanalysis (the talking cure?) is speech. What is fundamental to Lacanian psychoanalysis is the production of the subject in the Symbolic: language is the ‘essential de-essentialising mechanism’ which founds subjectivity. Let us now consider Lacan’s conception of the ‘mirror stage’. Notwithstanding Lacan’s contempt for mere ‘factual insubstantiality’, we cannot simply ignore the empirical dimension for his emphatic assertions. Indeed, we may note that this theory is based on an observation: the ‘jubilation’ or delight of the infant when confronted with its own mirror image. Yet, in practice, holding an infant up to the mirror can elicit a very variable response. Whether the child takes an interest or not depends on many different circumstances: their comfort, level of hunger, whether there are more interesting objects in the vicinity, such as a tantalisingly dangling blind-cord, or even a shiny hook on the frame of the mirror itself. Attention to the mirror image, if it occurs at all, is usually transient, and certainly not often associated with the ‘series of gestures’ and elaborate play to which Lacan refers. Moreover, as Tallis points out, the ‘startling spectacle of the infant in front of the mirror in which he overcomes, in a flutter of jubilant activity, the obstructions of his support and fixes on the object in a slightly leaning forward position’118 is observable in any infant excited by any object of interest, from a favourite book to a blackbird on the bird-table. It is essential for the transition from the specular ‘I’ to the social ‘I’, associated with the resolution of the Oedipus complex and accession to the symbolic sphere, that the child is held up to the mirror by its mother. The intricate process of developing subjectivity would be seriously derailed if the father (or even grandmother, aunt or brother and so on) did the holding. The theory specifies that the mother and infant should be symbiotically united at the moment when the child identifies with its mirror image, thus allowing the subsequent intervention by the father to occur. The infant’s fusion of the mother’s image with its own is vital in triggering the transition from the illusory identification with the mirror image to the dispersion of the self into language as ‘an infinitely mobile phallus signifier’.119 Yet if the father lifts the child to the mirror, the child’s identification with the mirror image would incorporate the image of the father, surely with rather different implications. Furthermore, the entire significance of the mirror stage turns on the dichotomy of the terrifying fragmentariness experienced by the infant and the satisfying unity of the image in the mirror. But the reflection that infants perceive in the mirror is usually partial, fragmentary in that the face and upper body are often the only parts of the body to be


observed. Furthermore, the average infant often fleetingly catches sight of parts of its body other than in the arms of its mother in the mirror. For example, it may glimpse a distorted image of its face in the taps of the bath, or in the window of the car, or in the inside of a saucepan lid. Tallis contends that the infant’s entire experience of its mirror image is both spatially and temporally fragmented. Not only the surfaces on which it glimpses itself but the level of illumination will affect the ‘selfencounter’. Random (and perhaps distorted) glimpses of various parts of its body in mirrors is unlikely to reward the child with a reassuringly ‘totalising image’ of selfhood. Yet the ‘lack of evidence’ argument has traditionally held little water with psychoanalysts. As Tallis concedes, most facts can be reinterpreted so that they appear to confirm rather than undermine the theory. For instance, the Freudian argument for the omnipotence of repressive mechanisms can translate active resistance to it into a sign of these very defence mechanisms at work. Seemingly, since one is always the subject of psychoanalytic mechanisms, one is not in a position to evaluate objectively the validity of them. On other occasions, the theories themselves are scooped out of empirical reality and elevated to the status of a fable, so that the child actually discovering the primal scene at a certain moment in time becomes the structure that represents the collective unconscious of the society to which it belongs, and so on. The elusivity of Lacanian argument has parallels in the verbal trickery of Derrida’s work. Setting aside the difficulties with the resistance of Lacan’s theories to empirical refutation, other problems internal to his arguments remain. For instance, from a supposed stage in the theory of infant development, Lacan produces a kind of genetic epistemology, claiming to have illuminated the genesis of subjectivity. More than this, he expands this thesis into the contention that the real world is unknowable by us, that the world of things, and not simply the infant’s access to the world of things, is a product of the world of words. Yet although the word of differentiated ‘reality’, according to Lacan, is the product of the world of linguistic ‘difference’, it seems that certain differentiated entities exist and have been interacting prior to the entry into the Symbolic. The mirror stage presupposes the existence of at least four separate ‘things’: the infant’s body, the mother’s body, the mirror itself, and the mirror image. As Tallis argues, ‘the pre-linguistic existence of these objects and the optical relations between them is hardly consistent with Lacan’s extreme nominalism’.120 Lacan’s assertion that ‘it is the world of words which creates the world of things’, explicitly disallows the existence of


any ‘things’ at all, either in the pre-linguistic reality of the Imaginary or in the extra-linguistic sphere of the real. Of particular relevance to our own agenda is Lacan’s conclusion that the self is a fiction. We have seen that this assertion is based on rather shaky empirical evidence. And there are further difficulties and inconsistencies in Lacan’s pronouncements on selfhood. For instance, the assumption is made that a child can recognise its own face in the mirror. Yet how can this apparent ‘given’ be compatible with Lacan’s other comment that no formed conception of selfhood as constructed in opposition to other material or human objects is possible in the shady realm of pre-linguistic reality? And if there is no boundary between child and mother, merely a symbiotic blurring, how is the child to identify its own image from its mother’s, or other objects reflected in the mirror? Even if this feat is among the child’s abilities, Lacan says nothing about this remarkable capacity: the ability to identify its image across a series of transformations and varying circumstances, or ‘object constancy’. Tallis asks, if the self is a fiction, ‘how does the child manage to refer so many different manifestations of its body in the mirror, to the same self?’121 If the fundamental experience of infancy is of ‘flying apart in all directions’, from where does this object constancy spring, this pre-linguistic awareness that ‘the image in the mirror is me’? Or, as Tallis succinctly phrases it: Why should a series of random exposures to quite different images of oneself give rise to a fictitious idea of stability that overrides the more continuous – and according to Lacan true – deliverance that one is fragmented?122 One of the aspects of Lacan’s thesis which is most difficult to accept is that the infant is mentally and perceptually more advanced than its motor abilities, to the extent that ‘the child anticipates on the mental plane the conquest of the functional unity of his [sic] own body, which … is still incomplete on the plane of voluntary motility’.123 So the child is supposed to visualise a unity it has not experienced; indeed, the Lacanian child is required to acknowledge that its internal development is ruled by a ‘functional unity’ (which, as we have seen, seems to be far from the child’s experience) for which there is no foundation in the Real. Far from demonstrating that that the extra-linguistic foundation of the self is a fiction, through his account of infant development, Lacan actually presupposes pre-linguistic selfhood. To summarise, we have observed that the Lacanian theory of the emergence of selfhood is deficient in both empirical corroboration and


internal consistency, exacerbated by the jargon, abstraction and ambiguity of Lacan’s style. Yet Lacan’s arguments retain a strong hold in many academic circles, where his pronouncements are regarded as profound comments upon the relationship between language and reality and of the nature of subjectivity. With Derrida, he is perceived as illuminating the impossibility of gaining access to extra-linguistic reality. It seems that Lacan’s account of the acquisition of language and selfhood is seriously flawed. Yet even if it were entirely true, it still would not support the conclusion that extra-linguistic reality is a myth. Lacan asserts that the initial apprehension of selfhood (the mirror image) is rooted in misrecognition: it consists of an imaginary identification of the subject with ‘that which is not itself’. If this is the case, then the whole of human consciousness must be built on these illusory foundations. So the pre-linguistic and post-linguistic worlds are as fictitious as each other, and all discourses have their origin in illusion and misrecognition, and so does consciousness. So even if Lacan’s theories were true, they would not demonstrate that extra-linguistic reality did not exist. It is undeniable that Lacan’s arguments cast doubt on our ability to have access to a ‘real’ world outside of consciousness; yet this falls very far short of Lacan’s claim that’it is the world of words that creates the world of things’.124 VIII

Thinking difference differently

Post-structuralist thought powerfully demonstrates the fact that misrecognition, discontinuity and difference necessarily intervene between the self and itself, and between the self and the world it encounters. Perfect and transparent self-presence, the immediate grasp and possession of absolute meaning are shown to be illusions. As Peter Dews observes, deconstruction’s primary insight is that the disseminative process of language cannot be accounted for in terms of the intentional and interpretive acts of a solitary consciousness.125 So when Derrida remarks that the subject is not some meta-linguistic substance or identity, some pure cogito of self-presence; it is always inscribed in language126 it is difficult to disagree. Identity does indeed presuppose alterity or otherness: language mediates in a plurality of ways between consciousness


and ‘reality’, while complete self-understanding through intuitive selfreflection is always deferred by the intervention of the sign. We must concur with Derrida that ‘immediacy is [indeed] the myth of consciousness’.127 Our difficulty lies in Derrida’s insistence on the primordiality of différance as structural absence, negative trace, operative before all perception and thought; or, in Lacan’s conception of the human subject, as ‘irredeemably fractured, decentred, condemned to a permanent dispossession of self’,128 reflecting back only the echo of the signifier. If this is the case, then difference and non-meaning must be posited as prior to – and taking precedence over – presence, identity and continuity. Indeed, for Derrida, the illusion of self-presence requires a forceful repression of différance or alterity: the rapport of self-identity to itself is always a rapport of violence with the other; so that the notions of property, appropriation and self-presence, so central to logocentric metaphysics, are essentially dependent on an oppositional relationship with otherness.129 Rather than viewing self-presence and meaning in a relationship of violence and total opposition to différance and non-meaning, to what extent can the play of presence and absence, continuity and fragmentation, unity and disunity, possession and dispossession which permeate our conscious and unconscious relationships to ourselves and others in the world be considered as a dynamic process of (partial and contingent) selfunderstanding? Derrida himself may be read against the pro-différance deconstructionist grain when he observes that In the one case, ‘to differ’ signifies non-identity; in the other case, it signifies the order of the same.130 What would it mean to read ‘the one case’ (alterity) and ‘the other case’ (sameness) as equiprimordial? Dislodging the primacy of différance need not mean a return to the reflection theory of consciousness, allowing ‘the thing signified … to glow finally in the luminosity of its presence:131 but it might deflect the trajectory of the infinite regress of signifier to signifier towards the indispensable (although ultimately unreachable) ground of ‘the real’. However, before turning to these questions, we will consider the impact of post-structuralism on feminist theory, since the categories of subjectivity, self-presence, experience and agency are of particular concern in this field.

2 Woman as Text The Influence of Post-structuralism on Feminist Theory

I

Undecidable ‘Woman’ ‘Woman’ is not some thing, the determinable identity of a figure that appears in the distance, at a distance from other things, and which could be approached or left behind. Perhaps as non-identity, nonfigure, simulacrum, she is the abyss of distance, the distancing of distance, the division of spacing, distance itself …1 The way to myself and other women is blocked by [the] male icon as a point of reference, for reverence. And I have to make arguments which sound extravagant to my ears, that women exist.2

The influence of post-Saussurean thought may be discerned in almost every branch of contemporary feminist theory; Gill Howie, writing in The Future of Philosophy (1998), notes: ‘the third and current stage [of feminism] has been dominated by post-structuralism’.3 In particular, Jacques Derrida and Jacques Lacan are often celebrated as the imaginatively transgressive ‘shock-troops of anti-essentialism’,4 at the forefront of a glorious routing of the (male) self-contained authentic humanist subject from its privileged status in Western philosophical thought. In a similar vein, post-structuralist feminists attempt to tear the mimetic contract to ribbons and exile ‘woman’ to the hinterland of undecidability, while simultaneously striving to retain political agency in the deconstructive-nominalist maze: for where is feminism if ‘woman’ does not exist? Having considered the submerged misreadings, assumptions and arguments from which post-Saussurean thinkers derive their authority in Chapter 1, here we explore the fundamental incompatibility of feminism and post-structuralism. While deconstructive-nominalist approaches may play a limited strategic role in ‘leavening’ any theories 41


of female agency and subjectivity, it seems that their input must be strictly curtailed, lest ‘women’ themselves find themselves theoretically ‘erased’ by an ambiguously (re)essentialising post-structuralist hand. Feminist theory’s seduction by post-structuralism is attributable to several causes. Primarily, post-structuralism appears to offer feminists a powerfully subversive tool: the contention that our semantic and conceptual categories are produced by language alone, irrespective of their conformity with the objective structure of reality seems to make language social and a site of political struggle. Chris Weedon recommends the post-structuralist critique to feminism ‘as a way of conceptualising the relationship between language, social institutions and individual consciousness which focuses on how power is exercised and on the possibilities of change’.5 For example, if we consider the category ‘woman’, it is possible to argue that the meaning of ‘woman’, or the qualities identified as ‘womanly’ are not innately fixed and reflected in the term ‘woman’, but are ‘socially produced with language, plural and subject to change’.6 Thus post-structuralist theory appears to offer feminists opportunities for challenge and redefinition, opportunities to expose the precarious, shifting nature of subjectivity, discourse and power, to demonstrate that established meanings, values and power relations are not impregnable absolutes but are open to question. With the existence of both ‘extra-linguistic reality’ and a meaningful degree of ‘self-presence’ established as the starting point for my argument, in this chapter I will concentrate on post-structuralist approaches to subjectivity, in particular women’s subjectivity, seeking to demonstrate that these arguments not only refuse any grounds on which to ‘speak the self’, but, due to a veiled determinism, ultimately deny the (female) subject’s ability to reflect on dominant social discourses and challenge their determinations. If ‘woman’ does not exist then a series of semantic chasms is opened, through which the female subject descends into the shadowy realm of pure textuality. Here we will explore the implications of this radical nominalist stance in an examination of Julia Kristeva’s oeuvre, arguing that her work is a paradigm instance of the difficult marriage of feminism and post-structuralism, where the fluidity of the sign ‘woman’ is stridently proclaimed but simultaneously denied as conceptual closure is reinvoked at a different level.7 Although in some respects imaginative and innovative, Kristeva’s theories draw heavily on principles of Derridean deconstruction and, in particular, appropriate many elements of the Lacanian Weltanschauung. Therefore, by way of introduction, we will begin with a brief consideration of the category of ‘woman’ in the work of both Jacques Derrida and Jacques Lacan.

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II ‘The non-truth of truth’: the category of ‘woman’ in Derrida and Lacan In labelling ‘woman’ as différance itself, Derrida appropriates ‘woman’ as the figurehead for the anti-essentialist deconstructive ‘shock-troops’. In order to confront the implications of this stance, it is necessary to return once more to the Derridean notion of différance. In an early lecture on the subject, Différance (1973), Derrida remarks that this neologism is neither a word nor a concept although it resembles both the more it is mentioned. This remarkable comment illustrates the implicit Derridean belief that he alone can ‘turn the binary and referential qualities of language on and off like a light switch’,8 momentarily escaping the play of textuality in a way quite incompatible with the principles of deconstruction. Yet if the claim that différance eludes the metaphysical polarities of language is perplexing, when ‘woman’ is apparently substituted for the term différance, manifold difficulties proliferate. Not the least of these is the realisation that Derrida’s textual ‘freewheeling’ often obscures an absence of empirical and indeed theoretical justification. Derrida’s consideration of feminism in his essay ‘Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles’ (1991) may serve as a starting place. He contends that: feminism is the operation by which woman wants to resemble man, the dogmatic philosopher, demanding truth, science, objectivity, that is, demanding the whole virile illusion, along with the castration effect that comes with it. Feminism wants castration – including that of woman.9 Here misguided feminists apparently become men by mistakenly trying to imitate their modes of thought and practice instead of wholeheartedly embracing the deconstructive non-truth that is appropriate to women. Indeed, more than an echo of the old cliches (irrationality, hysteria, lack of independent thinking) which haunt the Eternal Feminine are discernible here, ‘between the blinds’10 of the deconstructive rhetoric: there is no essence of woman because woman averts and averts from herself … out of the depths endless and unfathomable, she engulfs and enveils any essentiality, any identity, any properness. Blinded here, philosophical discourse founders – lets itself be hurled toward its ruin … Woman is a name of this non-truth of truth.11 What position do men and women occupy in this discourse? Robert Scholes notes that they operate not as simple referential categories but


as ideal types; he observes: ‘allegory is always tinged with Platonism, and every attempt to get away from essence in the form of the categorical nouns required by language leads back to essence in the form of unutterable ideas which lie beyond human understanding’.12 So the abyss between metaphysical immanence and deconstruction is not so unbridgeable as one might have imagined! By interchanging the ideal and referential categories of ‘man’ and ‘woman’, Derrida radically undercuts his avowed aims. Beneath the rhetorical ambiguity, Derrida merely reverses and reinscribes the presence/absence opposition. This leads to the position that to have an essence is shamefully regressive and conservative while to lack one is pure jouissance, the key to that coveted space on the socio-cultural margins where one can revel in boundless undecidability. As Scholes appositely remarks, ‘if deconstructionists were priests, castration would be a sacrament’.13 But if ‘man’ and ‘woman’ both lack essences, then why highlight woman’s lack? As we observed in Chapter 1, it is meaningless to speak of absence without presence and vice versa. Scholes’ summary is succinct: ‘if one denies all essences, if, that is, one claims to be a thorough-going anti-essentialist, then one cannot make meaningful distinctions on the basis on the absence and presence of essence.’14 Thus, in invoking the many faceted card of essentialism, Derrida is unable to avoid essentialising notions even as he seeks to dismantle them. Again, the structure of language and its rootedness in shared experiences is the denied subtext which underwrites Derrida’s deconstructive manoeuvring. Post-structuralists appear to assert that to hold concepts in common is to be guilty of essentialism and its twin crimes of biological reductionism or social universalism. Yet to the extent that a common understanding of conceptual categories is essential to our daily life, we the practitioners of language cannot be anything but essentialists – or entirely mute. To appropriate a Derridean phrase, we are ‘always already’ essentialists; anything outside our ‘shared nexus of language and perceptions’15 is unrecognisable. The interrogative tactics of deconstruction may shake the foundations of referentiality, but they cannot bring down the entire edifice. Like Derrida, Jacques Lacan places ‘woman’ as sign very firmly sousrature or under erasure: The woman can only be written with The crossed through. There is no such thing as The woman, where the definite article stands for the universal.16

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This refusal of unity, this dismissal of false universals such as the Eternal Feminine and so on, may appear conducive to feminism, calling into question ‘the register of the absolute fixity … of the category of woman.’17 But in fact a closer examination of Lacan’s account of the acquisition of female subjectivity will expose the impoverished subjectposition which Lacanian analysis imposes on women’s material beingin-the-world. During the Oedipal phase, Lacan argues that the little girl comes to desire not her mother but the phallus as a symbol of the missing object of desire which can never be rediscovered. It is only through the introduction of the ‘Name of the Father’, the symbolic order which destroys the mother/infant dyad to form the Oedipal triangle, that the girl’s relationship with the mother can take on meaning. The child’s first experience of desire triggers the process of language and symbolisation; the desire for the lost maternal body is, for Lacan, necessarily connected to the realisation that words can stand in for objects. Thus women’s sexuality must be regarded as inseparable from the phallocentric symbolic order through which it is produced: That the woman should be inscribed in an order of exchange of which she is the object, is what makes for the fundamentally conflictual, and I would say, insoluble character of her position: the symbolic order literally submerges her, it transcends her … 18 With this assertion we uncover the true nature of the straitjacket that is Lacanian female subjectivity: for Lacan, one cannot become a speaking subject at all without entering the symbolic order and thus accepting the Law of the Father. Haunted by unquenchable desire for the original lost subject manifested in the ceaseless, hopeless shift from one signifier to the other, the only possible opportunity for change offered to the female subject is the impermanence of linguistic signifiers. As Waugh remarks, ‘ “man” and “woman” are not necessarily tied to the same objects, the same signifieds, because the meaning of any linguistic element is given by its relation to all the other elements of language and has no inherent meaning of its own.’19 However, as we shall see, even this prospect of conceptual emancipation is dashed by the constraints of Lacan’s re-essentialising tendency which fills the ‘empty set’ of ‘Woman’ with impotent, distorted images. Lacan’s effort to ‘de-essentialise’ woman is subject to difficulties similar to those we encountered in Derrida’s attempt to speak (as) woman. Of course, at first sight, Lacanian analysis seems to offer feminist theory


some advantages. As Nancy Fraser remarks, by harnessing the Freudian construction of gendered subjectivity to the Saussurean model of structural linguistics, it becomes possible to reopen excluded questions about identity, speech and social practice and to treat gender as socio-cultural through and through. If the primary opposition of sexual difference is shown to be constituted by language, intervention becomes a possibility. However, on closer examination these apparent advantages evaporate, primarily with the realisation that Lacan’s theory is irrevocably circular. We have already explored the process by which individuals acquire (gendered) subjectivity through their difficult conscription as young children into a pre-existing phallocentric symbolic order. We observed that, for Lacan, the structure of the symbolic order determines individual subjectivity. Yet, simultaneously, the theory attempts to demonstrate that the symbolic is inherently, necessarily, phallocentric since the attainment of subjectivity requires submission to ‘the Father’s Law’. So, from this angle, the nature of individual subjectivity determines the nature of the symbolic order. The argument is circular. What are the implications of this for the female ‘speaking subject’? In Lacan’s own words, woman is ‘without exit’;20 the symbolic order submerges and transcends her. Moreover, Lacanian development of gendered subjectivity is unalterable and invariable. Leland states: ‘given Lacan’s view of the phallic structuring of sex and gender as a function of the reigning social symbolics, the possibility of transcending or modifying the rule of phallic law is dim’.21 This thorough-going determinism effectively reinscribes woman’s disadvantaged space in the symbolic order with the encoding of masculine cultural authority as a necessary element of the human condition: ‘women’s subordination is … [demonstrated] as the inevitable destiny of civilization’.22 Moreover, insofar as one successfully negotiates the passage from natural to social being, the identity functions prescribed by the Symbolic Order are escapable only by psychosis. In Chapter 1 we observed how, despite Lacan’s attempt to ‘clean Freud’s house of biologism’,23 essentialism was impossible to eradicate completely from Lacan’s theory of signification. Yet essentialism is not the only fly in the Lacanian ointment, for to the extent that Lacan partially displaces the more obvious elements of Freudian biologism, he fills the void with an even more insidious psychologism, the insupportable view that autonomous psychological imperatives are given independently of culture and history. This is most evident in Lacan’s assertion that the phallocentricity of the symbolic order is required by the

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demands of an ‘enculturation process’ that is itself independent of culture. Both Dorothy Leland and Nancy Fraser forward versions of this argument.24 Moreover, Lacan’s theory of gendered subjectivity is questionable on the grounds of his homogenisaton of the ‘symbolic order’. In effect, Lacan subsumes many diverse and contradictory signifying practices under the monolithic and all-pervasive ‘symbolic order’; more than this, he bestows on this order an ‘exclusive and unlimited causal power’25 to fix people’s subjectivities in concrete, once and for all. The power of historical institutions and practices to form identities pale in comparison with that of overarching normative Symbolic. Thus langue, the symbolic code of signification, is appropriated from Saussurean linguistics and inflated to the status of the absolute. So the Lacanian Symbolic acts as a kind of post-structuralist steamroller. Since it is derived from langue, rather than from parole, the speaker’s use of communicative language, questions of agency, social identity and the speaking subject are excluded. Variable historical phenomena, such as representations of love in art and literature, the gender division of labour, contingent practices and traditions, are steamrollered by the homogenising symbolic, flattening tensions and contradictions – a process of essentialising surprising from an avowedly post-structuralist thinker. Indeed, so bloated is the Symbolic with the multiple signifying practices that it has assimilated, the claim that it alone determines the structure of subjectivity tells us precisely nothing: it is an ‘empty tautology’.26 Furthermore, Saussure’s insistence on the study of langue as synchronic rather than diachronic excludes consideration of historical change; the object of study is static and atemporal. Lacan’s harnessing of this theory to Freudian biologistic identity construction, far from liberating the gendered subject from the bonds of the ‘anatomy is destiny’ doctrine, merely replaces these shackles with an even more restrictive set. Not only is one constrained by the psychoanalytic proposition that gender identity is eternally fixed with the resolution of the Oedipus complex, but, with the simultaneous advent of the all-powerful, monolithic symbolic order, the gendered subject is confined to a permanent prison of a historical fixity where it is impossible even to conceive of debates over social meanings, hegemonic and counter-hegemonic discourses or even alternative perspectives. Julia Kristeva admits that, with Lacanian analysis, we are caught ‘in a profound structural mechanism concerning the casting of sexual difference in the West … and [we] can’t do much about it’.27 The Oedipal and Symbolic structuring of


subjectivity is total, for Lacan: once in place, we cannot escape the identificatory options circumscribed by patriarchal representations and gender categories: The [Lacanian] speaking subject is simply a grammatical ‘I’ wholly subjected to the Symbolic Order; it can only and forever reproduce that order. The Lacanian ego is an imaginary projection, deluded about its own stability and self-possession, hooked on an impossible desire for unity and self-completion; it therefore can only and forever tilt at windmills.28 Thus both Derrida and Lacan, ‘between the blinds’ of their evasive and elliptical styles, simultaneously re-essentialise women as they claim to de-essentialise her. Submerged in the ‘necessary’ phallocentric Lacanian Symbolic or in the abyss of Derridean distance the woman is condemned to be what is not, a figure of pure difference whose only agency is to call, siren-like (‘out of the depths, endless and unfathomable …’) to philosophical discourse so that ‘blinded, [it will] founder on these shoals, [will be] hurled down these depths to its ruin’.29 Because of their commitment to the (post)-structuralist model, Derrida and Lacan fail to account for questions of social synchronic identity, agency and the speaking subject. The paucity of their nominalism is most evident in their accounts of ‘The Woman’, accounts which ignore the being-in-theworld of real, material women, which deny the complexity and multiplicity of social identities, the richness of selves woven from a plurality of discursive strands, the agency of women’s active participation in the interactions that construct their experiences. Our discussion, of both Derrida and Lacan’s appropriation of woman as sign, has alerted us to the issues at stake in the invocation of the category ‘woman’. How do we represent sexual difference without reinscribing dual hierarchised oppositions; how do we attach the signifier ‘woman’ to real, material women without simultaneously essentialising their lived experience? Who determines which similarities between women are to be emphasised, when differences are to be articulated? More than any other French feminist philosopher, Julia Kristeva’s theory of the (speaking) subject has tantalised many feminist theorists in that she seeks to expose both the limits of the Lacanian theory of subjectivity and language acquisition by revealing the ‘poetic-maternal’ semiotic dimension of language that it excludes, and the excesses of Derridean deconstruction by stressing the heterogeneity of the human subject and the social dimension of language. Yet while one may read

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Kristeva’s writing as a necessary corrective to Derridean and Lacanian post-structuralism, with respect to the articulation of woman’s selfhood(s), her theories fail to fulfil their early promise, and are as conceptually restrictive as those of Derrida and Lacan.

Kristeva: anti-representationalism versus biological teleology

III

Kristeva’s misgivings about Derridean ‘grammatology’ may provide an appropriate starting place. While conceding that grammatology is ‘the most radical of all the various procedures that have tried, after Hegel, to push dialectical negativity further and elsewhere’,30 Kristeva believes that a fatal consequence of this approach is the abandonment of active subjecthood, vanquished by the ‘play of différance’. She writes that: the grammatological deluge of meaning gives up on the subject, and must remain ignorant of his [sic] functioning as social practice. … Neutral in the face of all positions, theses and structures, grammatology is, as a consequence, equally restrained when they break, burst or rupture: demonstrating disinterestedness towards (symbolic and/or social) structure, grammatology remains silent when faced with its destruction or renewal [emphasis mine].31 We have already considered the theoretical cost of Derrida’s assertion that il n’y a pas de hors-texte; Kristeva concurs with many other critics of deconstruction that the ‘deluge of meaning’ which grammatology unleashes is undermined by its abandonment of the socially functioning subject. Kristeva’s avowed concern to safeguard a place for the subject is motivated by her desire to theorise the various heterogeneous forces which disrupt language and which account for breaks, changes and transformations in the social structure. Her stress on the ‘speaking subject’ and her view of language as ‘production’ appears to place her theoretically at odds with the subjectless ‘world of words’ which constitutes post-structuralism – at first. Indeed, Kristeva contrasts the limited scope of a ‘mere grammatology’, mute in the face of the destruction or renewal of social structures, with the integrative project of ‘semanalysis’, which seeks to provide a comprehensive account of primary linguistic/psychoanalytic processes, conceiving of meaning not as a sign-system, but as signifying process. Despite this ambitious aim, Kristeva indeed ‘gives up on the subject’, locking the female


speaking subject into a reified subject-position quite as restrictive and essentialising as that conceived by Derridean deconstruction or Lacanian psychoanalysis. Kristeva’s initial approach to the ‘speaking subject’ is most clearly articulated in her seminal 1973 article ‘The System and the Speaking Subject’, a paper which announces her determination to reject the principles of structuralism. Distinguishing between structuralism on the one hand and ‘semiotics’ or ‘semanalysis’ on the other, Kristeva contends that structuralism’s exclusive focus on Saussurean langue, or the static phase of language, posits language as a homogeneous structure impervious to oppositional practice or change, whereas semanalysis, by reading language as a discourse enunciated by a speaking subject, stresses its fundamentally heterogeneous nature. Thus semanalysis celebrates the dynamism of language as a signifying process rather than a static system, manifest in a series of ‘signifying practices’ which, while normgoverned, are not necessarily entirely constraining, and are situated in historically determined relations of production. Kristeva stresses the ‘sociality in which the (speaking, historical) subject is embedded’.32 For Kristeva, a theory of meaning must necessarily be a theory of the speaking subject. This subject has a social and a historical location, yet is not entirely determined by the dominant discursive codes; this subject, capable of transgression and innovation, acts as the ‘necessary link’ between linguistics and psychoanalysis. Kristeva argues that in the absence of such a link, linguistics must work with an impoverished conception of the human subject and psychoanalysis with an inadequate understanding of language. Yet Kristeva’s theories increasingly privilege the psychonanalytic approach; indeed, she appropriates the Lacanian split subject, divided by the rival claims of the conscious and unconscious, ‘driven by bio-psychological processes that are part of the signifying processes, and subject to social and economic constraints’.33 We will have more to say about the implications of this questionable link between libidinal drives and discursive practice. Kristeva’s discursive/pragmatic model apparently resurrects the issues of context, agency and practice systematically excluded by the structuralist/Saussurean model of language. The socially situated speaker, while immersed in norm-governed signifying practices, is nonetheless capable of ‘transgressive practice’. She writes that the moment of transgression is the key moment in practice: we can speak of practice wherever there is a transgression of systematicity, ie. a transgression of the unity proper to the transcendental ego …34

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Transgressive practice, or the transgression of dominant discourses, may enable discursive innovation and thus actual change, perhaps the ‘fracture of a symbolic code which can no longer “hold” its (speaking) subjects’.35 Signifying practices may be thus infiltrated and reworked in the form of modified discursive norms. Thus Kristeva seeks to ‘establish the heterogeneous logic of signifying practices, [to] locate them, finally and by way of their subject, in the historically determined relations of production’.36 She urges the necessity for the subject to ‘call himself [sic] in question’,37 to abandon the protective shell of the transcendental ego in order to restore his connection with the drive-governed, but also social, political and historical ‘negativity’ which ‘rends and renews the social code’.38 The concept of the speaking subject, socio-historically situated but not entirely bound to discursive norms, and capable of innovative transgressive practice, is certainly conducive to an exploration of how women experience their individual and collective identities, and how these fluctuating selfhoods may be theorised. In her later work, Kristeva develops a psychoanalytically grounded gender subtext to her arguments, and it is this progression that we will examine now. Kristeva’s ambitious doctoral thesis, Revolution in Poetic Language (1974) has had a vast impact on feminist considerations of subjectivity and identity, presenting as it does a far-reaching theory of the processes which constitute language, elements of which are explicitly associated with the maternal/feminine. Again Kristeva wishes to stress the subversive power of language as a dynamic process that manifests the variety and diversity of human subjecthood. In a preliminary examination of the signifying process (signifiance), Kristeva transforms Lacan’s distinction between the Imaginary and the Symbolic Order into a distinction between the semiotic and the symbolic. It is the interaction between these two ‘processes’ which constitutes the signifying process. We recall that, according to Lacan, the paternal law (or Name of the Father) structures all linguistic signification, or the ‘symbolic’, and thus becomes the organising principle of culture itself. Through the repression of primary libidinal drives, such as the radical desire for the maternal body, this law allows the possibility of meaningful language and thus meaningful experience. Effectively, the symbolic is generated by repressing the primary relationship to the maternal body. Created by this constrictive law, the newly created ‘unitary’ subject participates in and perpetuates the language of the symbolic; the ‘libidinal chaos’ of the Lacanian Imaginary is contained within the ‘protective shell of the transcendental ego’.39 Multiple meanings, associated with the libidinal


multiplicity which characterised the primary relationship to the maternal body, are suppressed by the linguistic processes of the symbolic order, which affirm the primacy of absolute and univocal meanings. Kristeva herself defines the symbolic as ‘a social effect of the relation to the other, through the objective constraints of biological (including sexual) differences and concrete, historical family structures’.40 Yet Kristeva’s understanding of the nature of the symbolic order differs in one vital respect from that of Lacan; Kristeva insists upon what she terms the ‘semiotic’ dimension of language. She challenges the Lacanian narrative which assumes that only through the repression of the primary relationship to the maternal body is cultural meaning possible. Moreover, she attempts to expose the limits of Lacan’s theory of language acquisition and subjectivity by revealing the ‘semiotic’ dimension which it excludes. The ‘semiotic’, a poetic-maternal linguistic practice, operates as a perpetual source of disruption and subversion within the symbolic, understood as the system, structured as language, which governs every social practice. In developing her theory of the semiotic dimension of language, Kristeva aims to articulate a theory of the subject which ‘does not reduce the subject to one of understanding, but instead opens up within the subject [another] scene of pre-symbolic functions.’41 The concept of the semiotic is derived from the Greek, the term ‘semiotic’ signifies ‘mark, trace, index, precursory sign, proof … imprint’.42 In an attempt to account for the dynamic interrelations between the semiotic and the symbolic, Kristeva introduces the notion of the semiotic ‘chora’ (from the Greek for enclosed space, womb) which must be understood neither as a sign nor a position but as an essentially mobile and extremely provisional articulation constituted by movements and their ephemeral stases … Neither model nor copy, the ‘chora’ precedes and underlies figuration and thus specularization, and is analogous only to vocal and kinetic rhythm.43 The concept of the ‘chora’ is appropriated largely from Plato’s Timaeus, albeit amplified and reworked. In words which Plato concedes are extremely ‘difficult and obscure’44, he attempts to describe three forms of reality. First, an intelligible and unchanging form, second its visible and changing copy and third, a form which he tentatively posits as ‘ the receptacle and, as it were, the nurse of all becoming and change’.45 In experimental and metaphorical language, he compares this form to the

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image of the mother, before substituting the word ‘space’ or ‘chora’ for ‘receptacle’: Space is … eternal and indestructible … provides a position for everything that comes to be, and is apprehended without the senses by a sort of spurious reasoning and so is hard to believe in – we look at it indeed in a kind of dream and say that everything that exists must be somewhere and occupy some space, and that what is nowhere in heaven or earth is nothing at all.46 The Kristevan notion of the ‘chora’ assimilates both Plato’s maternal image and his more abstract formulation of ‘space’. These elements are subliminally supplemented by the Aristotelian ‘chorion’, signifying the membrane that encloses the foetus in the womb. The chorion may be regarded as a place where the mother’s and the child’s bodies both coalesce and separate, creating a striking image of the otherness internal to subjectivity. Indeed, in ‘Motherhood According to Giovanni Bellini’, Kristeva describes the maternal body thus: Cells fuse, split and proliferate; volumes grow, tissues stretch and body fluids change rhythm, speeding up or slowing down. Within the body, growing as a graft, indomitable, there is an other.47 The chorion represents the space of the other within the mother’s body; moreover, ‘within its double structure, the first communication between the foetus and the m(other) occurs’.48 The semiotic ‘chora’ is associated with the pre-Oedipal primary processes, the fundamental ‘pulsions’ which Kristeva regards as predominantly oral and anal. Kristeva explains, discrete quantities of energy move through the body of the subject who is not yet constituted as such, and in the course of his [sic] development, they are [socially] arranged according to the various constraints imposed upon this body … [thus] the drives, which are ‘energy’ charges as well as ‘psychical’ marks, articulate what we call a ‘chora’: a non-expressive totality formed by the drives and their stases in a motility that is as full of movement as it is regulated.49 Kristeva urges that we ‘read in this rhythmic space’ of the ‘chora’ the ‘process by which signifiance is constituted’;50 Plato’s description of the ‘chora’ as nourishing and maternal but not yet unified in an ordered whole is the foundation of Kristeva’s theory.


Moreover, Kristeva contends that the chora is a ‘modality of signifiance’ in which the linguistic sign is not yet articulated as the absence of an object: ‘the kinetic functional stage of the “semiotic” precedes the establishment of the sign; it is not, therefore, cognitive in the sense of being assumed by a knowing, already constituted subject.’51 Signifiance, for Kristeva as for Lacan, is a question of positioning; if meaning is to be generated, it can only accrue from the splitting (coupure) of the semiotic (or Imaginary) continuum. Kristeva appropriates Husserl’s term ‘thesis’ to describe this phase in which the subject is able to attribute differences and thus meaning to the rhythmic heterogeneity of the ‘chora’. For Kristeva, the ‘thetic’ phase ‘marks a threshold between two heterogeneous realms: the semiotic and the symbolic.’52 Kristeva rearticulates Husserl’s phenomenological categories in order to position the semiotic ‘chora’, as the space in which the speaking subject is formed, in relation to signifying processes. In Husserlian terminology, ‘positing’ is a nominal act in which the object presented is referred to as existing; this necessitates an active, rational commitment on the part of the thinker. The Husserlian ‘thetic’ is a quality or function of positing: ‘such are “thetic” acts, acts that “posit” Being.’53 Husserl derives this understanding from his conception of worldly existence: I find that the spatio-temporal fact-world to which I myself belong … to be out there … just as it gives itself to me as something that exists out there. All doubting … of the data of the natural world leave standing the general thesis of the natural standpoint.54 Kristeva’s intellectual investment in Husserl’s conception of the thetic ‘manifests a commitment to resist the assimilation of all phenomena to language’;55 in the Kristevan sense, however, the thetic ‘posits’ Being in that it is only through the thetic rupture of the semiotic continuum that subjectivity (and thus signification) may be acquired. The thetic is ‘a break in the signifying process, establishing the identification of the subject and its object as preconditions of propositionality’.56 For Kristeva, all enunciation is necessarily thetic: it requires a separation of the subject from his or her own image, from objects in the world. Kristeva supplements the Husserlian thetic with the Lacanian development of Freud’s conception of identity acquisition, positing the mirror phase as the key moment which allows ‘the constitution of objects detached from the semiotic chora’.57 Language-learning, for Kristeva, is an ‘acute and dramatic confrontation between positing-separatingidentifying and the motility of the semiotic “chora” ’.58 Moreover,

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according to Lacan/Kristeva, the threat of ‘castration’ completes the process of separation that posits the subject as signifiable. Occupying the position of ‘alterity’ is the phallus – her replete body is the receptacle and guarantor of all demands. Here the scission of language and the scission of the subject reflect and inform each other: the ‘discovery of castration’ detaches the subject from his or her fusion with the mother and diverts her or his identity into the phallocentric symbolic. Dependence on the mother is severed, the thetic threshold crossed, the mobile, instinctual semiotic almost entirely repressed. Before considering the subversive eruptions of the semiotic in the symbolic order, it might be appropriate to stress the dual nature of the semiotic ‘chora’, the two levels at which it operates in Kristevan discourse. In its Platonic context, the ‘chora’ plugs a theoretical gap, imaginatively answering the question ‘where is the place where first things come to be?’59 Yet the ‘chora’ operates in a different register in Kristeva’s thinking, as she imbues it with a bodily, specifically maternal function, as a (ambiguously) female space within which the speaking subject originates. In contrast to the monolithic all-powerful Lacanian Symbolic, the Kristevan symbolic appears to be a more vulnerable entity, open to transgression and disruption by the semiotic ‘chora’ which pulsates beneath its surface. The Kristevan symbolic ‘travels within the image of the eyelid: even when it brings together two edges of a fissure, it waits to reopen and to separate what it had previously joined’.60 The semiotic repeatedly tears the symbolic open: for Kristeva, this transgression enables ‘all the various transformations of the signifying practice that are called “creation” ’.61 Indeed, once the subject has entered the symbolic order, the repressed ‘chora’ may be perceived as ‘pulsional pressure’ within symbolic language – as meaninglessness, disruption, contradiction, absence. The ‘chora’ constitutes the ‘heterogeneous, disruptive dimension of language, that which can never be caught up in the closure of traditional linguistic theory’.62 The ‘normativity’ of communicative language, its semantics, syntax, contextual relations, is forever vulnerable to invasion by the surging ‘chora’. Crucially, however, the ‘chora’ cannot be conceived as separate from symbolic language: ‘it exists in practice only within the symbolic’.63 For Kristeva, the text is always charged by the libidinal drives of the ‘chora’ which underlie the text. The symbolic structure of the text is, to a degree, vulnerable to these instinctual rhythms; no sooner is meaning constituted than it is undone by what remains outside meaning. It appears that whatever transitory aesthetic unity or totality is formed will


be ‘dynamited’ by a plethora of drives which pulverise signification. Indeed, Kristeva stresses that the rupture of the ‘thetic’, ‘that crucial place on the basis of which the human being constitutes himself [sic] as signifying and/or social’64 is the very place towards which textual experience aims. Here textual experience seems to become a form of selfanalysis, ‘one of the most daring explorations the subject can allow himself, one that delves into his constitutive process’.65 The human body/subject is effectively caught up in the dynamic of the text: the difficulty of maintaining the symbolic function under the assault of the negativity of the semiotic drives indicates the supposed ‘risk’ that textual practice represents for the subject. This ‘risk’ – presumably of a dissolution of the ‘coherent’ subject into psychotic babbler – turns out to be not quite so threatening as it would at first seem, thanks to the inherent structural resilience of the Kristevan symbolic; this point will be developed later. Indeed, Kristeva’s stress on the vulnerability of the symbolic is emphatic. She contends that, such is the instability of traditional contemplative or theoretical thought that the ‘seismic’ activity of the ‘chora’ is separated from this sphere by only the thinnest crust. In textual terms, the semiotic pulsions breach this barrier through a form of poetic ‘negativity’ perceptible as a series of ruptures, absences and breaks in the symbolic language. Kristeva writes: In any poetic language, not only do the rhythmic constraints, for example, go so far as to violate certain grammatical rules … but in recent texts, these semiotic constraints (rhythm, vocalic timbres in Symbolist work, but also graphic disposition on the page) are accompanied by non-recoverable syntactic elision; it is impossible to reconstitute the particular elided syntactic category (object or verb) which makes the meaning of the utterance decidable.66 Certain warning bells begin to ring here: Kristeva’s persistent valorisation of transgression (textual or otherwise) regardless of content, as well as the implicit connection of the maternal-feminine with undecidability, the dangerous implications of which we demonstrated in our analysis of Derridean/Lacanian ‘woman-sous-rature’, alert us to possible difficulties ahead. So for Kristeva, poetic language effects the ‘semiotisation of the symbolic’.67 Indeed, in Polylogue (1977), Kristeva intensifies her emphasis on the constitutive connection between the maternal and the functions of the semiotic. Citing the image of the child at the mother’s breast, she

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argues that here ‘the superego and its linear language … are combatted by a return of the oral, glottic pleasure’ of suction and fusion.68 Moreover, the maternal “voice” is seen as giving “music” to literature [in the form of] melody, harmony, rhythm, “gentle” and “pleasing” sounds.’69 Yet, as Domna Stanton remarks, the radical quality of the Kristevan poetic/semiotic text does not merely predicate a simple ‘return of the repressed’, but a form of ‘metaphorical incest’70: the artist/child transgresses the Law of the Father by entering the ‘archaic, instinctual and maternal territory’.71 Indeed, Kristeva’s theory never strays far from the Freudian script. Not only her appropriation of the Freudian/Lacanian notion of the subject’s desire to (re) possess the mother, but her privileging of the specifically male artist/ child signifies her often uncritical reliance on Freudian precepts. It seems that for Kristeva, the male artist ‘touches base’ with the semiotic through transgressive poetic endeavour, while women do it by giving birth. In fact, Kristeva concedes that the daughter, for whom the mother is not the ‘other’ but the ‘same’, forms her most important alliance with the father, which results in her more steadfast conformity to symbolic authority and thus her inferior status as ‘less subversive/creative than semiotic man’.72 Woman as mere reproductive body, man as her creative superior – do we hear the surreptitious return of those grand hierarchising meta-narratives post-structuralism claimed to counter? What evidence does Kristeva supply for the ‘revolutionary’ artist/ subject’s ability to allow the jouissance of the transgressive semiotic to disrupt the oppressive symbolic order? The writings of late nineteenthcentury avant-garde poets like Lautréamont and Mallarmé, or modernist writers such as Joyce, are, for Kristeva, paradigm instances of ‘revolutionary’ creativity. Such writing exceeds the laws of rhetoric, such as the imposition of a definable speaker communicating with a definable addressee. Quite how this textual freeplay crosses the boundaries of art and life (we remember that the mimetic contract has been shredded by post-structuralist sleights of hand such as the sentence, ‘this is not a written sentence’) to become revolutionary practice in the world is never made clear by Kristeva. The ‘chastened metaphor’ of ‘revolution’ seems to be aestheticised and diluted past recognition. Yet Kristeva insists on the capacity of the text to effect social change. According to her, the text promotes linguistic and social change in order to bring about new social relations and the subversion of capitalism: ‘radical transformation of social structures is, no doubt, one of the most obvious manifestations of [revolutionary] textual practice’.73 Once more, exactly how this


transformative leap between textual practice and revolutionary social change is to be effected is unclear. Even if we accept the existence of the semiotic ‘chora’ stirring up the social, psychic and aesthetic components of the subject, how we travel from semantic non-closure to the actual displacement of the paternal law, or from challenging the mastery of the univocal signifier to dislodging the Name of the Father is not specified. It is almost enough to make one doubt the fundamental presupposition of Kristevan thought: that there is a causal link between drives, their eruption in the text and their subsequent potential to effect revolutionary change in the world. We will return to this assumption later. Like Lacan and Derrida, Kristeva maintains that ‘woman, as such, does not exist’.74 For Kristeva, a woman cannot simply ‘be’; she operates as ‘that which cannot be represented, that which is not spoken, that which remains outside naming and ideologies’.75 To this extent, Kristeva’s poststructuralist stance is impeccable; however, the anti-essentialist vigour with which she interrogates the category ‘woman’ stands in sharp contrast to her quasi-biologistic identification of the pre-discursive maternal body as the concealed foundation of all signification. Kristeva’s 1979 essay ‘Women’s Time’ approaches the question of feminism and its relationships both to femininity and to the symbolic order from a different angle. Here, Kristeva argues that the feminist endeavour must be regarded, both historically and politically, as three-tiered. The first phase may be understood as ‘universalist’ in its approach, tending to ‘globalize the problems of women of different milieux, ages, civilizations or simply of varying psychic structures under the label “Universal Woman” ’.76 This phase may be characterised by women’s demand for equal access to the symbolic order, to ‘a place in linear time as the time of project and history’;77 in pragmatic terms, this desire manifested itself in ‘struggles for equal pay for equal work: for taking power in social institutions on an equal footing with men; the rejection … of the attributes traditionally considered feminine’.78 Other feminists have labelled this phase ‘liberal feminism’. In the second phase, sometimes described as ‘radical feminism’. Kristeva argues that feminists of this generation are ‘essentially interested in the specificity of female psychology and its symbolic realisations, [seeking to] give a language to the inter-subjective and corporeal experiences left mute by culture in the past’.79 Such an approach rejects the male symbolic order in the name of difference or an ‘exploded, plural, fluid’80 irreducible female identity. The third position, which is Kristeva’s own, attempts to challenge the very notion of identity: ‘the very dichotomy man/woman as an opposition

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between two rival entities may be understood as belonging to metaphysics’.81 She asks, ‘what can “identity”, even “sexual identity” mean in a new theoretical and scientific space where the very notion of identity is challenged?’82 Here Kristeva’s call for an awareness of the insubstantial nature of gender identities floats free of political struggle in an attempt to radically transform feminism’s understanding of that struggle. Quoting Joyce’s comment, ‘Father’s time, mother’s species’,83 Kristeva remarks: ‘when evoking the name and destiny of women, one thinks more of the space generating and forming the human species than of time, becoming or history.’84 Perhaps the reason why ‘one’ thinks this way may have more to do with residues of paternalistic biologism than any essential functions of female subjectivity, but Kristeva appears to disregard this possibility. For Kristeva, female subjectivity ‘essentially retains repetition [cyclical time] and eternity [monumental time] from among the multiple modalities of time known through the history of civilisations’.85 Here Kristeva explicitly links female ‘cycles, gestation, the eternal recurrence of a biological rhythm’ with ‘extra-subjective time, cosmic time occasioning … unnameable jouissance’.86 These means of conceptualising time from the perspective of motherhood and reproduction are contrasted with the notion of historical time as linear time: ‘time as project, teleology … progression’87 which, according to Kristeva, is inherent in the logical and ontological values of any given civilisation; it may be manifested in the linguistic notion of a sequence of words. Despite Kristeva’s emphatic desire to shake off the delimiting ‘coherence’ of the term ‘woman’ which ‘has the negative effect of effacing the differences among the diverse functions or structures which operate beneath this word’,88 and her aim to promote multiplicity of female expressions and preoccupations, she veers dangerously close to the essentialism/biologism she so vociferously repudiates. While she continually stresses her official post-structuralist position that ‘woman, as such, does not exist’,89 she never rejects the classical Freudian quasibiologistic belief that the body forms the material foundation for the constitution of the subject. Indeed, in the essay ‘Motherhood According to Giovanni Bellini’ (1980) we discover that, for Kristeva, maternal drives are considered part of a ‘biological destiny’, are manifestations of ‘a non-symbolic, non-paternal causality’:90 material compulsion, spasm of a memory belonging to the species that either binds together or splits apart to perpetuate itself, series of markers with no other significance than the eternal return of the lifedeath biological cycle. How can we verbalize this pre-linguistic,


unrepresentable memory? Herclitus’ flux, Epicurus’ atoms, the whirling dust of cabalic, Arab and Indian mystics, and the stippled drawings of psychadelics – all seem better metaphors than the theory of being, the logos, and its laws.91 Not only is the repressed maternal body the locus of multiple drives, but it is also the ‘bearer of a biological teleology’.92 This teleology is apparently evident in, amongst others, non-Western religious beliefs and practices, in aesthetic representations engendered by near-psychotic states, in avant-garde artistic techniques. Exactly why these diverse cultural manifestations display the ‘principle of maternal heterogeneity remains unexplained. Kristeva’s advocacy of a teleological aim to maternal drives prior to their constitution in language or culture jostles uncomfortably with her simultaneous, radically nominalist assertion that ‘woman, as such, does not exist’. Historical, psychological and quasi-biologistic assertions alternate in Kristeva’s writing with pragmatic emphases on the contingency and historicity of discursive practices. Or, from a different perspective, ‘she ends up alternating … . moments that consolidate an ahistorical, undifferentiated maternal feminine gender identity with moments that repudiate women’s identities altogether.’93 I will consider these and other difficulties with Kristeva’s writing in the next section and, in particular, the strictly limited value of post-structuralism for feminism, and, more specifically, its incompatibility with any attempt to theorise the subjectivity, experience and agency of real material women. IV

Questioning Kristeva

The contention that Kristeva fails to sustain a workable (or credible) conception of female (or feminist) agency forms the basis for this critique. Indeed, the residue of Freudian/Lacanian quasi-biologistic gender bifurcation and the Saussurean structuralist inheritance in her theory form an uncomfortable amalgam which results in a fragmented, contradictory approach to women’s agency and culminates in a reinforcement of the phallocratic symbolic order where ‘a woman finds herself caught … and can’t do much about it’.94 Kristeva’s analysis of the connections between the symbolic order and agency is bleak, and it is derived almost entirely from Lacan. We recall that for Kristeva/Lacan, to acquire coherent subjectivity the infant must repress the maternal imaginary/semiotic sphere and enter the symbolic

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order. The symbolic order is the foundation for our ability to identify ourselves as separate individuals; as a consequence, we are entirely dependent on a patriarchal linguistic order for our intelligibility to ourselves and others. Moreover, for Kristeva, one’s every utterance is branded by gender meaning; the division between the sexes underwrites patriarchal, capitalist, monotheistic Western culture. For example, any attempts on the part of women to identify with or even represent the maternal unconscious will be forced, of necessity, to appropriate the coded signs of the symbolic order and thus be absorbed within it: meaningless psychotic raving is the only alternative. We have already explored the limits of Lacanian (female) subjectivity, how its initial implication that gender and sexuality are social constructs that are in principle susceptible to intervention and change disguises a straitjacket of a historical fixity; for Kristeva/Lacan the identity options prescribed by the phallocratic system are inescapable. As Leland points out, ‘submission to the Symbolic Order, which structures and sustains subjectivity, is not just a diachronic, developmental event but a permanent condition of social being’.95 It is obvious that Kristeva’s largely uncritical appropriation of Lacanian post-structuralism will reproduce many of Lacan’s errors, not least in her embrace of this ‘symbolicism’, which treats the symbolic order as an ‘all-powerful causal mechanism’.96 We have seen how with Lacan, and now Kristeva, the symbolic reaches quasi-divine status as a normative system with the power to fix people’s subjectivities. The significance of historical institutions and practices is diminished, while linguistic structure, kinship structure and social structure are conflated. Indeed, the ‘additive’ nature of Kristeva’s theorising – wherein not only are sizeable chunks of other theories inserted into her own analysis but significant problems with these often deficient theories are addressed merely by adding to them rather than radically overhauling them – is most clearly illustrated in her classification of signifying practices. Against the Lacanian ‘symbolic’ (fundamentally a repetition of Lacan’s phallocratic symbolic order), she places the ‘semiotic’, ‘a register keyed to the expression of libidinal drives via intonation and rhythm and not bound by linguistic rules’.97 In initiating the notion of the semiotic, Kristeva poses a challenge to Lacan’s assertion that cultural meaning requires the repression of the primary relationship to the maternal body; she insists on the underlying presence of a (ambiguously) feminine, maternal element in all signifying practice. We have seen how the Kristeva semiotic operates as a kind of pre-Oedipal counter-current to paternally moulded cultural authority, a perpetual source of subversion


within the symbolic. In effect, this poetic-maternal ‘language’ allows the maternal body to challenge and disrupt the paternal law. It appears that Kristeva has dislodged the Lacanian presumption that language is monolithically, essentially phallocentric; has she opened an oppositional gap where female subjectivity and agency may be profitably theorised? The answer to this question must be in the negative. Several feminist theorists, most notably Judith Butler, have demonstrated that Kristeva’s analysis of signifying practices betrays the pragmatic intentions so dynamically portrayed in ‘The System and the Speaking Subject’ where she vowed to ‘establish the heterogeneous logic of signifying practices, [to] locate them, finally and by way of their subject, in the historically determined relations of production’.98 Butler argues that, ‘Kristeva’s strategy of subversion … appears to depend upon the stability and reproduction of precisely the paternal laws that she sought to displace’.99 Her exposure of the limits of Lacan’s attempt to locate the paternal law as the primary motivation in language is transposed into the subtextual exposure of the limits of her own theory: namely, that the semiotic is always subordinate to the symbolic, that it acquires its very nature within the terms of a hierarchy which is entirely resistant to challenge. Butler asks, if the semiotic promotes the possibility of the subversion, displacement, or disruption of the paternal law, what meaning can those terms have if the symbolic always reasserts its hegemony?100 Indeed, we may ask what meaning ‘semiotic’ itself can have if we consider Kristeva’s remark, in ‘About Chinese Women’, that the semiotic is ‘only a theoretic supposition justified by the need for description’.101 In positing the semiotic as logically and chronologically anterior to the imposition of the symbolic, Kristeva fundamentally underlines her lack of concern with ‘the real’ or the historical. Butler queries whether the primary relationship to the maternal body, theorised by both Lacan and Kristeva, is a ‘viable construct’, and whether it is even a knowable experience according to either of their psycholinguistic theories. Logically and chronologically anterior to the symbolic, we recall that, for Kristeva, the sustained presence of the semiotic subversion will lead to psychosis and the degeneration of socio-cultural structures; on the other hand, the pre-discursive libidinal pulsions of the semiotic are glorified as an emancipatory revolutionary operation which ‘renews the social code’102 (emphasis mine). Simultaneously positing and denying the power of the semiotic as the nexus of pre-discursive opposition to

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the symbolic, Kristeva’s analysis of the semiotic conceals many other questionable theoretical moves, many of which oscillate around the vexed issue of maternity as the locus of teleological pre-cultural reality. From Desire in Language (1970) onwards, Kristeva explicitly describes the semiotic in terms of maternal drives. These constitute not only the mother’s drives but also those which demonstrate the dependency of the infant’s body on the mother; so the ‘maternal body’ refers to a ‘relation of continuity’103 rather than a distinct object of desire. We have observed that, while the symbolic is erected on the primary repression of desire for the mother, the semiotic resurrects the maternal body in poetic language, in the form of sound play, rhythm and so on. For Kristeva, one of the primary ways the hegemony of the symbolic signifying process may be disrupted is through the proliferation of meaning engendered by multiple signifying metaphors. According to Kristeva, metaphor creates ‘a surplus of meaning [which] manages to open the surface of signs toward the unrepresentable’.104 We have already observed the ‘woman-as-difference’ trope at work in the writings of both Derrida and Lacan; certainly Kristeva’s inscription of la difference feminine appears decisively influenced by the texts of such contemporary postmodern thinkers. Although the term ‘maternal-feminine’ is Luce Irigaray’s it accurately reflects Kristeva’s approach which celebrates the recovery of the maternal body in poetic language. As we observed earlier, Kristeva’s model for the maternal/poetic function remains firmly rooted within the Freudian Oedipal process. Kristeva appropriates the pre-Oedipal and inscribes it as a gynocentric space, one which is the foundation of her theory of revolutionary poetic practice. Indeed, as Stanton remarks, the radical quality of the poetic/semiotic text does not merely predicate a return of the repressed, but what Kristeva styles as metaphorical incest: ‘the artist/child commits the paternally forbidden act of appropriating the archaic, instinctual and maternal territory’.105 Poetic language, for Kristeva, always signifies a return to the maternal which encapsulates both the heterogeneity of drives and libidinal dependence. Indeed both poetry and maternity exist as ‘privileged practices’ within phallocratic culture and allow a nonpsychotic experience of the heterogeneity and dependency which characterise the maternal sphere. As we know, Kristeva believes the heterogeneity of the maternal semiotic ‘chora’ operates as a subversive strategy of displacement which undermines the dominant codes of the paternal law by unleashing the repressed plurivocity which inheres in language. Yet there is a rigidly enforced limit to the disruptive power of the maternal ‘chora’: the heterogeneous pulsions of the semiotic must


always operate within and be represented within the paternalistic symbolic order. As Butler succinctly puts it: ‘obedient, then, to syntactical requirements, the poetic-maternal practices of displacing the paternal law always remain tenuously tethered to that law’.106 A total overthrow of the symbolic order is structurally impossible for Kristeva’s analysis; as a discourse of (female) agency and emancipation it is as restrictive as the feminisation of difference offered by Derrida and Lacan. Most vitally, Kristeva does not stray from the structuralist assertion that the hegemony of the patriarchal law is the foundation of culture itself. We have explored the problematic function of the maternal ‘chora’; now we look at the implications of the view that the chora is logically and chronologically anterior to patriarchal culture itself. The first difficulty that we encounter runs parallel to a problem which we identified in Lacan’s account of the mirror stage, namely circularity. Lacan contends that the structure of the symbolic order determines the character of individual subjectivity; and simultaneously that the symbolic order must necessarily be phallocentric since the acquisition of selfhood is only possible through submission to the Law of the Father. A similar difficulty exists in Kristeva’s analysis, and it relates to her understanding of the relationship between language and drives. As Butler asks, if these drives are only manifest in language or cultural forms already demarcated as symbolic, how can we verify their pre-symbolic ontological status?107 Kristeva assumes that drives have aims prior to their emergence in language; moreover, she believes that these drives inhere only in linguistic utterances which disrupt monolithic signification within the symbolic. So poetic language depends for its very existence on the prior existence of these drives. Indeed, as Butler argues, any attempt to ‘attribute a causality to drives which facilitates their transformation into language and by which language itself is to be explained’108 cannot be achieved within the parameters of language itself. Quite simply, Kristeva’s theory is circular: drives are explained by recourse to poetic language which is itself explained by reference to drives. Kristeva’s account of the pre-symbolic ontological status of drives cannot, according to the tenets of her theory which states that these drives are only manifest in language or cultural activities already within the symbolic, verify this pre-symbolic ontological status. It seems that Kristeva implicitly assumes an objective theoretical standpoint outside the symbolic in order to guarantee her analysis – which contravenes the most basic fundamentals of post-structuralism. As in our consideration of Derridean différance, we fleetingly observe the

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acrobatics of the post-structuralist thinker as he or she escapes the play of symbolic language, assuming an objectivist stance which is concealed by the obscurities of subjectivism, textuality and nominalism. Judith Butler makes a related point, asking ‘how do we know that the instinctual object of Kristeva’s discourse is not a construction of the discourse itself?’109 As we have seen, we have no reason for positing this subversive multiplicity as prior to signification other than Kristeva’s word for it. The internal flaw of Kristeva’s theory is that, since Kristeva’s own writing must necessarily operate within the symbolic, there can be no ‘outside’ to it, not only no (albeit heavily disguised) objective standpoint, but similarly, no referential connection with the outside world of context and agency. Il n’y a pas de hors-texte’? – a far cry indeed from the call to ‘fracture the symbolic code’ through the transgressive practices of the ‘social, political and historical’ subject.110 This flaw is compounded by Kristeva’s assertion of the participation of maternal drives in a ‘biological destiny … a non-symbolic, nonpaternal causality’.111 The effect of introducing biologism into the concept of the maternal body is to imbue it with a ‘natural’ causality, to ‘close’ the concept of maternal heterogeneity, confined by a ‘teleology both unilinear and univocal’.112 It seems that Kristeva perceives the desire to give birth as ‘a species-desire’: ‘part of a collective and archaic female libidinal drive that constitutes an ever-recurring metaphysical principle’.113 The subversive, libidinal nature of the semiotic congeals into the univocity of the self-identical, teleological maternal body. Rather than the disseminative eruptions of the disruptive ‘chora’, the Kristevan maternal body actually constitutes a rigid, closed concept, its subversive potential harnessed. The cultural variability of the experience of maternity far exceeds the reifying boundaries which Kristeva imposes on the condition; indeed, as Butler remarks, who is to know if the ‘maternal’ instinct itself may not be a culturally constructed desire generated by the concealed paternalistic necessity for heterosexual reproduction? Even if we do not concur with this extreme view, the maternal represents only one aspect of potential female difference. In Kristeva’s work (as well as other French thinkers such as Cixous and Irigaray), maternity emerges as ‘a new dominance … congealing as feminine essence, as unchanging indifference’.114 Kristeva’s initial project of counter-valorising the maternal/ feminine as an oppositional feminist beachhead within paternalistic discursive practice, while initially enabling, has set hard into an archaic, biologistic teleology based on a univocal conception of the female sex as the ‘uncaused cause’. De-historicising and psychologising motherhood,


she advances an essentialist feminine model which entirely contradicts her own radical-nominalist assertion that ‘woman … does not exist’.115 Moreover, it appears that the source of the most extreme flaws in Kristeva’ s arguments stems from her (often unspoken) adherence to the principles of both psychoanalysis and structuralism, which, when they are not merely cancelling each other out, work to erase agency, social interaction and the contingency of historical practices, particularly from a feminist point of view. Let us begin with the psychoanalytic inheritance. Kristeva, like Lacan, is a Freudian. The primary implication of this, for our purposes, is the fundamental Freudian claim that the self is radically (and necessarily) divided. Indeed, Freud’s entire Weltanschauung is predicated on his division of every capacity involved in human agency according to gender. For example, masculinity is linked with civilisation, independence, thought and control, while femininity is associated with regression through the primary processes of the unconscious, dependency, feeling and submission. While Kristeva admittedly rejects the Freudian association of agency with masculinity, in the light of our examination of the parasitic, dependent nature of the maternal semiotic ‘chora’, she remains fatally mired within Freudian gender bifurcation. The first and most fundamental point to note is Kristeva’s concurrence with the Freudian/Lacanian conception of the symbolic determination of psychic life; already we have observed the necessary subordination of the quasi-feminine/maternal semiotic to the paternalistic monolith of the symbolic; submission to this order is a permanent condition of psycho-social being. Kristeva concedes that ultimately we cannot elude the identificatory options laid down by gender categories and patriarchal representations; she has ‘meticulously mapped an impossible situation’.116 The above observation is now familiar, but it seems that Kristeva’s disabling indebtedness to Freud runs much deeper within her theories. In order to illustrate the point, we will return to our consideration of Kristeva’s very influential 1979 essay ‘Women’s Time’. Here she asks, What can ‘identity’, even ‘sexual identity’ mean in a new theoretical and scientific space where the very notion of identity is challenged. … what I mean is … . the demassification of the problematic of difference.117 Elsewhere in the same article she elaborates: I think that the apparent coherence which the feminist ‘woman’ assumes in contemporary ideology … essentially has the negative

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effect of effacing the differences among the diverse functions or structures which operate beneath the word.118 An impeccably difference-aware statement, and one with which many feminists would concur. Our difficulty arises, however, from her next comment: The time has come to emphasize the multiplicity of female expressions and preoccupations so that from the intersection of these differences there might rise … . The real fundamental difference between the two sexes [emphasis added].119 This, if possible, would be a priceless discovery. How might it be effected? As a first step, Kristeva advocates listening, ‘more carefully than ever, to what mothers are saying today … through their discomforts, insomnias, joys, desires …’.120 For Kristeva, the overwhelming bond the mother feels for her child ruptures the bounds of her own identity; this destabilisation opens her to submerged memories of her symbiotic relationship with her own mother: recovered childhood, dreamed peace restored … at night, opaque joy that roots me in her bed, my mother’s … .121 According to Kristeva, the destabilising force of maternity ‘constitutes an implicit critique of the repression society enforces and is, therefore, disruptive of social norms’.122 The mother-as-dissident acts as an agent who acknowledges the myth of fixed identity and yet carves out a fragile subjectivity by alternating between fluctuating instability and ‘provisional unity’.123 Indeed, Kristeva views pregnancy as an institutionalized form of psychosis … it is an identity that splits, turns in on itself and changes without becoming other: the threshold between nature and culture, biology and language.124 Here Kristeva explicitly links ‘the only true love’ a woman feels for her child with ‘self-sacrifice’.125 What are the implications of these assertions for Kristeva’s aim to uncover the true nature of sexual difference? Not only does Kristeva resurrect a clichéd conception of female difference but that this supposed difference is in fact grounded, to its detriment, in Freudian thought. The outcome of Kristeva’s quest to plumb women’s unconscious in search of points of intersection that are definitive of femininity appears


to end in a single answer: idealised maternity. Moreover, it appears that, for Kristeva, only mothers are qualified to make political demands; mothers are thus elevated to a superior status above other women. With this move, the Freudian conception of femininity is truly reinstated. The following passage illustrates the depths of Kristeva’s Freudian commitment: The truth of it is that the lowered head of the mother before her son is accompanied by the immeasurable pride of the one who knows she is also his wife and daughter. She knows she is destined to that eternity … of which every mother is unconsciously aware, and with regard to which maternal devotion or even sacrifice is but an insignificant price to pay … contrasted with the love that binds the mother to her son, all other ‘human relationships’ burst like blatant shards.126 This special privileging of the mother–son relationship is rooted in the Freudian contention that, motivated by lack and desire, the little girl wants a penis. We recall that, for Freud, the castration complex is the source of the desirability of the penis/phallus: the male fears the loss of the penis while the female feels the anxiety of never having had one. If the little girl is to make a successful exit from the Oedipus complex, albeit marked by the desire for the paternal phallus, she realises that a baby (especially a son) would be a viable substitute, a compensation for the precious missing organ. In this passage, Kristeva, like Freud, appears to promote the necessity of a relation to the phallus. Head bowed, the Freudian mother accepts with modesty and seemly pride her elevated but ultimately secondary place in the paternal order as the producer of sons. This conservative determination to reproduce the social and familial order is startlingly at odds with Kristeva’s advocacy of mothers as quasi-guerrilla dissidents, and is most incompatible with an account of female agency which seeks to explore the varied meanings of motherhood as cultural practice, let alone ‘the multiplicity of female expressions and preoccupations’.127 Moreover, in ex-plicitly associating the maternal with the semiotic and the phallic with the symbolic, Kristeva is im-plicitly erecting a theoretical, oppositional structure which merely reflects dominant cultural gender norms. Indeed, in ascribing oppositional capacities typically regarded as masculine to the quasi-feminine semiotic,128 rather than radically unsettling gender conventions, she simply reverses them to no theoretical or political end.

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Furthermore, Kristeva’s resuscitation of the elderly cultural stereotype of women as self-sacrificial mothers is unsatisfactory on several counts. For instance, the pre-Oedipal maternal ‘power’ to rupture fixed identity and, seething with oppositional potential, to ‘rend and renew the social code’129 ultimately lacks social reference. Kristeva’s account of the subversive potential of the semiotic ‘chora’ is immersed in the unpredictable, chaotic unconscious, unregulated by cultural values or rational procedures: as such, it cannot provide any reliable means of differentiating or evaluating valid claims from psychotic babble. Kristeva’s attempt to explain how patriarchal codes may be subverted without plunging wholly into psychosis is grounded in the concept of the Freudian superego. The primary function is to condemn socially unacceptable behaviour. Yet since it is the locus of socially generated values, it ‘reinforces socially sanctioned repression’;130 thus it is inappropriate as a means to distinguish between social criticism and psychotic babbling in Kristeva’s theory of libidinal transgression. Unsurprisingly, Kristeva nominates mothers as the functional equivalent to the Freudian superego. The supposed inherent conservatism of mothers, engendered by the responsibilities of maternity, combined with their ‘nurturing’, ‘non-violent’ nature, is to guarantee the validity of criticism of social conventions. Yet as Meyers notes, ‘neither a superego paradigm nor a maternal paradigm will prevent people from running amok’.131 Kristeva’s replacement of the superego with the paradigm of maternal solicitude, while ostensibly challenging standard psychoanalytic images of gender, merely reinscribes these stereotypes at a different level in her insistence on mandatory motherhood: ‘the vacuum left by rejected masculine capacities [is] filled by feminine stereotypes’.132 It appears that the formidable tenacity of Freudian gender identity is not so easy for Kristeva to evade. Indeed, the bond between individual identity and gender identity is integral to psychoanalytic precepts. Meyers reminds us that the psychological forces which drive the Freudian process of feminine and masculine development are themselves gendered: while the boy’s castration complex represents his fear of loss and thus his determination to prevent it (an active response), the girl’s castration complex, sparked by the discovery of her ‘lack’ represents disillusion and disappointment (a passive response). Despite Kristeva’s attempt to subvert the active/passive gender dichotomy, by basing her theories in the counter-valorisation of traditional female norms, she cannot but reproduce many of the essentialising traps which stud Freudian psychoanalysis. Thus female hysteria and irrationality are celebrated in the transgressive Kristevan semiotic, while the fixity of post-Oedipal gender


identity is described as ‘unavoidable’.133 The ambiguously feminine Kristevan semiotic, then, instead of overthrowing the symbolic, amounts to no more than an insignificant blip on the unchanged surface of hegemonic paternal law. Indeed, Kristeva herself remains inextricably committed to the delimitation of female agency which inheres in the intractable infrastructure of the psychoanalytic Weltanschauung. In ‘The System and the Speaking Subject’, Kristeva claims that structuralism ‘shows [no] awareness of the … semiotic logic of the sociality in which the (speaking, historical) subject is embedded’ and anyway ‘is now over’.134 Far from being ‘over’, Kristeva’s lingering adherence to structuralism exacerbates the psychoanalytical difficulties which infect her theories at the deepest level. Some theorists have noted Kristeva’s tendency to ‘remedy theoretical problems by simply adding to deficient theories instead of by scrapping them or overhauling them’.135 So it is with structuralist principles in Kristeva’s thought; they may be capped with anti-structuralist stances but the motivation of the original structuralist impulse remains active. By way of illustration, we will focus on Kristeva’s understanding of the symbolic. What constitutes the Kristevan symbolic? As we have seen, for Kristeva as for Lacan, the symbolic order is fundamentally a linguistic register, a signifying practice bounded by syntactical and grammatical rules. Yet, like Lacan, Kristeva’s consistency in her understanding of the symbolic is variable. Used in its narrowest Saussurean sense, the symbolic is equivalent to la langue, the structure of language as a system of differential signs; at its widest, Kristeva uses the notion as blanket term not only for all linguistic structures, but all cultural practices and historical institutions. She argues that ‘without the symbolic, [the subject] would be incapable of doing anything’;136 that the symbolic ‘is the social contract’;137 that the symbolic encompasses all ‘economic, political and ideological constraints’.138 Thus the symbolic assumes mammoth, allengulfing proportions; impossibly diverse signifying practices are sucked into its homogenising slipstream and assimilated until it attains the power to constitute and define discrete subjectivities in perpetuity. So inflated is the Kristevan/Lacanian symbolic with the importance of its boundless power that it floats entirely free of the variability of sociohistorical phenomena, the plurality and complexity of individual and social identities. In her discussions of the symbolic, Kristeva writes as if the ‘system’ (in this case the symbolic) may be defined in isolation from its actual use in specific contexts and without reference to extra-linguistic reality. Yet

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as Raymond Tallis notes, ‘the “system” … cannot even begin to be described without reference to its particular operations on specific occasions in the real world’.139 The Kristevan notion of the symbolic gives structure priority over event and it is this remnant of structuralist thinking in her own work which imprisons the gendered subject in the allpowerful reified symbolic order without possibility of change. In the same way, the plurality of discursive practices is reduced to a quasistructuralist binarism: the symbolic (paternal)/semiotic (maternal) dualism. The predictable confrontations between the dominant symbolic and the parasitic semiotic work to cancel each other out: ‘one forever shattering the identitarian pretensions of the other, the second forever recuperating the first and reconstituting itself as before’.140 Moreover, despite her early emphasis on socio-historical context, the ‘historical typology of signifying practices’,141 Kristeva, again motivated by implicit structuralist impulses, allows social context to be itself incorporated into the monolithic ‘symbolic’: ‘the symbolic is the social contract’.142 These two theoretical moves have a deeply constraining effect on her ability adequately to account for fluctuating, complex identities and how these identites are experienced in their socio-cultural context. Indeed, Kristeva’s ambiguous position on the question of ‘woman’ conforms to a similar pattern. On the one hand, she proposes what has been termed ‘a regressive version of gynocentric-materialist essentialism’,143 an implicit semi-biologistic conflation of femininity with maternity, while on the other hand she advocates the extreme nominalism of ‘woman does not exist’, dismissing collective identities as dangerous fictions. Again we encounter a puzzling disunity in her theory as structuralist assumptions jostle for position with vehemently anti-structuralist stances. The principle of emancipatory contradiction, that productive tension between opposing positions so beloved of Derrida, emerges in Kristeva’s work as a lack of theoretical consistency, exacerbated by an evaporating concern with the importance of referentiality, agency and identity. V

Woman: substance or text?

We have explored Kristeva’s theories of female subjectivity and its operations within the symbolic code as a paradigmatic instance of the fundamental incompatibility of feminism and post-structuralist/ psychoanalytic models for theorising female selfhood. Below I will elaborate on these scissions, as well as acknowledging some of the more positive, productive aspects of the post-Saussurean approaches.


The seeds of the problem lie in feminism’s difficult relationship with the Enlightenment conceptions of justice, reason and autonomous subjectivity as universal models. Much post-structuralist (feminist) theory has sought to expose the contradictions and blind-spots of Enlightenment thought. In particular, the ‘universal’ Enlightenment principle of ‘sameness’144 has been interrogated by proponents of sexual difference; the deconstruction of the public/private dichotomy which inheres in much Enlightenment thought,145 consigning women to the ‘ “private” realm of feeling, domesticity, the body, in order to clarify a public realm of Reason as masculine’,146 demonstrates the confusion and contradictions which lie beneath the facade of ‘sameness’. Yet the feminist philosopher Patricia Waugh opposes this thoroughgoing condemnation of Enlightenment thought, arguing that while the epistemological doubt and radical perspectivism of post-structuralist and postmodern thinking may prove useful strategic weapons, feminism ‘cannot sustain itself as an emancipatory movement unless it acknowledges its foundation in the discourses of modernity’.147 Waugh develops this insight with an examination of postmodern agonising over the ‘Death of the Self’, where the fragile transitory subject is understood merely as a face drawn in the sand, destined to be erased by the encroaching tide. Frederic Jameson explains this view thus: not only is the bourgeois individual subject a thing of the past, it is also a myth: it never really existed in the first place; there have never been autonomous subjects of that type. Rather this construct is merely a philosophical and cultural mystification which sought to persuade people that they ‘had’ individual subjects and possessed this unique personal identity.148 Yet certain theorists, including Waugh herself and Raymond Tallis, detect a nostalgia for the ideal autonomous self of Enlightenment thought concealed beneath the radical nihilism which this view of the impossibility of ethical and imaginative selfhood promotes. Indeed, Tallis identifies an entire tragic strain of post-Kantian meta-philosophers including Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre and Derrida within whose thinking exists ‘a disappointed longing for the union of absolute lucidity and undeniable substantiality … for an absolute coincidence of knowing and being’.149 In refusing to settle for less than utter transparency between knowing and being (which is impossible), such thinkers consign themselves to an endless hunger for undivided selfpresence dulled only by jaded cynicism. But, as Waugh remarks, those

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who have been systematically excluded from the constitution of the ‘universal subject’, whether for reasons of gender, sexuality, ethnicity or class, are unlikely to hunger nostalgically for a state they have never experienced, nor to celebrate the jouissance of its destruction. She continues, ‘to recognise the limitations of an ideal which was never one’s own is to bear a very different relationship to its perceived loss’.150 Waugh believes that the fragmented, decentred subject is, to a large extent, a product of post-structuralism/postmodernity’s inability to (re)think a self not built upon the pure idealism of the autonomous subject of Enlightenment thinking, German Idealism and Kantian aesthetics. If women’s experiences of selfhood do not correspond either to the nostalgic conception of pure, static subjectivity nor to the transgressive celebration of its dissolution, other models of agency, personal autonomy and self-expression must be developed elsewhere. Nicole Ward Jouve speaks of the need to speak as a subject, and as a subject bent on self-knowledge. We have lost ourselves in the endlessly defracted light of Deconstruction … For we [especially women] have been asked to go along with Deconstruction whilst we had not even got to the Construction stage. You must have a self before you can afford to deconstruct it.151 Indeed, Waugh argues that for those marginalised by the dominant culture, a sense of identity derived from impersonal socio-cultural power discourses, rather than a sense of identity derived from an inner ‘essence’, has been an important element in their self-conceptions ‘long before post-structuralists and postmodernists began to assemble their cultural manifestos’.152 It has long been asserted that historically constructed subjectivity, expressed through the binarism ‘self/other’, necessarily constructs masculine ‘selfhood’ on complementary female ‘otherness’: [Man] is the subject, he is the absolute; she is the other.153 A similar idea is forwarded by Luce Irigaray,154 who alerts us to the basic assumption which she sees as underlying all Western philosophical discourse: the necessity of postulating a subject capable of reflecting on its own being. The meta-philosopher’s reflections on the general conditions of man’s Being conceal a dependency on specularity or selfreflexivity; that which exceeds this ‘reflective circularity’ is termed unthinkable. Thus Irigaray concludes that Western philosophical discourse can only represent femininity as the negative of its own


reflection. Waugh traces the history of the eponymous trope of the unrepresentable feminine: The subjective centre of socially dominant discourses (from Descartes’ philosophical, rational ‘I’ to Lacan’s psychoanalytic phallic/ symbolic) in terms of power, agency and autonomy has been a ‘universal’ subject which has established its identity through the invisible marginalization or exclusion of what it has also defined as ‘femininity’ (whether this is the non-rational, the body, the emotions or the pre-symbolic).155 As we have observed in the work of Derrida, Lacan and Kristeva, the ‘feminine’ is believed to be inexpressible since it exists outside the realm of symbolic signification; of course, as we have seen, the very attempt to place woman outside the bounds of signification simultaneously reessentialises her as it claims to de-essentialise her: woman emerges reified once more as a figurehead for ‘différance’, disabling ontological decidability. Here we will pause to consider the implications of the widespread feminist post-structuralist embrace of ‘difference’ and the associated term ‘separation’. As we have shown, with the advent of deconstruction, not only has the status of the universal subject been rejected as masculinist ideology, but the multiple differences among women (including sexuality, class, colour and ethnicity) have been insisted upon to the extent that the category of ‘woman’ begins to disintegrate under the weight of these heterogeneous pluralities. Moreover, deconstructivepsychoanalytic theories aim to show that the other is always implied in any definition of the self, that the self is never identical with itself. Indeed, as Waugh observes, in most deconstructive-psychoanalytic theories, selfhood is achieved through separation: the infant becomes a ‘self’ by breaking free of the mother and establishing its difference, its boundaries. Thus ‘otherness’ becomes a necessary condition of woman, so that ‘separation and objectivity rather than relationship and connection become the markers of identity’.156 Moreover, for the selfconstructed-in-difference, continuity of subjective identity is predicated upon the objectification of all others, the denial of the existence of others as subjects. Thus Waugh observes ‘the disintegration of the rational, autonomous, nineteenth century ego into the alienated, tortured solipsism of the modernist self’.157 Without seeking to reinscribe a watered-down version of the universal subject, and remaining aware of the pitfalls surrounding an untheorised

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return to the ‘I’, I wish to develop Domna Stanton’s contention that ‘sameness permeates all efforts to speak difference’.158 In order to lay the foundations for this, we need to return to the issue of the value of the sign in Saussurean linguistics, on which the deconstructive enterprise is founded. Consider the following passage from the section in Course in General Linguistics entitled ‘The Sign Considered in its Totality’: Although both the signified and the signifier are purely differential and negative when considered separately, their combination is a positive fact: it is even the sole type of facts that language has, for maintaining the parallelism between the two classes of differences is the distinctive function of the linguistic institution [emphasis added].159 It is true that in speech we do not use signifiers or signifieds in isolation but instead deploy signs in which they are fused. As Tallis stresses, differences are used to establish positive, present meaning: A particular speech act is not all a matter of difference (or form); it is also a matter of presence (or content). The sign in use is not purely differential, non-substantial.160 Hugh Bredin makes a similar point when he remarks that, no relation can be intelligible, or can even be stated, unless the items related are already equipped with some properties or other … A relation is itself determined by the things it relates.161 Derrida, in his essay ‘Différance’ (1973) fails to assimilate the impact of Saussure’s original observation: As the condition for signification, this principle of difference affects the whole sign, that is, both the signified and the signifying aspects.162 In attributing differential negativity to both elements of the sign, Derrida creates the flawed foundation on which the whole edifice of post-structuralist thought is constructed. But if difference establishes positive, present meaning then immediately the sign ‘woman’ may be cautiously163 reinstated as a meaningful category. A sign may derive its specificity from the other, absent signs


around it which demarcate its territory; it does not follow, however, that the sign in use is absent. As Tallis remarks, ‘meaning may be carried by difference, but it is not carried away by difference’.164 This, however, is not to deny the many real material differences between real, material women in the world, but rather to emphasise the depths of absurdity to which post-structuralism has dragged us with the radical nominalist position which insists that ‘woman’; does not exist, and to the extent that feminism behaves as if ‘she’ does, it participates in a metaphysical, religious and/or totalitarian fallacy. As Scholes remarks, the very names of feminism and deconstruction are founded on antithetical principles: ‘feminism upon a class concept and deconstruction upon the deconstructing of all such concepts’.165 Indeed, the reification of Derridean différance is one of the most serious flaws in deconstructive thinking. Elsewhere, Scholes asserts that ‘we cannot read Derrida without supplying names and concepts for the spaces generated by his text’.166 In the same way we cannot speak about the category ‘woman’ without bringing the sign within some common frame of language: the problem of reference refuses to stop dogging poststructuralism’s heels simply because language cannot operate without it. Indeed, it is essential to subject the principle of difference itself to some scrutiny. For instance, how can we be sure that ‘difference as teleology is [not] part of the phallocentric design’,167 that the reification of difference merely reinforces the binary-bound codes which dominate paternalistic culture? Any inscription of difference must be determined by ‘the indifferent dominant discourse’,168 and may thus easily end up reproducing the construction of dualistically conceived sexual difference, even as it claims to have no use for it, as we observed in our critique of Kristeva’s thought. Admittedly, feminism and post-structuralism do share certain goals. Both seek to conceptualise the relationship between language, social institutions and individual consciousness; both probe and/or disrupt traditional boundaries: between masculine and feminine, the dominant and the marginal; both emphasise the absence of a strong sense of coherent, stable subjectivity; both warn against the reinscription of mechanisms of oppressive power. Severe disjunctures emerge, however, as post-structuralist thought, and indeed postmodernism in general, celebrates the disintegration of the classical unified subject, urges scepticism of the existentialist belief in self-presence while real material women are only beginning to develop a sense of (albeit fluctuating, provisional) selfhood(s), a collective and individual sense of identity,

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agency and being-in-the-world. As Rosi Braidotti emphasises: the truth of the matter is: one cannot deconstruct a subjectivity one has never been fully granted; one cannot diffuse a sexuality which has historically been defined as dark and mysterious. In order to announce the death of the subject one must first have gained the right to speak as one; in order to demystify meta-discourse one must first gain access to a place of enunciation.169 The identification of language as a constitutive aspect of social reality is perhaps the most productive principle of deconstructive-psychoanalytic theories. A way of adopting certain aspects of these theories without either embracing the extremism of radical nominalism or consigning the whole ‘oeuvre’ to the hinterland of philosophical absurdity is to adopt Michael Fischer’s phrase, ‘leavening’.170 Here deconstructivepsychoanalytic theories are valued to a limited degree for their ability to expose rigid fixity, monolithic tendencies and denied ideological subtexts; to loosen unyielding dogmatism in feminism or elsewhere. Before closing this chapter, however, we will take a closer look at poststructuralism’s erosion of the category of agency. As we have observed, such thinkers ultimately refuse the female subject agency, the ability meaningfully to reflect on the social discourse and challenge its determinations. Kristeva herself admits that, from a post-structuralist perspective, ‘a feminist practice can only be negative, at odds with what already exists so that we may say “that’s not it” and “that’s still not it” ’.171 Post-structuralism effectively silences women’s voices, actually undercuts women’s ability to oppose dominant discourses by firmly (re)placing ‘woman’ at the margins of decidability (Derrida), or confining her in the wordless pre-Oedipal sphere (Lacan). Then it is safe to sit back and complacently admire her beautiful ravings from a distance. Indeed, as Linda Alcoff remarks, by designating individual particularities such as subjective experiences a social construct, post-structuralism’s negation of the authority of the subject ‘coincides nicely with the classical liberal’s view that human particularities are irrelevant’.172 If, according to post-structuralism, ethnicity, class and gender are constructs, they are thus unable to guarantee conceptions of truth or justice because ‘they are without foundation themselves’.173 The problem of conceptualising women’s selfhood without slipping into the gullies of nominalism and essentialism that yawn on either side of the path is presently under intense debate in feminist philosophy.


Models of gendered subjectivity are required which provide alternatives to both reified, essentialist conceptions of gender identity and utterly negative dispersals of the category of ‘woman’ at any level. In the light of this, it may be useful to question whether an emphasis on the provisionality and positionality of identity, on the socio-historical construction of gender, on the discursive production of knowledge and power, may be satisfactorily reconciled with active, coherent agency in the world. Teresa de Lauretis advocates a move beyond the self/other binarism implicit in Lacan/Kristeva’s theories of subject acquisition, positing instead a conception of the ‘I’ as a complex sphere of multiple subjectivities and competing identities: … this notion of identity points to a more useful conception of the subject than the one proposed by neo-Freudian psychoanalysis and poststructuralist theories. For it is not the fragmented, or intermittent, identity of a subject constructed in division by language alone, an ‘I’ continuously prefigured and preempted in an unchangeable symbolic order. It is neither the imaginary identity of the individualist, bourgeois subject, which is male and white; nor the ‘flickering’ of the posthumanist Lacanian subject which is too nearly and at best (fe)male …174 In this conception, subjectivity may be read as a locus of possibilities or potentialities ‘where there is no clear split between “I” and “not I” but rather a range or continuum of existence’.175 De Lauretis’ primary contention is that subjectivity, what one perceives and comprehends as subjective, is constituted via a continuous regenerative process which she calls ‘experience’: thus subjectivity is ‘produced not by external ideas, values or material causes, but by one’s personal, subjective engagement in the practices, discourses and institutions that lend significance (value, meaning and effect) to the events of the world.’176 The emphasis on connectivity, positionality, situatedness and especially experience as foundational to possible models of female subjectivity is suggestive. If experience acts as the interface between ‘outer world’ and ‘inner world’ then, far from dismissing it as the mouthpiece of ‘ideology’, the category of experience deserves a re-evaluation in the twilight of poststructuralism. VI

Directions

Post-structuralism celebrates discontinuity, difference, non-meaning; its appeal to feminism lies principally in its opposition to essentialism, to

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absolutism, to foundationalism. Yet I ask: is it possible to renounce essentialism, absolutism and foundationalism without resorting to the emptiness of radical nominalism? Can we relocate contingent lived experience and self-presence at the centre of theories of female subjectivity without succumbing to the ideal of a false universalism? Where can flesh-and-blood female bodies be situated between textuality and referentiality, between synchrony and diachrony, between surface and depth? If there is a point of intervention between the material experiences of women and the abstract representation of woman-sous-rature, that may be the place where a postmetaphysical, rather than poststructuralist, analysis of women’s experiences can begin. In the following chapters, we will explore both the post-structuralist erosion of the experiential reality of subjectivity and the ways in which experience may be reconsidered in the wake of post-structuralist thinking. In Chapter 5, we return to the issue of (the representation of) women’s experiences in the world, arguing for the necessity of placing women’s symbolically mediated lived experience at the centre of any theoretical construction of (female) subjectivity.

3 The Post-structuralist Erasure of Experience

I

Self – language – world Well, what about truth? What about morality and responsibility and individuals? And what about ordinary consciousness and experience and presence and uses of language in contingent situations?1

Iris Murdoch’s impassioned stand against the excesses of postSaussurean theory mentions the most significant of the philosophical categories to fall victim to the ‘shock-troops’ of deconstructive practice: morality, truth, the individual. Yet the closely associated concepts of ‘experience’ and ‘presence’ are perhaps the most seriously battered, emerging from their encounter with post-structuralism as philosophical pariahs, contaminated by, and indeed representative of, a supposedly discredited metaphysical tradition. The notion of experience, in particular, is often singled out for especially heavy criticism. Experience as ‘ideology’s homeland’ is the dominant perception: it has been described as ‘an embarrassment’;2 ‘an ideological, symbolic construction … a lie’.3 For post-structuralists, experience is but an effect (a casualty?) of the Derridean ‘metaphysics of presence’, the contention that words are merely signs of an actual substance which is forever elsewhere; moreover, experience cannot be guaranteed by the individual’s subjectivity since that ‘illusory’ concept has been shattered by the cavorting of différance. In this chapter, we will examine the post-structuralist ‘case’ against experience, and to provide a critique of these arguments. Yet I do not seek merely to argue for a simple reinstatement of the classic metaphysical understanding of experience, later developed in Husserlian phenomenology, as the gateway to unqualified and immediate presence 80

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or essence. The post-structuralist challenge to foundationalism, as I conceded in Chapter 2, is not without a certain negative significance. For example, the post-structuralist emphasis on the precarious, contradictory nature of language, its insistence on language’s relational, systematic aspects which prevent meaning from being fixed once and for all, ruling out the possibility of errorless origin, may be read as a necessary corrective to the metaphysical notion that meaning can achieve transcendent status, timeless and invariant, ‘free from the unsettling play of language’.4 Furthermore, the very notion of the individual is subject to severe post-structuralist interrogation, and this too forces us to acknowledge the contradictory, provisional aspects of selfhood and our problematic ‘being-in-the-world’. Indeed, the fact that I attempt this reappropriation of experience in dialogue with post-structuralism testifies to the ‘leavening’ function which I believe it can provide if it is successfully harnessed, preventing it from sliding into mere theoretical vandalism. This purely destructive element of deconstruction, however, reminds us of the impoverished aspects of post-structuralism in general. To return to Murdoch once more, we are all … in order to live at all, truth-seekers on that familiar everyday (transcendental) edge where language continually struggles with an encountered world.5 In my exploration of experience, I attempt to maintain that vital connection between self and world which post-structuralism would sever, remembering that what post-structuralism fatally omits to observe is that language both creates and reflects reality. Against the ‘autistic echo-chambers’6 of the deconstructed self, I argue that far from dismissing experience as lie, construct or illusion, we must acknowledge that we are indeed subjects constructed by experience, individuals immersed in particular linguistic and extra-linguistic situations. In stressing the primacy of direct, lived experience ‘as something lived through’,7 I do not dismiss the negative aspects of this concept. The duplicity of experience lies in its capacity to reproduce, rather than contest, ideological systems. Chris Weedon expresses this view succinctly: ‘poststructuralism denies the authenticity of individual experience by decentring the rational, … autonomous subject of liberal humanism … rendering it socially constituted within discourse’8 [emphasis mine]. While acknowledging the symbolically mediated elements of subjectivity, and thus the experiences of the subject, to elevate the power of the Symbolic to quasi-divine status erases both individuality


and personal agency: in this conception, the self is no more than a sponge saturated with competing discourses, while the Symbolic itself, infinitely reified, collapses under its own theoretical weight.9 I do not advocate an untheorised return to the ‘I’ or a naive conception of experience as purely unmediated encounter with reality. Yet, nonetheless, I do propose a reevaluation of the beleaguered notion of lived experience. To this end, I forward a strategy employed by certain phenomenological hermeneutic theorists, such as Jürgen Habermas, Hans-Georg Gadamer and Paul Ricoeur, sometimes described as ‘postmetaphysical’ thinking, which may offer a way beyond both metaphysical objectivism and post-structuralist relativism. Such an approach is indeed anti-foundationalist in the sense that it rejects the attempt to reproduce objective, determinate meanings, yet it does not sacrifice the transmission of meaning and the possibility of (albeit provisional and intersubjective) knowledge and truth. We will explore this approach in more detail later, pausing here only to offer an example of the means by which postmetaphysical hermeneutical strategies avoid the nihilistic cul-de-sacs of post-structuralism. In a comparative essay on Gadamer and Derrida, Gary Madison10 contrasts the deconstructionist notion of ‘undecidability’ with hermeneutical ‘inexhaustibility’. Both concepts participate in the antimetaphysical assertion that it is impossible to reach final and absolute meaning, stressing the indeterminacy, the polysemy of language. The point of divergence relates to the perceived nature of this indeterminacy. Madison remarks: ‘unlike “undecidability”, “inexhaustibility” points not to the eternal vanity of all human endeavour but rather to the limitless possibility of interrogation, expression and understanding.’11 Postmetaphysical connection with the ‘intuitively present lifeworld’,12 not alienated linguistic solipsism, offers a theoretical lifeline to the deconstructed subject, allowing the readmission of meaningful selfpresence, experience and personal agency: ‘ “inexhaustibility” means that in the already acquired we can always find that which can serve to renew our lives and to break the metaphysical circle of the eternal repetition of the Same.’13 Thus while all interpretive absolutisms are ruled out, the self-defeating deconstructive severance of subject and world is avoided. In renouncing the classical Cartesian fundamentum inconcussum and embracing an anti-foundationalist stance towards the experiencing self, I do not seek to operate without the Kierkegaardian ‘knotted thread’ which secures the starting point for any philosophy. Rather, I envisage a provisional ‘ground’ in the ‘rootedness’ or situatedness of the experiencing


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self in her or his cultural and historical circumstances. As George Steiner remarks in his insightful essay ‘Real Presences’, Without some axiomatic leap towards a postulate of meaningfulness, there can be no striving towards intelligibility or value-judgement however provisional … We must read as if.14 A similar ‘leap in the dark’ (leap of faith?) is necessary if we are to move beyond the ‘complacencies and licence of interpretive anarchy’.15 We must take the risk of ‘as if’ to bridge the experiential gap between self and world, where truth is not simple correspondence with reality but the transformative disclosure of (contingent, contextual) possibilities for being: the pharmakon that heals the deconstructive rift. II Experience sous rature: the post-structuralist case against Erlebnis Predecessors Experience reveals nothing and cannot found belief nor set out from it.16 The post-structuralist rejection of experience17 originates in the inversion of the standard notions of Western metaphysics by Nietzsche and subsequently Heidegger: the nihilistic ‘adventure of difference’ pursued by each of these thinkers sought to purge philosophy of the metaphysical conservatism encapsulated in the ‘reduction of everything to a single principle’,18 to break the Platonic hierarchies of value and open up philosophy to the play of heterogeneity: ‘Truth’ is therefore not something there, that might be found or discovered – but something that must be created … – as a processus in infinitum, an active determining – not a becoming-conscious of something that is in itself firm and determined.19 It is thus impossible to make an accurate ‘picture’ of a previously determined reality since all our claims are not representations but interpretations: ‘there is no Ding-an-sich out there to be described in a neutral, transparent medium of thought or language … “what there is” is always shorthand for “what there is for us” ’.20 For Heidegger, the pluralising impact of ‘difference’ acts to unseat the sovereign metaphysical notion of presence as the supreme ‘meaning of being’. Indeed,


Heideggerian ‘difference’,21 in its attempt to overcome transcendentalism by affirming the primordial absence, the essential non-homogeneity, at the heart of Being is the foundation for both Jacques Derrida’s and Gilles Deleuze’s ‘civilisation of the image’22 where the reign of simulacra and reflections is glorified and the repetitive structure of absence is ceaselessly traced. Yet it is the later Heidegger’s attack on the autonomous Enlightenment self which casts most light on the subsequent post-structuralist rejection of experience. For the later Heidegger, the primary authority of language always pre-exists the speaking self; thus ‘it is not I, the individual human being, who first of all and essentially speaks, but language itself’.23 The voice of Logos will always drown out that of the individual self; for Heidegger, there can be no other authority than the quasi-divine Logos, and it is impossible for the individual to do other than acquiesce since outside the linguistic ‘House of Being’ there is only non-being. The Enlightenment attempt to place the self at the centre of linguistic authority is thus, for Heidegger, inauthentic, delusional; our only authentic (and indeed possible) response to primordial Language is reverent submission. Nietzsche’s formulation of ‘truth as process’ and Heidegger’s postphenomenological attempt to overthrow the identity and stability associated with the ‘metaphysics of presence’ by reference to difference, absence and change form the major tributaries to post-structuralism’s stand against the hallowed metaphysical integration of experience and truth.24 Moreover, the influence of Freudian psychoanalysis provides ample additional support for regarding experience with suspicion. Freud considered consciousness to be only a minor and transient component of the mental life of an individual; in Moses and Monotheism (1974), Freud asserts that the conscious ego is ‘principally determined by the individual’s own experience, that is by accidental and contemporary events’.25 Thus the significance of the conscious, experiencing selfpresent element of the ‘I’ which encounters the external world is relegated to a very secondary position behind the vast reservoir of primitive drives and impulses which form the unconscious.26 Experience, once a gateway to ‘the real’, comes to be seen by the nihilistic discourses of modernity as an obfuscating tool of metaphysics, a false guide to a non-existent truth, or so deeply swathed in the darkness of the unconscious as to be beyond understanding. The essence of the problem What is the nature of the post-structuralist case against experience? Experience is essentially a casualty of the post-structuralist onslaught


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against extra-linguistic reality. While very few thinkers would deny that language is implicated in the human construction of reality, as we have seen27 post-structuralist thinking wants to take the far more extreme step of positing language as the sole medium in which reality is constituted. As such, ‘the traffic is all one way’:28 Derrida and his disciples insist that while language encompasses and constitutes reality, reality does not (cannot) impinge on the differential system of language.29 Thus experience must be understood as a purely linguistic construct. Post-structuralism explicitly rejects the commonsensical (a category which is subject to even more blistering scorn than experience) notion that experience, what we think and feel in any given situation, is prior to language but requires language in order that it may be communicated to others. Rather, we are urged, indeed directed, to accept that there is no unmediated experience of the world; knowledge is possible only through the categories and laws of the symbolic order.30 The blissfully deluded subject, ‘imagines’ that she is ‘the source rather than the effect of language’;31 in fact, far from comprehending that she is merely the mouthpiece for a conflicting array of linguistically mediated discourses, and that her individuality is but an illusion of the ‘metaphysics of presence’, she even believes that she is entirely in control of her own meaning. Indeed, as we shall soon see, the genesis of the notion of linguistically saturated experience is foundational to the Derridean critique of the ‘metaphysics of presence’: ‘the historical determination of the meaning of being in general as presence’.32 We recall that the ‘metaphysics of presence’ entails the belief that linguistic signs necessarily (not accidentally) lack the presence of a signifying agent. However, as we know, this perceived state of affairs is deemed to be an illusion, since the superstructure of Derridean/Heideggerian Language absorbs all subjectivity. The speaker is actually absent to herself and her meaning is not anterior to but generated within language. And if meaning is entirely intrinsic to language then the speaker is merely the mouthpiece for primordial Logos and is incapable of possessing pre-existent, extra-linguistic meaning and thus true self-presence. If Language is all, self-presence is an illusion.33 And by extension, experience, as our encounter with an extra-linguistic world, dissolves without trace. So at one pole of the argument there is the extreme empiricist who believes that language expresses experience without loss of reality, ‘that it can faithfully translate experience, that it makes no difference,34 here


the traffic is ‘all one way’ from reality to language and the road is straight and clear. At the opposite pole, the post-structuralist theorist places experience firmly sous rature, as a side effect of the metaphysics of presence. The referential component of experience – that it is a reflection of the real – is emphatically denied. To continue the driving analogy, the traffic emerging from this pole is not so much all one way but condemned to endlessly circle the roundabout of the Text without ever reaching the destination of the real. Yet very few philosophers of language would attempt to argue from the ‘duped’ perspective mentioned above, to deny that language is implicated in the construction of reality, to assert that a necessary and internal relation binds word and world inexorably together, or to insist that the subject is always in absolute control of her meaning. This position appears to be yet another straw target set up to validate and justify the more extreme of post-structuralism’s arguments. Before moving on to a more detailed exposition and critique of post-structuralism’s high-handed attempt to suck lived experience into the vortex of the Text, I want to state my fundamental position with regard to the situation of experience between self and world. I do not propose a naive reinstatement of transparent language whose meaning is located solely in the speaking individual, but neither do I accept the claims of Derridean linguistic determinism that linguistic relativity is absolute and all-encompassing (il n’y a pas de hors texte … ), that the structure of reality is only a docile side-effect of the insuperable structure of language. The route between language and reality (and reality and language) is indeed a two-way street, and thus that the category of experience may be reevaluated as not simply a construct, but something that constructs, that we are indeed ‘subjects constructed by our experience and [that we] truly carry traces of that experience in our minds and on our bodies’.35 If the post-structuralist self is wholly submerged in language, then I do not aim to drag her out of the water altogether, but simply to bring her and the experiential element of her selfhood to the surface. Primary post-structuralist arguments against experience The erasure of the conceptual dimension of experience as ‘the place where objective things make contact with subjective ideas’36 is, according to Richard Harland, characteristic of post-Saussurean thinking and constitutes an attempt to ‘outleap the dimension of experience, to start from a starting point outside of experience’.37 This strategy seems to steer us perilously close to the metaphysical approach so explicitly


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disavowed by post-structuralists. But what are Derrida’s thoughts on the category of experience? Derrida on experience As for the concept of experience, it is most unwieldy here. Like all the notions I am using here, it belongs to the history of metaphysics and we can only use it under erasure. ‘Experience’ has always designated the relationship with a presence, whether that relationship had the form of consciousness or not. At any rate, we must … exhaust the resources of the concept of experience, before attaining and in order to attain, by deconstruction, its ultimate foundation … experience as arche-writing [archi-ecriture]. The parenthesising of regions of experience or of the totality of natural experience must discover a field of transcendental experience. This experience is only accessible in so far as, after having … isolated the specificity of the linguistic system and excluded all the extrinsic sciences and metaphysical speculations, one asks the question of the transcendental origin of the system itself … 38 There are many strands to follow in this passage. We will begin with the most significant, the explicit association of experience and presence. In Chapter 1, we touched on the idea that presence originates in the lived experience of the speaking subject, in the form of ‘auto-affection’, in which the speaker both hears and simultaneously understands her own speech. For Derrida, speech and the consciousness of speech – that is to say consciousness simply as self-presence – are the phenomenon of an auto-affection lived as suppression of difference. That phenomenal, that presumed suppression of difference, that lived reduction of the opacity of the signifier, are the origin of what is called presence.39 Thus presence is essentially an effect of the afferent feedback that makes us feel that we are where our words are … that we put our meaning where our mouths are.40 In Speech and Phenomena: Introduction to the Problem of Signs in Husserl’s Phenomenology (1973), Derrida attempts to demonstrate exactly how the idea of presence originates in the experience of the speaking subject through the phenomenon of auto-affection. For Derrida, self-presence is


the means by which consciousness acquires awareness by affecting itself, or being different from itself. This difference is of vital importance in that it is actually constitutive of subjectivity: it produces a subject. Auto-affection is not a modality of experience that characterizes a being that would already be itself. It produces sameness as self-relation within self-difference; it produces sameness as the non-identical.41 Yet, as Derrida asserts, self-presence is merely an illusion of speech: the connection of self to self which is auto-affection is ‘always already’ infected by the mediating sign whose very character is defined, for Derrida, by infinite deferral and absence. Moreover, Derrida asserts that the system of ‘hearing (understanding) oneself speak’ has had a massive impact on our collective modes of thinking, has ‘necessarily dominated the history of the world during an entire epoch and has even produced the idea of … world-origin that arises from the difference between the worldly and the nonworldly, the outside and the inside … universal and non-universal …’.42 Thus it seems we are subject to a huge linguistic confidence trick in which all human subjectivity and world history turns on an apparently trivial axis: the experience of auto-affection. In contrast to the idea of experience short-circuited by the illusion of presence, in the above passage Derrida posits the notion of experience conceived as archi-ecriture, which, he claims, must lead to the discovery of a ‘transcendental field of experience’. It would appear that Derrida is making a reckless leap from impeccable linguistic idealism, consonant with the relativistic principles of post-structuralism, to an advocacy of sheer metaphysical universalism. Can this be the case? Let us begin with Derrida’s reference to parenthesising or ‘putting into brackets’ regions of experience. This term refers to the Husserlian notion of the epoche or phenomenological reduction which ‘brackets off’ (or holds in suspension) all constituted knowledge, such as that deriving from philosophy, history, psychology, common sense or even metaphysics. In such a view, the external world may or may not exist: it is regarded merely as an object of belief. So when Derrida calls for the ‘bracketing off’ of regions of experience, he is seeking to discount those elements of ‘factual’ experience – ‘historical, psychological, physiological, sociological’43 – which constitute the ‘totality of natural experience’. In effect, he wishes to disregard analyses of ordinary lived experiences of reality, of being-in-the-world, in favour of a ‘transcendental’


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understanding of experience. What can this mean? Surely if the notion of ‘experience’ is so radically reinterpreted it must lose the very qualities which define it as such? Remaining within the terms of the Derridean argument for now, we must clarify the concept of archi-ecriture if we are to advance our understanding of his position. The idea of archi-ecriture is grounded in Derrida’s rejection of the ‘phonocentric’ view that speech is the condition of possibility of writing. We recall that, according to Derrida, writing is actually the condition of speech.44 Writing gains ascendancy over speech in the form of a huge sign-system where ‘meaning’ is generated by the infinitely deferred relationship of signs to each other and which is in fact independent of its localised speakers: Derrida emphasises ‘the structure peculiar to language alone, which allows it to function entirely by itself when its intention is cut off from intuition’.45 Derrida calls this most fundamental (or transcendent) language, which floats free of reference to the world, archi-ecriture or primal writing. So the ‘transcendental field of experience’ which Derrida ‘must’ uncover in some sense participates in this postulated primal language or archi-ecriture. We cannot, of course, be in any sense ‘aware’ of such a system; as Iris Murdoch remarks, it can neither be ‘in any ordinary way experienced, nor can it be indicated by traditional metaphysical concepts of experience’.46 According to Derrida, once the curtain of ‘natural experience’ has been drawn aside the ‘transcendent field of experience’ is uncovered and, like all else in the post-structuralist sphere, what is discovered is Language as archi-ecriture: What is ‘transcendent’ is not the world, but the great sea of language itself which cannot be dominated by the individuals who move or play in it, and who do not speak or use language, but are spoken and used by it.47 Indeed, for Derrida, I am doubly alienated from my conscious experience: not only is my experience of the world an illusion of the Text but that experience is already a part of my unconscious, already inscribed in my memory, not a direct encounter with reality. In ‘Freud and the Scene of Writing’ in the collection Writing and Difference (1978), Derrida expounds this counter-intuitive theory. For Derrida, ‘writing supplements perception before perception even appears to itself’.48 The origin of this startling assertion lies in Freud’s examination of a children’s toy, the ‘Mystic Writing-Pad’. In Freud’s essay ‘Note on the Mystic Writing Pad’ (1971), he describes this toy as


analogous in its workings to the psychic apparatus of the human mind. The device consists of a bottom layer of wax over which lies a sheet of waxed paper and on top of that a thin transparent celluloid sheet. Writing on the pad involves the use of a stylus which presses the lower surface of the waxed paper on to the wax slab. The indentations are visible as dark writing upon the otherwise smooth surface of the celluloid. Lifting the paper away from the base instantly erases any writing on the pad. Crucially for Freud’s analogy, however, the wax base still retains the indentations of the stylus even when the surface writing is erased. So the translucent layer which receives the stimuli of writing retains no permanent traces and is thus analogous to the conscious mind, while the wax base, on which are permanently inscribed the introjected and repressed elements of conscious perception, represents the unconscious mind. Freud suggests that if we imagine one hand writing upon the surface of the Mystic Writing Pad while another periodically raises its covering sheet from the wax slab, we shall have a concrete representation of the way in which I tried to picture the functioning of the perceptual apparatus of our mind …49 Yet Derrida’s appropriation of the Freudian Mystic Writing Pad radically changes the significance attributed to the device. The Freudian unconscious, on which are ‘inscribed’ the repressed experiences of the subject, mutates into an all-embracing structure where even our most immediate experience is not a direct encounter with the external world but a contact with that which has already been inscribed on the ‘surface’ of the unconscious. Thus, for Derrida, Writing supplements perception before perception even appears to itself … The ‘perceived’ may be read only in the past, beneath perception and after it.50 So all aspects of our conscious and unconscious selves are infected with archi-ecriture. As Richard Harland puts it, ‘we can never catch up with the actual memory of our … contact with the world, we are eternal latecomers to the ‘now’ of our own experience’.51 Our experiences are so utterly saturated by non-individual, non-experienced primal language that we cannot ever be said to be experiencing anything new. Once more, the ‘permanent trace’ of archi-ecriture intervenes between self and world, self and self. Derrida appears to be countering the ‘repressive logic of presence’ with a hallucinatory metaphysical picture of a primal


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language so all-powerful that it not merely represses but erases (or consumes) our entire perception of reality. Therefore I may believe that I am experiencing a painting, a flower, a football match, the birth of my child, but in doing so I am subject to a vast illusion. All I am really ‘experiencing’ is Language, Language as neometaphysical transcendent system, beyond all external verification. Thus the inexorable determinism of post-Saussurean thought erases not only the rich complexity of experience but with it the possibility of any self-presence, self-knowledge or personal agency. Althusser on experience Before attempting a critique of the post-structuralist erasure of experience, it is important to note a related, widely influential strand in the postSaussurean stance against the experiential. This position argues that experience always reproduces rather than reflects given ideological systems, that when we speak of ideology we should know that ideology slides into all human activity, that it is identical with the lived experience of human existence itself … This ‘lived’ experience is not a ‘given’, given by a ‘pure’ reality, but the spontaneous ‘lived experience’ of ideology in its peculiar relationship to the real [emphasis added].52 The main proponent of this contention is the French Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser. Although Althusser’s brand of anti-humanist (post)structuralist Marxism enjoyed a high profile in intra-Marxist debate and beyond from the 1960s until at least the mid-1970s, Althusser’s reputation as a political theorist declined rapidly. Yet a deeply held suspicion of the category of experience has proved to be a persistent residue of Althusserian theory, particularly in the field of literary theory, emerging in one form or another in influential texts such as Catherine Belsey’s Critical Practice (1983), Chris Weedon’s Feminist Practice and Poststructuralist Theory (1993), Diana Fuss’s Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature and Difference (1990) and many others. The thrust of his argument is broadly post-structuralist in that, in a way not dissimilar to Derridean Language, Althusserian ideology (in the form of language) intervenes between individuals and the real conditions of their existence. Ideology, for Althusser, refers to the means by which constellations of signifying practices generate social subjectivity by ‘interpellating’ the individual, constituting her subjectivity for her in language. As such, it emphatically rejects orthodox ‘rationalistic’ theories of ideology which


view reality as ‘out there’ but obscured by distorting and misleading representations of it. Rather, for Althusser, ideology resides in our ‘affective, unconscious relations to the world, to the ways we are prereflectively bound up in social reality’.53 Ideology is representational, but what it represents is ‘not the system of the real relations which govern the existence of individuals, but the imaginary relation of those individuals to the real relations in which they live’.54 As Catherine Belsey notes, Althusserian ideology bears both a real and an imaginary relation to the world: ‘real in that it is the way in which people really live their relationship to the social relations which govern their conditions of existence, but imaginary in that it discourages a full understanding of these conditions of existence and the ways in which people are socially constituted within them’.55 Essentially, for Althusser, ‘ideology an imaginary relation to real relations’.56 Nonetheless, this imaginary relation is, for Althusser, endowed with a material existence. Insofar as every conscious subject believes in the ‘ideas’ seemingly ‘inspired’ by consciousness and acts according to these ideas or beliefs, the subject must inscribe her or his ‘own ideas as a free subject in the actions of his [sic] material practice’.57 Indeed, ideology is not merely a material practice; for Althusser, there is no ‘being-in-theworld’ that is not immersed in ideology: ‘there is no practice except by and in an ideology’.58 Althusserian ideology has no outside, ‘never says “I am ideological” ’.59 Thus it is identical with lived experience itself. Like Derrida, Althusser places experience ‘in parentheses’: it exists, but it operates within imaginary, rather than real, relations; an illusion itself, it deals in duplicity. Furthermore, in some way similar to Derrida, experience is ‘always already’ saturated by archi-ecriture so that we may never catch up with the ‘present moment’ of our own experience, likewise for Althusser even the most immediate facts of experience have ‘always already’ been interpreted, channelled by self-interest and subjectivism, even before the shadow of ideology falls between the subject and her experience. Althusser makes this connection explicit in the following passage: Like all obviousnesses, including those that make a word ‘name a thing’ or ‘have a meaning’ (therefore including the obviousness of the ‘transparency’ of language), the obviousness that you and I are subjects – and that that does not cause any problems – is an ideological effect, the elementary ideological effect.60 Yet more than this, Althusser sees ideology not only as the prime mover in all material practice and experience, but as constitutive of ‘who we


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are’, of our very identities. Ideology, appearing as immediate or direct experience, brings our sense of ourselves into being in our relations with the social. For Althusser, ideology supplies the subject with the (illusory) palliative of coherent, autonomous selfhood which constitutes our practical consciousness. This ‘misrecognition’ is one of the two prime functions of Althusserian ideology (the other being recognition) and it essentially involves a misrecognition of self rather than world. It refers to the ‘imaginary’ nature of the individual’s relationship to her or his real conditions of existence and it is directly derived from Jacques Lacan’s concept of the ‘Imaginary’ as expounded in his essay ‘The mirror stage as formative of the function of the I’ (1966). The Lacanian Imaginary refers not to invention or unreality but to the condition of ‘split’ subjecthood which is generated, initially, by the infant’s encounter of her own image (hence ‘Imaginary’) in a mirror. This moment of apparent identification is to be understood as an encounter with the pre-linguistic ‘I’, as ‘the transformation which takes place in the subject when he [sic] assumes an image’.61 Despite (indeed because of) the infant’s state of ‘nursling dependency’, the fixed, stable image she encounters is experienced with ‘jubilation’; this is due to the ‘misrecognition’ which transforms the felt chaos of the child’s existence into an image of reassuring unity. Yet this unified, specular ‘I’, far from establishing the stable foundation of personal identity is, for Lacan, a ‘fiction’, the first in a series of misidentifications which, in the effort to comfort ourselves with coherence and stability, merely cause us to ‘misrecognise’ the real nature of our fragmented and alienated being. Likewise, Althusserian ideology acts as the mirror which affords us a comfortably unified and coherent image of ourselves, and thus the impetus to behave in socially acceptable ways, over against the fragmentation and disorder which characterises our ‘true’ selves. Thus we are pre-reflectively implicated in social reality: our complicity with dominant societal discourses is ‘always already’ operative. Our ideology infected experience encounters reality as directed towards us, opening up to draw us in. Althusser terms this process ‘interpellation’ and his celebrated essay ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’ (1971) describes its modes of operation. In this essay, Althusser deals with the ‘reproduction of the material conditions of production’;62 this capitalist necessity is achieved by ‘Ideological State Apparatuses’ (ISA): defined as ‘a certain number of realities which present themselves to the immediate observer in the form of distinct and specialized institutions’.63 Heading this list of ideological enforcers are the religious ISA followed by the educational


ISA; family, political, legal, trade-union and cultural ISAs make up the remainder, fortified by the Repressive State Apparatuses (RSAs) of government, army, police and court system, which, according to Althusser, function by violence rather than ideology. The diversity of these ISAs, for Althusser, always achieves unity in their subservience to the ideology of the ‘ruling class’ which has at its disposal the RSAs. The reproduction of the relations of production is secured through the determination of dominant meanings: that is, through language. So, for example, the political ISA ‘subjects individuals to the political State ideology, the “indirect” (parliamentary) or direct (plebiscitary or fascist) “democratic” ideology’, while the communications ISA ‘crams’ the subject with ‘daily doses of nationalism, chauvinism, liberalism, moralism etc. by means of the press, the radio and television’.64 Moreover, Althusser contends that ‘there is no ideology except by the subject and for subjects’.65 Indeed, not only is the category of the subject constitutive of all ideology, but the category of the subject is only constitutive of all ideology insofar as all ideology has the function (which defines it) of ‘constituting’ concrete individuals as subjects.66 Even the recognition of the ideological nature of both our experiences and our subjectivity, the awareness that we are not ‘concrete, individual, distinguishable and (naturally) irreplaceable’,67 cannot allow us knowledge of the mechanisms of ideology. How then can we conceive why the category of the ‘subject’ is constitutive of ideology? Not only does the argument appear to be logically circular (ideology constitutes subjects which constitute ideology) but, since we are ‘always already’ subjects and ideology is eternal we can never know ideology’s workings. Nonetheless, Althusser attempts to provide a ‘concrete exposition’ of the means by which ideology ‘interpellates’ individuals as subjects: I shall … suggest that ideology ‘acts’ or ‘functions’ in such a way that it ‘recruits’ subjects among the individuals (it recruits them all), or ‘transforms’ the individuals into subjects (it transforms them all) by that very precise operation which I have called interpellation or hailing, and which can be imagined along the lines of the most common everyday police (or other) hailing: ‘Hey, you there!’68 Moreover, the one hailed ‘always recognizes that it is really him [sic] who is being hailed’.69 Thus we experience society as somehow naturally given to us, a community which hails us, stretches out its arms to


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welcome us in, identifies us as a significant member, uniquely important. This interpellation is the means by which ideology bestows subjectivity on us. Except for the fact that this explanation requires a complete suspension of the notion that concrete individuals are always already concrete subjects. Indeed, for Althusser, the individual is always already a subject even before she or he is born: Before its birth, the child is therefore ‘always already’ a subject, appointed as a subject in and by the specific familial ideological configuration in which it is ‘expected’ once it has been conceived.70 We will examine these apparent inconsistencies in the following critique of post-structuralist arguments against the validity of the experiential, pausing here only to summarise the main points of Althusser’s interrogation of experience. We start with the fundamental assertion that ‘lived experience is ideology’ and, as such, is constitutive of our subjectivity; it inheres in all our ‘lived relations’ with the social. We are ideological creatures ‘all the way down’; there is no scrap of individuality in us that is not contaminated by ideology. So on the one hand, our experience bears false witness to the real state of social affairs which is that, hiding behind a benign visage, ideology, careless of our cherished self-images of unique individuality, merely requires us to act as tools in the reproduction of the conditions of production central to capitalism. On the other hand, experience cannot be said to be bearing false witness in that it is impossible to make such judgements of truth or falsehood when we are within ideology, since as subjects we are always-already interpellated: The writing I am currently executing and the reading you are currently performing are … rituals of ideological recognition, including the ‘obviousness’ with which the ‘truth’ or ‘error’ of my reflections may impose itself on you.71 Experience (as ideology) constructs us as subjects twice over: as both the unified coherent self of practical consciousness and as fragmented, deluded, shackled to the steamroller of anonymous capitalist forces. Neither incarnation allows us access to knowledge or truth. Both Derrida and Althusser condemn the subject to a violent determinism in the form of a metaphysical closure so absolute that selfhood, self-presence and lived experience become mere attributes either of quasi-divine Ideology or transcendent archi-ecriture.


Knowing the dancer from the dance: finding experience again

III

O body swayed to music, O brightening glance, How can we know the dancer from the dance?72 Post-structuralism has drained the category of lived experience dry. It has been jettisoned along with all other out-moded metaphysical concepts such as presence, individuality, truth and knowledge. As I have indicated, however, the post-structuralist critique of Western metaphysical thinking may be regarded as a necessary purge; the savage interrogation of simple referentiality, of the unified individual, of the supremacy of reason has ruptured philosophical complacency, forced thinkers to re-engage with and reformulate received notions inherited from centuries of philosophical tradition. Most importantly, the idea of errorless origin, of objective, translucent meaning is countered by the positing of language as polysemic, its reiterative indeterminacy excluding the possibility of interpretive absolutisms. Where I believe the poststructuralist enterprise fails is in the degree to which this indeterminacy is pursued. The Lacanian self-alienation of the subject, the Derridean rejection of self-presence and experience, the Althusserian scission of agency from the individual: all these approaches lead us beyond the delimiting objectivism of traditional metaphysical thinking, but they take us so far beyond that the categories they (rightly) interrogate begin to (wrongly) evaporate entirely. All we are left with is the monolith of Language, speaking in its many discursive tongues; the only option for the philosopher is the role of ‘an intellectual “kibitzer”, a concern-free creator of abnormal discourse, an insouciant player of … deconstructive wordgames’.73 If we are not to turn full circle, connecting with metaphysical discourse again in the reification (deification) of language to absolute status, we need to provide a reevaluation of the categories that post-structuralism has erased, taking into account the insights poststructuralism has afforded us, but refusing the infinite deferral of deconstruction. In my critique, I attempt to lay the foundations for such an approach, a basis for the reappropriation of experience which nonetheless acknowledges the impersonal linguistic, social and historical determinants which partly construct our experience, the provisionality and positionality, the contextuality and contingency of our conscious lived relations to the world. Yet I will try to check the philosophical nihilism, the debilitating relativism which is associated with rampant post-structuralist ‘play’, thus retaining a space for self-reflection, agency and historical


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continuity in my exploration of experience. While language is the medium for much of our experience, it does not determine the concept. When it comes to the category of experience, the dancer is not entirely subsumed within the play of the dance. This critique, while intended as a general exploration of the consequences of entirely erasing the validity of conscious experience, will focus in particular on the work of Derrida and Althusser since these thinkers are the most emphatic and perhaps the most influential proponents of the linguistic/ideological ‘bracketing’ of experience. The critique is conducted under two headings: experience and extra-linguistic reality and experience and the subject. Experience and extra-linguistic reality We begin with the fundamental contention that experience is purely a linguistic construct primarily since extra-linguistic reality, the reference of experience, is an illusion. As we observed in Chapter 1, our encounter with the world is, of course, not purely intra-linguistic. But it should not be denied that language mediates much, even most, of our lived experience of ‘reality’. For example, acquisition of social identity is fundamentally associated with acquisition of language; the occupation of each of our socio-cultural niches is partly determined by sets of verbally mediated discourses impacting on the emerging subject. So while I question the extent to which language (whether conceived as archi-ecriture, ideology or discourse) determines our lived experiences, I do not attempt to (re)posit the autonomous Enlightenment individual, regarding language as transparent, a simple tool of communication. It is, of course, true that language transcends the individual: many of our dealings with external reality are intra-linguistic; for example, abstract notions such as individuality, culture, morality, ideology do not possess concrete reference in the world and may only be understood through the words which conceptualise them. As Tallis notes, ‘the individual encounters much of “his” [sic] world in linguistically packaged form … The realm of knowledge is verbally organised and access to it is verbally mediated’.74 Experience, then, if not linguistically saturated, is certainly (often) linguistically mediated. Language categorises experience; the import of our sense perception may only be accessed through linguistic categories. The perception of an object is conjunctive with its potential verbalisation; the two processes are fundamentally linked. Language is alive in the very means by which we perceive the world; it permeates both our abstract and particular experiences of the world. But it does not determine them to the absolute extent on which post-structuralism


insists: experience is not purely intra-linguistic. The world of words does not create the world of things. As we know, post-structuralist thinking is deeply influenced by the ideas of Ferdinand de Saussure. In particular, the contention that ‘it is the world of words that creates the world of things’ is primarily derived from comments Saussure made about cognitive capacity outside language: Psychologically our thought … is only a shapeless and indistinct mass … Without language, thought is a vague, uncharted nebula. There are no pre-existing ideas before the appearance of language.75 In asserting that the world of words creates the world of things, poststructuralism wants to argue that reality is undifferentiated prior to language, that it is reality which is the vague, uncharted nebula denoted by Lacan’s ‘inexpressible X’. Consider, for instance, Catherine Belsey’s contention that ‘it is language which offers the possibility of constructing a world of individuals and things, and of differentiating between them’.76 This claim is very different from Saussure’s, who, uncontroversially, regards only thought as undifferentiated and vague prior to language. Saussure’s assertion does not deny the capacity of consciousness to experience differentiated reality and it involves a vast (and seemingly logically unjustifiable) intellectual leap to reach the counter-intuitive conclusion that not only thought but reality itself is undifferentiated outside language. For example, my daughter has not yet acquired language, but she is capable of posting circular, triangular, rectangular and hexagonal shapes into their appropriate places in her sorting toy. If reality was really undifferentiated prior to language, if it was only language which ‘constructed a world of individuals and things’, this simple task would be impossible. And, as we have noted in Chapter 1, if there is no extra-linguistic reality, it would actually be impossible to note this fact; it would require a position outside language – which is forbidden by the very terms of the argument. Moreover, without reference (that is, reality outside language), the evolution and even emergence of language is inexplicable. How did language begin if it did not originate in the verbal demarcation and communication of a differentiated extra-linguistic reality? So the ground on which it is asserted that our experience of the world is enabled by language is already shaky. Post-structuralists have seized the largely undisputed (except by extreme empiricists) notion that language contributes to the constitution of reality and inflated it to gigantic


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proportions; in effect, they have made a theology of a simple linguistic fact. Let me give an example of the consequence of positing language as saturating every aspect of experiential reality. It is widely accepted that pregnancy and birth are riddled with discourses specific to each culture: for instance, these discourses are manifest in the Western desexualisation of the pregnant body and the ‘necessity’ for obstetrical appropriation of the pregnant body, or the hygiene rituals enacted after birth in many tribal communities. I certainly do not wish to deny the existence or the power of such discourses, or their hegemonic infiltration of my own experience of birth. So, to this extent, language creates the ‘reality’ of my birth-experience. But if we follow the post-structuralist line of argument, my own experience of birth must be a purely intra-linguistic affair. The post-structuralist critic Joan Scott explains: ‘experience is a linguistic event (it doesn’t happen outside established meanings)’.77 My experience of the altered consciousness, searing pain and weightless euphoria of the moment of birth are to be regarded as effects of language. The neo-metaphysical determinism of post-structuralism views my affective consciousness of the material reality of my body in labour as an illusion; always the shadow of différance falls between my self and my experiences. We are embodied subjects in the world and our language is (must be) originally grounded in experience. It has often been demonstrated78 that extra-linguistic experience influences the development of language: for example, the Inuit people have 15 or 16 different words describing 15 or 16 kinds of snow while Kalahari tribes have no word for snow at all. If all reality were intra-linguistic, operating independently to reference in the world, no words for snow would be necessary for Inuits, Kalahari bushmen or citizens of New York City since no differentiated significances (such as different varieties of snow) could exist. On the contrary, it seems obvious that the extent of minute differentiation which these words denote is a result of the Inuit people’s experience of, and need to respond to, the climactic conditions of their environment. To appropriate a phenomenological phrase, ‘all experience is experience of something’. As Iris Murdoch remarks, ‘what we encounter remains free, ambiguous, endlessly contingent, and there’.79 It is the world of things which anchors the world of words. Experience and the subject Re-establishing experience at the roots of language is not a difficult task, but it does not allow the category to escape from post-structuralist erasure completely. Experience, for post-Saussureans, is forever contaminated


by the metaphysics of presence. It is in Derrida’s attack on the possibility of self-presence that experience is most at threat from deconstructive dissolution, since if the self-consciousness of the world-encountering individual is shown to be nothing more than an illusion generated by the play of signs, experience as one’s conscious relationship to the world is radically undermined. If my conscious, experiencing self is ‘always already’ inhabited by archi-ecriture, then what value can my experience have, other than as yet another reinscription of the Text? Experience may be regarded as the generator of the ‘original sin’ of post-structuralist thinking: the ‘illusion’ of self-presence, which, we recall, is supposed to originate in the experience of the speaking subject through the phenomena of auto-affection, an occurrence which simultaneously constitutes our subjectivity and alienates us from ourselves. In Chapter 1, I argued that Derridean self-presence is indeed impossible, although not simply because the linguistic sign infects our self’s encounter with itself; rather, because Derrida, following Husserl, understands presence as absolute, wholly signifying itself to itself, entailing total self-possession and self-knowledge. For Derrida/Husserl one cannot attain degrees of self-presence much as one cannot be a little bit pregnant.80 Absolute presence in the form of entire coincidence of being and meaning will of course forever elude us. This undeniable fact is rooted not only in the internal existence of the unconscious mind but also, and perhaps even more importantly, in our experience of the external world. Our perception of and engagement with our world is always marked by a kind of Heideggerian ‘thrownness’; the very medium of our existence – the external world – is a given which is other to ourselves. Thus we can never attain absolute knowledge of ourselves; since we are primarily embodied beings in a world that constantly exceeds our grasp, the otherness of our being-in-the-world will always permeate our sense of self. I concur, with Derrida, that asemic consciousness is an impossibility: there will always be an irreducible gap between being and knowing. Yet partial self-presence, I will argue, is not only possible, but indeed necessary to our experience of reality. To what extent are we ever ‘present’ to ourselves? Iris Murdoch offers a description of our fluctuating experience of self-presence: Some or much of the time when we are ‘aware’ do not have any vivid sense of presentness … An inability to be fully present is something which we often feel. We move about in time in all sorts of strange ways which are also entirely familiar. We ‘live in memory’, we anticipate and plan, we discover unconscious wishes … our mental life is


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time-textured … but our time adventures return to and are based in presence and encounter.81 Self-presence, as we experience it, is a conflicting, contingent and continuous flow of desires, perceptions, insights, emotions, intuitions constantly intersecting with the minutiae of our daily encounter with the world. In positing the experiencing ‘I’ not as present but as absent, a mere constellation of signs passively ‘played’ by archi-écriture, Derrida shrivels the vitality of our lived consciousness of the world, as well as our potential agency in that world. Indeed, as we have observed in his remarks on the ‘Mystic Writing Pad’, for Derrida even our most direct experience of the world is apparently nothing more than a contact with that which has already been inscribed in our unconscious: archi-écriture, which transcends all context and verification. The question is whether we are prepared to dismiss the rich complexity of this encounter with ourselves and the world as nothing but a play of signs, based entirely on the trivial phenomena of hearing ourselves speak? This seems to be flimsy evidence for taking the radical step of denouncing self-presence as ‘the myth of consciousness’82 and, if subjectivity is a linguistic construct, ‘bracketing’ the lived experiences of that subject where bracketing is synonymous with erasure. Where does this conceptual reduction leave the possibility of meaningful experience? If the action of putting experience ‘in parentheses’ entails discounting all elements of ‘regional’ experience – that is, the ‘totality’ of lived experience whether understood as historical, psychological, physiological, sociological and so on – and merely signifies an encounter with primal language, then the possibility of meaning is called into question. Or rather, only one ‘meaning’ can be achieved: language. As some critics have observed, post-structuralism seems to understand language as a tautology, only ever eable to be ‘about’ itself. Very few theorists would wish to argue that individual experiences have inherent, essential, fixed meanings, or to deny that language, in the form of ideologies or discourses which pre-date our own entry into language, enables the meanings we attribute to our experiences, but Derridean post-structuralism appears, whether he intends it or not, to preclude the possibility of experience having any meaning at all, however provisional or contingent.83 Althusserian post-structuralism employs a similar approach to the untrustworthy ‘meaning(s)’ attributed to experience by the subject. Although messy lived experience is not neatly ‘bracketed off’ and conveniently forgotten about in this analysis, it is nonetheless an


aetiolated, passive and docile concept, inertly absorbing and reproducing the conditions of production. The human subject may attribute meaning to her experiences but this meaning is nothing more than a series of ‘misrecognitions’; the subject may believe that she is making contact with reality in her interpretation of her experiences, but meaning is always already inhabited and determined by dominant ideological discourses. So our subjectivity and interpretation of experience operate within a linguistically/ideologically determined frame of reference: we do not deny it. What is open to question is the reifying assertion that ideology not only shapes but is lived experience, thus annihilating conscious selfhood and agency, as well as the possibility of understanding either to any degree. Moreover, for Althusser, ideology is constitutive of our identity; it is the fundamental mode of our being.84 We recall that this subject-centred understanding of ideology – that ideology exists only within and because of the human subject – is derived from Lacan’s analysis of the ‘mirror stage’. In a striking parallel with Derrida’s attempt to characterise the everyday experience of hearing oneself speak as the basis for ‘the idea of the world, the idea of world-origin’85 and the flawed metaphysics of presence, Lacan offers his interpretation of the infant’s seemingly trivial experience of her or his image in the mirror as fundamental to the construction of identity: this experience is crucial to ‘the formation of the “I”;86 it discloses ‘the ontological structure of the human world’;87 it is implicated in the ‘cipher of [our] mortal destiny’.88 In his appropriation of Lacan’s analysis, Althusser simply substitutes ‘ideology’ for the infant’s mirror; thus dominant ideological discourses reassuringly provide us with a (false) image of ourselves not only as stable, coherent and autonomous but as required, hailed, heartily welcomed into the weave of socio-cultural reality. Indeed, we have seen that Althusser’s conception of superstructural ideology exceeds in power even the monolithic spread of Lacan’s symbolic order: for Althusser the individual is always already a subject even in utero, and (grotesquely) when the child emerges into the world she is immediately pounced upon by the symbolic/ ideology that has been lying in wait for each infant born since before his [sic] birth, and seizes him before his first cry, assigning to him his place and role and hence his fixed destination.89 Both the status and advent of subjecthood are in doubt here. Is subjectivity conferred on the individual while embryonic, at the age of six to


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eighteen months during the ‘mirror stage’, or is it imposed when the adult individual is ‘interpellated’ and thus ‘recruited’ by the ‘precise operations’ of ideology? If the embryo is always already a subject, is this subjecthood the same as that conferred by the moment of interpellation? And if the embryo is already a subject, why the need for ideology to interpellate her 16 or 18 years later? As we have noted in Chapter 1, the core difficulty with Lacan’s model of subjecthood as conferred by mirror-image is one to which all conceptions of subjectivity founded upon self-reflection are prey: how is it possible for the subject to recognise or even misrecognise herself in the mirror if she has no prior notion of selfhood? Moreover, we recall that Lacan’s interpretation of the ‘mirror stage’ is intended to be consonant with his contention that ‘it is the world of words which creates the world of things’. Yet we saw in Chapter 1 how his analysis presupposes the differentiated pre-linguistic existence of the child, the mother and the mirror. If the child’s experience of the pre-linguistic world was really undifferentiated then she may well mistake her mother’s face for her own mirror image, if she was even capable of ‘thinking’ in these terms at all: indeed, what can the child’s ‘own’ image mean if her ‘self’ is indistinguishable from the swirl of other human and material entities which surround her? Even where Lacan is most at pains to exclude extra-linguistic reality it creeps back into his theory, proving itself to be ineradicable; even where Lacan refuses to tie the Kierkegaardian knot which grounds his analysis, it is tied for him. What are the implications of these logical difficulties for Althusser’s notion of ideology’s interpellation of the subject? Althusser appears to take Lacan’s theory to its farthest conclusions. If subjecthood is based upon imaginary identifications with that which is not itself (ie. ideology), then all consciousness and experience must be rooted in these fictions, and ideology becomes a prison to which Althusser readily admits there is no outside. Ironically, although Althusser has escaped from positivist empiricism, the post-structuralist prison which he erects possesses startling similarities to the insulated complacency of orthodox empiricism which he sought to outleap: arguing from a historical materialist perspective, E.P. Thompson remarks, ‘both are the products of conceptual stasis, erected, stone on stone, from static a-historical categories’.90 Effectively Althusser adds a further leap to Lacan’s argument, so developmental observations lead to ontological conclusions which, with Althusser, are transformed into a socio-political universal: ideology. But if the empirical and logical bases on which these ontological conclusions are founded prove to be flawed, then the status of ideology’s


quasi-divine power to create subjectivity, consciousness and experience is called into question. Althusser’s attempt to side-step this difficulty by changing tack, maintaining that even as embryos we are already subjects creates new problems. If subjectivity is, in the Lacanian/Derridean sense ‘linguistically and discursively constructed and displaced across the range of discourses in which the concrete individual participates’,91 and if subjectivity is experienced as autonomous individuality, the source of meaning and belief, then in what sense can the developing foetus be a subject, even within the post-structuralist framework within which Althusser forwards his arguments? With Althusser’s image of the ‘embryo-as-subject’ we reach the nadir of the post-structuralist erasure of experience: if the roots of our ideological construction reach all the way back to the moment of our conception then the possibility of having experiences that are not synonymous with ideology is stifled a good nine months before we enter the world! The implications of this assertion are vast. Most significantly, we are plunged into an a-historical theoreticism, a realm of static closure where socio-cultural and historic processes, which, through discourse, position subjects and mould their experiences become superfluous since subjectivity has always already been constituted by the antenatal workings of ideology. Moreover, if there is no distinguishable gap between the conception of a child and the inexorable imposition of subjectivity, it is unclear what purpose the notion of interpellation serves. Even if we leave this quandary aside, there are several difficulties with the idea that ideology ‘hails’ its subjects in such a way that ‘the one hailed always recognises that it is really him [sic] who is being hailed’.92 For example, the assertion relies on a homogeneous, monolithic conception of ideology and an inert, pliant proto-subject93 who is the object of ideology’s call. Althusserian ideology, which exerts such an inexorable determinism on the individual, is characterised (significantly) as a single god-like voice which leaves the individual in no doubt that she is the object of its directive; indeed, she is in no position to disregard that call since to live in the world at all she must submit to this enforced recruitment: the only alternative for Althusser/Lacan is psychosis. Yet Althusser’s imaginary ‘theoretical theatre’94 fails to account both for the multiplicity of ways which the individual may be ‘hailed’ by ideological discourses and for the contradictory results of this supposed interpellation: as Terry Eagleton remarks, ‘someone may be a mother, Methodist, houseworker and trade unionist all at the same time, and there is no reason to assume that these various forms of insertion into ideology will be mutually


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harmonious’.95 Yet I believe that Althusser’s conception of interpellation as a kind of on-street ideological baptism has even deeper implications than a failure to demonstrate the contradictory plurivocity of ideology. And it is here that we return to the Althusserian contention most central to our analysis: that ideology ‘is identical with the “lived” experience of human existence itself’.96 In making lived experience synonymous with ideology, Althusser distorts the notion of value. For Althusser, ideology’s loudspeaker presents me with a set of values, beliefs and ideas which I unquestioningly accept as my own, ‘freely chosen’ by me. It has often been remarked that this notion of ideology represents a complete eviction of human agency since Althusser insists that every ‘subject’ endowed with a ‘consciousness’ and believing in the ‘ideas’ that his ‘consciousness’ inspires in him [sic] and freely accepts, must ‘act’ according to his ideas, must therefore inscribe his own ideas as a free subject in the actions of his material practice.97 If consciousness (or lived experience) is utterly saturated by ideology then the acts to which it ‘must’ give rise are equally infected; thus Althusser enforces a compulsory abrogation of responsibility and agency on behalf of the subject. Abject passivity and ideological dependency are ‘misrecognised’ as freedom and autonomy; the irony of this fundamental ‘obviousness’ is that we ‘achieve’ our false freedom and autonomy by obediently submitting to the force of the Law: the resonances of Heidegger’s assertion that the only authentic response to primordial Language is reverent supplication are surely at work here. Yet the difficulty with Althusser’s conflation of experience and ideology is not simply a matter of the erasure of agency and the possibility of transgression, politically and personally serious though that might be. The crudity of Althusser’s structuralist characterisation of values as invisibly but forcibly imposed by ISAs, whether in utero, walking down the street or sitting at a school desk, cannot account for the ‘lived experience’ through which we learn our values. As E.P. Thompson notes, Values … are lived, and they arise within the same nexus of material life and material relations as do our ideas. They are the necessary norms, rules, expectations etc., learned … within the ‘habitus’ of living.98 In collapsing experience and value, along with every other mode of consciousness into the conceptual black-hole of ideology, Althusser


subjects the notion of ideology to such infinite expansion and reification that it floats free of any political, social or historical reference to the world: so that my preference for a certain variety of delphinium is, for Althusser, as much a product of ideology as attending a civil rights protest. In seeking to outleap the dimension of experience, Althusser has outleapt the world entirely; in seeking to dissolve the category of experience, replacing it with the automatic generation of subjectivity within the ‘capitalist mode of production’, his objectivist structural science cannot allow for the social and historical processes through which our identities and values are gradually shaped, or for the discursive contradictions we both encounter and, in praxis, live every day. Of course, our experience of the world is, as the post-structuralist Joan Scott argues, ‘always already an interpretation and something that needs to be interpreted’;99 of course, I do not counter the external, mechanistic workings of Althusserian ideology with an advocation of the naturalisation of experience in an unmediated relationship between words and things. Experience will always occur and be interpreted within discursive modes of being; what I wish to refute is that experience is those discursive modes of being. Moreover, in effectively positing rationality as a function of ideology, or ideology as a displaced rationality, Althusser neglects to acknowledge that subjects are not merely the passive recipients of state-imposed values, but, admittedly within a discursive framework, do apply reason to the values they (ambiguously) choose. For example, my choice to breastfeed is at least in part a rational value-judgement: I employ rational evidence to adduce that breastfeeding provides my baby with the most perfect food available for her, that it maximises immunity from infection and allergies in later life and so on. An irreducible gap does exist between the subject and the ideological or discursive positionings which weigh down on her. As E.P. Thompson notes, as subjects we are as much but no more determined in [our] values as in our ideas and actions … [we] are as much but no more ‘subjects’ of [our] own affective and moral consciousness as of [our] general history.100 Indeed, Jürgen Habermas101 has argued that the absolute rejection of the metaphysical tradition in which Althusser, Derrida and Lacan all participate inevitably disallows the possibility of rational critique itself. Here we are reminded of Iris Murdoch’s remark that ‘of necessity, in order to live at all, [we are] truth-seekers on that familiar everyday … edge where language continually struggles with an encountered world’:102 if we are


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not in possession of rational faculties at least partially independent of the functions of ideology that potentially lead us to truth (not conceived as the representation of an objective state of affairs but as provisional, contextual perches for our understanding), then the subject becomes an automaton and her experiences meaningless. Antonio Gramsci’s (1971) comments on the relationship of theory to practice provide an alternative way of understanding lived experience which does not rob the subject of all agency and responsibility: Having first shown that everyone is a philosopher, though in his [sic] own way and unconsciously, since even in the slightest manifestation of any intellectual activity whatever, in ‘language’, there is contained a specific conception of the world, one then moves on to the second level, which is that of awareness and criticism … one proceeds to the question – … is it better to take part in a conception of the world mechanically imposed by the external environment, ie, by one of the many social groups in which everyone is automatically involved from the moment of his [sic] entry into the conscious world? … Or, on the other hand, is it better to work out consciously and critically one’s own conception of the world and thus … choose one’s sphere of activity, take an active part in the creation of the history of the world … refusing to accept passively and supinely from outside the moulding of one’s personality?103 In advocating this approach, Gramsci does not ignore the hegemonic workings of what he terms ‘common sense’: the uncritical and often unconscious way of perceiving the world that has become ‘common’ in any particular epoch;104 rather, Gramscian critical consciousness evolves through a critical relationship with one’s own lived experience, where one engages in a process of bringing to consciousness and interrogating the means by which ‘common sense’ has moulded one’s beliefs and values. Gramsci’s dialectical model remains rooted in lived experience and human practice: he argues that ‘ “ideology” itself must be analysed historically, in the terms of the philosophy of praxis’.105 In claiming that ‘everyone is a philosopher’ and that ‘it is not a question of introducing from scratch a scientific form of thought into everyone’s individual life, but of renovating and making “critical” an already existing activity’,106 Gramsci emphatically locates the possibility of agency and selfconsciousness achieved through the interrogation of lived experience within the individual. This strategy stands in marked contrast to the evacuations of Althusser’s objectivist/scientist structuralism which


refuses to engage with the nature of our lived experience within capitalist society. Of course, a critical understanding of the self can never achieve the full self-presence for which Husserl (directly) and Derrida (covertly) yearn; but consciousness of participation in particular hegemonic forces need not involve the atrophy of the subject, the paralysis of agency or the dismissal of experience. Rather, through a ‘critical consciousness’ of our lived experience, the rupture between theory and practice instituted by the high priests of (post)structuralism may be bridged. The reintroduction of experience, however, effects a new kind of (enabling) rupture. In the paradigmatic work of both Derrida and Althusser we have observed the consequences of the absorption of the experiential into over-arching Structure (whether termed ideology or language): here we are nothing but deluded fools in an unreachable world, immersed in the closure107 of quasi-divine language/ideology which transcends context or verification. As E.P. Thompson notes, these post-structuralist pilgrims ‘still wish to worship the Absolute; they do not repudiate but seek only to amend the rites’.108 IV

Self – experience – world

I believe that the (post)structuralist attempt to outleap experience is symptomatic of the fundamental structuralist contention that system may be defined without reference to context, to its use in particular situations. Indeed, the post-structuralist erasure of experience may be read as the flip-side of its desire for the Absolute: the uncertainty, contingency and contextuality – the inherent ‘messiness’ – of lived experience must be sloughed off and discarded lest it obscure the clean lines of the system. If structure necessitates closure, the inexhaustibility of experience must be reined in and forced to conform. But if we reintroduce the category of experience conceived as process, as the continual weaving of the cord which connects consciousness (in the form of values, feelings, intuitions, desires and so on) to a world which is forever ‘incorrigibly plural … and more of it than we think’109 we overcome the stasis endemic to all structuralisms.110 We can break out of the circularity imposed by the eternal repetition of the Same typical of all metaphysical and neo-metaphysical systems and truly engage with the inexhaustibility of experience with all the possibilities for interrogation and understanding which this notion entails. However, this is not to subject (post)structuralism to the kind of inexorable erasure which it applies to experience. The unpredictability of experience and our ways of theorising it will always remain partially determined by


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discursive structures. The model of two-way traffic which we adopted to illustrate the reciprocal nature of the relation of language to reality and vice versa has a resonance here, perhaps best encapsulated in the following passage by Jürgen Habermas: Subjects capable of speaking and acting who, against the background of a common lifeworld, come to an understanding with each other about something in the world, relate to the medium of their language both autonomously and dependently: they can make use of grammatical rule-systems, which make their practices possible in the first place, for their own purposes as well. Both moments are equiprimordial. On the one hand, these subjects always find themselves already in a linguistically structured and disclosed world … To this extent, language sets itself off from the speaking subjects as something antecedent and objective, as the structure that forges conditions of possibility. On the other hand, the linguistically disclosed and structured lifeworld finds its footing only in the practices of reaching understanding within a linguistic community [emphasis added].111 The admission of the quixotic autonomous/dependent nature of experience is essential to any attempt to theorise our conscious relations with the world. It is only when experience’s dependency on structure is disproportionately inflated to the extent that structure exerts an inexorable determinism over experience that (post)structuralism becomes a theology and the experiential cord between self and world is severed. Here the importance of positing the subject not as absent, a mere function of language, but as (albeit partially) present to herself in a world irreducible to intra-linguistic or intra-ideological reality becomes not just a possibility but a necessity, if the categories of lived experience, agency and understanding (in the sense of the generation and possession of viable, if provisional, meaning) are to have any weight at all; we must posit both self and world as ultimately eluding the insuperable determinism of the post-structuralist linguistic/ideological straitjacket. If the self is not to be reduced entirely to an ‘autistic echo-chamber’112 and if experience is not to be placed so deeply under erasure that it ‘means’ not encounter between self and world but non-individuated, non-experienced primal language or inexorably determining ideology, we must think ‘as if’.113 We must make a postmetaphysical leap across the conceptual abyss which post-structuralism has gouged between self and world. We must theorise experience ‘as if’ an experiencing self exists who is not entirely


constituted by language, or ideology operating through language. Yet the ground towards which we leap must be a ‘ground without a ground’, a provisional perch which is situated, contextual and contingent. We must acknowledge with Gadamer that the very idea of a situation means that we are not standing outside it. We are always within the situation, and to throw light on it is a task that is never completed.114 Indeed, one of the merits of post-structuralism has been its interrogation of the immobilising objectivism of the metaphysical fundamentum inconcussum, and of the illusion of complete self-transparency through reflection. Yet both Derrida’s search for transcendental experience (‘bracketing’ all ‘local’ or ‘regional’ i.e. real experience), and Althusser’s conflation of the concepts of lived experience and ideology somewhere become a quest for guaranteed truth and thus slip into neo-metaphysical absolutism. Nonetheless, like any metaphysic, post-structuralism is impossible to disprove: its very emptiness lends it an invulnerability. Hence the necessity of adopting an anti-foundationalist stance, a fundamental presupposition (provisional, not absolute) that self and world are not entirely reducible to the ‘bottomless chessboard’115 of structure. Only a situated standpoint which both permits and limits the possibility of theoretical vision can allow experience to reoccupy that irreducible gap between self and world and enable a truly dynamic open-ended theoretical engagement with ‘the drunkenness of things being various’.116

4 Frameworks for Experience

Why all this fuss and bother about the mystery of the unconscious? What about the mystery of the conscious? What do they know about that?1

I Hermeneutics and deconstruction In the previous chapter I attempted to demonstrate how post-structuralism has reduced the fecundity of experience to sterility and stasis. In this chapter, I seek to recontextualise experience, in all its contingency and uncertainty, identifying it as the continual weaving of the cord which connects consciousness (in the form of beliefs, values, feelings, intuitions, desires and so on) to a world which always exceeds our capacity to understand it. I believe that it is important to recognise the limits attendant upon this enterprise. As Raymond Tallis remarks, ‘we are “never quite there” … we elude ourselves and the world eludes the grasp of a fully self-possessed experience’.2 Paul Ricoeur advocates a philosophy which gives up ‘the dream of a total mediation, at the end of which reflection would once again amount to intellectual intuition in the transparence to itself of an absolute subject’.3 In our desire to free the category of experience from non-individuated primal language, we must take care not to slide into the illusion of neutrality present in Cartesian or Husserlian idealism, which embraces the primacy of subjectivity, and grounds experience in ‘the self-transparence of a fundamental subject’.4 Neither must we identify the object of experience as a simply given world, unmediated by the filter of language. I believe we must acknowledge, with Hans-Georg Gadamer, that while being is not reducible to language, our world is only ‘world’ insofar as it comes into language. 111


These axioms – the rejection of the primacy of subjectivity, and the acknowledgement of linguality as the most fundamental mode of realisation of our being-in-the-world – do not appear to differ dramatically from the core principles of post-structuralism. And, as I have previously remarked, I do believe that post-structuralist thinking can be employed as a necessary corrective to certain absolutising impulses. Yet my approach to the experiential, guided as it is by postmetaphysical hermeneutics, avoids the theoretical extremism of post-Saussurean thought, which seeks to dissolve both self and world entirely. As Habermas notes, post-Saussurean thought has made transcendental subjectivity disappear without trace, and indeed in such a way that one also loses sight of the system of world relations, speaker perspectives, and validity claims that is inherent in linguistic communication itself. Without this reference system, however, the distinction between levels of reality, between fiction and reality, between everyday practice and extraordinary experience … becomes impossible and even pointless. The house of ‘being’ itself is sucked into the maelstrom of an undirected linguistic current.5 Or as Iris Murdoch puts it, even more succinctly, Something is lost, the existing incarnate individual with his real particular life of thoughts and perceptions and moral living.6 Moreover, while post-structuralist thinking can alert us to submerged discourses which construct our very notions of selfhood, meaning and power, it is by no means innocent of the duplicity it locates within other philosophical enterprises. As we have seen in the paradigmatic work of Derrida and Althusser, the absorption of the experiential into overarching Structure, transcending all context or verification, and the bracketing of the ‘messiness’ of lived experience (lest it spoil the pure form of the system) in fact conceals a profound longing, a metaphysical hunger, for the Absolute as archi-écriture or ideology. In contrast, postmetaphysical hermeneutics offers an authentically anti-foundational approach which moves decisively beyond both metaphysical objectivism and deconstructive relativism, and allows a re-engagement with truth, understanding and meaningful experience. Postmetaphysical/phenomenological hermeneutics (particularly the work of Gadamer, Ricoeur and to a lesser extent, Haberm as) is the approach which forms the parameters for my exploration of experience.7

Frameworks for Experience 113

Although Gadamer, Ricoeur and Habermas are often referred to as ‘postmetaphysical thinkers’, the term requires some qualification. For instance, although Habermas is critical of the inflated status of the rational in Western metaphysics, he argues against throwing the baby (rationality) out with the bathwater (metaphysics). Moreover, Gadamer and Ricoeur may be read as postmetaphysical hermeneutic thinkers in that both move beyond the traditional hermeneutics of Schleiermacher, Betti and Hirsch (whose aim was to uncover objective, determinate meaning in the text), instead positing meaning as inseparable from application (Gadamer) or appropriation (Ricoeur). Yet Ricoeur, at least, resists the label ‘postmetaphysical’, arguing instead for the importance of ‘doing metaphysics in another manner’:8 that is, on the basis of a hermeneutic phenomenology. Gadamer and Ricoeur may both be understood as belonging to this synthesis of two continental philosophical traditions. Ricoeur identifies a ‘mutual belonging’ between phenomenology and hermeneutics: ‘phenomenology is the place where hermeneutics originates; phenomenology is also the place it has left behind’.9 While Ricoeur rejects the Husserlian conceptions of selftransparency and direct knowledge of the self, he believes that phenomenology remains the fundamental presupposition of hermeneutics, in that every question concerning ‘being’ is a question about the meaning of that being. Thus the fundamental question of both phenomenology and hermeneutics is the relationship between the intelligibility of sense and the reflective nature of self. Ricoeur writes that the ultimate root of our problem lies in this primitive connection between the act of existing and the signs that we deploy in our works; reflection must become interpretation because I cannot grasp the act of existing except in signs scattered in the world.10 The approach of all these thinkers, however, remains resolutely antifoundational. Against the Husserlian ideal of scientificity as inevitably rooted within objectifying thought, contemporary hermeneutics forwards the idea of ‘the ontological conditioning of belonging’: ‘whereby he who questions shares in the very thing about which he questions’.11 The notion of ‘belonging’ is equivalent to Heidegger’s idea of the ‘thrownness’ of being-in-the-world, which precedes all reflection. For these postHeideggerian thinkers, we are thrown into the world, condemned to begin in medias res. As Ricoeur notes, all interpretation places the interpreter in medias res and never at the beginning or the end. We suddenly arrive, as it were, in the middle


of a conversation which has already begun and in which we try to orientate ourselves in order to be able to contribute to it.12 This ontological condition of belonging means that every interpretation is coloured by this ‘thrown-ness’: there is no presuppositionless, ‘prejudiceless’ interpretation, for while the interpreter may free himself from this or that situation, he cannot free himself from his own facticity, from the ontological condition of always already having a finite temporal situation as the horizon within which the beings he understands have their initial meaning for him.13 Therefore our understanding is always finite, always immersed in the pre-theoretical givenness of the concrete, historical situation, the web of inherited meanings which constitutes our being-in-the-world. Just as absolute coincidence of self-presence and facticity forever elude us, in the same way no interpretation can achieve absolute vision.14 This is the key hypothesis of (ambiguously postmetaphysical) hermeneutic philosophy: ‘that interpretation is an open process that no single vision can conclude’.15 Heidegger’s thought may be identified as a primary locus of Derrida’s work, as well as that of Gadamer and Ricoeur. Derrida’s trajectory leads him to embrace the deconstructive freeplay of dissemination, and consequently to reject all possibility of meaning, understanding and truth. In contrast, Gadamer’s and Ricoeur’s routes out of Heidegger, while acknowledging that language is the primary condition of all human experience, never lose sight of context, never forget that meaning is inseparable from application. As Gadamer remarks, ‘hermeneutics reaches into all the contexts that determine and condition the linguisticality of the human experience of the world’.16 The hermeneutic project reconnects meaning with action, sense with reference, structure with event. As we will see, however, the insights of post-Saussurean thought are not forgotten. Indeed, with Ricoeur especially, a dialogical dynamic operates between langue (as internal linguistic relations) and parole (as process, reference, the specificity, facticity and particularity of actual subjects in socio-historical contexts). The reintroduction of parole is the ‘return of the repressed’, the reconnection of both word and self with context, the exchange of poststructural passivity for hermeneutic creative consciousness. With the abandonment of the Derridean epoche (which subsumes lived experience entirely within the reification of


langue- as- archi-écriture), parole breathes life into the category of the experiential. As Ricoeur notes, ‘the only [human] reality, in the end, are individuals who do things’.17 Working within this framework, I will deal with language and selfhood separately in an attempt to establish a basis for exploring the experiential; I am aware, however, that this artificial division remains at the theoretical level, since the interpenetrations of language and selfhood frequently fuse, forming dense conceptual tangles. Nonetheless, I believe that this approach can allow insights into the ambiguous status of the experiential; moreover, it is consonant with my attempt to theorise experience ‘as if’.18 Experience must be theorised at the interface between language and selfhood. It is here, at the interstices of discourse and individuality, in the irreducible gap that we have posited between the subject and the ideological and structural positionings which weigh down on her, that we can reconnect the category of experience with creativity, agency and (albeit partial) self-understanding in the here and now. In choosing a hermeneutic approach, we make a choice in favour of meaning.

II ‘The bite of the real’: language in hermeneutic phenomenology To say … that synchronic systems cannot deal in any adequate conceptual way with temporal phenomena is not to say that we do not emerge from them with a heightened sense of the mystery of diachrony itself.19 The linguality (the Sprachlichkeit) that pervades all human experience is the foundation of the phenomenological hermeneutic enterprise. Gadamer remarks, The experience of the world in language is ‘absolute’. It transcends all the relativities of the positing of being, because it embraces all being-in-itself, in whatever relationships it appears. The linguistic quality of our experience of the world is prior … We cannot see a linguistic world from above … for there is no point of view outside the experience of the world in language from which it could itself become an object.20 This essentially Heideggerian approach, which contends that all thinking about language is always already drawn back into language, that in our


knowledge of ourselves and in our knowledge of the world, our language encompasses us, might appear at first to dissolve the experiential connection between self and world as emphatically as any Derridean strategy. Yet the hermeneutic approach decentres, but does not dismiss the subject; and while it allows that language is the true element of our being-in-the-world, it maintains (in opposition to Derridean poststructuralism) that language has no independent life apart from the world that comes to language within it: ‘the linguistically disclosed and structured lifeworld finds its footing only in the practices of reaching understanding within a linguistic community’.21 Language and world are in an important sense, mutually constitutive: not only is the world ‘world’ only insofar as it comes into language, but language, too, has its real being only in that the fact that the world is re-presented within it. Thus the original humanity of language means at the same time the fundamental linguistic quality of man’s beingin-the-world [emphasis added].22 Gadamer pursues the point in an exchange with Habermas. He reflects Habermas’ contention that he, Gadamer, has claimed that the linguistically articulated consciousness determines all the material being of life practices; rather, Gadamer argues, he merely wishes to state ‘that there is no societal reality … that does not bring itself to representation in a consciousness that is linguistically articulated’.23 While the priority of the relation (language) over its relational members (speaking subjects) has not dissolved, the emphasis has shifted. The interpretive arbitrariness of post-structuralism is avoided through the recovery of the subject. Yet the subject of phenomenological hermeneutics is not identical with the ‘erased’ subject of post-structuralism, lost amid the forces of social determinants and unconscious drives; neither is it equivalent to pure self-presence, self-authenticating and self-transparent. Rather, the self-presence of the hermeneutic subject is always mediated by signs: The hermeneutical subject is a speaking/spoken subject: it exists only as the self-affirming object of effort and desire, and to the degree that it exists self-understandingly it does so only as the result of the constitutive and critical play of signs, symbols and texts; it is not a natural (or metaphysical) given but the result of a process of semiosis.24 While the notion of the speaking/spoken subject will be addressed in more detail in the following section, it cannot go unmentioned in any


phenomenological hermeneutic analysis of language. The challenge to the (post)structuralist principle of ‘structure over process’ involves a reinstatement of the speaking self whose spoken language refers to lived reality. Nowhere is this realignment of self, language and world more explicit than in Ricoeur’s theory of language, and especially his concept of ‘discourse’.25 Before beginning an examination of Ricoeur’s theories of language and subjectivity it is important to emphasise that his critique of semiology explored here is directed at structuralist modes of analysis. Yet I believe many of his comments are equally applicable to post-structuralist theory which, as we have already noted, often fails to escape many of the pitfalls of structuralism. Indeed, both structuralism and poststructuralist share what Richard Harland has termed a ‘before-sentence orientation’26 which constitutes an underlying framework of assumption. The correlate of this ‘before-sentence orientation’ is the search for primal processes and structures before or beyond human consciousness and individuality and which constitute human subjectivity. Harland uses the term ‘Superstructuralism’ to designate this broad grouping; throughout this analysis I have employed the terms ‘(post)structuralist’ or ‘post-Saussurean’ (where applicable) in order to indicate theoretical connections and associations. Thus my encounter with Ricoeur seeks to develop and extend his insightful critique of structuralist modes of thought to encompass post-structuralist approaches, particularly the work of Derrida and, from here, to posit viable alternatives to the model of subjectivity offered by post-Saussurean thought. System, which as we observed in the previous chapter, has been elevated to the status of Absolute by post-Saussurean thinkers, is, for Ricoeur, no more than ‘a cross-section of a living operation’.27 Without this (literally) vital ‘lived’ dimension, language, envisaged by the postSaussureans as an autonomous entity composed of circulating internal differences, fails to account for cultural or historical change, creative or communicative speech. Ricoeur contends that the semiological point of view excludes the primary intention of language, which is ‘to say something about something’.28 The post-Saussurean reduction – the methodological violence of il n’y a pas de hors texte – obliterates linguistic experience. It is the task of the hermeneutic thinker (as speaker and listener) to limit the claim to absolutise language as object. Against the fundamental postulate of the closed system of signs, from which all other aspects of post-structuralism flow, Ricoeur believes that the phenomenology of meaning finds its foundation, not in language per se, but in speech or discourse, and particularly in the utterance. Ricoeur notes,


For us who speak, language is not an object but a mediation. Language is that through which … we express ourselves and express things. Speaking is the act by which the speaker overcomes the closure of the universe of signs … speaking is the act by which language moves beyond itself as sign towards its reference and towards what it encounters. Language seeks to disappear; it seeks to die as an object.29 This approach rests on the distinction between semiotics (signs) and semantics (sentences): if the sign is the basic unit of language, the sentence is the basic unit of discourse. Discourse, in this sense, is understood as language-event or linguistic usage. In ‘The Model of the Text: Meaningful Action Considered as Text’ (1991), Ricoeur enumerates four characteristics of discourse which, taken together, constitute speech as an event. They are summarised below: (i) Discourse is always realised temporally and in the present, whereas the language system is virtual and outside of time. (ii) As autonomous entity language lacks a subject, but discourse refers back to its speaker through complex indicators such as personal pronouns. (iii) While the signs in language refer only to other signs within the same system, thus excluding world, temporality and subjectivity, discourse is always about something. It refers to a world that it claims to express or represent. In discourse the symbolic function of language is actualised; it is the signifying intention that breaks the closure of the sign. (iv) Language is only the condition of communication for which it provides the codes; discourse, on the other hand, is the arena of communication: it thus involves not only a world but an other, the interlocutor to whom it is addressed. Yet Ricoeur’s challenge to the insufficiencies of Saussurean and postSaussurean semiology, while operating as a restraint against the reification of structure over process, does not seek to undermine the entire (post) structuralist enterprise. Rather, Ricoeur believes that one cannot leap straight to the phenomenology of speech without first taking the structural detour, disentangling semantics from semiology. He argues that a renewed phenomenology of meaning cannot simply juxtapose ‘the openness of language to the lived world of experience’ against ‘the closed state of the universe of signs’ in (post)structural linguistics.30 Only


‘hand-to-hand combat with the presuppositions of semiology’31 and a recognition of the interdependence of semiology and semantics can allow a recovery of intentionality, expression and outward directedness (towards both self and world) that does not slide into psychologism or subjectivism. Despite his call for a complementary theory of signification and subjectivity which ‘take[s] support from its obstacle and embrace[s] its adversary’,32 nonetheless Ricoeur wants to privilege the workings of discourse over those of the sign. He affirms that outside the semantic function in which they are actualised, semiological systems lose intelligibility: ‘if you suppress [the] referential function, only an absurd game of errant signifiers remains’.33 Developing the point, Ricoeur remarks, opposing sign to sign is the semiological function; representing the real by signs is the semantic function, and the first is subordinate to the second. The first function serves the second; or, if one prefers, language is articulated for the purpose of the signifying or representative function.34 In other words, the system of signs (langue) considered separately from discourse is only a potentiality, ‘the set of conditions of articulation without which language could not exist’.35 It is discourse which injects the ultimate sterility and negativity of deconstructive freeplay with the actual and the living, with the experiences of a speaking, acting subject. Applied to post-structuralist thought, this argument demonstrates that, despite the effervescence or explosiveness of Derridean dissemination, the spilling and diffusion of meaning is hermetically sealed within absolutised langue. This ‘truncated’ linguistic theory, where the semiological has replaced the semantic, constitutes only one side of the language model. It forms only the negative condition of signification, the necessary condition of reference. It is the predicate on which the language system is founded, yet ‘the differential principle is only the other side of the referential principle’.36 The moment of the sentence, ‘which says something about something’37 is the referential moment where the interception of the epoche is overcome and parole breathes life into langue. Moreover, the moment of the sentence is where subjectivity, creativity and the ‘sayability’ of conscious experience resurface. Captured within the ceaseless negativity of post-Saussurean différance, it is not surprising that the ‘subject’38 of post-structuralism is entirely passive, a mere channel for language. The hermeneutic subject, however, is


thrown a life-line in the form of discourse, the dynamic which lifts the speaker out of the potentialities of langue and into the particularities of lived reality, the here and now of act, event, choice and innovation. Yet it is with the intermediary role of the word that we reach the ‘point of articulation’ between semiology and semantics, and the point where hermeneutic phenomenology and post-Saussurean theory sharply diverge on the issue of meaning. We recall that, for Derrida, meaning is the product of the play of difference and is thus never identical with itself; rather, it is forever deferred, suspended beyond our reach, always traced through with absence: ‘the spin-off of a potentially endless play of signifiers’.39 Meaning, insofar as it exists at all, occurs fleetingly in the interstices between differences.40 This approach depends on the assumption that meaning is internal to the language system: the value or meaning of any given linguistic unit is determined purely by its differences from all the other units in the language system, while since any present meaning is a function of absent signifiers, meaning can never be fully present. Raymond Tallis41 considers this stance to be a conflation of the idea of system and its use in particular situations; that is, a blurring of langue and parole. System remains only a potentiality, a condition, and meaning a sterile game until they are cut loose from the tyranny of postSaussurean langue and immersed in the specificities of the ‘stream of life’. It is this most fundamental insight which lies at the heart of Ricoeur’s postmetaphysical language theory. Ricoeur begins with the fact that in (post)-Saussurean theory, there is no word but only differential values: In the dictionary, there is only the endless round of terms which are defined circularly, which revolve in the closure of the lexicon. But then someone speaks, someone says something. The word leaves the dictionary; it becomes word at the moment when man becomes speech, when speech becomes discourse and discourse a sentence.42 Ricoeur describes the word as ‘a trader between the system and the act, between the structure and the event’;43 that is, it operates as a differential value within the structure at the same time as it assumes semantic actuality in the utterance: The word … is at the intersection of language and speech, of synchrony and diachrony, of system and process. In rising from system to event, in the instance of discourse, it brings structure to the act of


speech. In returning from the event to the system, it brings to the system the contingency and disequilibrium without which it could neither change or endure.44 Yet, unlike the sentence-as-event (whose actuality is transitory and ephemeral), the word survives the sentence, becoming ‘heavy with a new use-value’45 – the phenomenon of polysemy. Ricoeur asserts that the phenomenon of polysemy is incomprehensible without the introduction of a dialectic between sign and use, structure and event. The essential nature of polysemy may only be grasped by focusing on process over structure, on the word as a cumulative, metaphorical entity, capable of incorporating new dimensions of meaning without relinquishing the old ones. Words bring a wealth of potential meanings to the sentence; but how is this surplus of meaning screened out? The key lies not in the words themselves, which are all polysemic to some degree; rather the univocity or plurivocity of our discourse is the accomplishment of contexts. It is the contexts of use of utterances which filter surplus meaning, and it is here too that the possibility of interpretation emerges: It is with [the] selective function of context that interpretation, in the most primitive sense of the word, is connected. Interpretation is the process by which, in the interplay of question and answer, the interlocutors collectively determine the contextual values which structure their conversation.46 This spontaneous contextual filter reduces ambiguity in the case of univocal discourse (where only one meaning is appropriate). So if I am speaking on a geometrical theme, the term ‘volume’ must be interpreted as a body in space, rather than a book on the shelf of a library. Here it is the task of the context to reduce the semantic richness of words, to sift out all other extraneous meanings. On the other hand, in the case of poetry, the polysemy of words is liberated, and multiple dimensions of meaning may be realised simultaneously. This celebration or abundance of meaning admittedly occurs within the language system, yet – crucially for a move beyond post-Saussurean thinking – the structure does not create anything. Rather, the expansion of the metaphorical process is countered by the limiting action of the semantic field; it is in the shifting space between the two forces that meaning is at play. Thus the closure of the universe of signs is transformed by the openness of discourse.


For Ricoeur there is an essential dialectic between event and meaning: ‘if all discourse is realised as event, all discourse is understood as meaning’.47 Not the fleeting event but the meaning which endures is the real focus of Ricoeur’s enquiry. Language surpasses itself as system when, through discourse, it realises itself as event. In the same way, discourse, by entering the process of interpretation and thus understanding, surpasses itself as event and becomes meaning. This movement from event to meaning is the key characteristic of discourse. In his seminal work Beyond Superstructuralism: the Syntagmatic Side of Language (1993), Richard Harland study of Derrida’s treatment of the word is complementary to Ricoeur’s analysis.48 Harland is concerned with the exclusion of syntagmatic relations, which hold across the horizontal sequence of words uttered one after another, from postSaussurean theory. He notes that, despite the innovations of poststructuralist theory, it remains within the structuralist orbit in ‘look[ing] from the word actually uttered to the unuttered words on which it depends’.49 The authority of the ‘imperialistic’ sentence is disputed, and the freedom of individual words celebrated. For Derrida, the ‘dissemination’ of the single word transcends in importance the syntagmatically constructed argument. By proclaiming writing (archi-écriture) as the condition of language, Derrida seeks to prove the independence of words from their source. Derrida’s consequent assumption that words are equally independent from each other seems to follow automatically. Indeed, it seems that, within Derrida’s implicit nostalgia for parousia or full self-presence, there is a parallel and equally impossible concealed desire to locate meaning in the absence-haunted isolated word. Yet Harland convincingly demonstrates how the unstable, precarious meanings of words are truly realised when words are linked syntagmatically. Harland’s argument is based on a term with which we are now familiar: context. Derrida’s excision of the syntagm from language reduces the word to a state of total isolation. An example of the implications of such semantic reduction is the word ‘Eternity?’ painted on the huge erratic known as the Butterlump Stone on the north-eastern shore of Strangford Lough, in County Down, Northern Ireland. The word is starved of all context; thus its possible meanings are allowed to spill over and proliferate in many directions (but not all: as Ricoeur reminds us elsewhere: ‘words have more than one meaning, but they do not have an infinity of meanings’).50 But how representative is the message on the Butterlump Stone of all signification? Harland argues that instances like this are exceptions to the normal processes of language and constitute


an abnormal form of signifying. He contends that Derrida’s understanding of meaning is excessively reductive: ‘to deprive a word of all context is to deprive it of the environment that it needs to survive’.51 Moreover, Harland highlights the fact that there is no known language which does not have sentences; any theory which fails to account for the necessity of the sentence is thus seriously flawed. Harland considers the meanings of single words to be only aspects or moments; it takes the ‘curious necessity’ of the syntagm to permit ‘the fulfillment towards which the single word naturally inclines’.52 Moreover, Harland regards the combined meaning of words as not an addition but rather a subtraction. For Harland, what comes out of the sentence is more limited and determinate than what went in. So the phrase ‘blue flower’ is narrower and more restricted than either of its constituent elements taken separately. Harland likens the process of meaning to the imposition of coloured glass filters on top of one another: the meaning of words together is no more than whatever can filter through all of them. In essence, ‘as words are built up, so meaning is defined down’.53 The meaning(s) of the single word are not reified, as in Derridean dissemination, but ‘lose themselves’ in the new meanings of the sentence. This seemingly simple insight has radical implications for intentionality, agency and creativity. Against the passivity of the Derridean subject, who exists as a mere channel for language, the move from word to sentence enables the revival of not just the speaking subject, but the receiver who impels the syntagmatic meaning through a process of filtering. It is the role of the receiver, individually and collectively with the speaker, to establish the selective function of contextualisation, or the contextual values which structure their conversation. The intention of the utterer is no longer the Husserlian guarantor of meaning; rather the utterer’s intention becomes a matter of conjecture. The syntagmatic model locates intention in the – necessarily active and creative – listener, who ‘reinvents the sentence in such a way as to mean all of its meanings together’.54 As Harland notes, ‘by concentrating so heavily upon the relation between the words and their utterer, Derrida effectively distracts himself from considering the more important relations between one word and another’.55 Yet Derrida’s error amounts to more than oversight. In our exploration of Ricoeur’s notion of discourse, we observed the necessary momentum from system to act, structure to event, potentiality to particularity: in short, the movement from langue to parole which imbues language with its most essential dynamic. Harland argues that Derridean deconstruction causes this process of specification and particularisation to ‘run backwards’, from reference in the world to spreading


insubstantiality: ‘the word has lost its sense only because Derrida has refused to allow it to be specified in the context of other words’.56 Both Ricoeur’s analysis of discourse in language and Harland’s critique of Derrida’s exclusion of the syntagm run emphatically against Derrida’s view that writing is the condition of possibility of speech. No doubt Derrida would find damning evidence of phonocentric bias in their work. It is certainly true that Ricoeur privileges the moment of speech over system, and regards this process as language coming to itself. Yet neither writer is guilty of logocentrism, defined as a belief in the existence of meaning inherent in the external world and independent of language. Hermeneutic phenomenology both avoids the allure of the transparent cogito – the idea that unmediated being may somehow be located at the end of the trail of signs – and the short-circuited sterility of postSaussurean linguistic theory, where an objective and impersonal structure predetermines the subjective operations of consciousness. Working within the framework of Ricoeur’s concept of ‘discourse’ – the move from system to event to meaning, albeit by the detour of countless mediated meanings – we can begin the rehabilitation of the experiential. The nonidealist reconnection with meaning (which does not deny the existence of uncertainty, ambiguity, unmeaning) is the postulate on which we can restore lived experience to a central place in the contingencies of our linguistic being. It represents a recovery of ‘what is living, concrete and actual in language’.57 The phenomenological fact that experiencing (albeit decentred) subjects exist who momentarily and ceaselessly anchor language in the particularity of their actual living (‘the material being of life-practices’) is the foundation of the hermeneutical arc which spans language and lived experience. Beyond the post-Saussurean epoche or reduction, we reconnect with the ‘endeavour, renewed ceaselessly, to express integrally the thinkable and the sayable in our experience’.58

III ‘A limited harmony’: refiguring the self In his essay ‘Preface to Transgression’ (1977), Michel Foucault remarks The breakdown of philosophical subjectivity and its dispersion in a language that dispossesses it while multiplying it in the space created by its absence is probably one of the fundamental structures of contemporary thought.59 The ‘crisis of the subject’ in contemporary Continental philosophy reaches its height in post-Saussurean thinking. Here the subject is not


only decentred but utterly dissolved: its existence is as transitory and unknowable as the Foucauldian face in the sand awaiting erasure by the incoming tide. The origins of what has become known as the ‘postmodern subject’ lie in a rejection of ‘the forbidden territory of Enlightenment thought’;60 the primacy of the Kantian/Cartesian unitary self-knowing consciousness, functioning as the origin and foundation of meaning and knowledge, is radically undermined. According to Charles Taylor, this rejection is premised on an anti-Enlightenment, anti-Romantic suspicion of ‘the supposed unity and transparency of the disengaged self [and] of the alleged inner sources of the expressive self.’61 The transcendental sovereignty of the subject is called into question: Man is to be understood as constructed by the symbol and not as the point of origin of symbolism. The individual … is always already subject-ed into the structure into which he or she is born. The structure is what sets in place an experience for the subject which it includes … Being always subject-ed, the subject can never be the transcendental source. [emphasis added]62 Moreover, the traditional conception of the subject as a centre of consciousness is open to further attack from anthropological, as well as philosophical, quarters. Clifford Geertz remarks that the Western conception of a person as a bounded, unique, more or less integrated motivational and cognitive universe, a dynamic centre of awareness, emotions, judgement and action, organised into a distinctive whole and set contrastively against a social and natural background is, however incorrigible it may seem to us, a rather peculiar idea within the context of the World’s cultures.63 This allegation of the ‘false parochialism’ of ethnocentricity (the belief that familiar Western language games, forms of life, traditions and paradigms possess universal and/or transcendental permanence) is one of the cornerstones of the ‘incommensurability’ thesis. This thesis is perhaps best characterised by Karl Popper’s notion of the ‘Myth of the Framework’: a scenario where ‘we are prisoners caught in the framework of our theories; our expectations; our past experiences; our language’;64 communication (let alone understanding) with subjects living in radically ‘other’ frameworks is thus impossible. So the postmodern subject is alienated twice over: in the first place, because she is immersed in non-individuated language and relations of


power which both construct and permeate her very notion of subjectivity and identity, she is unable to achieve a sense of self that is not compromised, contaminated; in the second place, hemmed in by ‘radical perspectivism’ and the cultural barriers of incommensurability, meaningful engagement with other ‘selves’ beyond her own sociohistorical ‘framework’ is an impossibility. A return to Derrida’s work on subjectivity may allow some insight into the inner workings of the contemporary ‘deconstruction of self’. As we know, many of Derrida’s extraordinarily wide-ranging theses are premised on the structuralist principle that subjectivity, like all social practices, is constituted in and through language. The adoption of this principle necessarily involves the abandonment of the ideal of parousia: an asemic consciousness, translucently present to itself. With Derrida, the self is deposed as the origin and guarantor of meaning and truth. Rather than standing behind or outside of language, the self is always already infiltrated by language. In contrast to Paul Valery’s contention that ‘between what I say and what I hear myself say, no exteriority, no alterity, not even that of a mirror seems to impose itself’,65 Derrida asserts that between the apparent synthesis of consciousness and itself, the trace of the sign is always present. This violation of the closed-circuit of selfhood is produced by the phenomenon of auto-affection, the process of simultaneously speaking and hearing oneself speak, by which, according to Derrida, consciousness comes to self-presence by being different to itself. Thus language intervenes at the level of the constitution of the subject: one is constituted as a conscious subject on the basis of speech. Although one appears to undergo ‘the unique experience of the signified producing itself spontaneously from within the self’,66 consciousness is not originary but is always already breached, divided from itself by the sign. Peter Dews claims that ‘there is no domain of “phenomenological silence”, of intuitive self-presence prior to the representational, and therefore divisive, function of language’.67 With Derrida, the locus of meaning has shifted from the originary consciousness to the interstices between signifiers. The self, in this sense, is ‘the nucleus of a rupture’,68 and the possibility of self-reflection is – seemingly – denied. Derrida’s thesis on subjectivity may be summarised by a simple proposition: that self-consciousness is an indirect and always already mediated encounter. I believe that this assertion is true. Yet I disagree with the implications which Derrida draws from it. From the contention that self-consciousness and self-reflection are always already mediated by language, Derrida deprives the subject of signifying intention. Meaning and presence are


understood as nothing more than effects of language. The impoverished subject who remains is incapable of introspective acts of self-reflection, indeed of any kind of self-knowledge. Derrida’s anti-phenomenological stance towards subjectivity makes the subject nothing more than the mouthpiece for archi-écriture. As we noted in Chapter 1, however, there is no reason why subjectivity should be understood as Husserlian parousia: absolute coincidence of the self with itself. Self-reflection is, of course, necessarily indirect – but this acknowledgement need not end in the atrophy of the subject, nor need it collude in the hegemony of the disengaged self. Mediated subjectivity need not mean alienated selfhood. A reconnection with the particularity of lived experience, allied to the admission that the selftransparence of the fundamental subject is a fiction may, via the long detour of semiotic mediation, lead us towards an anti-foundational conception of self that is nonetheless ‘open to epiphany’.69 In his work Sources of the Self: the Making of the Modern Identity (1989), Charles Taylor observes a (re)turn to experience or interiority paradoxically linked to a strong vein of anti-subjectivism among modernist writers and thinkers such Eliot, Pound, Rilke and Heidegger. He notes that a turn inward, to experience or subjectivity, didn’t mean a turn to a self to be articulated, where this is understood as an alignment of nature and reason, or instinct and creative power. On the contrary, the turn inward may take us beyond the self as usually understood, to a fragmentation of experience which calls our ordinary notions of identity into question …70 This Nietzschean receptiveness to the fragmentation of experience beyond the boundaries of the unitary self is reflected in D.H. Lawrence’s comment that ‘Our ready-made individuality, our identity, is no more than an accidental cohesion in the flux of time’.71 Taylor traces the trajectory of the modernist retrieval of experience, with its associated breaches in received notions of identity and time, to its apotheosis in Saussurean and post-Saussurean theory: the epiphanic centre of gravity begins to be displaced from the self to the flow of experience, to new forms of unity, to language conceived in a variety of ways – eventually even as a ‘structure’.72 Ironically, then, what began with Heidegger, Rilke, Lawrence, Proust and so on as an attempt to connect with experience via the fragmentation


of self ends, with Derrida and others, in the dissolution of both self and experience in the play of language. Yet Taylor’s analysis takes us further. The impetus to enter the mode of decentring or dissolving subjectivity so characteristic of contemporary thinking does not run counter to introspection and interiority. Rather, it is only the latest manifestation of our ancient attempts to grapple with the self: decentring is not the alternative to inwardness; it is its complement.73 How does this insight impact on our project at hand: the attempt to rethink experience post-post-structuralism? How can we reconcile the need to avoid slipping into transcendental subjectivism by positing an originary self who grounds and guarantees the meaning(s) of lived experience, with the need to retain the subject who is the seat of these experiences?74 I believe that we must remain within the broadly decentring continuum, the movement away from the self as radical origin which characterises the modernist/postmodernist approach to the subject. Yet, rather than adopting the Derridean strategy of the absolute erasure of the experiencing subject, following Taylor’s insight that decentring is the complement, rather than the alternative, to inwardness, it appears that this move away from the self may (paradoxically) lead us back towards an enriched understanding of the experiencing self which avoids the hypostasis of subjectivity. It is possible to conceive of the decentring of subjectivity not as a linear movement from the self to its dissolution in insatiable archi-écriture, but as a cyclical process, or a dialectic, whereby the self can only return to itself partially, and through the detour of signs, thus achieving ‘a limited harmony’.75 In Freud and Philosophy (1970), Ricoeur asks ‘what does Reflection signify? What does the Self of self-reflection signify?’.76 These two questions lead to Ricoeur’s attempt to theorise decentred subjectivity without losing sight of the existing, incarnate, reflective individual. Thus Ricoeur’s philosophy operates in the space between the first truth of the Cartesian cogito – the fact that ‘I am’ – and the elusive nature and identity of the self – ‘what I am’. Ricoeur’s project moves across several philosophical dimensions. Most fundamentally, his thinking operates where the axes of hermeneutics and phenomenology meet. The phenomenological dimension represents the conditions of possibility of Ricoeur’s analysis in its ‘choice in favour of meaning’:77 a presupposition, likened to faith, that existence is somehow inherently meaningful. This tributary to Ricoeur’s densely woven thinking focuses on the facticity of the subject’s being-in-the-world; it is


concerned with ‘that which is immediately and indubitably given to consciousness … the “mineness” characteristic of existence’.78 The hermeneutic plane, on the other hand, controls the potential excesses of phenomenology, the slippage towards transcendental subjectivism. It supplies the methodology of Ricoeur’s approach to the self, turning away from an intuitive or psychologistic understanding of selfhood in favour of indirect interpretation(s) and mediated subjectivity. Where phenomenology and hermeneutics coincide, however, is in their focus on the interpretive activity of a thinking subject which turns back and reflects on itself in the aim of achieving a heightened self-understanding.79 In its embrace of the ‘presupposition of meaning’, Ricoeur’s work, at times, appears to teeter on the margins of Husserlian idealism. Yet Ricoeur, unlike Husserl, never seeks to locate pure presence uncontaminated by non-presence: the impossible ideal of the asemic consciousness. Neither, unlike Derrida, does he harness this impossibility to the inherently linguistic being of the human subject in order to discredit the very possibility of subjectivity and self-understanding. Ricoeur decisively cuts loose from the goal of absolute self-transparency of a fundamental subject – ‘the heirloom of transcendental idealism’80 – in the ‘renouncement of all hubris on the part of reflection, of any claim that the subject may make to found itself on itself’.81 Yet the loss of the subject as radical origin need not exclude the possibility of recovered reflective subjectivity. However, the recovery of a new, decentred subjectivity is marked by the transfer of the locus of meaning from the originary, sovereign Ego to the outside world: ‘the axis of interpretation [is shifted] from the problem of subjectivity to that of the world’.82 We recall that Ricoeur has made a choice in favour of language, a decision to stand ‘resolutely within the complexities of discourse, not reducing but relying on the polysemy, the overdetermination of linguistic expression’.83 Thus Ricoeur argues that: there is no self-understanding that is not mediated by signs, symbols and texts; in the last resort understanding coincides with the interpretation given to these mediating terms.84 Of course, Ricoeur’s acknowledgement of the demise of the ‘prerogative of self-reflection’ resonates with contemporary ‘anti-metaphysical’


critiques of subjectivity and meaning, particularly those strategies which place the subject-as-false consciousness at the mercy of unconscious drives and insuperable relations of power. Ricoeur’s dialogical encounter with the challenges of psychoanalysis and semiology supplies his thinking with a cutting critical edge, a delicate yet incisive awareness of the ‘conflict of interpretations’. Thus, even as he seeks to restore ‘meaning in its richest, its most elevated, most spiritual diversity’ at the core of the hermeneutics of suspicion, Ricoeur is sensitive to a deconstructive need to ‘unmask the unavowed forces … the unconscious sources or social motivations’85 which operate beneath conscious meaning. Ricoeur concurs with the basic premise of psychoanalytic theory: a rejection of the ‘claim that the subject’s reflecting on himself or the positing of the subject by himself is an original, fundamental and founding act’.86 He acknowledges, with Freud, that the subject is never the subject it thinks it is. With psychoanalysis, the internal perception of the subject is set aside in favour of the ‘systems’ of the unconscious, preconscious and conscious; these systems are ‘irreducible to any quality of consciousness, to any determination of the “lived” ’.87 Although the move from ‘the lived’ to ‘the system’ may appear antithetical to Ricoeur’s fundamentally phenomenological approach, his detour through Freudianism both offsets and radicalises the idealist Husserlian elements in his own thinking. Ricoeur believes that Freud performs a kind of Husserlian epoche in reverse. While the Husserlian epoche was intended to bracket everything transcendent in order to achieve a reduction to pure consciousness, Freud’s anti-phenomenological reduction seeks to topple immediate consciousness from its primary position as source of meaning. Kathleen Blamey remarks that the phenomenological reduction attests to the mastery of the ego, as it suspends or brackets everything outside. The Freudian suspension brackets immediate consciousness in the sense that it continues to be offered to investigation, but no longer appears as what is most evident … since it is not the origin but the product of other processes.88 Yet, according to Ricoeur, the Freudian doctrine of the subject has not eliminated consciousness and the ego: ‘it has not replaced the subject, it has displaced it’.89 Consciousness and ego remain among the variables which constitute the human subject; the displacement lies in the fact that neither consciousness nor ego occupies the position of principle or origin. A radical transformation has occurred in which ‘what was origin


becomes task or goal’90 Reflection may have ‘lost the assurance’ of consciousness as the repository of meaning, but the aspiration to achieve some degree of self-understanding remains intact. This stands in distinct contrast to the view of subjectivity implied in Derrida’s wellknown appropriation of Freud’s analogy of the ‘Mystic Writing Pad’. We recall that, according to Derrida’s reading, the Freudian unconscious, on which is ‘inscribed’ the repressed experiences of the subject, assumes a primacy over all elements of the topographical system. Even our most immediate experience is not a direct encounter with the external world but a contact with that which has already been inscribed on the surface of the unconscious. Ricoeur’s reading of Freud as corrective critique moves a step beyond Derrida’s reification of the unconscious. Just as the differential principle (of the structure) is only the flip-side of the referential principle (of the discursive event), so too the negative task of deconstructing the false cogito – which is Derrida’s position – is, for Ricoeur, only the inverse of a more positive stance where meaning can be recovered through the process of interpretation. Ricoeur does not smoothly erase the cogito, as Derrida implicitly does in his assertion of the primacy of the all-enveloping unconscious. Rather, the self which emerges from Ricoeur’s reading is a ‘wounded cogito’: a cogito which posits but does not possess itself, a cogito which understands its primordial truth only in and through the avowal … of the illusion, the fakery of immediate consciousness.91 The ‘humiliated’ subject of reflection is stripped of the illusion which conflates the identification of the reflective cogito with immediate consciousness. Denied this narcissistic comfort, the subject must abandon the relative ease of metaphysical abstraction in favour of ‘the long road of awareness’.92 This process has two stages: through dispossession, the delusion of the immediacy of consciousness is subordinated to the locus of meaning in desire; through reappropriation, ‘meaning is wrested from the ruins of self-delusion through the activity of interpretation’.93 We have seen how the subject of self-reflection is refigured through Ricoeur’s encounter with Freud. The transformation of meaning is equally central to the reflective processes of the decentred self. Having been displaced as immediately given to a transparent consciousness, meaning resurfaces as the contingent, unfinished product of a detour through all the mediations of signs, symbols and texts. Meaningful connection with one’s own consciousness is a difficult, provisional


process, always kept in check by the hermeneutics of suspicion. Reflection is blind intuition if it is not mediated by what Dilthey called the expressions in which life objectifies itself … Thus reflection is a critique … in the sense that the cogito can be recovered only by the detour of a decipherment of the documents of its life. Reflection is the appropriation of our effort to exist and of our desire to be by means of the works which testify to this effort and this desire [emphasis added].94 Ricoeur’s encounter with Freud shifts the locus of meaning and selfunderstanding from the ‘givenness’ of self-transparency to a distant point on the horizon. In moving from the givenness of complacent narcissism to the idea of self-understanding as ‘task’ or ‘work’ via the critical passage through Freudian ‘archaeology’, Ricoeur recovers a teleology of the self which, in positing but not possessing itself, escapes the ‘idealism of meaning’. We have already examined the impact of Ricoeur’s engagement with semiological or post-Saussurean theory on his analysis of language and discourse. The attempt to transform the primacy of structure over process into a dialogical encounter has implications for the subject too. Here Ricoeur wrestles with the question of how deeply the ‘I’ is a creation, or construct of language. For Ricoeur, the question ‘who is speaking?’ only makes sense at the level of discourse as sentence or event; the system is, by definition, subjectless. Yet, as we have noted with the reading of Freud, the subject thus recovered does not represent a naive return to a transparent ‘I’. The subject of language might not be me or who I think I am; in any case, the question ‘Who is speaking?’ has a sense [at the level of the sentence], even if it must remain a question without an answer.95 To what extent is the ‘I’ a construct of language? At the level of the semiological system (or structure), Ricoeur acknowledges that ‘the personal pronoun [‘I’] is an empty sign that anyone can seise’.96 In one sense, this assertion is almost trivially true: our speech is, to some extent, inevitably ‘off-the-peg’. As Raymond Tallis remarks, Much of what we say appears to be citation, quotation from a verbal bran-tub, rather than an original use of words chosen to fulfill an independently conceived signifying intention.97


Moreover, this apparent ‘iterability’ of linguistic signs, their ability to shift seamlessly from one context to another, endlessly spilling over and exceeding the speaker’s intentions, is used by Derrida to affirm once more the absence which operates at the core of our saying. ‘Iterability’, in conjunction with the phenomena of auto-affection, acts as a manifestation of différance, intervening at the most fundamental level between our being and our saying. As Christopher Norris writes, iterability is part of an economy of difference nowhere coinciding with the present intentions of individual speech.98 Thus Derrida contends that language is not a function of the speaking subject. This implies that the subject (self-identity or even consciousness of self-identity, selfconsciousness) is inscribed in language, that he is a ‘function’ of the language. He becomes a speaking subject only by conforming his speech … to the general law of difference.99 In Derrida’s view, then, the speaking subject is no more than a linguistic function robbed of all intentionality. In contrast, Ricoeur’s approach affords the subject the possibility of agency and creativity within the medium of linguistic being, without succumbing to the ‘metaphysics of presence’. Moving beyond the hollow and delusional Derridean ‘I’, Ricoeur invests the personal pronoun with a potentiality, an implicit directedness towards signification, which is realised when the sign ‘I’ is seized and appropriated by the subject. He writes that the pronoun is waiting there, in my language, like an instrument available for converting this language into discourse through my appropriation of this empty sign.100 Thus the semiological study remains only the ‘preface’ to a wider endeavour: the sign, incomplete in itself, moves beyond its potentiality when it connects with ‘the present occurrence of discourse … the I, the here, the now, the this’.101 It is a matter of little wonder, then, that Derrida declares the impossibility of locating presence in speech. This is because Derrida analyses speech as though it were merely another function of langue. He excludes


intentionality, agency and creativity – in short, the imprint of the subject on her words – precisely because, in the rarefied atmosphere of the system, these qualities are unable to exist. The disseminative spread of absence and alienation through all aspects of our being-in-the-world flows from this neo-metaphysical stance, where the hic et nunc of parole is totally eclipsed by the non-individuated play of langue. Thus Norris’s description of Derridean language as ‘an economy of difference nowhere coinciding with the present intentions of individual speech’102 illuminates only too clearly the flaws of the post-structuralist model of the speaking subject. The imperialism of archi-écriture does not coincide with the individual speech of the subject; rather, it colonises it. Moreover, I believe that the failure of Derridean language or langue (the two are equivalent, for the particularities of parole have no place in his schema) to account for the speaking subject is based on a misreading of Saussure which is central to his entire approach. Let us look once more at the quotation from Speech and Phenomena (1973) discussed earlier. Here Derrida considers Saussure’s apparent contention that ‘language, as a system of differences, is not a function of the speaking subject’. From here Derrida moves to the ‘implication’ that the speaking subject is a ‘function’ of the language. Yet the fact that language is not a function of the speaking subject (which we do not deny, having rejected the idea of the originary consciousness) does not directly lead to the assertion that the subject is only a function of language, her self-presence nothing more than an effect of différance. The question of the relationship of selfhood to language is a far more complex (and contentious) matter than a mere transfer of ‘function’ from language to subject or vice versa. What happens to the shimmering play of Derridean différance if we do the unthinkable and allow the speaking subject a degree of intentionality, a say, if only a limited one, in her own meanings, a self that is not entirely a construct of language? The entire economy of the system is opened up. The introduction of real, material, speaking subjects to the system creates numerous provisional points of contact, ceaselessly renewed, between langue and parole, between potential and actual. The moment of intervention, where the subject appropriates the system in saying ‘I’, is the moment when langue is toppled from the status of the Absolute and parole joins specificity to system. Yet although we have questioned the severe reduction of the speaking subject to the status of linguistic function in post-Saussurean thought, we have not yet answered the question which we posed earlier in this section: does language alone create the ‘I’? To answer ‘no’ to this


question is to risk a slide into the transcendental subjectivism which hermeneutic phenomenology (and indeed post-Saussurean theory) is determined to avoid; to answer ‘yes’ entails a neo-metaphysical reification of language where subjectivity is devoid of all agency, responsibility and creativity. The question of the status of the self is of particular importance to the project in hand, since the recovery of the category of the experiential in the wake of post-structuralism is dependent on the coherent and plausible positing of a subject who is capable of having these experiences. Post-Saussurean theory sets up an artificial ‘either/or’ dualism with relation to the question of the subject. According to post-structuralism, the subject must either be understood as a closed-circuit, absolutely transparent to itself in the Husserlian sense, or it must be recognised as an illusion, a purely linguistic construct, entirely devoid of individuality, intentionality and agency. Of course, these are false alternatives: the phenomenological model of subjectivity is discredited by the poststructuralist movement as irredeemably wedded to ‘onto-theology’ and the ‘metaphysics of presence’; to advocate anything other than an entirely linguistic self is to be ridiculed as naive, conservative, humanistic. Moreover, the post-Saussurean ‘either/or’ of selfhood sets up false alternatives in a second, and more fundamental sense, which I will develop below. Writing on the later Heidegger’s promotion of language’s power to create meaning to the rank of the absolute, Habermas deplores the current ascendancy of ‘the prejudicing force of linguistic world-disclosure’ which radically misunderstands the relation of the subject to the medium of her language. These acting and speaking subjects always find themselves already in a linguistically structured and disclosed world; they live off grammatically projected interconnections of meaning. To this extent, language sets itself off from the speaking subjects as something antecedent and objective, as the structure that forges conditions of possibility. On the other hand, the linguistically disclosed and structured lifeworld finds its footing only in the practices of reaching understanding within a linguistic community.103 I believe that this passage contains an insight about the ‘equiprimordial moment’ when language and subject interconnect which may be transferred to the question of the pre-linguistic construction of the subject. A similar comment is made by Ricoeur when he stresses the need for a subject who is ‘both determined by and involved in his speaking.’104 Yet


Ricoeur’s answer to the status of the self is, in the end, phenomenological, in the sense that he wants to retain the existence of a subject before language. He reaches this point through psychoanalysis. In the same way that Freud subordinates consciousness and language to the primacy of desire, Ricoeur insists on the anteriority of the ontic level to both the reflective and discursive level. For Ricoeur, the ‘I am’ is more fundamental than the ‘I think’ or ‘I speak’.105 In the final analysis, Ricoeur believes that language must belong to being, must ‘appear itself as a mode of being in being’.106 For him, a hermeneutic philosophy must show how interpretation itself arrives at being-in-the-world. First there is being-in-the-world, then understanding, then interpreting, then saying … it is from the heart of language that we say all this.107 However, at the end of this paragraph, Ricoeur adds an ambiguous yet suggestive comment. He observes that the circularity between I speak and I am gives the initiative by turns to the symbolic function and its instinctual and existential root.108 Throughout this exploration and analysis of selfhood and language in the light of hermeneutic phenomenology, post-structuralist thinking has been represented as providing a negative, quasi-metaphysical account of the self in language. However, at this juncture I suggest that postSaussurean thinking may help to ‘leaven’ the phenomenological tendency of Ricoeur’s position. Positing the I am as ontologically prior to language is essential if the ‘I’ is not to be reduced to a function of language. Yet with regard to the question of meaning, positing language and the existentially situated speaking subject as theoretically equiprimordial (in the Habermasian sense) may allow us to cut our ties with the transcendental, idealist cogito even more decisively than Ricoeur has done, while refusing the excesses of deconstructive subject-erasure. In this move, neither language nor self becomes reified; neither assumes an originary primacy over the other as the source of meaning: meaning is neither purely internal to the language system, a mere effect of language, nor is consciousness the locus and guarantor of meaning. Rather, the specificity of context surrounding speaking selves at any moment in time supplies the extra-linguistic ‘existential root’ to the system of values which is language. Using Ricoeur’s dialogical template, we can see that it is in the moment of contact or appropriation, in the dialectical play between the speaking subject and language, that the potentiality of the system


becomes the actuality of discourse, and that agency, intentionality, innovation, responsibility and creativity and above all meaning are ‘brought in from the cold’ in a kind of post-post-structuralist glasnost. The circularity of this position is undeniable – subject and object are mutually implicated within it; there can be no response to ‘epistemological demands for empirical verification’.109 However, the circle has a necessity, a positivity which prevents it becoming vicious: this is the ‘postulate of meaningfulness’ which informs hermeneutic phenomenology. It is the unverifiable ‘leap of faith’ that existence is indeed meaningful; without this postulate, we sacrifice all to the nihilistic flux of post-structuralist, thus incurring ‘a huge self-inflicted wound’.110 We have reached a provisional accommodation between self and language in the sphere of meaning which takes us beyond the limitations of the context-starved, impoverished subject of post-structuralism. An understanding of the self as linguistically mediated but not linguistically determined may open up a space for the experiential. However, our continuing critical yet dialogical relationship with post-Saussurean theory alerts us to an important issue which we must confront before leaving the question of selfhood: we must take yet another detour, this time through ideology. The perceived failure of traditional hermeneutics to deal with ideology is brought into even sharper focus by the post-Nietzschean understanding of all interpretation as ‘an imposition of power’111 beloved of postmodern theorists, particularly Derrida and Foucault. In this sense, hermeneutics is understood not only as wedded to a naive, objectivist approach to text, subject and meaning, but as complicitous with the imposition of spurious authority, tantamount to political tyranny. Indeed, in his essay on Nietzsche ‘Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles’ (1979), Derrida’s pejorative attitude to ‘the hermeneutic project’ is strongly to the fore. Yet his understanding of hermeneutics seems to exclude the contemporary anti-foundational, postmetaphysical strand of hermeneutic phenomenology. The ‘hermeneut’, in Derrida’s conception, is seeking to uncover ‘the true meaning of the text’,112 to gain access to the univocal and unproblematic intended meaning which ‘lies behind’ the surface of the text. Moreover, Derrida remarks that ‘the hermeneut cannot but be provoked and disconcerted’113 by the freewheeling nature of the ‘play’ of the text which – apparently – thwarts all interpretative attempts to locate decidable meaning. By characterising, indeed misrepresenting hermeneutics in this way, Derrida fails to perceive how the ‘both/and’ stance of contemporary hermeneutic phenomenology can take the subject and the text beyond the ‘either/or’ of post-structuralism,


in order to reconnect with some kind of truth – not truth in the sense of the accurate representation of an objective state of affairs, but as ‘the generation and possession of viable meaning … the disclosure of possibilities for being and acting’.114 Now, if hermeneutic theory was indeed guilty as charged of seeking to locate and reproduce the static meaning of texts,115 then the accusations of textual tyranny would be well founded. The fact remains, however, that the contemporary hermeneutic stance is more radically postmetaphysical in its approach to subjectivity and language than all deconstructive strategies, which inevitably become mired – as we have seen – in neo-metaphysical absolutism and rampant ‘undecidability’. Thus the suspicion that the hermeneutic approach is inherently authoritarian and reproductive of existing orders of objective meaning is immediately disproved. Yet to follow the approach of hermeneutic phenomenology is akin to walking a tight-rope wire. This is particularly evident when we place it in contrast to the negativity of post-structuralist thinking. The ‘both/ and’ position of hermeneutic phenomenology offers us a way beyond the ‘either/or’ represented by ‘the metaphysics of subjectivity’ and linguistic determinism. But if we seek to regain a measure of creativity or agency for the subject, we risk the accusation that our position cannot account for the influence that language and representation have on the way we think and express ourselves – or for the role they play in the construction of subjectivity itself. With regard to the production of meaning, although we maintain that the moment when the existentially situated subject seizes and appropriates the anonymous language system forms the fundamental dynamic of meaning, we also must acknowledge that this moment of appropriation cannot be conceived of as a purely autonomous and free act. At the same moment as the subject grasps and appropriates the system, the system ‘interpellates’ and places the subject in a specific socio-cultural framework. The act of appropriation, like the act of interpretation, is not isolated; rather it must always occur within the limits of discursive constraints.116 Moreover, if we speak from the ‘heart of language’, if language is ‘a mode of being within being’ in which we are immersed, then language is also the place of false consciousness, distortion and alienating distanciation. This is the view of ‘discourse analysis’, the strand of broadly poststructuralist thinking which situates social power within language itself. In the words of the Soviet thinker, V.N. Voloshinov, The logic of consciousness is the logic of ideological communication, of the semiotic interaction of a social group. If we deprive


consciousness of its semiotic, ideological content, it would have absolutely nothing left.117 Or, as the arch-post-structuralist Paul de Man remarks, What we call ideology is precisely the confusion of linguistic with natural reality, of reference with phenomenalism.118 As Terry Eagleton notes, for these theorists ‘the sign and its social situation are inextricably fused together, and this situation determines from within the form and structure of an utterance’;119 the correlate of this position is the disintegration of the unified subject, where consciousness is displaced, radically undermined by the introjected workings of the sign. In this sense, ideology is an organizing social force which actively constitutes human subjects at the roots of their lived experience and seeks to equip them with forms of value and belief relevant to their specific social tasks and to the general reproduction of the social order. [emphasis added]120 Furthermore, as Jürgen Habermas has remarked, with particular regard to Foucault’s work, all validity claims become immanent to particular discourses in this conception: ‘they are simultaneously absorbed into the totality of some one of the blindly occurring discourses and left at the mercy of the “hazardous play” among these discourses as each overpowers another’.121 The question, then, is whether the acknowledgement of this dimension of distorted meaning – in the form of the proposed hermeneutic detour (through the cultural manifestations of the sign) which acts as corrective critique to the notion of the transparent self – is enough. Should the balance tip towards discourse or agency? Do the discursive relations of power effectively constitute the subject ‘through and through’, so that agency and responsibility dwindle to nothing, and the speaking subject ‘forgets’122 that she is merely the function of interlocking ideological formations? Or can we retain a grain of selfhood, ontologically prior to the sign, a trace which denies transparency and autonomy, but which nonetheless allows us to make space for the experiential as more than a lie or an illusion? Is the subject – pace post-structuralist discourse theory – indeed discursively determined ‘all the way down’? A definitive answer to this question is impossible.123 Indeed, it is arguable that the attempt to seek


an answer could only end in the positing of a ‘transcendental signified’, the final termination of the chain of signs, the place of ultimate meaning and absolute presence. From where else but the height of the Absolute could one arbitrate such an issue? Rather than seeking to ‘climb out of our own minds’124 to resolve the question, it is necessary to refuse the ‘either/or’ that post-structuralism presents us with and to adopt a model of subjectivity which is truly postmetaphysical. In The View from Nowhere (1986), Thomas Nagel writes that it is necessary to combine the recognition of our contingency, our finitude, and our containment in the world with an ambition of transcendence, however limited may be our success in achieving it. The right attitude in philosophy is to accept aims that we can achieve only fractionally and imperfectly, and cannot be sure of achieving even to that extent.125 This paradoxical embrace of a teleology without telos is the only way out of (or rather, beyond) the quandary of the experiencing yet discursively contained subject. The chastened postmetaphysical self must learn to live without the ‘metaphysical comfort’ of a ‘fixed Archimedean point upon which we can secure our thought and action’.126 The reflective cogito is no longer commensurate with immediate consciousness. But in escaping the sovereignty of the self, we must avoid approaching the Absolute by a different route: that is, through the sovereignty of the signifier. The neometaphysical reification of language inauguarated by post-Saussurean thinkers imposes radical closure by drawing self and world into the autonomous, self-verifying system of language. An authentically postmetaphysical account of subjectivity must acknowledge ‘the recalcitrance of the existential to the category’,127 that being-in-the-world is ‘crazier and more of it than we think, / Incorrigibly plural’.128 We can never encompass ourselves entirely, nor interpret our experiences objectively: ‘we remain parts of the world, and products, determined or not, of its history’.129 But with the hermeneutic model of mediated subjectivity, we connect again with the possibility of self-knowledge, conceived of as an enriching journey whose ultimate destination – pure transparency – we will never reach: hermeneutics proposes to make subjectivity the final, and not the first, category of a theory of understanding … [T]he key hypothesis of hermeneutic philosophy is that interpretation is an open process that no single vision can conclude.130


In his encounter with Freud, we recall that Ricoeur identifies two stages in ‘the long road of awareness’.131 The first stage – dispossession – entails the abandonment of the ‘fakery’ of immediate consciousness, the acknowledgement that meaning is ultimately rooted in desire; the second stage – reappropriation – represents a reconnection with meaning not as immediate givenness, but as the product of ‘concrete reflection, that is, the cogito mediated by the entire universe of signs’.132 In ‘The Hermeneutical Function of Distanciation’ (1991), Ricoeur remarks The metamorphosis of the ego … implies a moment of distanciation in the relation of self to itself; hence understanding is as much disappropriation as appropriation. A critique of the illusions of the subject … therefore can and must be incorporated into selfunderstanding.133 I suggest that post-structuralist analysis could supply that ‘moment of distanciation’ which is essential to the meaningful dialogue of the self with itself, and to the recovery of the subject as a nexus of potentialities immersed in the contingencies of our linguistic and material being. The pure negativity of post-structuralism provides hermeneutics with a nihilistic check to any transcendentalising tendencies. Its capacity to fragment and displace consciousness across the panoply of discourses in which the subject participates; its insistence that ‘there is no unmediated experience, no access to the raw reality of self and others’;134 its representation of subjectivity as a construct grounded in social discourse far beyond individual control; its denial of intentionality, ontological autonomy and individual or collective agency – all these elements of the post-Saussurean critique temper, indeed hamper, the decentred hermeneutic self’s search for self-understanding. They form a kind of negative ostinato 135to the hermeneutic determination to ‘immerse the signifier in the existent once more’.136The deconstructive moment is an explanatory moment in that it forces us to confront and engage with the impersonal socio-cultural determinants which ceaselessly shape our encounters with self, world and other. Post-structuralist offers a subversive critique which unsettles our ontological complacencies, our narcissistic desire for the secret return of the sovereign subject. Its deconstructive force, incorporated into the dynamic of hermeneutic self-understanding, prevents our ideas of consciousness, agency, intentionality from solidifying, becoming heavy with reified meanings. Yet it is important to note that while the poststructuralist critique is insurmountable, in the sense that discourse


permeates our social and institutional structures of communication at the most fundamental level, and while it should be regarded as coextensive with the ‘pro-meaning’ hermeneutic enterprise, it should never be understood as total, capable of alienating the subject from her self entirely. The post-structuralist epoche or reduction, which seeks to erase the ‘messiness’ of lived experience in all its historical, psychological, physiological and social forms, cannot be allowed to incorporate self and world in the eternal loop of différance. Here we should recall Merleau-Ponty’s remark that ‘the lesson the reduction teaches us is the impossibility of a complete reduction’.137 The recovery of intentionality, expression and outward directedness (towards both self and world) is dependent on retaining a ‘residual existential trace’138 or irreducible gap between the subject and the dominant and conflictual discourses which mould her being-in-the-world. This philosophical decision is the establishment of the ‘as if’, the virtual space which enables the subject to attribute meaning to her lived experiences. Thus, in the last analysis, it is essential to assert the priority of the existential over the discursive, to affirm the ‘thisness’ (haecceitas) which supplies the discursively shaped subject with her existential root. This assertion is reflected in the phenomenological choice in favour of meaning (inexhaustibility) over the deconstructive dispersal of meaning (undecidability). This anticipation of significance is the pre-condition for understanding. Before closing this section, let us take stock of our position. We have confirmed that the meanings of consciousness does indeed lie outside of itself, dispersed in ‘countless mediations – signs, symbols, texts and human praxis itself’.139 Neither language nor consciousness can create meaning out of themselves ex nihilo. With hermeneutics, the transparent cogito is ‘humiliated’, falls Icarus-like from the heights of transcendental subjectivism, only to be recovered as an ‘opaque’ self who regards subjectivity not as what initiates understanding but what terminates it, paradoxically embracing a teleology without telos. And within the transformative ‘play’ between the discourses of post-structuralism and hermeneutic phenomenology, an authentically postmetaphysical model of the subject emerges, a subject whose self-reflection is always tempered by an awareness of the Sprachlichkeit in which she is immersed, and of the non-totalisable aporia and lacunae of her material and linguistic existence. This subject is ceaselessly ‘on trial’; every movement towards selfreflection is checked by the deconstructive moment operating within the dialectic of subjectivity. In place of the linguistic determinism of postSaussurean thought, however, is ‘a wager for meaningfulness’,140 an – admittedly unverifiable – affirmation of the possibility of provisional yet


decidable meaning. It is in this transformative play that ‘the serene assertion I am and the poignant doubt Who am I?’141 endlessly move from antithesis to synthesis and back again in the process142 that is subjectivity. The endless loss and retrieval of the self is mirrored in the ceaseless exchange of the nihilism of the deconstructive moment and the positivity of the reappropriative moment. The ‘ipseity’ or self-sameness of the self should thus not be regarded as a given, a static identity but as an endless process of becoming performed by a subject that is directed towards, but never simultaneous with herself: ‘a presence-to that is not to-itself’.143 In a recent interview with Jean-Luc Nancy, Jacques Derrida is asked how one might name this ‘place’, ‘who’ or ‘what’ which is the subject. Derrida responds In the text or in writing, such as I have tried to analyze them at least, there is, I wouldn’t say a place (and this is a whole question, this topology of a certain locatable non-place, at once necessary and undiscoverable) but an instance (without stance, a ‘without’ without negativity) for the ‘who’, a ‘who’ besieged by the problematic of the trace and of différance, of the signature and of the so-called ‘proper’ name … 144 Reading ‘between the blinds’ of Derrida’s obscure rhetoric, he appears to be admitting the possibility of an (undiscoverable and heavily sous rature) instance (not ‘place’) for the différance-haunted subject in his work. Admittedly, this subject is so desperately besieged and scored by the play of the ‘trace’ that to call her a subject at all seems far-fetched. Nonetheless, this circuitously qualified admission may represent a partial acknowledgement on the part of the ‘father of post-structuralism’ that the remorseless erasure which deconstruction exerts on the existential, situated subject has been too extreme in its methodological violence. Later, Derrida remarks There has never been The Subject for anyone, that’s what I wanted to begin by saying. … Some might say: but what we call ‘subject’ is not the absolute origin, pure will, identity to self … I am thinking of those today who would try to reconstruct a discourse around a subject that would not be predeconstructive, around a subject that would no longer include the figure of mastery of self … Perhaps we’ll pick this up again later on.145 Here Derrida inches further towards a cautious acceptance that the refusal of the possibility of asemic consciousness – the parousia of The Subject, where the self is absolutely transparent to itself, ‘rendered


without remainder into transparent signs’146 – need not necessarily mean an abandonment of the possibility of subjectivity in its entirety. Indeed, elsewhere in the same interview, he observes how the thought of Lacan, Althusser and Foucault, as well as that of their predecessors Freud, Marx and Nietzsche, does not ‘liquidate’ the subject entirely, but leaves open the possibility that ‘the subject can be re-interpreted, restored, re-inscribed’.147 Whether or not this assertion is true,148 Derrida’s late-flowering responsiveness to the possibility of a ‘reinscribed subject’ outside the ‘either/or’ of transcendental subjectivism/linguistic determinism represents a definite shift from the heights of deconstructive ‘out-conscious-ing’149 towards the notion of a humble, postmetaphysical subject, who sets out on the journey of subjectivity knowing that arrival is endlessly deferred. It is a move from pure critique to (albeit ambivalent) accommodation. Moreover, it appears to contain an implicit acknowledgement that, indeed, ‘decentring is not the alternative to inwardness; it is its complement’.150 In this sense, the further Derrida displaces the silently intuitive consciousness of the metaphysical Subject, the closer he brings us to a new conception of subjectivity where opacity replaces transparency. As Derrida himself admits … one must seek a new (postdeconstructive) determination of the responsibility of the ‘subject’. But it always seems to me to be worthwhile … to forget the word to some extent. Not to forget it, it is unforgettable, but to arrange it, to subject it to the laws of a context that it no longer dominates from the center. [emphasis added]151 What is this comment if not an acknowledgement of the necessity of shifting ‘the axis of interpretation from the problem of subjectivity to that of the world’152 an acceptance of the hermeneutic contention that it is not consciousness as radical origin which guarantees subjectivity, but context which provisionally grounds the constitutionally incomplete subject. The moment of ‘the present occurrence of discourse … the I, the here, the now, the this’153 is the moment when the subject appropriates the empty sign and thus ‘posits himself in expressing himself’.154 The specific context or coordinates within which I speak are what determine my utterances. As Raymond Tallis has noted, ‘there is no absolute difference between the self that has a context and the context that surrounds it’.155 Derrida has founded the deconstructive enterprise on the refutation of the self-founded self. In this tentative later move beyond a purely language-founded self, he, in parallel with phenomenological


hermeneutics, opens up the process of subjectivity to the long and roundabout route of an interpretation of public and private, psychic and cultural signs, where the desire to be and the effort to be which constitute us are expressed and made explicit.156

IV The postdeconstructive connectedness of experience We recall that, for post-Saussurean thinkers, experience is radically duplicitous, forever contaminated by the ‘metaphysics of presence’. The suspicion of experience originates in the post-Saussurean inflation of langue as a ‘culturally-imposed system predetermining all individual usage’.157 Since, like the Althusserian subject, we are ‘always already’ preceded by this system, ‘what we can experience consciously is determined by a system which always escapes consciousness’.158 The system – whether conceived as the Lacanian symbolic, Althusserian ideology or Derridean archi-écriture – emerges as the neo-metaphysical medium for the entirety of human reality. Thus if the self-consciousness of the individual is shown to be nothing more than an illusion generated by the play of signs, experience as one’s conscious relationship to the world is radically undermined. As Raymond Williams observes, experience may be seen ‘as the product of social conditions or of systems of belief … and thus not as material for truths but as evidence of conditions or systems which by definition it cannot itself explain’.159 In this conception, experience is conflated not with ideology but with hegemony: it infects consciousness and ways of seeing at the deepest level. Moreover, the fact that the category of the experiential implies the closest proximity to immediate consciousness or self-presence apparently reinforces the deconstructive rejection of any understanding of experience which is not primordially saturated by the sign. It is obvious that the concept of experience is badly in need of philosophical rehabilitation. We have observed how the model of the postmetaphysical subject (via the deconstructive critique) is situated in the hermeneutic space between discursive engagement and phenomenological disengagement, between the moment of appropriation and the moment of distanciation. Perhaps experience, as the continual weaving of the cord which connects self and world, will reflect and participate in this dialogical interplay. The deconstructive erasure of experience may only be redirected when we refuse once more the post-structuralist ‘either/or’; when we assert that an advocacy of experience as something more than the mouth-piece for langue need not mean an automatic


naturalisation of experience in an unmediated relationship between words and things. Considering the concept of experience Since experience has been drastically stripped of its historical, social, psychological and physiological dimensions by the post-structuralist epoche, it may be illuminating to trace the history and etymology of the concept up to the point of its radical erasure. In a section of Truth and Method on the history of the word Erlebnis (experience), Gadamer offers us a useful insight into the ambiguous category of the experiential. Gadamer notes that the verb erleben (to experience) means primarily ‘to be still alive while something happens’. This etylomological point directs us towards the immediacy of experience, its sheer newness, the shock of encounter with the real. Indeed, in one of its forms, Erlebnis may be understood as ‘shock’; that suddenness ‘which precedes all interpretation, treatment or communication’.160 Yet the term Erlebnis has a second quite different and seemingly contradictory sense. This refers to the permanent content of what is experienced. Working within the latter ‘internalised’ sense, Walter Benjamin speaks of ‘the weight of an experience (Erfahrung: “aura”)’:161 while Gadamer reconciles the apparent semantic contradiction in his understanding of this more enduring aspect of experience as ‘a yield or residue that acquires permanence, weight and significance from out of the transience of experiencing’.162 Moreover, this lasting trace resonates beyond the inner life of the individual; as Benjamin remarks, it ‘bears the marks of the situation which gave rise to it … [when] certain contents of the individual past combine with material of the collective past’.163 The slippery nature of the concept of ‘experience’ is evident in the semantic juxtaposition of fleeting immediacy versus permanent residue; furthermore, while ‘what is experienced is always what one has experienced oneself’,164 the category of the experiential remains in constant play between the self and her socio-historical circumstances, weaving a rich, dense cord.165 In contrast to the notions of experience employed by Dilthey in ‘lifephilosophy’ (where the concept of experience is the epistemological foundation for all knowledge of the objective) and Husserl in phenomenology (where experience is construed as ‘the intentional relation’, the collective name for all acts of intentional consciousness), Gadamer acknowledges both the unity and the elusiveness of experience. To use the term experience with regard to a particular episode in our intellectual, emotional or volitional lives is immediately to confer upon it a kind of unity: ‘if something is called or considered an experience its


meaning rounds it into the unity of a significant whole’.166 The intensifying, condensing import of the term ‘zeros in’ on the event in question, lifts it out of the stream of the life of consciousness and brands it, and its lasting meaning, in our memory. Since everything that is experienced is experienced by oneself, it involves ‘an inalienable and irreplaceable relation to the whole of this one life’.167 Yet over against this concept of experience, Gadamer posits life itself, in all its ambiguity, contingency and unmeaning. He argues that ‘experience has a definite immediacy which eludes every opinion about its meaning’; moreover, experience ‘cannot ever be exhausted in what can be said of it and in what can be grasped as its meaning’.168 Thus Gadamer allows for the possibility of determinable meaningful experience while simultaneously ‘fusing’ this possibility to the inexhaustibility of our experiential interpretations. It is the process of assimilation, rather than the content of the experiential event, which constitutes the real being and significance of experience. Above the level of sheer ‘givenness’, experience is thus always in the process of being ceaselessly determined and re-determined: that is its mode of being. Gadamer anchors experience in a process of determinable meanings, while leaving it ‘open at the top’, subject to endless revision, due to the ‘innovative unpredictability’169 of life: What we emphatically call an experience thus means something unforgettable and irreplaceable that is inexhaustible in terms of the understanding and determination of its meaning.170 Gadamer recalls Georg Simmel’s representation of experience as an adventure171 as distinct from an episode. While an episode lacks permanent significance, an adventure disrupts the usual flow of events, yet is ‘positively and significantly related to the context which it interrupts’.172 An adventure is only an adventure when it is thrown into relief by its difference from everyday life. Its very uncertainty is rooted in the mundanity of the everyday. Like an adventure, an experience is lifted out of the stream of life yet simultaneously related to the entirety of one’s life. In a similar way, experiences may be characterised as brief panoramic glimpses of the infinite significances of life caught from the peak of a wave, before descending once more into the trough of the everyday. Experience, in this sense, offers us view-points, not only into our own being, but to the infinite possibilities of being-in-the-world. Situating experience This overview of the hermeneutic understanding of the concept of experience has served to reacquaint us with the thickness, the richness and


fecundity of human experience. It represents a reorientation of experience away from the Derridean conception of experience as transcendental archi-écriture and towards ‘the experience of the world that we have as we simply live out our lives’.173 Yet several important questions remain. We know that language is the primary mode of realisation for our being-in-the-world, but is the participation of experience in the medium of language total? Does language saturate our every experience of the world in general? If this is the case, what implications would this have for an attempted recovery of the experiential from nonindividuated primal language (archi-écriture)? Are we at risk of imposing the post-Saussurean reduction on the whole of experience once more? Gadamer writes that ‘language characterises our human experience of the world in general … It is the centre of language, whence our whole experience of the world … unfolds’.174 It is undeniable that Sprachlichkeit is deeply woven into the sociality of human existence; it is the medium of our relationship to the world. So to this extent, experience must always occur within the framework of Sprachlichkeit; ‘we are always already encompassed by the language which is our own’.175 Yet if we choose to examine experience within the framework of hermeneutic ‘inexhaustibility’ rather than within the limits of deconstructive ‘undecidability’, we avoid imposing linguistic closure on the possibility of theorising experience, in all its richness and contingency. It may allow us to move towards a model of the experiential which is not characterised by passive receptivity or transcendent autonomous agency. Most significantly, it enables us to reconnect experience with meaning(s). Gadamer’s adoption and development of Heidegger’s insight that ‘pre-understanding’ or ‘prejudice’ expresses the ‘structure of anticipation’ of human experience may allow us to move closer to a productive understanding of experience which still manages to avoid erasing agency or creativity. Gadamer’s attempted rehabilitation of ‘prejudice’ is part of the move away from transcendental subjectivism in hermeneutic/phenomenological thought. For Gadamer, understanding is not the simple product of the self-conscious reflection of the ‘master-ego’ but is a ‘mode of the event of being’.176 Understanding is perceived as an essentially linguistic process; our possession by language is the ontological condition for understanding. Just as I do not choose to participate in language but, as a subject, am necessarily co-opted into its all-embracing structure which infinitely transcends my control, so too understanding, conceived as my necessary participation in transmitted meanings from the past


which form the horizons of my world, is equally fundamental to my being-in-the-world. For Gadamer, the phenomenon of understanding … shows the universality of human linguisticality as a limitless medium that carries everything within it – not only the ‘culture’ that has been handed down to us through language, but absolutely everything (in the world and out of it) is included in the realm of ‘understandings’ and understandability in which we move.177 Moreover, Gadamer asserts that all understanding inevitably involves some prejudice. Here prejudice is not understood in its pejorative Enlightenment sense as unjustified or erroneous judgement, a distortion of truth. Gadamer wants to recover the pre-Enlightenment concept of prejudice as ‘a judgement that is given before all the elements that determine a situation have been finally examined’.178 For Gadamer, the negative element of the concept is only the counterpart to the positive validity of the term. In Gadamer’s conception, the primacy of history saturates the conditions of possibility for self-reflection: In fact history does not belong to us, but we belong to it … The focus of subjectivity is a distorting mirror. The self-awareness of the individual is only a flickering in the closed circuits of historical life. That is why the prejudices of the individual, far more than his judgements, constitute the historical reality of his being.179 The prejudices which are embedded and transmitted in the language that we speak are as fundamental to our being as our conscious reflective judgements. Our prejudices are instilled in us prereflectively through the all-encompassing medium of language. Gadamer affirms that … the historicity of our existence entails that prejudices, in the literal sense of the word, constitute the initial directedness of our whole ability to experience. Prejudices are biases of our openness to the world. They are simply conditions whereby we experience something – whereby what we encounter says something to us.180 For Gadamer, the ‘effectivity of history’ is a core element within understanding itself, which is always already operative and of which we can never be fully aware. We are always subject to the effects of


effective-history: ‘it determines in advance both what seems to us worth enquiring about and what will appear as an object of investigation’.181 Gadamer contends that effective-historical consciousness is primarily consciousness of the hermeneutic situation. This consciousness, however, is always partial and incomplete: the very idea of a situation means that we are not standing outside it and hence are unable to have any objective knowledge of it. We are always within the situation and to throw light on it is a task that is never entirely completed. To exist historically means that knowledge of oneself can never be complete. All self-knowledge proceeds from what is historically pre-given … 182 This limitation of vision is, for Gadamer, constitutive of the idea of situation, or more particularly, horizon, itself: ‘the horizon is the range of vision that includes everything that can be seen from a particular vantage-point’.183 Gadamer takes a stand against the incommensurability thesis and the ‘myth of the framework’ when he argues that the closed horizon which is supposed to encapsulate different cultures is an abstraction; rather, he believes, ‘the horizon is … something into which we move and that moves with us’,184 just as horizons change for a person who is moving. Horizons are finite and changing but essentially open. Prejudices constitute the ‘horizon of a particular present’ in that they represent that beyond which it is impossible to see. Thus there can be no presuppositionless, ‘prejudiceless’ interpretation, for while the interpreter may free himself from this or that situation, he cannot free himself from his own facticity, from the ontological condition of always already having a finite temporal situation as the horizon within which the beings he understands have meaning for him.185 The pre-reflective givenness of my historically mediated situation means that prejudices or inherited meanings will saturate my self-reflection – and my experience – ‘all the way down’. It would seem that this model of experience does not differ substantially from that offered by Derrida in Of Grammatology. For both thinkers, language precedes experience: its manifestations, whether described as archi-écriture or prejudice, pervade and indeed constitute experience, providing its very conditions of possibility. Language inhabits my experience at both reflective and pre-reflective levels.


Yet it is in the relation of experience to (self)presence that we may gain insight into the place where the two thinkers diverge. We recall that Derrida argues that, ‘experience’ has always indicated a relationship to something present, whether or not this relation takes the form of consciousness.186 For Derrida, given his animus towards the very notion of presence, this necessary proximity of experience and presence is enough to discredit the experiential straight away. As Gadamer remarks, ‘Experience is always actually present only in the individual observation’.187 As such, experience may, in one sense, be regarded as a function of consciousness; as our lived connection with the world. As Derrida has recognised, the concept presupposes at least partial self-presence. Yet, paradoxically, the ‘mineness’ of experience is always already countered by the ‘otherness’ of the linguistically mediated nature of my subjectivity. We have seen how Derrida dissolves this ‘mineness’ and amplifies the Sprachlichkeit of experience by imposing a neo-Husserlian epoche on the concept: The parenthesizing of regions of experience or of the totality of natural experience must discover a field of transcendental experience.188 If meaning is internal to the autonomous, self-verifying languagesystem, and if experience is entirely subsumed within language, then it becomes impossible to conceive of experience having a reference in the world, or as playing a role in the process of self-reflection. This is because self, experience and world are entirely absorbed in the vortex of the Text, or in the constitutive play of discourses. Yet the fact that my self-presence or consciousness is traced through and through by the primordial ‘great sea of language’,189 does not necessitate the severity of the reduction that Derrida places upon the experiential. Gadamer’s situated, linguistically constituted self is capable of experience because it refuses the transcendental closure of the Derridean reduction. We have seen how Gadamer understands prejudices as ‘biases of our openness to the world’, how they constitute the ‘initial directedness of our whole ability to experience’. Conceived in this enabling, productive light, the otherness within our subjectivity (which is Sprachlichkeit) does not preclude the possibility of meaningful experience in all its myriad forms, as a ‘continuous present and presence of perceptions, intuitions, images, feelings, desires, aversions, attachments’.190


Rather, the layers of sedimented socio-historical meanings which provide the internal framework for my directedness to the world are precisely what enables me to have meaningful experiences in the first place. Yet Gadamer has come under heavy criticism for his celebratory rehabilitation of prejudice, most particularly for its complacency, its failure to take account for discontinuity and exclusion in history: in short, its apparent inability to deal with ideology. Gadamer stakes his project on ‘the hope for a communication without restriction and constraint’;191 thus he struggles to incorporate the alienating distanciation of unmeaning and distorted communication into his theory. Ideology or discourse is unmistakably ‘there’ in our every experience, not as an internal obstacle to understanding which can be ultimately overcome, but, as we noted in the previous section on subjectivity, as insurmountable in its entirety. Moreover, if one ontologises language, then at the same time one ontologises miscommunication and distortion. As Ricoeur remarks, one cannot speak with Gadamer of the common accord that carries understanding without assuming a convergence of traditions that does not exist, without hypostatizing a past that is also the place of false consciousness.192 The affirmation of prejudice as the openness of our experience to the world may have proved a false dawn in our attempted rehabilitation of the experiential. While with Derrida, the balance was tipped towards the ‘otherness’ of experience-as-archi-écriture, with Gadamer, the move towards the ‘mineness’ of experience is predicated on a somewhat naive refutation or exclusion of the negativity of historical tradition. Is it possible to salvage from Gadamerian hermeneutics a model for experience that can accommodate these parallel moments – mineness and otherness, openness and closedness – in such a way that takes account of this duplicitous structure of experience? We discovered with our analysis of hermeneutic subjectivity that, rather than seeking to ‘climb out of our own minds’193 and out of our present discursively constituted situation, thus purging our consciousness of all hegemonic ‘contamination’, in the same way we must adopt an approach which can allow for a distanciated element within experience. Gadamer’s approach, which attempts to imbue prejudices with an enabling and positive dimension, cannot supply the notion of the experiential with this element. Yet the degree of distanciation or dispossession must not be so absolute that experience becomes entirely severed from self, an alienated function of the discursively manipulated sign.


Distanciation may be ‘the condition of understanding’194 but it must operate in a dialogue with the positivity of (re)appropriation. Yet experience must be understood in and through distance – ‘the paradox of otherness’195 – if it is to be understood at all. The non-individuated play of difference identified by post-structuralism may provide the critical element which displaces the ‘authenticity’ of experience in a postmetaphysical conception of the experiential. In the same way that phenomenology and hermeneutics presuppose one another only if the idealism of Husserlian phenomenology succumbs to the critique of hermeneutics196 so too do hermeneutics and post-structuralism presuppose one another only if the hermeneutic/phenomenological orientation or directedness towards the meaning of being allows itself to be interrogated by the critique of post-structuralist. Gadamer may yet provide us with the insight which can unlock this particular problem. He writes … experience is experience of human finitude. The truly experienced man [sic] is one who is aware of this, who knows that he is master neither of time nor the future. The experienced man knows the limitedness of all prediction and the uncertainty of all plans. Experience teaches us to recognize reality … to know what is. But ‘what is’, here, is not this or that thing, but ‘what cannot be done away with’.197 What if this relinquishment of mastery, understood as the awareness of finitude, of limitation, could be conceived as commensurate with the Derridean reduction of experience? Or rather, could the Derridean epoche operate as a form of finitude – ‘what cannot be done away with’ – exerting limitation on the ‘mineness’ of experience? Can the structure of experience expand to accommodate this negative moment? Writing on the autonomy of the literary text, Ricoeur introduces the terms ‘decontextualisation’ and ‘recontextualisation’.198 Appropriating these terms for our own purposes, can we not posit experience as exposed to and thus constrained by the decontextualisation that is the poststructuralist reduction: the temporary theoretical erasure of the historical, social, psychological and physiological elements of experience, and the recognition of the insurmountability of hegemony’s pre-reflective colonisation of experience. The moment of recontextualisation could be conceived as the reappropriation of experience by the speaking, acting,


situated subject; as the reinstatement of the excluded dimensions of experience. This reinstatement would not be a simple reaffirmation of the dimensions previously sous rature. Rather, having undergone the deconstructive ‘explanation’ of decontextualisation, their recovery brings an awareness (not total, but nonetheless present) of the distortion (discursive or otherwise) which inhabits the spectrum of our experiences. This instigation of a critical moment within lived experience, while hermeneutical in ethos, echoes the Gramscian notion of ‘critical consciousness’ which we explored in Chapter 3. Gramsci’s idea of critical consciousness evolves through a critical relationship with one’s own experience in a process of bringing to consciousness and exploring the means by which ‘common sense’ (conceived in the plural) has moulded one’s beliefs and values. The integrative hermeneutic/post-Saussurean analysis of the experiential keeps faith with this dialectical approach, where experience is conceived not as the function of transparent self or wholly determinative language, but as anticipatory, open process. How does this stance affect the interpretation of experience? We have affirmed that experience is indeed ‘a linguistic event (it doesn’t happen outside established meanings)’.199 In Chapter 3, we used the example of birth to dispute the inexorable determinism or linguistic reduction which post-Saussurean langue exerts on this moment of extraordinary bodily and spiritual flux. Post-structuralist strategy would eradicate the ‘mineness’ of this experience absolutely. It may be appropriate to return to this example in the light of hermeneutic analysis. A postdeconstructive hermeneutic construction of experience, conceived as the play of decontextualisation and recontextualisation, can account for the discursive underpinnings which both enable and constrain my birth experience and, via the particularity of my situated bodily being, the elements which make that experience distinctively mine. As we have seen, the essential generality of post-Saussurean langue cannot account for the particularity – the messiness and the mineness – of individual experience. As Tallis observes, however, ‘my presence, my being-hereand-now, furnishes the necessary deictic input required to give my words specificity’.200 These ‘deictic coordinates’ ground the specificity of my birth experience in the play of discursivity; they constitute the moment of appropriation, which, in conjunction with the distanciation of deconstruction – conceived as the psycho-linguistic conditions of the production of subjectivity – provide the internal dynamic of the experiential. This model should not be regarded as a synthesis, but rather the holding of two antitheses in tension. Thus experience, like subjectivity, occurs both in and through distance.


Furthermore, it is important to emphasise the ‘thrown-ness’ and the inexhaustible nature of the interpretation of experience. All interpretation, whether of experience or not, places the interpreter in medias res. As Ricoeur notes, We suddenly arrive, as it were, in the middle of a conversation that has already begun and in which we try to orientate ourselves in order to be able to contribute to it.201 How much more difficult this task of interpretation is when it is experience in question. If we conceive the experiences of the subject as ‘the conversation that has already begun’, or in Gadamer’s terms, ‘the dialogue that we are’,202 then the circularity of our position is evident. Experience is indeed ‘always already an interpretation and something that needs to be interpreted’.203 There is only the infinite regress of layers upon layers of interpretations fading to the ‘inexpressible x’ that is pre-consciousness. Yet if experience is precariously founded on the interplay of decontextualisation and recontextualisation, this unpredictability has its counterpart in the ‘inexhaustibility’ of experience: its openness ‘at the top’. The ‘surplus of meanings’ which experience generates means that it can – at least partially – escape the closure of the post-structuralist epoche: it can ‘elude the power of the linguistic, even while it is linguistically constituted’. The sterility and stasis which characterises the purely deconstructive model of the experiential represents only one element of the dialectic of experience. To adopt a postdeconstructive or postmetaphysical approach requires that we ‘take the risk’ of experience, that we throw open the concept to multiple contingencies of our situated being. Thus we may be accused of exposing the concept to the rigidifying effects of metaphysical closure. Yet the inclusive gesture of distanciation and reappropriation, decontextualisation and recontextualisation avoids both the paralysis of the post-Saussurean reduction and the Aristotelian reification of experience as immediate presence. It keeps the hermeneutic/deconstructive model of the experiential constantly on the wing, following the intentional movement of consciousness towards meaning yet successively interrupting this flight with a series of deconstructive interventions which both limit and enable the process that is experience. Thus experience, like subjectivity, posits but never possesses itself. The non-idealist reconnection with meaning (which does not deny the existence of uncertainty, ambiguity, lack of meaning) is the


postulate on which we can restore lived experience to a central place in the contingencies of our linguistic being. It represents a recovery of ‘what is living, concrete and actual in language’.204 The phenomenological fact that experiencing (albeit decentred) subjects exist who momentarily and ceaselessly anchor language in the haecceitas or particularity of their actual living (‘the material being of life-practices’) is the foundation of the hermeneutical arc which spans language and lived experience. Beyond the post-Saussurean epoche or reduction, we reconnect with the ‘endeavour, renewed ceaselessly, to express integrally the thinkable and the sayable in our experience’.205

5 ‘It’s me here’:1 Writing the Singular Self, Writing the Postdeconstructive Female Self

I

Rapprochement Is the question ‘who’ suitable? With which ‘one’ have we henceforth to deal? …2

In the previous chapter, we explored the erasure or deconstruction of subjectivity in contemporary Continental thought, from its origins in Nietzsche and Heidegger to its consequences for the notions of experience, selfhood and self-presence. We formulated a ‘postmetaphysical’ reappraisal of the experiential based on the interpenetration of poststructuralist thinking and hermeneutic phenomenology. Taking inspiration from Paul Ricoeur’s fruitful critical encounters with structuralism and psychoanalysis, this model allows for a ‘critical’ or ‘deconstructive’ moment – distanciation – within lived experience, where the insurmountability of hegemony’s pre-reflective colonisation of experience, as well as the psycho-linguistic conditions of the production of subjectivity are acknowledged. Yet the negativity of the critique is continually opposed and redirected by the moment of reappropriation, the moment when ‘I’ reassert the ‘mineness’ or singularity of my own deictic coordinates which ground my specificity in the play of discourses. These moments – antithetically held in tension – provide the internal dynamic of the experiential, both limiting and enabling the movement of consciousness towards meaning(s). In this final chapter, we will explore what it means to ‘write the self’ in the light of the deconstructive/hermeneutic model of the experiential self. Here we will be returning to the field of feminist theory. In Chapter 2, we examined the vast influence of post-structuralist thought on contemporary feminist approaches. This chapter concluded with an 157


affirmation of the need to relocate lived experience and (partial) selfpresence at the core of any viable analysis of female subjectivity: but only in a way that can avoid the overdeterminations of both essentialism and radical nominalism. We will return to this task via an analysis of feminist theoretical accounts of autobiography, many of which are deeply coloured by anti-essentialist, anti-representational postmodern theory. A broadly anti-foundational hermeneutic/deconstructive approach to feminist autobiographical theory can alleviate many of the difficulties of a purely post-structuralist analysis without succumbing to the false ideal of self as radical origin.

II Who comes after the (writing) subject? … writing is the destruction of every voice, of every point of origin. Writing is that neutral, composite, oblique space where our subject slips away, the negative where all identity is lost, starting with the very identity of the body writing.3 If the seamlessly unified Subject is cast off into theoretical oblivion, can the demise of the ‘Author-God’4 be far behind? Roland Barthes’ influential essay ‘The Death of the Author’ (1968) remains central to poststructuralist attitudes towards authorial presence and referentiality, elegantly untying the threads which bind author and text, subject and world. Just as subjectivity must be cut free from autonomy, intentionality and selfhood so too, it seems, must the author relinquish her transcendental sovereignty over her work and dissolve without trace in the indeterminant play of textual jouissance. No longer may the author be conceived as ‘the unitary cause, source and master to whom the chain of textual events must be traced, and in whom they find their genesis, meaning, goal and justification’.5 Rather, the author is ‘never more than the instance writing … . [since] language knows a “subject”, not a “person” ’.6 It is the ‘person’7 of the author which must be excised, the oppressive shadow of her bourgeois ‘bios’ or life prevented from contaminating and constraining the ‘pure’ play of the text. The text itself is to be considered as a ‘tissue of signs, an imitation that is lost, infinitely deferred’ and emphatically not as ‘a line of words releasing a single “theological” meaning (the “message” of the Author-God)’.8 In Sade, Fourier, Loyola (1977), Barthes notes that Sade ‘always sides with semiosis rather than mimesis’.9 Applied to the wider poststructuralist attitude to ‘writing the self’, post-representational ‘semiosis’ or undecidability is presented as the only alternative to pure realism,

Writing the Singular and Postdeconstructive Female Self 159

while mimesis is abandoned in favour of ‘textual language in and for itself’.10 Indeed, the ‘death of the author’ school of literary theory is a paradigm instance of the ‘post-structuralist either/or’:11 either the magisterial Author, firmly installed as the guarantor and originator of all textual meaning, holds an inexorable tyranny over the text – or the author is nothing at all, a superfluity to the indeterminable excesses of the allencompassing Text. Despite the deconstructive aim to subvert the ‘monolithic institutions of the sign’, it seems that the move from Author to Text, celebrated as the linguistic anarchy of jouissance, merely reinscribes the metaphysical in a new place. The critic Sean Burke makes a similar point: That an entity is not the causa sine qua non does not proscribe against its being the causa causans. Observing light passing through a prism (though ‘we know’ that the prism is not the absolute origin of the resplendent spectacle before us) we do not deny its effect upon the light, still less call for the death of the prism. That the author can only be conceived as a manifestation of the Absolute Subject, this is the root message of every authocide.12 What are the implications of this slippage between the ‘deaths’ of the subject and the author? Why is the author conceived as no more than ‘a simple subaltern or manifestation of the subject’?13 Burke provides a dense description of the obscure relationships between the two terms in the light of post-structuralist thinking: The death of the transcendental subject is consectaneous with the death of the subject of knowledge, is in turn consectaneous with the death of the author as a formal principle of textual meaning which is again consectaneous with the disappearance of the psychobiographical signified.14 The author which emerges from this chain of associations is predicated on the principle of transcendental, sovereign subjectivity. In effect, the neo-Husserlian epoche, which we observed in the Derridean erasure of the experiential,15 has been implicitly applied to the concept of the author: stripped of the ‘mineness’ of psycho-biographical facticity, the author becomes ‘the purely ontological principle of the text’.16 The ‘transcendental anonymity’17 of the author is attainable only through the exclusion of every deictic coordinate which anchors the writing self in the particularities of her material being.


Refusing the post-structuralist ‘either/or’ of textual/referential selfhood requires a working conception of authorhood which avoids the reification of Author or Text, which allows us to ‘bring experience to language’. We have seen that pure textualism works on the level of metaphysical abstraction: ‘to write is, through a prerequisite impersonality … to reach that point where only language acts, “performs”, and not “me” ’.18 Now, if language ‘knows’ only a subject, not a person, what happens when the bios is reconnected with the graphe, when the authorial self, in all her contingency and finitude, ‘returns’ to the text? Far from channelling the plurivocity of the text into a single, univocal ‘message’, the return of the author acts as a ‘principle of uncertainty’ in the text, allowing ‘energies and forces that exceed and elude its reading in programmatic or linguistic terms’.19 Indeed, as Burke observes, the very attempt to resolve the myriad determinants of the text – biography, psychological dynamics, authorial inscription – in a totalising theory of reading and writing is almost impossible: A theory of the author, or of the absence of the author, cannot withstand the practice of reading, for there is not an absolute cogito of which individual authors are the subalternant manifestations, but authors, many authors, and the differences (in gender, history, class, ethnology …) that exist between authors – within authorship – defy reduction to any universalizing aesthetic.20 The shift from the Author/Text to the authorial self is a postmetaphysical shift away from both the premature closure of representation and the interpretive anarchy of textual play. It is a shift from authorial or textual transcendence to the ‘here and now’ of authorial intention, choice, innovation. This is not to deny the omnipresence of language – after all, ‘I cannot grasp the act of existing except in signs scattered in the world’21 – but it is to affirm that the (opaque) authorial self is more than the Foucauldian ‘complex and variable function of discourse’,22 more than the Barthesian ‘instance writing’.23 The reabsorption of narrative referentiality into the category of the author is not a rejection of the ‘disseminative’ aspects of the inexhaustible text, but a reacknowledgement of the diachronicity of narrative, life, self-as-process. Yet the category of narrative referentiality finds its fiercest critics among poststructuralist – especially feminist post-structuralist – theorists of autobiography. Before moving towards a rapprochement between hermeneutics and deconstruction with regard to the subject/object of autobiography,


we need to examine the implications of post-Saussurean critique in more detail.

III The paradoxes of autobiography: representing ‘I’ To identify oneself absolutely with oneself, to identify one’s ‘I’ with the ‘I’ that I tell you is as impossible as to lift oneself up by one’s hair …24 In his essay ‘Fictions of the Self: the End of Autobiography’ (1980), Michael Sprinker writes that The origin and the end of autobiography converge in the very act of writing … for no autobiography can take place except within the boundaries of a writing where concepts of subject, self, and author collapse into the act of producing a text.25 Deconstructive approaches effectively invalidate the very possibility of autobiography. Autobiography’s inevitable ‘failure’ to meet the ‘demand of total explicitness’26 of self render it, in the eyes of many poststructuralists, a redundant genre. In the world of livres sans auteurs, where lived experience, referentiality and self-presence are intratextual illusions, how could one begin to ‘write the self’, to represent it in the text, when that ‘self’ is but a hallucinatory effect of language? Derrida calls for the ‘forgetting of the pronoun, singularly of the first-person pronoun, the ‘I’ … memory effaces remembrance (or recollection) just as the ‘I’ effaces itself’.27 Appropriating Benveniste’s claim that the ‘I’ is nothing more than the person who utters the present instance of discourse containing the linguistic instance ‘I’, Louis Marin contends that the ‘I’ is purely fictional, since the ‘instance of discourse’ in which it appears is its only reference.28 Other critics point to ‘the futile referentiality of the extra-textual as the “real” person behind the text’.29 For post-structuralists, there is no ontological difference between autobiography and fiction: ‘autobiography is fiction and fiction is autobiography: both are narrative arrangements of reality’.30 And, since autobiography is a fiction, it cannot allow for the ‘presentification of self’; indeed, as a fiction ‘it can only inhibit presentification’.31 It is a matter of little wonder, then, that these thinkers proclaim, in addition to the deaths of the Author and the Subject, the ‘end’ of autobiography. The ‘forgetting’ of the psychobiographical signified – the life of the writing self, the ‘person’ of the author – while damaging to the notion of authorhood in general, makes a parody


of the autobiographical subject: she becomes a dupe of the discourse of self-transparency. In effect, she is doubly exposed to the subversions of the sign: once, through the linguistically saturated process of autoaffection by which she comes to ‘know’ herself; second, through the attempt to articulate that ‘self’ and her lived experiences in the text. The supposed reflective unity of the self, both in its emergence and in its representation, dissolves in the perpetual deferral of différance. Deconstructionist accounts of autobiography abound in instances of the post-structuralist ‘either/or’. According to the autobiographical theorist Laura Marcus, the rise of deconstruction afforded autobiographical critics ‘a limited range of options’, or rather a choice of two alternatives: either to ‘reassert the essential irreducibility of subjectivity and the absolute value of subjectivism’ or to ‘take the deconstructionist turn and use autobiography as an exemplary instance of the impossibility of self-presence, the radical split between the self that writes and the self that is written, and the crucial role of language in the constitution of the subject’.32 Even if the ‘deconstructionist turn’ is taken, the binarist approach continues: either the autobiography serves to create the illusion of a unified self out of the fragments of identity, or the [autobiographical] text reveals, in its fissure, its doubling and its incompleteness, the fragmentations of the subject and its lack of self-coincidence.33 In The Autobiographical Subject (1989), Felicity Nussbaum presents the reader with a similar set of alternatives: My theoretical approach argues … that the ‘self’ is an ideological construct that is recruited into place within specific historical formations rather than always present as an eternal truth. It is less an essence than an ensemble of social and political relations.34 The dualistic image of the autobiographical subject as either ideological ‘recruit’ or essential, eternal truth surfaces again in Robert Elbaz’s work, The Changing Nature of the Self: a Critical Study of the Autobiographic Discourse (1985). Here he observes the ideological myth, dictated by ‘common sense’, that every autobiography refers to a self, to a pre-given structure outside the text, to an essence, to Man … The self, it is thus claimed, exists before language, and the transparency of language allows for the pure referentiality of the literary text.35


This image of the self as ‘an immobile centre, a core of self-certainty’,36 rendered up in the text without remainder, is countered by Elbaz’s notion of the autobiographical subject as a purely ‘fictive voice’, a ‘futile referentiality’.37 For Elbaz, Sprinker, Nussbaum and other broadly poststructuralist critics, ‘the self can no more be the author of its own discourse than any producer of a text can be called the author – that is the originator – of his writing’.38 The myth of the autobiographical/ authorial subject as ‘creator/medium/product unified as a single, autonomous totality … the prototype of the individualist self’39 is ‘exposed’ as a fiction.

‘Fictive voices’: the textual ‘I’ in feminist autobiographical theory

IV

The polarising tendencies of post-structuralist criticism mean that ‘positing the person’ – whether of the authorial or the autobiographical subject – is regarded as a theoretical non-starter. In effect, the ‘death of the authorial/autobiographical subject’ removes ‘me’ (the writing ‘psycho-biographical signified’) from the text. Indeed, the interrogation and dismissal of the categories of the self-present subject, referentiality and representativity is of particular importance in feminist deconstructionist accounts of autobiography. Moreover, the implied opposition between the subject as either ideological recruit or fixed, extra-linguistic entity in these accounts forms a partially submerged subtext which precludes the possibility of theorising the ‘referential specificity of women’s lives as distinctly female’.40 Here we will examine two feminist/post-structuralist analyses of women’s autobiographical projects, tracing the ways in which the ‘poststructuralist either/or’ reinforces the apparent inevitability and incontrovertibility of the anti-representationalist aesthetic in feminist postmodern theory. The first text is Shari Benstock’s influential essay, ‘Authorizing the Autobiographical’ (1988). Benstock emphasises the need to ‘rethink the very coincidence of “ontology” and “autobiography” ’.41 Against the Hegelian claim that ‘consciousness of self is the birthplace of truth’,42 she questions the validity of the category of ‘self’ and thus the possibilities of self-knowledge and self-representativity: … autobiography reveals the impossibility of its own dream: what begins on the presumption of self-knowledge ends in the creation of a fiction that covers over the premises of its construction.43


Disputing Georges Gusdorf’s assertion that ‘the appearance of autobiography implies a new spiritual revolution: the artist and model coincide’,44 Benstock counters that ‘in point of fact, the “coincidence” of artist and model is an illusion’.45 Benstock bases her argument on Lacanian principles, especially the latter’s account of the ‘mirror stage’. We recall that this is the process by which the child is initiated into the Symbolic Order, and by which she or he dons ‘the armour of an alienating identity, which will mark with its rigid structure the subject’s entire mental development’.46 According to Lacan, the exteriorised image of the child’s (apparently) unified and coherent self represents ‘a mirage of coherence and solidity through which the subject is seduced into misrecognition of its own truth’.47 In Benstock’s reading of Lacan, the essential ‘discordance’ or self-estrangement of the subject derives from the fragmentary, partial, segmented experience of images, sounds and sensory responses in the first six months of life; it is this experience of ‘self’ which forms the unconscious as ‘an inner seam … – the space of difference, the gap that the drive toward unity of self can never close’.48 Moreover, in Benstock’s view, it is ‘what gives the lie to a unified, identifiable, coterminous self’.49 She perceives the mirror stage as a ‘desperate shoring-up of the reflected image against disintegration and division.50 It seems that, for Benstock, the subject’s identity across time is nothing more than a series of synchronic, disconnected moments which testify to a ‘permanent dispossession of self.’51 The application of this Lacanian model of fractured selfhood to the autobiographical enterprise involves a focus not on the total coincidence between being and knowing (and thus representing) but on ‘the measure to which “self” and “self-image” … can never coincide in language’.52 Benstock approves forms of self-writing which ‘exploit difference and change over sameness and identity’, which celebrate ‘the multiple forms of the je’.53 According to Benstock, female autobiographers can allow the ‘discordant je’ freer play because of their psycho-social experience of ‘otherness’. In contrast to the apparently seamless ‘I’ of masculinist autobiographical accounts, where disintegration and discontinuity are denied by both the organicism of the coherent, continuous self-same self and the textual mastery of the consciously controlling Author, Benstock sees women’s autobiographical texts as promoting a decentred, even absent, self, dislocated and unstable. She celebrates these ‘fissures of female discontinuity’ in all their forms: ‘internal cracks and disjunctures, rifts and ruptures … dislocations in time and space, insecurities, hesitations, and blind spots’.54 For Benstock, the entire autobiographical project is ‘poised over an abyss of selflessness’.55


Benstock’s analysis is firmly committed to the post-structuralist rejection of self-presence and its affirmation of absence and dispersal. Following Lacan, she regards the subject of enunciation – the referential ‘I’ – as radically incommensurable with the textual ‘I’: Language, which operates according to a principle of division and separation, is the medium by which and through which the ‘self’ is constructed. ‘Writing the self’ is therefore a process of simultaneous sealing and splitting that can only trace fissures of discontinuity.56 Domna Stanton’s essay ‘Autogynography: Is the Subject Different?’ (1984) adopts an even more emphatically deconstructionist approach. Whereas Benstock stresses the unbridgeable gaps and endless deferrals between the referential self and the textual self, Stanton wants to sever this connection completely: the excision of bio from autobiography is designed to bracket the traditional emphasis on the narration of ‘a life’, and that notion’s facile presumption of referentiality.57 As the critic Liz Stanley notes, ‘this is not merely a change of emphasis from the life to writing about the life – it is rather the excision of the life, a concern with writing to the exclusion of the text’s narrative referentiality’.58 In order to highlight her own position, Stanton quotes Philippe Lejeune’s influential definition of autobiography: a retrospective narrative in prose that a real person makes of his own existence when he emphasizes his individual life, especially the story of his personality.59 While approving Lejeune’s acknowledgement of the ficticity of autobiography and the ‘myth of the self’, Stanton deplores his inability to ‘give up the referential ghost or the identity of the subject’ which, she contends, ‘evokes the Cartesian principle of self-evidence or the spectre of Derridean phallogopresence’.60 How does Stanton support her critique of the ‘unity, coherence or self-presence that mark the Western myth of subjecthood’?61 She writes that every autobiography assumes and reworks literary conventions for writing and reading. And its texture is ultimately determined by the


ways in which meaning can be signified in a particular discursive context, an (ideo)logical boundary that always already confines the speaking subject.62 It appears that, for Stanton, the inescapable discursivity which fragments and displaces our selfhood(s) entirely precludes the possibility of self-presence (partial or otherwise); for Stanton, like Derrida and many other post-structuralist thinkers, presence is an all-or-nothing affair.63 In a truly post-Saussurean example of the victory of form over substance, Stanton reduces the substantiality of the ‘living, growing I and its life’64 to the status of a ‘referential ghost … [a] spectre’.65 Stanton approaches the issue of ‘the difference of autogynography’ with caution. In response to the repeatedly argued assertion that men’s narratives are linear, chronological, coherent while women’s are discontinuous, digressive, fragmented, Stanton points out that qualities of linearity and discontinuity are found in both male and female autobiographical texts. Indeed, according to Stanton, the supposedly ‘female’ approach of narrative discontinuity and fragmentation may ‘constitute particularly fitting means for inscribing the split subject, even for creating the rhetorical impression of spontaneity and truth’.66 Moreover, Stanton is suspicious of locating ‘real difference’ in autogynographical content. While the association of the female with personal, private and intimate concerns and the male with outward, professional achievements may appear to reflect the dichotomies that mark genderic differences in the symbolic system, the category of the personal tends to escape genderic boundaries, particularly in the autobiographical sphere. Stanton observes that the ‘personal’ confessions of Rousseau or Augustine are certainly central to most canonical discussions of autobiography; moreover, the concept of the personal extends and resonates well beyond the confessional to include narrowness of focus, introspection, affectivity, domesticity and so on. Furthermore, Stanton notes that the concept of the personal was a function of changing conventions, which determined the said and, more importantly, the unsaid, such as the desires and the experiences of the female body.67 Thus, as in the case of the restrictions imposed on St Theresa’s account of her ‘wicked life’ by her confessors, women’s ‘personal’ narratives may conceal as much as they expose, and remain as ‘partial inscriptions of … “selves in hiding” ’.68 Unsurprisingly, Stanton appears to place the category of the personal sous rature: both scored through and rigidly


contained by the impersonal socio-cultural determinants which shape our subjectivity, the personal cannot – for Stanton – be regarded as a manifestation of either unique selfhood or female difference. It is in the act of writing itself that Stanton locates ‘a fundamental deviance that pervade[s] autogynographies and produce[s] conflicts in the divided self’.69 She contends that since the symbolic order ‘equates the idea(l) of the author with a phallic pen transmitted from father to son’, the notion of a female writer becomes a ‘contradiction to the dominant definition of woman and casts her as the usurper of male prerogatives’.70 Thus, for Stanton, autogynography represents the acquisition of identity through writing: autogynography … ha[s] a global and essential therapeutic purpose: to constitute the female subject. In a phallocentric system, which defines her as the object, the inessential other to the same male subject … the graphing of the auto was an act of self-assertion that denied and reversed woman’s status.71 According to Stanton, the affirmation of the female as subject is simultaneously underwritten by relatedness to others. Woman’s symbolic status as ‘inessential other’ supplies a possible explanation for the textual construction of the female self through the relation to mother, father, mate and child. The female ‘I’ which is constructed is thus not simply a conglomerate of various selves, but rather, in its extension towards significant others, attains a diffusion, a decentredness which, according to Stanton, is inimical to that standard-bearer of the phallogocentric order: ‘the totalized self-contained subject present-to-itself’.72 Stanton’s self-confessed ‘textual, non-referential’ approach to the female subject involves a total elimination of the bio or subject’s life from autobiographical narratives; indeed, as Stanley remarks, Stanton views autobiographical writing as the source and origin of changes in women’s status, rather than being a product – albeit in dialectical relationship with – other kinds of change. This is the primacy of the textual, not of the social and material world within which it is located.73 Concluding her essay, Stanton appears to offer the reader two alternative theoretical routes through autogynography. Either one opts for a ‘valorized notion of female identity … conjoined with an explicit or


implicit belief in the referentiality and truth-value of autogynographies’74 or (the position she advocates) one acknowledges that because of woman’s different status in the symbolic order, autogynography … dramatize[s] the fundamental alterity and non-presence of the subject, even as it asserts itself discursively and strives toward an always impossible self-possession.75 Stanton and Benstock occupy different places on the same deconstructionist continuum. They share a common suspicion of unity, coherence and synthesis; they stress the priority of difference, dislocation, antithesis and absence over sameness and identity. Both probe the relation between the (female) self and self-consciousness, and question the representativity of her self-image; both reject, to varying degrees, the ‘autobiographical pact’ of identity between the real person (the subject) and the object of enunciation (the ‘I’ of the narrative). Yet while Benstock traces ‘fissures of female discontinuity’ – the disjunctures, rifts and ruptures which prevent the complete coincidence of the referential ‘I’ and the textual ‘I’ – Stanton wishes to abandon the ‘facile’ category of the referential ‘I’ altogether. If Benstock’s approach is concerned with the textual deferral, doubling and displacement of self – the ‘unsettling of the ‘I’ that had heretofore stood at the centre of narrative discourse’76 – in Stanton’s analysis, deferral and non-coincidence become complete excision and any degree of self-possession becomes an impossibility. Broadly speaking, on the subject of self-presence and its representation, Stanton and Benstock differ only in degree: while Benstock finds the fractured self in the gaps between textuality and referentiality, Stanton’s denial of referentiality produces a concept of gendered selfhood so deeply scored by difference that it can only be signified by ‘fundamental alterity and non-presence’.77 Whether ceaselessly deferred or subject to more radical erasure, both Benstock’s and Stanton’s notions of the self are posited in staunch opposition to the ‘Western myth of subjecthood’:78 the subject as a fixed, extralinguistic entity consciously pursuing its unique destiny … with its own sharp configuration … of well-defined, stable, impermeable boundaries around a singular, unified, and atomic core …79 Let us look more closely at both Benstock’s and Stanton’s constructions of this ‘myth’. Benstock describes it as a ‘unified, identifiable, coterminous


self’,80 while Stanton views it as ‘the totalized self-contained subject present-to-itself’.81 And for both Benstock and Stanton, it is women’s narratives which interrogate and subvert this masculinist construction of a ‘unique, unitary unencumbered self … [with] its privileged status as the origin of meaning, knowledge, truth’.82 We are now in a position to see the extent to which the ‘poststructuralist either/or’ informs feminist deconstructionist accounts of women’s autobiographies, in a way which owes much more to the rigid binaries of structuralist thinking than to the fluidity of post-structuralist freeplay. It seems that in both accounts, the ‘either/or’ of female selfhood takes the form of an opposition between textuality and referentiality. Here are the terms associated with each:

Textuality

Referentiality

alterity dispersal difference antithesis non-meaning absence disjuncture deferral intra-linguistic non-identifiable self sous rature

singularity totalisation identity, unity synthesis meaning presence coincidence representation extra-linguistic coterminous self-possession

How would the anti-representationalist feminist aesthetic be challenged if we abandoned this dichotomous approach? What if decentring did not become dissolution, if the impossibility of the absolute coincidence of self with itself did not mean pure absence, if disjunctures and rifts did not preclude moments of partial coincidence? What if the positing and writing of self did not imply ‘an impossible escape from the differential movement of language’83 but an interplay of singularity and alterity, of particularity and discursivity, of appropriation and distanciation, of ‘mineness’ and ‘otherness’? In short, could our hermeneutic/ deconstructive model of the ‘speaking/spoken subject’, which takes account of both the psycho-linguistic conditions of the production of subjectivity and the inexhaustible contingencies of our situated being, enable an approach to an ambiguously representable female selfhood which is located in the space created by the disjunction of life and discourse, ‘beyond the alternative of the cogito and of the anticogito’?84


I believe that this question may best be answered by an analysis of the post-structuralist dissolution of singularity in radical alterity, followed by an examination of the possibilities for re-theorising singularity in anti-foundationalist terms. From here, I hope that we can return to the question of the representability of female selfhood with a theoretical approach that recognises the equiprimordiality of singularity and alterity in our embodied existence.

V The erasure of singularity by rhizomatic theory there is no ‘true’ testimony without ‘false’ testimony.85 Post-structuralism is centrally concerned with system, with synchronicity, with surface. It is a philosophy of horizontality, supplanting hierarchy with anarchy, centring with dispersal, semantics with rhetoric, origin with difference. Nowhere is this tendency more manifest than in the work of Gilles Deleuze,86 in which the metaphor of the (vertical) ‘tree’ as origin and hierarchy is compared to the ‘rhizome’ of nonrepresentational, ‘radically horizontal’ thought. The rhizomatic model emphasises ‘lateral connectivity’ as destratification, the permeability of all hierarchies and boundaries; it celebrates the Nietzschean demand that the vertical axis of objective truth be overturned by the horizontal axis of subjective values. The motif of horizontality and surface is seen again in Barthes’ writing: In the multiplicity of writing, everything is to be disentangled, nothing deciphered; the structure can be followed, ‘run’ (like the thread of a stocking) at every point and at every level, but there is nothing beneath: the space of writing is to be ranged over, not pierced …87 It is precisely this insistence on ‘rhizomatics’ that denies the ‘existential root’ of the (writing) self, the particularity of the actual subject in her socio-historical context, the author as ‘psycho-biographical signified’. The ‘speaking/spoken’ self88 in the world and her attempts to bring her mediated experiences, her ‘incipient story’89 – however fragmented and displaced across the panoply of discourses – to language90 are implicitly or explicitly denied, subordinated to the surface play of the Text. Paul Ricoeur’s philosophy serves as a timely reminder of the existential dimension of the speaking/spoken – or writing/written – subject. While linguisticality might be the most fundamental mode of realisation of our being-in-the world, and while consciousness does not occupy the


position of absolute principle or radical origin – ‘the ground that grounds itself’91 – it is essential to acknowledge the imprint of the subject on her words: Language is not a world of its own. It is not even a world. But because we are in the world, because we are affected by situations, and because we orient ourselves comprehensively in those situations, we have something to say, we have experience to bring to language.92 Yet if ‘autobiography [is] the bringing of one’s life to language’,93 ‘who’ is speaking; ‘who’ is writing; ‘who’ is it that is making her imprint on her words? Where is That taste of myself, of I and me above and in all things, which is more distinctive than the taste of ale or alum, more distinctive than the smell of walnutleaf or camphor[?]94 Above all, deconstructionist accounts of subjectivity and consequently autobiography – whether feminist or otherwise – erase singularity: ‘I and me’. To believe oneself to be unique – an ‘irreplaceable center of perspective on the world’95 – is, in the post-structuralist world of discursively constituted ‘substitutable anyones’, a rather naive joke. Yet, as Jean-Luc Nancy observes, the notion of the subject, rather than focusing on traditional notions of ‘being’ or ‘essence’, can ‘deliver … an entirely different thought: that of the one and that of the someone, of the singular existent that the subject announces, promises, and at the same time conceals’.96 The idea of the unique is almost always included in deconstructionist accounts of the Western ‘myth of universal selfhood’. The following passage by the feminist autobiographical critic Sidonie Smith is representative: [A] certain ideology of language accompanies the notion of universal selfhood. The self so understood is both prelinguistic and extralinguistic … [this] self [has] a singular, unified and atomic core … Unique, unitary, unencumbered, the self escapes all forms of embodiment … Autonomous and free, … the self comes to … know the world in a monological engagement that establishes individual consciousness as the center and origin of meaning …. All ‘I’s are ontologically identical rational beings – but all ‘I’s are also unique. This is the stuff of myth, imperious and contradictory.97


In a similar way, in Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990), the feminist philosopher Judith Butler questions the singularity and the continuity of individual identity: What can be meant by ‘identity’ then, and what grounds the presumption that identities are self-identical, persisting through time as the same, unified and internally coherent?98 For Butler, identity operates as an effect of discourse, a ‘normative ideal rather than a descriptive feature of experience’; indeed, Butler calls the very notion of ‘the person’ into question, contending that ‘the “coherence” and “continuity” of “the person” are not logical or analytical features of personhood, but, rather, îsocially instituted and maintained norms of intelligibilityî’.99 Moreover, in The Psychic Life of Power (1997), Butler cautions against conflating this suspect category of ‘the person’ or ‘the individual’ with subjectivity, which she considers the condition for the intelligibility of individual persons: ‘The subject’ is sometimes bandied about as if it were interchangeable with ‘the person’ or ‘the individual’. The genealogy of the subject as a critical category, however, suggests that the subject, rather than be identified strictly with the individual, ought to be designated as a linguistic category, a place-holder, a structure in formation … The subject is the linguistic occasion for the individual to achieve and reproduce intelligibility, the linguistic condition of its existence and agency.100 Coherence, continuity, stability and self-sameness of ‘the person’ are apparently derived from the ‘illusion of substantial identity’, which Butler would replace with the non-substantive ‘I’: a linguistic category which is no more than ‘a consequence of certain rule-governed discourses that govern the intelligible invocation of identity’.101 Both Smith’s and Butler’s accounts contain the implicit assumption that if a subject is understood as unique or singular it follows that it must also be extra-linguistic, self-same, unified, autonomous, monological and originary.102 Yet, we may ask, must a diffuse selfhood imply non-identifiability? Must a non-autonomous, non-originary self be denied singularity? Can the unique exist in a subjectivity which avoids both the ‘atomic core’ of the cogito and the dissipative non-identity of the anticogito? Refusing the submerged structuralist dualisms which remain within post-structuralist thought means challenging these


implicit assumptions, adopting theoretical frameworks which are non-oppositional yet resist totalisation. A reevaluation of the status of the unique, the singular, the particular within our discursive modes of being may provide a point of opening for a hermeneutic/deconstructive approach to the representation of the (sexed) ‘I’ which can acknowledge both the ‘flesh and blood existent’103 and the discursive terms through which she is shaped, thus superseding both the horizontal ‘rhizomatics’ of pure textualism and the vertical ‘hierarchy’ of objective truth. My analysis of the category of the singular will be based on an exploration of sameness and otherness, and their relationship to identity. My point of departure for this analysis is grounded in the work of three ambiguously postmetaphysical philosophers, Jean-Luc Nancy, Adriana Cavarero and Paul Ricoeur.

VI ‘Working-through’: narrative identity beyond the immediacy of reflection in this period that some call postmodern, it may be that we no longer know what narrating means.104 In his Introduction to the collection of essays ‘Who Comes After the Subject?’ (1991), Jean-Luc Nancy asks But what existence? It is not an essence, it is the essence whose essence it is to exist, actually and in fact, in experience, ‘hic et nunc.’ It is the existent (and not the existence of the existent). With this in mind, the question asks ‘who?’ Which means that the question of essence – ‘What, existence?’ – calls forth a ‘who’ in response.105 For Nancy, ‘who’ someone is denotes ‘that actual, existent “what”, as it exists, a factual (even material) punctuation of Being’;106 this ‘who’ could be said to exist both before and after ‘the subject’. Nancy stresses that, for him, the question ‘who is “who”?’ is not a question of essence, but one of identity or of the presence of the existent, understood in the sense of ‘that which occupies a place’: as when one asks before a group of people whose names you know but not the faces: ‘Who is who?’ – is this one Kant, is that one Heidegger, and this other one beside him? … That is to say, a question of presence: Who is there? Who is present there?107


Thus, where there was nothing, someone comes. This ‘one’ who comes never stops arriving, in the sense that the subject is never the subject of itself, or entirely self-identical with itself: it is ‘one’ because it ‘comes’, not because of its substantial unity: the she, he or it that comes can be one and unique in its coming but multiple and repeated ‘in itself’.108 In coming into the world, then, the unique existent engenders a ‘presence-to [the world] that is not to-itself’.109 The philosophical tenor of Nancy’s short essay on the singular existent is echoed by Paul Ricoeur’s collection of essays, Oneself as Another (1992). If there is a way of approaching identity that does not dissolve singularity in the ‘identi-fictions’ of the non-substantive self, it must involve a conceptual distinction between self-sameness and identity in such a way that, in rejecting the homogeneity and stasis of sameness, the unique existent who ‘possesses’ her identity is not effaced. A different modality of identity is called for. In Oneself as Another, Paul Ricoeur acknowledges the pressing need for rethinking subjectivity beyond the alternative of the cogito and the anti-cogito, observing the amazing oscillations that the philosophies of the subject appear to present, as though the cogito out of which they arise were unavoidably caught up in an alternating sequence of overevaluation and underevaluation … Exalted subject, humiliated subject: it seems that it is always through a complete reversal of this sort that one approaches the subject.110 In this series of studies, Ricoeur distinguishes two major meanings of the concept ‘identity’, based on the Latin terms ipse and idem. The distinction between ipse and idem distinguishes ‘the person as someone in contrast to the fixed permanence of sameness’.111 Identity in the sense of idem denotes stasis, immutability, permanence in time, as opposed to ‘that which differs’: namely, ‘diversity, variability, discontinuity and instability’.112 Ricoeur notes that in its diverse uses, ‘same’ (meme) is used in the context of comparison; its contraries are ‘other’, ‘contrary’, ‘distinct’, ‘diverse’, ‘unequal’, ‘inverse’. The weight of this comparative use of the term ‘same’ seems so great to me that I shall henceforth take sameness as synonymous with idem-identity and shall oppose to it selfhood (ipseity), understood as ipse-identity.113


According to Ricoeur, identity in the sense of ipse implies ‘no assertion concerning some unchanging core of the personality’.114 Rather, ipseidentity denotes less a category of being than a category of doing: it is concerned with questions of agency and authorship, with the ‘who’ that is doing, speaking, writing, acting in the world. Ipseity encapsulates selfconstancy; however, unlike idem-identity, it refers not to static, inflexible, substantive identity, but to a dynamic, diachronic and incomplete identity always under construction. If the identity of the self is understood within the framework of ipseity, which acknowledges the ‘fragmentation that follows from the polysemy of the question “who?” ’,115 will the singularity, or the unrepeatable uniqueness of the individual person not be lost amid this chaotic multiplicity? Ricoeur’s answer lies in a shift of focus from the category of the ‘individual’ to the individual that each of us actually is: a unique existent, an ‘irreplaceable center of perspective on the world’.116 How then does one respond to the question ‘ “who” says “I”?’: We first answer this question by naming someone, that is, by designating them with a proper name. But what is the basis for this proper name? What justifies our taking the subject of an action, so designated by his, her, or its proper name, as the same throughout a life that stretches from birth to death? The answer has to be narrative. To answer the question ‘Who?’ as Hannah Arendt so forcefully put it, is to tell the story of a life. The story tells about the action of the ‘who’. And the identity of this ‘who’ therefore itself must be a narrative identity. [emphasis added]117 The philosophy of Hannah Arendt also provides an important point of departure for Adriana Cavarero’s concept of the narratable self. Arendt argues that philosophical discourse, directed as it is towards determining ‘what’ rather than ‘who’ ‘Man’ is by searching for qualities that he could possibly share with other living beings, is inherently incapable of capturing the individual uniqueness of a human being. She writes that ‘who’ someone is ‘retains a curious intangibility that confounds all efforts towards unequivocal verbal expression’.118 Taking up Arendt, Cavarero distinguishes two registers, philosophy and narration, which manifest opposite characteristics: Philosophy … has the form of a definite knowledge which regards the universality of Man. … Narration … has the form of a biographical knowledge which regards the unrepeatable identity of someone.


The questions which sustain the two discursive styles are equally diverse. The first asks ‘what is Man?’ The second asks instead of someone ‘who he or she is’.119 Cavarero’s concern is with the ‘unrepeatable existence’ of each human being ‘which – however they run disoriented in the dark, mixing accidents with intentions – neither follows in the footsteps of another life, nor repeats the very same course, nor leaves behind the same story’.120 She is interested in the singularity beyond the ‘what’, in the means by which ‘narration reveals the finite in its fragile uniqueness, and sings its glory’.121 In her thinking, she seeks to prevent the ‘inevitable sacrifice’ of the ‘fragility of each one … to the philosophical glories of the One’.122 Although Ricoeur does not participate in Cavarero’s theoretical promotion of the register of narration over that of philosophy, he does recognise the possibilities which narrativity, or more particularly, the notion of narrative identity offers in terms of approaching personal identity without recourse to polarised ‘either/or’ positions. Ricoeur is aware of the drawbacks of these analyses: Without the recourse to narration, the problem of personal identity would in fact be condemned to an antimony with no solution. Either we must posit a subject identical with itself through the diversity of its different states, or, following Hume and Nietzsche, we must hold that this identical subject is nothing more than a substantialist illusion, whose elimination merely brings to light a pure manifold of cognitions, emotions and volitions.123 Indeed, in ‘Life: a Story in Search of a Narrator’ (1987), Ricoeur argues that only a narrative understanding of ourselves can escape the ‘pseudoalternative’ of pure change – ‘an incoherent succession of occurrences’ – or absolute identity – ‘an immutable substance incapable of becoming’.124 Thus another layer is added to the difference between idem and ipse, namely between idem as formal or substantial identity and ipse as narrative identity: that is, a ‘model of dynamic identity arising from the poetic composition of a narrative text’.125 For Ricoeur, this narrative identity is constitutive of self-constancy, a sense of ‘oneself’ which can accommodate mutability within the cohesion of one lifetime. Far from embracing the stasis of the ‘abstract identity of the Same’, this model recognises the provisional quality of narrative selfhood; for Ricoeur, the story of a life is continuously ‘on the wing’, ceaselessly refigured by all


the (truthful or fictive) stories a subject relates about her or himself: ‘this refiguration makes this life itself a cloth woven of stories told’.126 The process of refiguration is potentially infinite and thus inexhaustible: indeed, it is this ‘endless rectification of a previous narrative by a subsequent one … and … the chain of refigurations that results from this’ that leads Ricoeur to conclude that ‘narrative identity is the poetic resolution of the hermeneutic circle’.127 Moreover, for Ricoeur, the notion of narrative identity can be applied to the self-constancy of a community as well as to an individual: ‘Individual and community are constituted in their identity by taking up narratives that become for them their actual history.’128 Thus the story of a life is constituted through a series of rectifications applied to previous narratives, just as the history of a people, or a collectivity, or an institution proceeds from the series of corrections that new historians bring to their predecessors’ descriptions and explanations …129 Cavarero’s model of the ‘narratable self’ places less emphasis on the process of dynamic configuration and refiguration characteristic of Ricoeur’s notion of ipseity and more on the pre-reflective, expositive dimensions of unique selfhood. Indeed, she argues that memory need not be an ‘active remembering’; it is not only in the conscious act of remembering, but more particularly in the ‘spontaneous narrating structure of memory itself’130 that Cavarero locates the ‘narratable self’. Thus the horizons of the terms ‘subject’ and ‘object’ coalesce and become indistinguishable: ‘the narratable self is at once the transcendental subject and the elusive object of all the autobiographical exercises of memory’.131 For Cavarero, each one of us lives him or herself as his or her own story, without distinguishing the ‘I’ who narrates from the ‘self’ who is narrated. The familiar ‘sense of self’ which is derived from this process of circular memory is, for Cavarero, not the fruit of an intimate and separated existence, or the product of our memory. It is neither the fantasmatic outcome of a project, nor the imaginary protagonist of the story that we want to have. It is not a fiction that we can distinguish from reality. It is rather the familiar sense of every self, in the temporal extension of a life-story that is this and not another.132 The narratable self, for Cavarero, ‘makes her home’ in the narrating memory: ‘the inalienable dwelling of her living her/himself, remembering


herself’.133 It is this spontaneous process, this ‘sense of being narratable’, and the awareness that the others whom we encounter are also narratable selves with unique life-stories, which, I contend, enables us to refer to a singular existent irreducible to her discursively-produced subjectivity. Thus, for Cavarero, the … particular contents – the pieces of story that the memory narrates with its typical and unmasterable process of intermittence and forgetting – are inessential.134 The narratable self consists in the pre-reflective sense that my life-story belongs to me alone; it coincides with the ‘uncontrollable narrative impulse of memory that produces the text’.135 Thus considered, the contents of the text itself are indeed superfluous; the narratable self is neither the product of the life-story recounted by memory, nor a construction of the text, nor an effect of the performative power of narration. For Cavarero, ‘the self-sensing of the self as narratable’ is ‘irremediably mixed up with [her text]’136 but is not derived from it. The narratable self is ontologically anterior to her text: Put simply, through the unreflecting knowledge of my ‘sense of self’ [dell’assaporarmi], I know that I have a story and that I consist in this story – even when I do not pause to recount it to myself.137 Moreover, as Cavarero remarks, someone’s life-story always results from an existence which has exposed her to the world: ‘the one who is exposed generates and is generated by this life-story – this and not another – which results from such an exposition’.138 The inevitability of our ‘nakedness’ (to adapt Ricoeur’s term) or exposure to the world – ‘the constitutive coinciding of appearing and being’139 – defines, for Cavarero, the non-substantive, expressive, exhibitive character of identity. Indeed, for Cavarero, the existent is the exposable and the narratable: ‘neither exposability nor narratability, which together constitute this peculiarly human uniqueness, can be taken away’.140 We have seen that the strongest post-structuralist suspicion is reserved not only for the category of the unique, but also for the (etymologically related) notion of unity, understood as a fictitious gloss on a fundamentally linguistic subjectivity, irredeemably welded to the ‘metaphysics of substance’. Conceived thus, unity becomes the foundation for the idea of self as radical origin, and the stable, continuous, coherent


base for the ‘reflective self-presence of consciousness to itself’.141 Both Cavarero and Ricoeur offer alternative constructions of the concept of unity as it impacts on ‘the narratable self’ (Cavarero) and ‘narrative identity’ (Ricoeur). Cavarero argues that the ‘self-sensing of the self as narratable’ encapsulates a desire for narration which, again, is not concerned with the contents of the life-story, but with the ‘naked uniqueness’ which is present at birth, but immediately starts to dissolve in the discontinuities of time and discursivity. For Cavarero, everyone is born both unique and one: Within the scene of birth, the unity of the newborn is materially visible and incontrovertible through its glaring appearance … This existent which only just exists … thus eludes every postmodern perspective because she cannot be thought within a philosophy that is fragmentary or eccentric. The newborn – unique and immediately expressive in the fragile totality of her exposure – has her unity precisely in this totally nude self-exposure.142 It is the loss of this unity that, for Cavarero, stimulates the sense of lack that feeds the desire for the narration of the self. Thus ‘the identity of a unique being has its only tangible unity – the unity that he/she seeks because it is unique – in the tale of his/her story’.143 This unity has no homogeneity, no substantial reality; rather it is what the narratable self desires, even in the face of the most fragmentary and discontinuous, untrustworthy and elusive, manifestations of the ‘autobiographical impulse of memory’. Furthermore, since the scene of action of the lifestory is ‘contextual and mutable’, and the self producing the story ‘intermittent and fragmentary’, ‘the story that results therefore does not have at its centre a compact and coherent identity. Rather, it has at its centre an unstable and insubstantial unity.’144 Cavarero summarises her position as follows, From a relational and expositive identity, which is immersed in the flux of existence and which is unpredictable by definition, the lifestory of a self whose identity gives itself as a simple unity, as the coherent development of an immutable substance, certainly cannot result. This unity is rather the temporal succession of an unrepeatable existence, which, continuing to appear, makes a story for herself … The unity lies precisely in the insubstitutability that persists in time because it continues to present itself in time.145


In ‘Life: a Story in Search of a Narrator’, Ricoeur approaches unity in a similar way: In the place of an ego enchanted by itself, a self is born, taught by cultural symbols, first among which are the stories received in the literary tradition. These stories give unity – not unity of substance but narrative wholeness.146 The unity of ‘narrative wholeness’ (rather than substance) to which Ricoeur refers does not participate in the rather one-dimensional post-Nietzschean/Freudian approach outlined above; rather, in rejecting the absolutist binary of fixed, pre-given substance versus radical dispersal of multiple personae, he is able to recover a sense of unity that can incorporate both change and cohesion, both discontinuity and selfconstancy without submitting to the spectre of self-identical substantialism so feared by the post-Saussureans. The notion of narrative unity which Ricoeur proposes derives not from permanence of substance, but is conferred in the continuous process of telling and re-telling stories about ourselves. Ricoeur compares this process of ‘working-through’ (Durcharbeitung) to the experience of psychoanalysis, where the analysand comes to ‘recognise’ herself in the stories she tells about herself: the very goal of the whole process of the cure … is to substitute for the bits and pieces of stories that are unintelligible as well as unbearable, a coherent and acceptable story, in which the analysand can recognize his or her self-constancy [ipseity].147 Thus, for Ricoeur, like Cavarero, the conferral of unity upon the self in the form of narrative identity/narratable selfhood need not imply an espousal of coherence and sovereign subjectivity. He emphasises the fact that narrative identity is not a stable and seamless identity: the fictional component of a narrative about oneself enables precisely those ‘imaginative variations’ that destabilise narrative identity. As Kathleen Blamey notes, The story told is always reshaped in the narrating itself; in fact, the identity of the story would seem to lie not in one single account but in the innumerable retellings, in the modifications and alterations that give it a temporal constitution.148


Ricoeur is aware of the theoretical limitations of his account. He observes, Just as it is possible to compose several plots on the subject of the same incidents … so it is always possible to weave different, even opposed plots about our lives … In this sense, narrative identity continues to make and unmake itself … [it thus] becomes the name of a problem as much as it is that of a solution.149 Interpreting myself in terms of a life-story confers a (contingent, shifting and incomplete) narrative identity and (ambiguous and provisional) unity on that self; but where does singularity enter Ricoeur’s appropriation of the Freudian process of ‘working-through’? If the narrated self is an ‘unstable mixture of fabulation and actual experience’,150 not a given but a task or process – a text with many lacunae – in what sense can we speak of it as a unique centre of perspective on the world, an irreplaceable existent? In Oneself as Another, Ricoeur writes, The dialectic [of concordance and discordance] consists in the fact that, following from the line of concordance, the character151 draws his or her singularity from the unity of a life considered a temporal totality which is itself singular and distinguished from all others. Following the line of discordance, this temporal totality is threatened by the unforeseeable events that punctuate it (encounters, accidents etc.)152 It seems that, according to Ricoeur’s account, singularity is derived from, or is a function of, unity, understood as temporal totality. It is thus linked to self-constancy and sameness. However, if the person cannot be considered as an entity distinct from her experiences, but participates in the ‘condition of dynamic identity peculiar to the story recounted’, the precarious or fragile nature of her uniqueness is revealed. The disparity, contingency and discontinuity of the ‘unforeseeable’ events which, read as an ambiguously coherent whole, constitute the narrative identity of ‘I, me, myself’, ceaselessly call into question the validity of my perceived singularity. This singularity is further threatened by the ‘open-endedness’ (as well as the unrecallable beginning) of my life: Now there is nothing in real life that serves as a narrative beginning; memory is lost in the hazes of early childhood; my birth, and, with greater reason, the act through which I was conceived belong more


to the histories of others … rather than to me. As for my death, it will finally be recounted only in the stories of those who survive me. I am always moving towards my death, and this prevents me from ever grasping it as a narrative end.153 The notion of ‘belonging to the histories of others’ seems to indicate a further difficulty for the rehabilitation of the singular self. The lifehistory of each person is inextricably woven through the life-histories of others: ‘whole sections of my life are part of the life-history of others – of my parents, my friends, my companions in work or leisure’.154 Cavarero, too, emphasises the role of ‘the other’ in the construction of the ‘narratable self’: for Cavarero, the narratable self is constitutively in relation with others. She writes that ‘the identity of the self, crystallised in the story, is … constituted by the relations of her appearance to others in the world’.155 Indeed, it is this expositive and relational existence – ‘this irremediable exposure to others’156 – which, for Cavarero, averts the foundationalist synthesis of the totalisable ‘One and All’: Fragile and exposed, the existent belongs to a world-scene where interaction with other existents is unforeseeable and potentially infinite. As in The Arabian Nights, the stories intersect with each other. Never isolated in the chimerical, total completion of its sense, one cannot be there without the other.157 What light does our exploration of narrative existence in the work of Nancy – and particularly Cavarero and Ricoeur – cast on our understanding of the category of singularity? It seems that my singularity, if I can be said to possess such a thing, is completely contingent; it is without beginning or end; it is relational and expositive – inextricably entangled in the life-stories of others, the ‘living, continuous overlap of all the life-stories’.158 Furthermore, if, as we observed in Chapter 4, my experience is prereflectively colonised by the psycho-linguistic workings of hegemony, then we might conclude here that our sense of uniqueness – derived as it is from our experiences – is equally enabled and delimited by our discursive positionings. These objections do indeed hold considerable weight if applied to a notion of singularity based on a substantive conception of uniqueness as grounded in a permanent, pre-given essence. But if we regard singularity neither as a substantialist159 illusion nor, with Butler, as merely a ‘socially instituted and maintained norm … of intelligibility’,160 but as an interpretation indefinitely pursued by an embodied, finite existent


we move closer to a sustainable anti-foundationalist conception of uniqueness. Bearing in mind ‘the constitutive unmasterability’161 of the ‘who’ emphasised by Cavarero, we acknowledge that alterity permeates my singularity at every level, whether through the discontinuities and contingencies of the (re)configured narrative self, through the diffusion of my uniqueness in and through other narrative selves, through my ‘topped and tailed’ life-story, lacking beginning or end, or, perhaps most significantly, through the otherness of the discursively mediated nature of my subjectivity. The paradox of this theoretical standpoint is that it reveals a ‘me and no other’ that is nonetheless predicated on otherness. The play of difference or dispossession which disrupts the (transitional and relational) construction of my unity and singularity is also the condition for my fragile uniqueness: that which both anchors my ipseity and casts it adrift. Hence Ricoeur’s comment that ‘there is no true testimony without false testimony’.162 Developing the notions of uniqueness contained in the narrative theory of Cavarero and Ricoeur, I suggest that singularity itself operates in two distinguishable yet intersecting registers. At the pre-reflective level, by virtue of the irreducible insubstitutability I assume by being born ‘unique and one’, and thereafter corporeally anchored as I live until I die, ‘I’ and all other ‘I’s possess a luminous, existential singularity which is derived from our being-as-existents; it is the very ‘thereness’ of my ‘who’. It is the acknowledgement – and no more163 – that I am someone. I derive this understanding of pre-reflective singularity primarily from Nancy’s assertion that ‘existence is the essence of the subject to the extent that it is, prior to any predication’.164 At the reflective level, singularity, understood in the sense of ipseity or narrative identity, is an opaque and vulnerable construct : the product of a continuous (and arguably spontaneous) process of discursively mediated figuration and refiguration undertaken by an individual existent. It is fragile in that it is quasi-fictional: it is an ongoing but retrospective organisation of life, an attempt to ‘fix the outline of these provisional ends’,165 a ‘consolation’ in the face of nothingness. Yet the (semi)fictionality of my singularity is not conferred, as the post-structuralists would have it, by the non-individuated play of difference, which, through the process of auto-affection, or purely through the narrative Text itself (Stanton), creates the illusion of my identity. Rather, developing the standpoints of both Ricoeur and Cavarero, it is (notwithstanding the alterity which saturates the conditions of my acting, speaking, writing) an affirmation – both a desire for, and a choice in favour of meaning – conferred by the self-stories related by ‘me’, a


finite, contextually located flesh-and-blood existent, a constitutionally incomplete yet reflective self.166 Singularity, thus considered, is a dynamic, diachronic yet disrupted process, traced through and through with difference and alterity: insubstitutably ‘there’ (or ‘here’) at a pre-reflective, existential level; more or less deferred and dispersed in a non-totalisable plurality of interpretations; alienated by the hegemonic conditions of discursively mediated existence; yet partially recovered/created in the ‘insubstantial unity’ which my (conscious and unconscious) imagination and desire weaves from the disparate and contingent experiences of my embodied existence.

VII Connecting specificity to system: the (female) ‘I’ between text and reference [d]ifference is both a part of the texture of lived experience, as well as the basis of unity and connection.167 Writing on the impact of postmodern thought on the autobiographical subject, Laura Marcus observes that ‘the categories of consciousness, self-presence, subjectivity and identity became concepts to be critiqued or defended’.168 I hope that the preceding discussion demonstrates my conviction that the categories of consciousness, (partial) self-presence, subjectivity and identity are concepts that need to be critiqued and – not ‘or’ – defended. The challenge now is to apply the deconstructive/ hermeneutic analysis of singularity-in-alterity – the non-coincidence of the self with a self that is nonetheless mine – to the question of the female autobiographical subject. In her recent work, Women and Autobiography in the Twentieth Century: Remembered Futures (1997), Linda Anderson summarises the aporias of the female autobiographical subject-position:169 How [can] women represent themselves in terms of a genre which as genre … derives its coherence from the unity of the self, from a self which transcends inconsistency and difference. As this suggests, the identity of autobiography as a genre … is put into question in a feminist critique of autobiography as well as (or because of) how ‘she’ identifies as ‘I’, that is takes up a position in writing which she cannot ‘naturally’ assume.170 As Nancy Miller notes, ‘Because women have not had the same historical relation of identity to origin, institution, production that men have had,


they have not, I think (collectively) felt burdened by too much Self, Ego, Cogito, etc’.171 Moreover, the difficulty of saying ‘I’ – if ‘I’ suggests the seamlessly unified, self-identical sovereign subject of phallogocentrism – for women autobiographers cannot be evaluated outside of the ‘difficulty of saying ‘she’: ‘in other words the construction of women as autobiographical subjects is inevitably implicated in – or a part of – the fluctuating discourses which construct the meaning of gender itself’.172 As we have seen, it is in response to the masculinist construction of the coherent, unified transcendental subject that post-structuralist autobiographical theorists such as Benstock and Stanton have decried the autobiographical self as a ‘duplicitous fiction’; stressed the radical disjuncture (or permanent dispossession) between the self and itself; valorised absence, discordancy, otherness; scorned the ‘facile presumption of referentiality’. We recall that, for Benstock, women’s self-writing is fractured with ‘fissures of female discontinuity’, while Stanton’s excision of the female ‘bio’ (life) in favour of a purely textual construction of female subjectivity ‘dramatises the fundamental alterity and nonpresence of the subject’. Despite the ubiquity of post-structuralist approaches to feminist literary theory, it is true that the ‘textualisation’ of the female autobiographical subject has not gone unchallenged. The recent (re)development of a school of feminist thought known as ‘personal criticism’ opposes the perceived impersonality or objectivity of high theory with an acknowledgement, and indeed a celebration, of the situatedness of the theorist. Autobiographical writing has a particular resonance for these critics since, in its locatedness or particularity, it rejects, in Nancy K. Miller’s account, ‘the grandiosity of abstraction that inhibits … the crisis of representativity’.173 Yet, in promoting a closer attention to the sexed specificity of women’s autobiographical voices, Miller is not unaware of the numerous pitfalls associated with this position: It was clear that feminist theory had arrived at a crisis in language, a crisis notably inseparable from the pronouns of subjectivity: between the indictment of the feminist universal as a white fiction brought by women of color and the post-structuralist suspicion of a grounded subject, what are the conditions under which as feminists one (not to say ‘I’) can say ‘we’?174 Despite these conceptual difficulties, the American feminist critic, Mary Ann Caws, insists on the retention of the ‘pronouns of subjectivity’, believing that the saying of ‘we’ and ‘I’ enables alternations between the


modes of the individual and the collective; she writes of her ‘unshakeable belief in involvement and in coherence, in warmth and in relation’.175 The spectrum of theory regarding the female autobiographical subject appears to offer us some rather polarised options: either we can limit ourselves to negatively tracing discontinuities and valorising absences (with the aim of subverting the masculinist symbolic), or we can (more or less) optimistically seek out the ‘warmth’ of coherence, relationality and connectivity. I believe that applying our hermeneutic/deconstructive model of the singularity-in-alterity of the experiential self to the status of the female autobiographical subject can allow an approach which does not valorise either discontinuity or continuity, fragmentation or stable coherence. I will pursue this interpretation through the categories of experience, singularity and collectivity. Experience If theoretical accounts do not fit actual biographical selves and the material realities of their lives, then there is something wrong with the theory, not the lives. Auto/biographies, both written and spoken, are intertextual, but within this there is the primacy of everyday life and its concrete material events, persons, conversations [emphasis added].176 Once more succinctly capturing the implicit ‘either/or’ with which much contemporary feminist post-structuralist theory presents the reader, Sidonie Smith observes that ‘[d]ifficulties negotiating the terrain of “the real” lead in fact to opposing orientations to experience’. First she presents the ‘either’: For some there is an experience outside representation to which the autobiographical text refers. And there is an ontological basis to identity in this experience … [the text thus] seeks to uncover the ‘true’ self and the ‘truth’ about that self’s experiences … the essential difference in body, psyche, and modes of knowing and being in the world. Then the ‘or’: For others such a positivist approach to experience neglects the relationship of experience to discourse, the artifactual nature of representation, the operations and apparati of cultural determinations.


From this perspective, there is no subject outside language as textuality displaces any transparent experience. And since language operates to fix subjects, the subject of resistance can only engage in a drama of negativity … a drama of the what-I-am-not.177 The model of the experiential that we formulated in Chapter 4 neither posits an essential, ‘true’ or extra-linguistic subject of experience nor a purely textual, intrinsically discursive self thus alienated from her experiences. The either/or of transcendental subjectivism/linguistic determinism becomes the both/and of an opaque self who posits but does not possess her experiences. Why is this model of the experiential particularly appropriate for theorising female subjectivities? First, because it offers an account of both experience and selfhood that not only acknowledges but incorporates the negativity and alienation generated by our insurmountably hegemonic being-in-the-world. Feminist post-structuralists have demonstrated this central fact of our existence as sexed beings over and over again: that positing (sexed) selfhood or identity as cause or origin of our being masks the fact that these supposed origins are actually ‘effects of institutions, practices, discourses with multiple and diffuse points of origin’.178 Thus, argue these critics,179 our experience of ‘being-women’ itself must be regarded with the utmost suspicion, due to its capacity to reproduce, rather than contest, ideological systems. In this vein, Jane Gallop argues that the politics of experience is inevitably a conservative politics for it cannot help but conserve traditional ideological constructs which are not recognized as such but are taken for ‘the real’.180 This thorough-going suspicion is well-justified from a feminist perspective; it should not be elided in a cosy understanding of female experience as unproblematically predicated on universalising connections and similarities derived from some form of female ‘essence’. It is right that women’s experiences should not be interpreted as ideologically innocent; rather, they should indeed be subject to theoretical interrogation and critique. But, as we know, the critique which some feminist poststructuralists apply to the category of female experience is so allconsuming that it disappears as a positive concept. For instance, in Smith’s account quoted above, displacement of transparent experience by textuality can only result in the negativity of ‘what is not’; the process is apparently inexorable.


The deconstructive moment of distanciation, operating in dialecticwithout-synthesis with the positive, interpretive hermeneutic element of our theoretical framework allows scope for the incisive critique offered by feminist post-structuralists. This ‘moment’ recognises that experience, if it is to be understood at all, must be understood in and through distance or difference.181 Applied to the notion of women’s experiences, it disallows the possibility of categorising that experience as purely the conscious relationship of an ontologically stable, coherent, essentially female subject to an immediately encountered world. The ‘authenticity’ of female experience, thus conceived, is continuously displaced. The deconstructive moment could be read as decontextualising women’s experiences, stripping away the historical, sociological, ethnological, psychological and physiological elements of our experiences. This post-structuralist intervention temporarily holds in suspension the very deictic coordinates of sex, class, ethnicity, age, sexual preference and so on that locate and situate individual women and exposes the non-individuated play of difference, absence and distortion that permeates women’s experiences at the deepest levels. The decontextualisation of women’s experiences thus acts as a mode of reduction (epoche) and explanation, a (necessarily partial) exposure to the uncomfortable fact that one’s experience is both enabled and delimited by ‘the epistemological, ontological, and logical structures of a masculinist signifying economy’.182 Moreover, the multiple significations of my ‘gender’ cannot be extracted from the political or cultural ‘intersections’ which produce and maintain it: If one ‘is’ a woman, that is surely not all one is; the term fails to be exhaustive, not because a pregendered ‘person’ transcends the specific paraphernalia of its gender, but because gender is not always constituted coherently or consistently in different historical contexts, and because gender intersects with racial, class, ethnic, sexual, and regional modalities of discursively constituted identities.183 In short, the moment of the deconstructive epoche alerts us to the feminist implications of the post-Saussurean observation that ‘what we can experience consciously is determined by a system which always escapes consciousness’.184 The potentially inexorable progression towards the dissolution of female experience in pure textualism (which is implicit in the deconstructive element of our integrative post-Saussurean/hermeneutic framework) is ceaselessly held in check by the moment of appropriation which allows a reconnection with the specificity of the diverse and contradictory experiences of individual women.


Appropriation is the moment when the ‘undecidability’ of deconstruction becomes the ‘inexhaustibility’ of hermeneutic phenomenology; it is the moment when the linguistic closure of the postSaussurean epoche is lifted, and Sprachlichkeit (linguisticality) becomes open to the ‘innovative unpredictability’185 of experience. From the admission that Sprachlichkeit is the ontological condition of my experience-inthe-world it need not follow that my experience is a merely an alienated function of Sprachlichkeit, which, at most, can only reiterate negativities: ‘what/where/who I am not’. The moment of appropriation is as essential to the internal dynamic of a postmetaphysical account of women’s experiences as the inclusion of the critical element of distanciation. From the point of view of feminist analysis, the appropriation of the ‘mineness’ of the experiential is necessary in order to hold the deconstructive slide in check. The reactivation of the deictic coordinates that were suspended by the deconstructive epoche – from my own sexed body,186 my class, my ethnicity, my age, through to my lifestyle preferences, my education, my work, my geographical location and so on – reopens the multiple, contradictory and shifting axes of identity along which my experiences flow; the fluctuating, contingent points of conjuncture where these myriad coordinates intersect are the ‘punctuations’ where ‘I’ am momentarily (ambiguously) present or, better, anchored. As Raymond Tallis reminds us, ‘there is no absolute difference between the self that has a context and the context that surrounds it’.187 Appropriation, then, cannot be interpreted as a simple statement of my being-as-a-woman (which, after all, is ensnared in conceptual and discursive tangles); rather, it is a complex affirmation – which continues to be haunted by the ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ in the form of poststructuralist critique – of the ‘mineness’ of my experiences, of the nonself-identical yet partially present self which both possesses and is dispossessed of these experiences; it acknowledges my being-as-awoman as one contextual strand among many, and one which may be only partially disentangled and interpreted. Nonetheless, following my commitment to the phenomenological/hermeneutic ‘choice in favour of meaning’, I believe that it is important for feminist theorists of the experiential to lay claim to these experiences – in the face of deconstructive opposition – rather than allowing the threads to tangle endlessly upon themselves in confusion and discontinuity. Seeking out and affirming continuities and similarities in women’s experiences from within an anti-foundationalist deconstructive/hermeneutic framework which simultaneously imposes a series of deconstructive interventions to prevent the attribution of these experiences to a female


essence – conceived as an irreducible ‘fixed and static “real” ’188 – may allow the female subject (whoever ‘she’ is/was/may become) to engage in what Sean Burke terms ‘the productive reconciliation of the subject and alterity’.189 Total interpretive possession of my experiences ‘as a woman’ is impossible; yet the aporia generated by this dispossession can be temporarily traversed and inhabited by the acts of appropriation which posit and affirm the ‘ownness’190 of my deictically coordinated experiences, as belonging (and also not-belonging) to a decentred but quasi-present self occupying a series of particular historical/cultural/ political spaces. Let us return to the experience of pregnancy and the act of giving birth by way of example. We can begin with two affirmations: ‘I live in a female rather than a male body; my female body has the (perceived) potential to give birth.’ Immediately, however, these statements plunge us into post-structuralist doubt.191 The perceived ‘naturalness’ of the act of giving birth is inevitably compromised – and indeed arguably constructed – by the discourses of sexuality, reproduction, maternity, technology and so on that inhabit childbirth at the deepest social and political levels. The capacity to give birth cannot be read as purely biologically defined, nor as a given to which all women bear the same relationship. As the feminist critic Michelle Stanworth notes, While it is the case that the lives of all women are shaped by their biological selves, and by their assumed or actual capacity to bear children, our bodies do not impose upon us a common experience of reproduction; on the contrary, our bodies stand as powerful reminders of the differentiating effects of age, health, disability, strength and fertility history. There is, moreover, little reason to assume that the biological potential to give birth has an identical meaning for women, regardless of their social circumstances or their wishes with regard to childbearing.192 The differentiating elements which fracture and disconnect women’s experiences of child birth are taken to even further lengths by thinkers such as Judith Butler. Butler is uncomfortable with the discourse of female ‘sameness’ implied in the relationship of child birth to the female body; indeed, she doubts whether the question of reproduction is, or ought to be, what is absolutely salient or primary in the sexing of the body. If it is, I think it’s the imposition of a norm, not a neutral description of biological constraints.193


If we characterise these viewpoints of alienated maternal function as the distanciative element in our model – the ‘not-mineness’ of experience – then where can the appropriative claim to ‘what is mine’ re-enter? The existential phenomenologist Erwin Straus, writing on the subject of ‘mineness’, observes that The meaning of ‘mine’ is determined in relation to, and in contraposition to, the world … to which I am nevertheless a party. The meaning of ‘mine’ is not comprehensible in the unmediated antithesis of ‘I’ and ‘not-I’, own and strange, subject and object … Everything points to the fact that separateness and union originate in the same ground.194 Adrienne Rich speaks of the experience of pregnancy in a way which might indicate affirmative intervention: In early pregnancy the stirring of the fetus felt like ghostly tremors of my own body, later like the movements of a being imprisoned in me; but both sensations were my sensations, contributing to my own sense of physical and psychic space.195 In parallel with Straus’s account of the dialectics of mineness, the ‘strange’ ‘not-mineness’ of the movements of the growing foetus are nonetheless experienced here as belonging to me: a phenomenological fact which the feminist philosopher Iris Marion Young terms ‘myself in the mode of not being myself’.196 Young’s qualification of this phraseology is illuminating: The pregnant subject is not simply a splitting in which the two halves lie open and still, but a dialectic. The pregnant woman experiences herself as a source and participant in a creative process. Though she does not plan and direct it, neither does it wash over her; rather, she is this process, this change.197 Thus the pregnant subject is an apt metaphor for the ‘productive reconciliation of the subject and alterity’: she appropriates her experiences, lays claim to them as her own, yet acknowledges that she is neither the sole radical origin of the changes happening to her body nor is she detached from the discursive underpinnings which situate and partially constitute her: the polarities of textuality/referentiality, inner/outer, subject/object, passivity/creativity, discursivity/intentionality are blurred.


We have seen that Ricoeur’s call to move ‘beyond the false alternatives of the cogito and the anti-cogito’ can be transposed as a move beyond the false alternatives of the experience-as-ideological-construct and experience-as-origin to an understanding of women’s experiences as simultaneously receptive and agential, meaningful and duplicitous. In restoring the significance of the experiential self as more than a mode of textuality but less than unmediated referentiality, I believe that this model of the experiential provides a productive point of departure for a postmetaphysical analysis of the female autobiographical subject. Singularity-in-alterity/singularity-in-collectivity We recall that in her critique of feminist and non-feminist autobiographical theory, Domna Stanton performs a kind of deconstructionist/feminist epoche which excludes the facticity of female experiences. Furthermore, in her explicit rejection of the ‘facile notion of referentiality’, she denies the possibility of the representation of unique, individually situated women’s lives; for Stanton, the intentional creation of a purely textual female self, predicated on the absence of the flesh-and-blood female existent and her experiences, is the founding act of autogynography. The female autobiographical subject, thus alienated by the absolute severance of the mimetic contract between her text and her life, is badly in need of theoretical rehabilitation. What Ricoeur terms the ‘capacity for self-designation belonging to the subjects of experience’198 must have a – qualified – place in the interpretation of women’s autobiographical texts. Using the dialectical model of the experiential outlined above as my framework, I argue that an affirmation of singularity (in alterity), (partial) presence and (insubstantial) unity need not be incommensurable with what Liz Stanley terms ‘the referential specificity of women’s lives as distinctly female’;199 and, moreover, that a move towards referentiality need not include the abandonment of the textual aspects of selfhood, nor need it imply a regressive embrace of the transparent, self-identical, autonomous autobiographical subject. The experiential has a significant part to play in this interpretation. If we understand the individual self as contextually inseparable from the ‘events’ of her experiences, indeed as participating in the condition of dynamic identity which the stories she and others tell about her experiences confer on her, then her bio or life returns to the scene of writing the autobiographical text. Yet the bio which returns here is not predicated on an automatic naturalisation of experience in an unmediated relationship between words and things. Neither is it the radical origin of a ‘valorised


notion of female identity … conjoined with an explicit or implicit belief in the referentiality and truth-value of autogynographies’.200 It is useful to remember here exactly why Stanton and other post-structuralist/feminist theorists of autobiography want to excise the bio: they appear to believe that to accept the theoretical inclusion of the bio necessitates an acceptance of the seamlessly unified, disembodied, autonomous, self-identical transparent self of masculinist thought: the ‘spectre of phallogopresence’.201 But the hermeneutic/deconstructive reevaluation of the experiential bio proposed here should hold no such fears for the anti-foundationalist feminist autobiographical theorist since, while it allows room for self-reflection and partial self-presence, it wholeheartedly rejects any recourse either to a masculinist, transcendental, sovereign subject or to an essentially female self whose life may be ‘weightlessly’ described in the text. It does not refer to some extralinguistic or pre-linguistic ‘first ground’ outside symbolic systems of representation which ‘guarantee[s] the epistemological correspondence between narrative and lived life’.202 Having cast off these epistemological certainties, the bio is neither wholly present nor wholly absent in the autobiographical text. Conceived in the Ricoeurian sense as ‘an unstable mixture of fabulation and actual experience’,203 the bio in autobiography becomes an uncertain, fragile yet inexhaustible flow of mediated references; it is vulnerable to deconstructive suspicion yet provides an indispensable series of indirect connections to the lived reality of an embodied, sexed self in the material world, thus preserving a space for ‘the referential specificity of women’s lives as distinctly female’.204 One may reconnect with diversity, contingency, ambiguity, indeterminacy, with ‘the nonuniversal, the colorful, among whom is “woman” ’205 without severing the link between textuality and referentiality entirely. Thus experience acts as a series of provisional and contingent anchorings which both inform and distort the narrative surface of the autobiographical text. It operates not as absolute foundation, but as that which is ‘taken up’206 by the subject as she pursues the singularity and unity she desires through the process that is ipseity. If the reincorporation of the experiential provides a place for the (ambiguously) referential in theories of women’s autobiographies, I believe that the notion of ipseity or narrative identity – which posits a dynamic, continuous and incomplete identity always under construction – can provide the purely synchronic play of narrative surface (promoted by theorists such as Stanton and Benstock) with a muchneeded vertical or diachronic dimension. The diachronic or ‘depth’ element is provided by the affirmation that the singularity of one’s


life-story is an interpretation both lived and indefinitely pursued over time by an embodied, finite existent. Virginia Woolf’s observation is pertinent here: Here I come to one of the memoir writer’s difficulties … They leave out the person to whom things happened. The reason is that it is so difficult to describe any human being. So they say: ‘this is what happened’; but they do not say what the person was like to whom it happened. And the events mean very little unless we know first to whom it happened. Who was I then?207 Reintroducing the ‘unique, unrepeatable, personal identity’208 of the woman to whom the events of her life-story happened is, I argue, a vital move for feminist autobiographical theorists. It is vital because if women’s selves are so radically dispersed and fragmented across the panoply of discourses as to make their representations nothing more than pure performance (pace Butler) something is lost: the subject of autobiography, the psycho-biographical signified, the ‘woman to whom things happened’, and her ‘li[fe]-with-meaning’.209 The reluctance of post-structuralist feminists to engage with the idea of the unique is understandable, given its associations with masculinist notions of autonomy, transcendence, transparency. Yet, as we have seen, it is possible to theorise singularity without committing oneself to any of these notions. We recall that singularity, thus considered, may be read as a dynamic, diachronic yet disrupted process, traced through and through with difference and alterity. It is insubstitutably ‘there’ (or ‘here’) at a pre-reflective, existential level yet deferred and dispersed in a non-totalisable plurality of interpretations. It is alienated by the hegemonic conditions of discursively mediated existence; yet partially recovered/created in the ‘insubstantial unity’ which my (conscious and unconscious) imagination and desire210 weaves from the disparate and contingent experiences of my embodied existence. Moreover, my singularity is not understood as the unified and atomic core of consciousness which is the guarantor of all meaning but is found relationally and expositively in the diffusion of my uniqueness in and through other narrative selves: my ‘life-story is different from all others precisely because it is constitutively interwoven with all others’.211 Understanding singularity as a non-substantive, expressive, exhibitive mode of identity which continually makes and unmakes itself may help to avoid the either/ors of the feminist post-structuralist position by positing ‘me’ not as a purely textual creation, predicated on absence, nor


as a directly representable referent, predicated on absolute presence, but as a sexed existent, a contextually located, constitutionally incomplete yet reflective self. Thus conceived, the singular self is not a stable, selfsame entity with a coherent, univocal story. Indeed, as we have seen, the play of difference or dispossession which disrupts the (transitional and relational) construction of my unity and singularity is also the condition for my fragile uniqueness: that which both anchors my ipseity and casts it adrift. Thus a constitutively sexed but ontologically incomplete autobiographical ‘I’ may be posited between textuality and referentiality: an insubstitutability ‘not necessarily a lie but certainly a highly complex truth’.212 The narrative of each woman autobiographer’s text, scored through as it is with alterity and dissonance, need not merely trace ‘fissures of discontinuity’, or replay over and over ‘the drama of what-I-am-not’; rather, in affirming the particularity, the specificity, the singularity of ‘my’ story that is mine and no other’s yet is predicated on otherness, each writer, in all the contingencies of her finitude, demonstrates her ‘diverse ways of understanding and inhabiting the subject-position of “woman” ’.213 Yet ‘speaking as a woman’ in an autobiographical text risks erasing the many profound differences between women beneath a false representativity: ‘the super-personal paradigm of Woman’.214 Adrienne Rich observes that there is no neutral place to stand free and clear in which one’s words do not prescriptively affect or mediate the experience of others, nor is there a way to decisively demarcate a boundary between one’s location and all others … We are collectively caught in an intricate, delicate web in which each action I take, discursive or otherwise pulls on, breaks off, or maintains the tension in many strands of a web in which others find themselves moving also.215 The deconstructive dimension of our model insists upon the radical historical and cultural variability which marks the ‘volatile collectivity’216 of the social group ‘women’. This distanciating moment resists a reconciliation or assimilation of the insubstitutability of each woman with the collectivity ‘women’. Yet the interpretive, hermeneutic element of our framework seeks provisional meanings, tenuous continuities (always arrested by the intervention of deconstructive discontinuities) between women’s stories; it in turn arrests the extremity of ‘hyper-individualism’217 which is the ultimate logic of the assertion of radical differences between women.218


Starting not from ‘the authority/ authenticity of experience’ nor from ‘the illusion of experience’ as revealed in women’s autobiographical texts, but from the uncertain and shifting ground-without-a-ground between textuality and referentiality that we have characterised as the domain of the female autobiographical subject, the continuities and discontinuities between women’s stories may be no more than glimpsed as potential lines of connection, brief vistas of different horizons, before they are submerged once more in the plethora of deictic coordinates which anchor each woman’s story in a multiplicity of discourses. The rapprochement between hermeneutics and deconstruction thus demonstrates that at the level of reference, at the level of textuality, at the level of singularity, at the level of collectivity, ‘distanciation is the condition of understanding’.219 As Merleau-Ponty observes, that which permits us to centre our existence is also that which prevents us from centring it absolutely.220

Conclusion

For who we are is something unfulfillable, an ever new undertaking and an ever new defeat.1 In Authorship: from Plato to the Postmodern (1995), Sean Burke speaks of the need for ‘the productive reconciliation of the subject and alterity’.2 In Logics of Disintegration (1987), Peter Dews, following Merleau-Ponty, makes a related point: he observes that ‘in the case of interpretation, there must be an anticipation of meaning which is both confirmed and disappointed’.3 In this book, I have attempted to bring a hermeneutic/ deconstructive ‘both/and’ approach to questions of the experiential, self-presence, subjectivity, singularity and self-representation. The rapprochement I have proposed between hermeneutics and deconstruction – which forms the basis of my framework for exploring the experiential – provides a postmetaphysical alternative to both ‘the sovereignty of the subject’ and ‘the sovereignty of the sign’. It acknowledges ‘the recalcitrance of the existential to the category’,4 while not forgetting that the category, in the form of hegemonic discourse, both enables and controls the existential at every level. In this way, we can move beyond both the horizontal ‘rhizomatics’ of pure textualism and the vertical ‘hierarchy’ of objective truth to a concept of experiential selfhood that avoids both the ‘atomic core’ of the cogito and the dissipative non-identity of the anti-cogito. In applying this model, I have questioned the primacy of différance and alterity. It is true that otherness is not added on to selfhood from outside, as though to prevent its solipsistic drift, but … belongs instead to the tenor of meaning and to the ontological constitution of selfhood5 197


My existence is predicated on otherness. Alterity saturates the conditions of my acting, speaking, writing, being: it both anchors my selfhood and casts it adrift. Following Gadamer, ‘one must lose oneself in order to find oneself’.6 Yet following the phenomenological presupposition of hermeneutics, that there must be a ‘choice in favour of meaning’7 – which is in no sense a denial of the existence of undecidability, discontinuity and non-meaning – I affirm the primacy of ‘me’ – the unique, flesh and blood, sexed, finite and contextually located existent; a constitutionally incomplete yet reflective self who both possesses and is dispossessed of her experiences. With regard to feminist theory, post-structuralism is a valuable tool. With post-structuralist or deconstructive approaches, we can trace the process of unravelling meaning within masculinist, unilinear, heterosexist discourses; we can explore the aporia or lacunae exposed by this process of hidden disintegration. These approaches illuminate denied ideological subtexts; oppose the sameness and stasis of monolithic thinking; demand that we lose the ‘metaphysical comforts’ of transparent identity, self-evident meaning and immediate self-reflection. Yet, as we have seen, the anti-representationalist aesthetic which poststructuralism offers feminist theory calls for what Domna Stanton terms ‘the facile presumption of referentiality’:8 the radical disjuncture between the referential ‘I’ who lives, speaks, laughs, weeps, gives birth, dies in the world, and the textual ‘I’ which is a free-floating fiction, so deeply scored by difference and deferral that it can only be signified by alterity and non-presence. This stance is echoed by Julia Kristeva’s assertion that ‘a feminist practice can only be negative, at odds with what already exists so that we may say “that’s not it” and “that’s still not it” ’.9 Post-structuralism is a critique – it demonstrates the negative drama of ‘what I am not’ that both curtails and enables the lived experiences of the sexed subject. Ironically, the impetus of its anti-foundationalist attempt to place a neo-Husserlian epoche on the existent and her encountered world carries it full circle to a new metaphysics where the ‘bottomless chessboard’ of language itself becomes the transcendental signified. Therefore, my hermeneutic/deconstructive model of the ‘speaking/spoken subject’, which takes account of both the psycho-linguistic conditions of the production of subjectivity and the inexhaustible contingencies of our situated being, seeks to provide a way of theorising an ambiguously representable female selfhood which is located in the space created by the disjunction of life and discourse. By locating the female autobiographical subject between text and reference, I seek to connect specificity to system, thus reconnecting with the particularity of the

Conclusion 199

unique, sexed existence (understood as a ‘presence to [the world] that is not to-itself’,10 the one who comes yet never stops arriving): that singular ‘thereness’ which is ontologically anterior to the text. My dialectical approach to the experiential is particularly appropriate for theorising female subjectivities because it offers an account of both experience and selfhood that not only acknowledges but incorporates the negativity generated by our insurmountably hegemonic being-in-the-world. It acknowledges the force of the post-structuralist assertion that positing (sexed) selfhood as the origin or essence of our being disguises the fact that these apparent origins are themselves effects of myriad discourses, practices and institutions. It discounts the possibility of categorising experience as the conscious relationship of an ontologically static, essentially female subject to an immediately encountered world, and, through the deconstructive moment of distanciation, insists on the cold fact that one’s experiences are delimited by ‘the epistemological, ontological and logical structures of a masculinist signifying economy’.11 Yet the potentially inexorable progression towards the dissolution of female experience and subjectivity in pure textual negativity is ceaselessly held in check by the moment of appropriation which enables a reconnection with the specificity of the diverse and contradictory experiences of individual women. The most fundamental insight of this moment is that from the admission that Sprachlichkeit is the ontological condition of my experience-in-the-world, it need not follow that my experience is merely an alienated function of Sprachlichkeit, which can only reiterate the negativities of what/where/who I am not. The deictic coordinates that were suspended by the deconstructive epoche – my own sexed body, my ethnicity, my class, my age and so on – once brought back into play, form the axes of identity along which my experiences flow; the fluctuating points of conjuncture where these multiple coordinates contingently intersect are the ‘punctuations’ where ‘I’ am momentarily anchored. It is important to emphasise that appropriation cannot be interpreted as a simple indication of my being-as-a-woman, transcending the conceptual slippages of the sign ‘woman’, but as a complex affirmation of the ‘mineness’ of my experiences, where my being-as-a-woman is only one oscillating contextual strand among many. Total interpretive possession of my experiences ‘as a woman’ remains an impossibility. Yet the aporia generated by the deconstructive dispossession may be traversed and inhabited by appropriative acts of affirmation which posit the ‘ownness’ of my deictically coordinated experiences as ambiguously belonging to a decentred but quasi-present self occupying a series of specific historical/political/ cultural spaces, and leaving her imprint on them.


Since my analysis began with an examination of Derrida’s thought, it may be appropriate to return to a reconsideration of deconstruction by way of conclusion. In more recent works and interviews Derrida himself appears to have modified his animus towards the possibility of some form of self-identity and decidable meanings. In an interview with Richard Kearney, ‘Deconstruction and the Other’ (1984), he acknowledges the need to ‘maintain two contradictory affirmations at the same time’.12 Moreover, he states that ‘deconstruction is not an enclosure in nothingness, but an openness towards the other’.13 The import of these comments is developed in Limited Inc. (1988), where Derrida makes a more explicit renunciation of absolute undecidability. Here he modifies the deconstructive notion of the play of différance as undecidability, claiming that it points to the impossibility of complete decidability and complete undecidability. He writes, ‘in accordance with what is only ostensibly a paradox, this particular undecidable [play] opens the field of decision or of decidability. It calls for decision in the order of ethicalpolitical responsibility’.14 Later in the same book, Derrida modifies the balance of his previous comments on the context of speech. Whereas in earlier texts he had argued that the context of speech was inevitably compromised and contaminated by the undecidable play of language, now he concedes that the play of undecidability and iterability must itself be ‘contaminated’ by context, singularity, the particular circumstances of the speech act. He observes, let us not forget that ‘iterability’ does not signify simply … repeatability of the same, but rather alterability of this same idealized in the singularity of the event, for instance, in this or that speech act. It entails the necessity of thinking at once both the rule and the event, concept and singularity.15 The ‘necessity of maintaining two contradictory affirmations at the same time’ is observable in the paradoxical idea of the non-coincidence of the self with a self that is nonetheless mine. It is a paradigm instance of the interplay of singularity and alterity, presence and absence, unity and difference, coincidence and disjuncture which permeates the categories of experience, presence and self. But for us now The beyond is still out there as on tiptoes here we stand On promontories that are themselves a-tiptoe Reluctant to be land.16

Notes Introduction Difference Unleashed 1. Simone de Beauvoir, Force of Circumstance (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968). 2. Johann Gottlieb Fichte, The Vocation of Man, trans. Peter Preuss (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987) 77. 3. Gianni Vattimo, The Adventure of Difference: Philosophy after Nietzsche and Heidegger, trans. Cyprian Blamires (London: Polity Press, 1993) 4. 4. Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, trans. Wade Baskin (London: Peter Owen, 1960) 120–2. 5. Vattimo, The Adventure of Difference, 151, 144. 6. Peter Dews, Logics of Disintegration (New York and London: Verso, 1988) 26. 7. Vattimo, The Adventure of Difference, 139. 8. Roland Barthes, ‘The Death of the Author’, Image-Music-Text, trans. and ed. Stephen Heath (London: Fontana, 1977) 145, 143. 9. Jacques Lacan, Ecrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (London and New York: Routledge, 1989) 300. 10. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1974) 166. 11. Dews, Logics of Disintegration, 32. 12. Paul Ricoeur, ‘On Interpretation’, From Text to Action: Essays in Hermeneutics II, trans. Kathleen Blamey and John B. Thompson (London: Athlone, 1991) 15. 13. G.B. Madison, ‘Ricoeur and the Hermeneutics of the Subject’, The Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur, ed. Lewis Hahn (Chicago: Open Court, 1995) 77. 14. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, 401. 15. Domna Stanton, ‘Autogynography: Is the Subject Different?’, The Female Autograph: Theory and Practice of Autobiography, ed. Domna Stanton (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984) vii. 16. The term ‘flesh and blood (female) existent’, which I use throughout the book, is Adriana Cavarero’s, following Hannah Arendt. Cavarero refers to the necessity of retaining ‘the material proof of a woman who really lived, in flesh and bone, in a time and a place’ (Cavarero, Relating Narratives, 70). In this book, I employ the term to emphasise the fundamental materiality of the subject’s existence in the world without diminishing the significance of the discursive, relational and expositive elements of her subjectivity. Thus the term does not participate in the ‘classical’ discourses of selfhood, where the self is understood as unified, coherent and autonomous. Neither does it endorse the post-structuralist construction of subjectivity, where the subject is understood merely as ‘a linguistic category, a place-holder, a structure in formation’ (Butler, Psychic Life, 10). Rather, it posits the idea of a unique, sexed ‘who’ that is not reducible to a discursive ‘what’. 17. Liz Stanley, The Auto/biographical I: The Theory and Practice of Women’s Autobiographical Writings (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1992) 20. 201

202 Notes 18. I acknowledge that feminist post-structuralists (such as Judith Butler, Chris Weedon, Diana Fuss, Joan W. Scott, Biddy Martin, Peggy Kamuf) do seek to theorise ‘real’ women, and can illuminate the complex relationships between language, social institutions and subjectivity. However, I believe that their emphasis on the ‘undecidability of identity’ – that is, the repeated poststructuralist valorisation of the constitutive fragmentation and performativity of the subject – cannot account for the particularity, the ‘mineness’ of my lived experiences in the ‘here and now’. As Cavarero observes, ‘in spite of everything, the existent exists and resists’ (Cavarero, Relating Narratives, 127). 19. Paul Ricoeur, ‘The Hermeneutic Function of Distanciation’, From Text to Action: Essays in Hermeneutics II, trans. Kathleen Blamey and John B. Thompson (London: Athlone, 1991) 85.

Chapter 1 Difference and Undecidability: Post-Saussurean Thought 1. J.G. Fichte, The Vocation of Man, trans. Peter Preuss (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987) 63–4. 2. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins, 1976) 158. 3. Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993) 144. 4. Richard Harland, Beyond Superstructuralism (London: Routledge, 1993) 222. 5. Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, trans. Wade Baskin (London: Peter Owen, 1960) 66. 6. Saussure, Course, 117. 7. Saussure, Course, 120. 8. Saussure, Course, 122. 9. Derrida, Of Grammatology, 49–50. 10. Jacques Lacan, Ecrits, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Routledge, 1989) 66. 11. Derrida, Of Grammatology, 158. 12. Peggy Kamuf, ‘Editor’s Introduction’, A Derrida Reader, ed. Peggy Kamuf (New York and London: Harvester, 1991) vii. 13. Derek Attridge, ‘Introduction’, Acts of Literature, ed. Derek Attridge (New York and London: Routledge, 1992) ix. 14. Christopher Norris, Deconstruction: Theory and Practice (London and New York: Routledge, 1991) 18. 15. Bertrand Russell, The Problems of Philosophy (London and New York: Oxford UP, 1973) 40. 16. Madan Sarup, An Introductory Guide to Post-structuralism and Postmodernism (London and New York: Harvester, 1988) 37. 17. M.H. Abrams, A Glossary of Literary Terms (London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich College Publishers, 1990) 225. 18. Derrida, Of Grammatology, 14. 19. Derrida, Of Grammatology, 10. 20. Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993) 132. 21. Jaques Derrida , Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs, trans. David B. Allinson (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973) 15.

Notes 203 22. Christopher Norris, Deconstruction: Theory and Practice (London and New York: Routledge, 1991) 28. 23. Derrida, Of Grammatology, 34. 24. Derrida, Of Grammatology, 44. 25. Derrida, Of Grammatology, 166. 26. Norris, Deconstruction, 29. 27. Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, 99. 28. Derrida, Of Grammatology, 12. 29. Derrida, Of Grammatology, 50. 30. Sarup, An Introductory Guide, 39. 31. Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, 15. 32. Raymond Tallis defines ‘logocentrism’ as ‘a belief in the existence of an order of meaning inherent in the outside world and independent of language’ (Tallis, 166); Terry Eagleton understands ‘logocentrism’ as ‘a belief in some ultimate “word”, presence, essence, truth or reality which will act as the foundation for all our thought’ (Eagleton, Literary Theory, 131). 33. Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, 134. 34. Jacques Derrida, ‘Choreographies’, The Derrida Reader, ed. Peggy Kamuf (New York and London: Harvester, 1991) 451. 35. Norris, Deconstruction, 31. 36. Jacques Derrida, ‘Of Grammatology’ The Derrida Reader, ed. Peggy Kamuf (New York and London: Harvester, 1991) 41. 37. Jacques Derrida, ‘Of Grammatology’, The Derrida Reader, ed. Peggy Kamuf (New York and London: Harvester, 1991) 40. 38. Derrida, Of Grammatology, 7. 39. Derrida, Of Grammatology, lxxxix. 40. Jacques Derrida, ‘The Double Session’, The Derrida Reader, ed. Peggy Kamuf (New York and London: Harvester, 1991) 190. 41. One of the primary reference points for the notion of the Word as transcendental signified is found in The Bible, John 1: 1, 14: ‘In the beginning was the Word [Logos], and the Word was with God, and the Word was God ... And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us’; Derrida’s version of the same text overturns the biblical emphasis on presence in favour of absence, undecidability and discontinuity: ‘In the befinning the post, John will say ... and it begins with a destination without address, the direction cannot be situated in the end. There is no destination ... within every sign already, every mark or trait, there is distancing, the post’ (Jacques Derrida, The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987) 29. 42. Derrida, Of Grammatology, 10. 43. Peter Dews, Logics of Disintegration (London: Verso, 1988) 9. 44. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper and Row, 1962). 45. Jacques Derrida, ‘Of Grammatology’ The Derrida Reader, ed. Peggy Kamuf (New York and London: Harvester, 1991) 40. 46. Peirce quoted in Derrida, Of Grammatology, 48. 47. Jacques Derrida quoted in Dews, 13. 48. It is fruitless in the sense that meaning will always evade and exceed our attempts to pin it down, since meaning, for Derrida, is not ‘out there’ in

204 Notes

49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55.

56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67.

68. 69. 70. 71.

72. 73.

external reality, but is nothing more than an effect of the endless play of language. Derrida, Of Grammatology, 69. Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, 154. Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, 58. Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, 147. Eagleton, Literary Theory, 130. Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, 141. Indeed, according to Peter Dews, the logical consequence of Derrida’s account of signification is not the volitilisation of meaning but its destruction; for Dews, an unstoppable mediation of signs by other signs leaves no room for the emergence of meaning (Dews, 30). Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, 142. Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, 134. Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, 137. Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, 138. Derrida, Of Grammatology, 8–9. Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, 85. Hugh Bredin, ‘Sign and Value in Saussure’, Philosophy, 59: 1984, 75. Bredin, ‘Sign and Value’, 75. Bredin, ‘Sign and Value’, 76. Derrida, Of Grammatology, 35. Dews, Logics of Disintegration, xv. Diana Fuss, Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature and Difference (New York and London: Routledge, 1990) 4. Diana Fuss is concerned here with demonstrating the essentialism inherent in deconstructive approaches; she contends that essentialism and constructionism (the contention that essence itself is a socio-historical construction) are inextricably co-implicated with each other. Yet the main point of this important book concerns the possibility of rethinking the essentialist/constructionist opposition itself, especially with regard to feminist theory. She seeks to ‘work both sides of the essentialist/ constructionist binarism at once, bringing each term to its interior breakingpoint’ (Fuss, xiii). Fuss recognises the need for a sensitively nuanced approach to this rigidly polarised debate, arguing that ‘ “essentially speaking”, we need both to theorise essentialist spaces from which to speak and simultaneously, to deconstruct these spaces to keep them from solidifying’ (Fuss, 118). Fuss, Essentially Speaking, 4. Jacques Derrida, ‘Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles’, The Derrida Reader, ed. Peggy Kamuf (New York and London: Harvester, 1991) 359. Richard Rorty, ‘Philosophy as a Kind of Writing’, The Consequences of Pragmatism (Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 1982) 92. It will be noted that Rorty’s distinction between Philosophy and philosophy resembles the standard distinction between the correspondence and coherence theories of truth. Rorty, ‘Philosophy of a Kind of Writing’, 42. Derrida himself regards the separation of reality from representation as impossible. He observes that in Western philosophy, ‘the sign is from its origin and to the core of its sense marked by this will to derivation or effacement’ (Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, 51).

Notes 205 74. Edmund Husserl, Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology, trans. W.R. Boyce Gibson (New York: Humanities Press, 1931) 310. 75. Tallis, Not Saussure, 205–06. 76. Dews, Logics of Disintegration, 32. 77. Quentin Kraft, ‘Towards a Critical Re-Renewal’, Beyond Post-structuralism, ed. Wendell V. Harris (Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania UP, 1996) 230. 78. Kraft, Beyond Post-structuralism, 240. 79. Tallis, Not Saussure, 227. 80. Derrida, Of Grammatology, 158. 81. Jacques Derrida, Limited Inc. (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern UP, 1988) 137. 82. Derrida, Limited Inc., 137. 83. Richard Kearney, ‘Deconstruction and the other’, interview with Jacques Derrida, Dialogues with Contemporary Thinkers (DCT) ed. Richard Kearney (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1986) 123. 84. Derrida, Limited Inc., 148. 85. Kraft, ‘Towards a Critical Re-Renewal’, 242. 86. Derrida, Limited Inc., 136. 87. Derrida, Limited Inc., 136. 88. John Searle, ‘Literary Theory and its Discontents’, Beyond Post-structuralism, ed. Wendell V. Harris (Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania UP, 1996) 133. 89. Searle, 132. 90. Derrida, Of Grammatology, 14. 91. Derrida, Limited Inc., 147. 92. Joyce A. Joyce, ‘The Black Canon: Reconstructing Black American Literary Criticism’, New Literary History, 18 (winter 1987) 341. 93. Kraft, ‘Towards a Critical Re-Renewal’, 244. 94. Dews, Logics of Disintegration, 27. 95. Dews, Logics of Disintegration, 30. 96. Kraft, ‘Towards a Critical Re-Renewal’, 246. 97. Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, trans. Justin O’Brien (New York: Vintage, 1959) 14. 98. Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, 6. 99. Eagleton, Literary Theory, 164. 100. Tallis, Not Saussure, 131. 101. Eagleton, Literary Theory, 164. 102. Lacan, Ecrits, 17. 103. Lacan, Ecrits, 2,1. 104. Lacan, Ecrits, 2. 105. Lacan, Ecrits, 2. 106. Lacan, Ecrits, 4. 107. Dews, Logics of Disintegration, 55. 108. Lacan, Ecrits, 19. 109. Jacques Lacan quoted in Anika Lemaire, Jacques Lacan, trans. David Macey (London: Routledge, 1977). 110. Eagleton, Literary Theory, 166. 111. Tallis, Not Saussure, 140. 112. Lacan, Ecrits, 65. 113. Tallis, Not Saussure, 132. 114. Lemaire, Jacques Lacan, 142.

206 Notes 115. 116. 117. 118. 119. 120. 121. 122. 123. 124. 125. 126. 127. 128. 129. 130. 131.

Fuss, Essentially Speaking, 8. Fuss, Essentially Speaking, 9. Fuss, Essentially Speaking, 9. Lacan, Ecrits, 2. Tallis, Not Saussure, 143. Tallis, Not Saussure, 149. Tallis, Not Saussure, 149. Tallis, Not Saussure, 150. Lacan, Ecrits, 18. Lacan, Ecrits, 65. Dews, Logics of Disintegration, 228. Derrida quoted in Kearney, Dialogues with Contemporary Thinkers, 125. Derrida, Of Grammatology, 166. Dews, Logics of Disintegration, 70. Kearney, Dialogues with Contemporary Thinkers, 117. Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, 129. Derrida, Of Grammatology, 49–50.

Chapter 2 Woman as Text: The Influence of Post-structuralism on Feminist Theory 1. Jacques Derrida, ‘Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles’, A Derrida Reader, ed. Peggy Kamuf (New York and London: Harvester, 1991) 358. 2. Somer Brodribb, ‘Nothing Mat(t)ers’, Radically Speaking: Feminism Reclaimed, eds, Diane Bell and Renate Klein (London: Zed Books, 1996) 298. 3. Gill Howie, ‘Feminist Philosophy’, The Future of Philosophy, ed. Oliver Leaman (New York and London: Routledge, 1998). 4. Naomi Schor and Elizabeth Weed (eds) ‘Introduction’, The Essential Difference (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1994) vii. 5. Chris Weedon, Feminist Practice and Poststructuralist Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993) 23. 6. Weedon, Feminist Practice and Poststructuralist Theory, 23. 7. In Reading Kristeva (1993), Kelly Oliver observes that Kristeva’s writing is full of contradictions: she is both essentialist and anti-essentialist, conservative and anarchic, ahistorical and historically grounded. Yet Oliver attempts a ‘recuperative’ reading of Kristeva, arguing that the ambiguities and contradictions inherent in her work open up the possibility of alternative interpretations. I agree that Kristeva’s work is a rich source of creativity, intellectual challenge and insight. Nonetheless, I contend that Kristeva’s emphasis on the constitutive negativity within identity operates at the expense of any form of positive identity; in Chapter 5, I propose a model of singular female subjectivity which may accommodate both the negative and the positive moments which form our sense(s) of identity. 8. Robert Scholes, ‘Eperon Strings’, The Essential Difference, eds, Naomi Schor and Elizabeth Weed (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1994) 121. 9. Derrida S, ‘Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles’, 363. 10. ‘Between the Blinds’ is the sub-title of the anthology, A Derrida Reader, ed. Peggy Kamuf (New York and London: Harvester, 1991).

Notes 207 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

21. 22.

23. 24.

25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44.

Derrida S, ‘Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles’, 359. Scholes, ‘Eperon Strings’, 126. Scholes, ‘Eperon Strings’, 127. Scholes, ‘Eperon Strings’, 128. Scholes, ‘Eperon Strings’, 119. Lacan quoted in Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose, Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the ecole freudienne, (New York: W.W. Norton, 1982) 144. Mitchell and Rose, Feminine Sexuality, 15. Lacan quoted in Mitchell and Rose, Feminine Sexuality, 45. Patricia Waugh, Feminine Fictions: Revisiting the Postmodern, (New York and London: Routledge, 1989) 60. Lacan quoted in Dorothy Leland, ‘Lacanian Psychology and French Feminism: Toward an Adequate Political Psychology’, Revaluing French Feminism: Critical Essays on Difference, Agency and Culture, eds, Nancy Fraser and Sandra Lee Bartky (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1992) 123. Leland, ‘Lacanian Psychology and French Feminism’, 124. Nancy Fraser, ‘The Uses and Abuses of French Discourse Theories’, Revaluing French Feminism: Critical Essays on Difference, Agency and Culture, eds, Nancy Fraser and Sandra Lee Bartky (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1992), 182. Diana Fuss, Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature and Difference (London and New York: Routledge, 1990), 9. See Nancy Fraser, ‘The Uses and Abuses of French Discourse Theories’, and Dorothy Leland, ‘Lacanian Psychology and French Feminism: Toward an Adequate Political Psychology’, Revaluing French Feminism: Critical Essays on Difference, Agency and Culture, eds, Nancy Fraser and Sandra Lee Bartky (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1992). Fraser, ‘The Uses and Abuses of French Discourse Theories’, 182. Fraser, ‘The Uses and Abuses of French Discourse Theories’, 123. Kristeva quoted in Leland, ‘Lacanian Psychology and French Feminism’, 124. Fraser, ‘The Uses and Abuses of French Discourse Theories’, 184. Derrida, Spurs, 359. Kristeva quoted in Michael Payne, Reading Theory: An Introduction to Lacan, Derrida and Kristeva (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), 189. Kristeva quoted in Payne, Reading Theory, 190. Julia Kristeva, ‘The System and the Speaking Subject’, The Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril Moi (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989) 26. Payne, Reading Theory, 20. Kristeva, ‘System’, 29. Kristeva, ‘System’, 30. Kristeva, ‘System’, 32. Kristeva, ‘System’, 33. Kristeva, ‘System’, 33. Kristeva, ‘System’, 33. Kristeva quoted in Payne, Reading Theory, 167. Julia Kristeva, ‘Revolution in Poetic Language’, The Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril Moi (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989) 95. Kristeva, ‘Revolution’, 93. Kristeva, ‘Revolution’, 94. Plato quoted in Payne, Reading Theory, 167.

208 Notes 45. Plato, Timaeus and Critias, trans. Desmond Lee (London: Penguin, 1977) 71. 46. Plato, Timaeus and Critias, 72. 47. Julia Kristeva, Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, ed. Leon S. Roudiez (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980) 237. 48. Payne, Reading Theory, 169. 49. Kristeva, ‘Revolution’, 93. 50. Kristeva, ‘Revolution’, 94. 51. Kristeva, ‘Revolution’, 95. 52. Kristeva, ‘Revolution’, 102. 53. Edmund Husserl, Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology, trans. W.R. Boyce Gibson (London: Macmillan, 1962) 273. 54. Husserl, Ideas, 95. 55. Payne, Reading Theory, 173. 56. Kristeva, ‘Revolution’, 98. 57. Kristeva, ‘Revolution’, 100. 58. Kristeva, ‘Revolution’, 100. 59. Payne, Reading Theory, 177. 60. Payne, Reading Theory, 178. 61. Kristeva, ‘Revolution’, 113. 62. Toril Moi, introduction to The Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril Moi (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989) 13. 63. Kristeva, ‘Revolution’, 118. 64. Kristeva, ‘Revolution’, 117. 65. Kristeva, ‘Revolution’, 117. 66. Kristeva, Desire, 166. 67. Kristeva quoted in Domna C. Stanton ‘Difference on Trial: A Critique of the Maternal Metaphor in Cixous, Irigaray and Kristeva’, The Poetics of Gender, ed. Nancy K. Miller (New York: Columbia UP, 1986) 166. 68. Julia Kristeva, Polylogue (Paris: Seuil, 1977) 74. 69. Kristeva, Polylogue, 73. 70. Stanton, ‘Difference’, 166. 71. Kristeva, Polylogue, 136. 72. Stanton, ‘Difference’, 167. 73. Kristeva quoted in Payne, Reading Theory, 180. 74. Julia Kristeva, About Chinese Women, trans. Anita Burrows (London: Boyars, 1977) 16. 75. Kristeva quoted in Toril Moi, Sexual / Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory (London and New York: Routledge, 1994) 163. 76. Julia Kristeva, ‘Women’s Time’, The Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril Moi (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989) 194. 77. Kristeva, ‘Women’s Time’, 193. 78. Kristeva, ‘Women’s Time’, 193. 79. Kristeva, ‘Women’s Time’, 194. 80. Kristeva, ‘Women’s Time’, 194. 81. Kristeva, ‘Women’s Time’, 209. 82. Kristeva, ‘Women’s Time’, 209. 83. Joyce quoted in Kristeva, ‘Women’s Time’, 190. 84. Kristeva, ‘Women’s Time’, 190. 85. Kristeva, ‘Women’s Time’, 191.

Notes 209 86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92.

93. 94.

95. 96. 97. 98. 99. 100. 101. 102. 103. 104. 105. 106. 107. 108. 109. 110. 111. 112. 113. 114. 115. 116. 117. 118. 119. 120. 121. 122. 123. 124. 125. 126.

Kristeva, ‘Women’s Time’, 191. Kristeva, ‘Women’s Time’, 192. Kristeva, ‘Women’s Time’, 193. Kristeva, About Chinese Women, 16. Kristeva, Desire, 239. Kristeva, Desire, 239. Judith Butler, ‘The Body Politics of Julia Kristeva’, Revaluing French Feminism: Critical Essays on Difference, Agency and Culture, eds, Nancy Fraser and Sandra Lee Bartky (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1992) 171. Fraser, ‘The Uses and Abuses of French Discourse Theories’, 190. Kristeva quoted in Diana T. Meyers, ‘The Subversion of Women’s Agency in Psychoanalytical Feminism’, Revaluing French Feminism: Critical Essays on Difference, Agency and Culture, eds, Nancy Fraser and Sandra Lee Bartky (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1992) 145. Leland, ‘Lacanian Psychology and French Feminism’, 130. Fraser, ‘The Uses and Abuses of French Discourse Theories’, 188. Fraser, ‘The Uses and Abuses of French Discourse Theories’, 187. Kristeva, ‘System’, 32. Butler, ‘Body Politics’, 163. Butler, ‘Body Politics’, 163. Kristeva, About Chinese Women, 58. Kristeva, ‘System’, 33. Butler, ‘Body Politics’, 165. Kristeva quoted in Stanton, ‘Difference’, 158. Stanton, ‘Difference’, 166. Butler, ‘Body Politics’, 168. Butler, ‘Body Politics’, 170. Butler, ‘Body Politics’, 171. Butler, ‘Body Politics’, 171. Kristeva, ‘System’, 30, 33. Kristeva, Desire, 239. Butler, ‘Body Politics’, 172. Butler, ‘Body Politics’, 172. Stanton, ‘Difference’, 174. Ktisteva, About Chinese Women, 16. Andrea Nye, ‘Women Clothed with the Sun: Julia Kristeva and the Escape from/to Language’, Signs 12: 664–668. Kristeva, ‘Women’s Time’, 209. Kristeva, ‘Women’s Time’, 193. Kristeva, ‘Women’s Time’, 193. Kristeva, ‘Women’s Time’, 193. Julia Kristeva, ‘Stabat Mater’, The Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril Moi (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989) 172. Meyers, ‘The Subversion of Women’s Agency’, 146. Kristeva quoted in Meyers, ‘The Subversion of Women’s Agency’, 146. Julia Kristeva, ‘A New Type of Intellectual: The Dissident’, The Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril Moi (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989) 297. Kristeva, ‘New Type’, 297. Kristeva, ‘Stabat Mater’, 172.

210 Notes 127. Kristeva, ‘Women’s Time’, 193. 128. Kristeva denies an explicit link between the feminine and the semiotic, refusing to ascribe gender to the pre-Oedipal maternal body. Yet in the same way that the phallus/penis distinction in Lacanian theory is impossible to maintain, the separation of the feminine and the maternal is equally unviable. 129. Kristeva, ‘System’, 32. 130. Meyers, ‘The Subversion of Women’s Agency’, 150. 131. Meyers, ‘The Subversion of Women’s Agency’, 150. 132. Meyers, ‘The Subversion of Women’s Agency’, 152. 133. Kristeva, Desire, 46. 134. Kristeva, ‘System’, 25, 27. 135. Fraser, ‘The Uses and Abuses of French Discourse Theories’, 187. 136. Kristeva, ‘Revolution’, 114. 137. Kristeva, ‘Women’s Time’, 196. 138. Kristeva, About Chinese Women, 153. 139. Raymond Tallis, Not Saussure: A Critique of Post-Saussurean Literary Theory (London: Macmillan, 1988) 72. 140. Fraser, ‘The Uses and Abuses of French Discourse Theories’, 189. 141. Kristeva, ‘System’, 32. 142. Kristeva, ‘Women’s Time’, 196. 143. Fraser, ‘The Uses and Abuses of French Discourse Theories’, 190. 144. This principle assumes that gender and other differences – such as ethnicity, age, class and so on – are irrelevant to the status of the coherent, autonomous self-identical human subject. 145. For example, the division and differentiation of the private sphere of the family and the public sphere of freedom and action is evident in Kant’s essay, ‘What is Enlightenment?’ The feminist theorist Jane Flax comments: ‘One of the marks of modernisation then is the emergence of a distinctive ideology of the family as the world of love/family/dependence/women and children. Men are differentiated; as fathers they bridge the gap between family and the public world ... Women are not differentiated. We remain in the background, as dangerous but necessary guardians of those who are not yet able to think for them (or our) selves.’ Jane Flax, Disputed Subjects: Essays on Psychoanalysis, Politics and Philosophy (New York and London: Routledge, 1993) 78. 146. Patricia Waugh, ‘Modernism, Postmodernism, Gender: the View from Feminism’, Feminisms eds, Sandra Kemp and Judith Squires (Oxford and New York: Oxford and New York UP, 1997) 206. 147. Waugh F, ‘Modernism, Postmodernism, Gender’, 207. 148. Frederic Jameson, The Prisonhouse of Language: a Critical Account of Structuralism and Russian Formalism (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1972) 115. 149. Tallis, Not Saussure, 276. 150. Waugh, ‘Feminism’, 208. 151. Nicole Ward Jouve, White Woman Speaks with Forked Tongue : Criticism as Autobiography (London: Routledge, 1991) 7. 152. Patricia Waugh, Feminist Fictions: Revisiting the Postmodern (New York and London: Routledge, 1989) 3. 153. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. H.M. Parshley (Harmandsworth: Penguin, 1972) 28.

Notes 211 154. ‘The father denies the specularization/speculation. He ignores ... the physical, mathematical and even dialectical co-ordinates of representation “in the mirror”. In any case, he would know nothing of the irreducible inversion which is produced in identification of other as other’. (Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1985) 301. 155. Waugh, Feminist Fictions, 8. 156. Waugh, Feminist Fictions, 21. 157. Waugh, Feminist Fictions, 21. 158. Stanton, Difference, 173. 159. Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, ed. Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye, trans. Wade Baskin (London: Peter Owen, 1960) 120–1. 160. Tallis, 212. 161. Hugh Bredin, ‘Sign and Value in Saussure’, Philosophy, 59: 1984: 67–75. 162. Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena and other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs, trans. David B. Allison (Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1973) 139. 163. I use the term ‘cautiously’ to emphasise my belief that differences cannot and indeed should not be erased in a return to the unproblematic category of ‘woman’. 164. Tallis, Not Saussure, 213. 165. Robert Scholes, ‘Reading Like a Man’, Men in Feminism, eds, Alice Jardine and Paul Smith (New York and London: Routledge, 1989) 208. 166. Robert Scholes, ‘Eperon Strings’, The Essential Difference, eds, Naomi Schor and Elizabeth Weed (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1994) 121. 167. Stanton, Difference, 177. 168. Stanton, Difference, 173. 169. Rosi Braidotti, ‘Envy: or With your Brains and My Looks’ Men and Feminism, eds, Alice Jardine and Paul Smith (New York and London: Routledge, 1989) 237. 170. Michael Fischer, ‘Deconstruction and the Redemption of Difference’, Beyond Poststructuralism: The Speculating of Theory and the Experience of Reading, ed. Wendell V. Harris (Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania UP, 1996). 171. Kristeva quoted in Linda Alcoff, ‘Cultural Feminism versus Post-structuralism: The Identity Crisis in Feminist Theory’, Feminism and Philosophy, eds, Nancy Tuana and Rosemarie Tong (San Francisco: Westview Press, 1995) 442. 172. Alcoff, ‘Cultural Feminism versus Poststructuralism’, 443. 173. Alcoff, ‘Cultural Feminism versus Poststructuralism’, 443. 174. Teresa de Lauretis, ‘The Essence of the Triangle or, Taking the Risk of Essentialism Seriously’ The Essential Difference, eds, Naomi Schor and Elizabeth Weed (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1994) 109. 175. Teresa de Lauretis, Alice Doesn’t (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1984) 109. 176. de Lauretis, Alice Doesn’t, 159.

Chapter 3 The Post-structuralist Erasure of Experience 1. Iris Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (London: Penguin, 1993) 202. 2. Derrida quoted in Murdoch, Metaphysics, 191. 3. Alice Jardine, ‘The Demise of Experience: Fiction as Stranger than Truth?’, Postmodernism: A Reader, ed. Thomas Docherty (New York and London: Harvester, 1993) 433.

212 Notes 4. Gary Madison, ‘Beyond Seriousness and Frivolity; a Gadamerian Response to Deconstruction’, Gadamer and Hermeneutics, ed. Hugh J. Silverman (London: Routledge, 1991), 124. 5. Murdoch, Metaphysics, 211. 6. George Steiner, ‘Real Presences’, No Passion Spent: Essays 1978–1996 (London: Faber, 1996) 31. 7. Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism, trans. Henry Zohn (London: NLB, 1973) 154. 8. Chris Weedon, Feminist Practice and Poststructuralist Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993) 125. 9. I refer the reader to an exploration of the unwieldy Symbolic’s genesis in the Saussurean concept of langue in Chapter 2. 10. Madison, ‘Beyond Seriousness’, 119. 11. Madison, ‘Beyond Seriousness’, 131. 12. Jurgen Habermas, ‘Themes in Postmetaphysical Thinking’, Postmetaphysical Thinking, trans. William Mark Hohengarten (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992) 38. 13. Madison, ‘Beyond Seriousness’, 131. 14. Steiner, ‘Real Presences’, 34. 15. Steiner, ‘Real Presences’, 34. 16. Georges Bataille, Georges Bataille: Essential Writings, ed. Michael Richardson (London: Sage, 1998) 140. 17. The term ‘experience’ requires clarification here, spanning as it does many interrelated and sometimes contradictory meanings. When I use the term ‘experience’, I am referring not purely to sensory perception of the world but to direct, lived experience (or Erlebnis: ‘shock’). I understand ‘experience’ as primarily encompassing our ‘perceptual, intellectual, volitional and emotional acts’ although an exploration of the question of self-presence necessitates an additional understanding of experience as a retrospective, inward process. Working within the latter ‘internalised’ sense, Walter Benjamin refers to the ‘weight of an experience (Erfahrung: ‘aura’)’ (Benjamin, 154), lending the term a significance not achieved by the more fleeting Erlebnis. Erfahrung ‘bears the marks of the situation which gave rise to it ... [when] certain contents of the individual past combine with material of the collective past’ (Benjamin, 113). It is Raymond Williams, however, who articulates the most fundamental controversy in the use of the term ‘experience’: ‘at one extreme experience is offered as the necessary (immediate and authentic) ground for all (subsequent) reasoning and analysis [while] at the other extreme, experience ... is seen as the product of social conditions or of systems of belief ... and thus not as material for truths but as evidence of conditions or systems which by definition it cannot itself explain’ (Williams, 128). 18. Gianni Vattimo, The Adventure of Difference; Philosophy after Nietzsche and Heidegger, trans. Cyprian Blamires (London: Polity Press, 1993) 2. 19. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale (New York: Random House, 1967) 298. 20. James C. Edwards, The Authority of Language: Heidegger, Wittgenstein, and the Threat of Philosophical Nihilism (Tampa: University of South Florida Press, 1990) 33.

Notes 213 21. In his first major work, Being and Time (trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson, New York: Harper and Row, 1962), Martin Heidegger contends that the metaphysical tradition fails to take account of what he terms ‘ontological difference’, the difference between entities and the being of entities, or the difference between beings and Being. In the metaphysical tradition, being is understood in terms of presence. This prioritising of presence, Heidegger argues, only occurs because being is already understood in terms of presence, or substance – ‘what is there’ – whereas this phenomenon is actually merely a modality of time. Likewise, the metaphysical notion of the unified, autonomous, rational self, conceived as transparently present to itself, is subject to a similar delusion. 22. Although the term is Roland Barthes’, Jacques Derrida explores these ideas in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (London: Routledge, 1978) while Gilles Deleuze, in a collaboration with Felix Guattari, develops a philosophy of the real as simulacrum in Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. R. Hurley et al. (London and New York: Routledge, 1984). 23. Edwards, Authority of Language, 221. 24. In Gynesis: Configurations of Women and Modernity (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1985), Alice Jardine remarks that the main aim of rethinking ‘truth-in-modernity’ has been to ‘unravel the illusion that some kind of universal truth exists which can be proven by some so-called universal experience’ ( Jardine, 145), although, as I hope to demonstrate, the post-structuralist case against experience goes far beyond a critique of universal truth-in-experience in its dismissal of the experiential (subjective or objective) as a mere function of language. 25. Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism, trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1974) 149. 26. Yet the id does not consist solely of seething instincts; it functions also as the ‘storehouse of memory’, containing every important cluster of emotionally charged ideas or memories which have been formerly present in the conscious mind but have subsequently been repressed into pre-consciousness. Thus certain vivid and emotionally affective experiences do make their way to the unconscious mind and may thus impact in this circuitous although more radical sense on consciousness. As such, introjected experience resonates with Walter Benjamin’s concept of Erfahrung: ‘experience ... is less the product of facts firmly anchored in memory than of a convergence in memory of accumulated and frequently unconscious data ... the structure of memory [is] decisive for the philosophical pattern of experience’ (Benjamin, 110). Yet in this conception our recovery of these introjected experiences can never offer anything more than a fleeting (and probably distorted) contact with them. Thus, for psychoanalysis, the truth of our most significant experiences remains veiled and partial – ultimately unknowable. 27. See my exposition of the fundamental principles of post-Saussurean thought in Chapter 1. 28. Raymond Tallis, Not Saussure: A Critique of Post-Saussurean Literary Theory (London: Macmillan, 1988) 49. 29. I refute this contention in Chapter 1, primarily on the grounds that the Saussurean belief that ‘language is a form, not a substance’, that a sign’s value or identity is exclusively determined by relations, is an error. As Hugh Bredin

214 Notes

30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44.

45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64.

remarks in his essay ‘Sign and Value in Saussure’ (Philosophy 59 (1984): 67–77) a relation must be at least partly determined by the things it relates; no linguistic relation can be understood or even formulated unless the things among which the relation obtains already possess identifiable properties. Catherine Belsey, Critical Practice (London and New York: Routledge, 1983) 46. Weedon, Feminist Practice, 33. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1976) 12. For an account of the origin of these ideas in the Saussurean thesis of difference in language see Chapter 1. Jardine, ‘Demise’, 437. Robert Scholes, ‘Reading Like a Man’, Men in Feminism, eds Alice Jardine and Paul Smith (New York and London: Routledge, 1989) 218. Richard Harland, Superstructuralism: The Philosophy of Structuralism and PostStructuralism (London and New York: Methuen, 1987) 76. Harland, Superstructuralism, 76. Derrida, Of Grammatology, 60–1. Derrida, Of Grammatology, 166. Tallis, Not Saussure, 180. Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, 82. Derrida, Of Grammatology, 8. Derrida, Of Grammatology, 60–1. A more detailed exploration of Derrida’s arguments concerning writing and speech may be found in Chapter 1. I confine myself here to a brief summary by way of reminder. Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, 92. Murdoch, Metaphysics, 192. Murdoch, Metaphysics, 193. Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (London: Routledge, 1978), 224. Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 1856–1939, vol. XIX (London: Hogarth, 1971) 232. Derrida, Writing and Difference, 224. Harland, Superstructuralism, 144. Louis Althusser, ‘Ideology and the Ideological State Apparatuses’, Lenin and Philosophy (London: New Left Books, 1971), 204. Terry Eagleton, Ideology (London and New York: Verso, 1991) 18. Althusser, Ideology, 155. Belsey, Critical Practice, 57. Althusser, Ideology, 156. Althusser, Ideology, 157. Althusser, Ideology, 159. Althusser, Ideology, 164. Althusser, Ideology, 161. Jacques Lacan, Ecrits, 2. Althusser, Ideology, 124. Althusser, Ideology, 136. Althusser, Ideology, 146.

Notes 215 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72.

73. 74. 75.

76. 77. 78. 79. 80.

81. 82. 83.

Althusser, Ideology, 160. Althusser, Ideology, 160. Althusser, Ideology, 162. Althusser, Ideology, 163. Althusser, Ideology, 163. Althusser, Ideology, 165. Althusser, Ideology, 162. W.B. Yeats, ‘Among School Children’, The Norton Anthology of English Literature, ed. M.H. Abrams, 5th edn (New York and London: Norton, 1986) 1954. Madison, ‘Beyond Seriousness’, 121. Tallis, Not Saussure, 50. Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, ed. Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye, trans. Wade Baskin (London: Peter Owen Ltd., 1960) 111–12. Belsey, Critical Practice, 4. Joan Scott, ‘The Evidence of Experience’, Critical Inquiry, 17 (1991) 773–93. See Raymond Tallis, Not Saussure (London: Macmillan, 1988) 64 for an instance of this argument. Murdoch, Metaphysics, 196. Derrida (following Husserl’s conception of presence as ‘the self-presence of transcendental life’ (Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, 6): that is, consciousness as immediate self-presence, a ‘for-itself’ (für-sich) unmediated by signs) understands ‘presence’ as ‘the meaning of being in general ... presence as substance/essence/existence [ousia] ... the self-presence of the cogito’ (Derrida, Of Grammatology, 12). That is, although Derrida critiques Husserl’s claim that the solitary consciousness has no need of the mediation of signs to achieve full self-presence, and contends that the notion of presence itself depends on the notion of representation, he forwards no alternative conception of presence. Rather, like Husserl, he retains an understanding of self-presence as an ‘all or nothing’ affair. As Peter Dews remarks, Derrida ‘automatic[ally] and incautious[ly] equat[es] subjectivity with the selfpresence and self-identity of consciousness’ (Dews, 97). Thus I believe the metaphor of pregnancy is a particularly apposite one here, mirroring the either/or of presence in Derrida’s work. Admittedly, the accumulation of discursively mediated experiences encountered by the pregnant woman throughout the duration of her pregnancy means that the experience of being six weeks pregnant is very different from the experience of being six months pregnant. Nonetheless there is a fundament empirical distinction between being pregnant (even ‘a little bit’, in the sense of a few days or weeks) and not being pregnant, as any woman who has experienced an unwanted pregnancy will confirm. Murdoch, Metaphysics, 212. Derrida, Of Grammatology, 166. Indeed, as we know, Derrida understands meaning as endlessly deferred, ultimately unreachable. Through the process Derrida terms ‘the logic of supplementarity’, no text carries self-evident meaning but points only towards a multiplicity of other texts, which in turn point to a multiplicity of other texts

216 Notes

84.

85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93.

94. 95. 96. 97. 98. 99. 100. 101. 102. 103. 104.

105. 106. 107.

108. 109.

and so on indefinitely. So the logical outcome of Derrida’s theory is not the valorisation of meaning as fluid and elusive but as theoretically impossible. As Peter Dews observes, for Derrida, ‘any specification of meaning can only function as a self-defeating attempt to stabilise and restrain ... the ‘dissemination’ of the text’. As Derrida himself argues, ‘you are indefinitely referred to a concatenation without basis, without end, and the indefinitely articulated retreat of the forbidden beginning ...’ (Derrida, Dissemination, 333–4). Indeed, Althusser claims that not only has ideology no history but is in fact eternal, existing even within communism; it is, for him, an essential structure operative in all societies. Derrida, Of Grammatology, 7. Lacan, Ecrits, 1. Lacan, Ecrits, 2. Lacan, Ecrits, 7. Althusser, Ideology, 195. E.P. Thompson, The Poverty of Theory (London: Merlin, 1978) 33. Belsey, Critical Practice, 61. Althusser, Ideology, 163. The term ‘proto-subject’ is mine; I use it here to denote the theoretical contradictions which Althusser introduces when he argues both that it is interpellation which constitutes individuals as subjects and simultaneously that individuals are always already subjects. Althusser, Ideology, 163. Eagleton, Ideology, 145. Althusser, Ideology, 204. Althusser, Ideology, 157. Thompson, 175. Scott, ‘Evidence of Experience’ 797. Thompson, Poverty of Theory, 175. Habermas, ‘Themes in Postmetaphysical Thinking’, 28–53. Murdoch, Metaphysics, 211. Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1971), 323–4. Indeed, Gramsci adopts a more pluralist and historical approach to common sense in contrast to Althusser’s reification of monolithic ideology: he notes that ‘common sense is a collective noun, like religion: there is not just one common sense for that too is a product of history and a part of the historical process’ (Gramsci, 325–6). Gramsci, Selections, 376. Gramsci, Selections, 378. Despite Derrida’s characterisation of ‘différance’ as the infinite deferral of meaning, if self and world are drawn completely into the vortex of language then closure is automatically effected by language’s own status as independent, self-sufficient, self-verifying system: this autonomous neo-metaphysical power-structure invokes a closure far more violent and radical than that effected by locating meaning in the conjunction of sign and referent. Thompson, Poverty of Theory, 166. Louis MacNeice, ‘Snow’, Modern Irish Poetry: An Anthology, ed. Patrick Crotty (Belfast: Blackstaff, 1995) 78.

Notes 217 110. For example, for Derrida, language is a closed system: it possesses a ‘structure peculiar to language alone, which allows it to function entirely by itself when its intention is cut off from intuition’ (Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, 92); moreover, this transcendent sea of language is always prior to subjectivity, and indeed constitutes subjectivity for the individual. 111. Habermas, ‘Themes in Postmetaphysical Thinking’, 43 112. Steiner, ‘Real Presences’ 31. 113. I have developed this strategy partly from the work of the literary critic George Steiner, who contends that we must read as if texts have meaning although this meaning can never be exhausted, and partly from Gadamerian anti-foundationalist hermeneutics, where (unlike deconstructive principles) interpretation and understanding are conceived as provisionally posited but nonetheless achievable. 114. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. William Glen-Doepel, 2nd edn (London: Sheed and Ward, 1979) 269. 115. Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, 154. 116. MacNeice, ‘Snow’ 78.

Chapter 4 Frameworks for Experience 1. James Joyce quoted in Galya Diment, The Autobiographical Novel of CoConsciousness Goncharov, Wolf and Joyce (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1994). 2. Raymond Tallis, Not Saussure (London: Macmillan, 1988) 229. 3. Paul Ricoeur, ‘On Interpretation’, in From Text to Action: Essays in Hermeneutics 2 (London: Athlone, 1991) 18. 4. Ricoeur ‘On Interpretation’, 15. 5. Jurgen Habermas, Postmetaphysical Thinking (Cambridge: Polity, 1992) 43. 6. Iris Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (London: Penguin, 1993) 202. 7. I hope that my approach will remain sensitive to the different voices within this strand of philosophy, avoiding the allure of the ‘grand synthesis’. 8. Paul Ricoeur, ‘Reply to G.B. Madison’, The Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur, ed. Lewis Hahn (Chicago: Open Court, 1995) 95. 9. Paul Ricoeur, ‘Preface’, From Text to Action: Essays in Hermeneutics 2, trans. Kathleen Blamey and John B. Thompson (London: Athlone, 1991) xiii. 10. Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation, trans. D. Savage (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970) 46. 11. Paul Ricoeur, ‘Phenomenology and Hermeneutics’, From Text to Action: Essays in Hermeneutics 2 (London: Athlone, 1991) 30. 12. Ricoeur, ‘Phenomenology and Hermeneutics’, 33. 13. David Linge, ‘Editor’s Introduction’, Philosophical Hermeneutics, Hans-Georg Gadamer, ed. and trans. David Linge (Berkeley: University of California, 1977) xlvii. 14. For example, if I were to walk around a lake noticing how it looks different from different perspectives, nevertheless I would be unable to produce a synthesising theory of how the lake really is which explains these different perspectives or demonstrates which is closest to the truth. My account will be necessarily perspectival.

218 Notes 15. Ricoeur, ‘Phenomenology and Hermeneutics’, 33. 16. Hans-Georg Gadamer, ‘On the Scope and Function of Hermeneutic Reflection’, Philosophical Hermeneutics, ed. and trans. David Linge (Berkeley: University of California, 1977) 19. 17. Paul Ricoeur, ‘History and Narrative as Practice’ (Interview with Paul Ricoeur by Peter Kemp), Philosophy Today (Fall 1985) 217. 18. I believe that, in order to theorise the experiencing self, we must think ‘as if’ an experiencing subject exists who is not entirely constituted by language, or ideology working through language; I believe that it is only with this ‘postulate of meaningfulness’ that interpretation and understanding of experience is possible at all. 19. Fredric Jameson, The Prisonhouse of Language: A Critical Account of Structuralism and Russian Formalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972). 20. Gadamer Truth and Method, 408, 410. 21. Habermas, Postmetaphysical Thinking, 210. 22. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 401. 23. Gadamer, ‘Scope and Function’, 35. 24. G.B. Madison, ‘Ricoeur and the Hermeneutics of the Subject’ The Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur, ed. Lewis Hahn (Chicago: Open Court, 1995) 80. 25. The impetus for Ricoeur’s theories of language and subjectivity is derived in part from the work of Merleau-Ponty. Ricoeur regards Merleau-Ponty’s attempt to ‘return to the speaking subject’ as a flawed but inspirational project. With regard to language, Merleau-Ponty placed the phenomenological approach in direct opposition to the objective science of signs in his desire to progress more quickly to the ‘fecundity of expression’: the phenomenon of speech itself. Ricoeur regards this as a negative move, believing that in doing so Merleau-Ponty misses ‘the structural fact’ of language as an autonomous system. Ricoeur prefers instead to set the phenomenological and semiological discourses in dialogue. He sees his own approach to language as a reconsideration of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of speech: ‘not a repetition but a renewal of the very movement of his reflection’ (Paul Ricoeur, ‘The Question of the Subject: the Challenge of Semiotics’, trans. Kathleen McLaughlin, The Conflict of Interpretations: Essays in Hermeneutics, ed. Don Ihde (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1974) 247. 26. Richard Harland, Beyond Superstructuralism (London: Routledge, 1993). 27. Paul Ricoeur, ‘Question of the Subject’, 249. 28. Paul Ricoeur, ‘Structure, Word, Event’, trans. Robert Sweeney, The Conflict of Interpretations: Essays in Hermeneutics ed. Don Ihde (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1974) 84. 29. Ricoeur, ‘Structure, Word, Event’, 85. 30. Ricoeur, ‘Question of the Subject’, 251. 31. Ricoeur, ‘Question of the Subject’, 251. 32. Ricoeur, ‘Question of the Subject’, 254. 33. Paul Ricoeur, ‘The Model of the Text: Meaningful Action Considered as a Text’, From Text to Action: Essays in Hermeneutics 2, trans. Kathleen Blamey and John B. Thompson (London: Athlone, 1991) 149. 34. Ricoeur, ‘Question of the Subject’, 252. 35. Ricoeur, ‘Question of the Subject’, 253–4.

Notes 219 36. Ricoeur, ‘Question of the Subject’, 260. 37. Ricoeur,’ Question of the Subject’, 260. 38. The term ‘subject’ is placed in inverted commas because the very notion of a post-structuralist subject is almost a contradiction in terms: the poststructuralist language system is virtual and outside of time, thus necessarily lacking temporality and subjectivity. 39. Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993) 127. 40. However, as Richard Harland notes, despite the post-structuralist encouragement of textual incontinence, these theorists still presuppose the rigid boundaries of an established language system. Richard Harland, Beyond Superstructuralism, 25. 41. Raymond Tallis, Not Saussure. 42. Ricoeur, ‘Structure, Word, Event’, 92. 43. Ricoeur, ‘Structure, Word, Event’, 92. 44. Ricoeur, ‘Structure, Word, Event’, 95. 45. Ricoeur, ‘Structure, Word, Event’, 92. 46. Paul Ricoeur, Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, ed. and trans. J. Thompson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981) 107. 47. Paul Ricoeur, ‘The Hermeneutical Function of Distanciation’, From Text to Action: Essays in Hermeneutics 2, trans. Kathleen Blamey and John B. Thompson (London: Athlone, 1991) 78. 48. Despite the similarities in their approaches, Harland does not mention Ricoeur in his book. 49. Harland, Beyond Superstructuralism, 7. 50. Ricoeur, ‘Structure, Word, Event’, 93. 51. Harland, Beyond Superstructuralism, 15. 52. Harland, Beyond Superstructuralism, 17. 53. Harland, Beyond Superstructuralism, 17. 54. Harland, Beyond Superstructuralism, 34. 55. Harland, Beyond Superstructuralism, 35. 56. Harland, Beyond Superstructuralism, 216. 57. Ricoeur, ‘Question of the Subject’, 259. 58. Ricoeur, ‘Structure, Word, Event’, 91. 59. Michel Foucault, ‘Preface to Transgression’, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, eds Donald Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Oxford: Blackwell, 1977) 42. 60. Steve Pile and Nigel Thrift, ‘Introduction’, Mapping the Subject: Geographies of Cultural Transformation, eds Steve Pile and Nigel Thrift (London: Routledge, 1995) 5. 61. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989) 488. 62. R. Coward and J. Ellis, Language and Materialism (London: Routledge, 1977) 3–4. 63. Clifford Geertz, Works and Lives: the Anthropologist as Author (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989) 229. It should be noted, however, that other thinkers dispute the cultural incommensurability of models of selfhood, demonstrating instead the cross-cultural commonality of notions of self. For instance, Jonathan Shear notes the striking similarities between Descartes’ model of the self as selfsame consciousness, single, simple and continuing throughout

220 Notes

64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74.

75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94. 95. 96. 97.

one’s awareness, and the notions of selfhood found in Asian Buddhist and Vedanta thought. ( Jonathan Shear, ‘Experiential Clarification of the Problem of Self’, Models of the Self, eds Shaun Gallagher and Jonathan Shear (Thorverton: Imprint Academic, 1999) 408. Karl Popper quoted in Richard Bernstein Beyond Objectivism and Relativism: Science, Hermeneutics, Praxis (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983) 84. Derrida, Of Grammatology, 20. Derrida, Of Grammatology, 20. Peter Dews, Logics of Disintegration: Post-structuralist Thought and the Claims of Critical Theory (London: Verso, 1988) 19. Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978) 67. Taylor, Sources of the Self, 488. Taylor, Sources of the Self, 462. D.H. Lawrence quoted in Ricardo Quinones, Mapping Literary Modernism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985) 93. Taylor, Sources of the Self, 465. Taylor, Sources of the Self, 465. The latter consideration takes account of Kant’s observation that all of one’s experiences are within one’s self; self must be present, in some sense, in order to have any experiences at all (Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp-Smith (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1965). Thomas Nagel, The View from Nowhere (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986) 126. Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy, 42–3. Ricoeur, ‘Phenomenology and Hermeneutics’, 38. Madison, ‘Ricoeur and Hermeneutics’, 75. Madison, ‘Ricoeur and Hermeneutics’, 77. Hans-Georg Gadamer, ‘On the Problem of Self-Understanding’, Philosophical Hermeneutics, ed. David Linge (Berkeley: University of California, 1977) 49. Ricoeur, ‘On Interpretation’, 15. Ricoeur, ‘Phenomenology and Hermeneutics’, 36. Kathleen Blamey, ‘From the Ego to the Self’, The Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur, ed. Lewis Hahn (Chicago: Open Court, 1995) 573. Ricoeur, ‘On Interpretation’, 15. Ricoeur, ‘On Interpretation’, 16. Ricoeur ‘Question of the Subject’, 237. Ricoeur ‘Question of the Subject’, 237. Blamey, From the Ego to the self, 590. Ricoeur, ‘Question of the Subject’, 241. Ricoeur, ‘Question of the Subject’, 241. Ricoeur, ‘Question of the Subject’, 243. Ricoeur, ‘Question of the Subject’, 264. Blamey, From the Ego to the self, 590–1. Paul Ricoeur, ‘Existence and Hermeneutics’, The Conflict of Interpretations, ed. Don Ihde (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1974) 17–18. Ricoeur ‘Question of the Subject’, 254. Ricoeur ‘Question of the Subject’, 255. Tallis, Not Saussure, 186.

Notes 221 98. Christopher Norris, Deconstruction: Theory and Practice (London: Methuen, 1982) 110. 99. Jacques Derrida, see Tallis, Not saussure, 184. 100. Ricoeur, ‘Question of the Subject’, 255. 101. Ricoeur, ‘Question of the Subject’, 255. 102. Norris, Deconstruction, 110. 103. Habermas, Postmetaphysical Thinking, 43. 104. Ricoeur, ‘Question of the Subject’, 261. 105. Here Ricoeur differs from Gadamer’s position on the fundamental linguisticality (Sprachlichkeit) of our being-in-the-world. Ricoeur believes that it is essential to subordinate Sprachlichkeit to the experience of ‘belonging’ which precedes it. He writes, ‘consciousness of being exposed to the effects of history, which precludes a total reflection on prejudices ... is not reducible to the properly lingual aspects of the transmission of the past’ (Ricoeur, ‘Phenomenology and Hermeneutics’, 41). He contends that is the ‘interplay of distance and proximity’, the ‘existential structures constitutive of being-in-the-world’ (Ricoeur, ‘Phenomenology and Hermeneutics’, 42) which come to language rather than what language produces. 106. Ricoeur, ‘Question of the Subject’, 265. 107. Ricoeur, ‘Question of the Subject’, 266. 108. Ricoeur, ‘Question of the Subject’, 266. 109. Bernstein, Beyond Objectivism, 134. 110. Taylor, Sources of the Self, 513. 111. Taylor, Sources of the Self, 488. 112. Derrida quoted in Madison, ‘Beyond Seriousness’, 122. 113. Madison, ‘Beyond Seriousness’, 123. 114. Madison, ‘Beyond Seriousness’, 134. 115. The term ‘texts’ includes not only literary or historical writing, but also the speech of the subject herself. For hermeneutic phenomenologists the human subject becomes ‘like’ a text in that the meaning(s) of her existence are always mediated: ‘reflection must become interpretation because I cannot grasp the act of existing except in signs scattered in the world’ (Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy, 46). 116. The use of the term ‘discursive’ here moves away from the Ricoeurian sense of discourse as language-event or linguistic usage, towards the Foucauldian sense of the term, which – broadly understood – refers less to actual utterances and more to the rules and structures which produce these utterances, and which structure our notions of identity and reality. The distinction between ‘discourse’ and ‘ideology’ is more difficult to make. The critic Sara Mills suggests that ideological analysis, in the last instance, retains some notion of the individual subject who is capable of resisting and intervening in ideological determinants; discourse theory, however, because of its Foucauldian insistence on the erasure of the ‘constituent subject’ – the individual – disengages much more fundamentally from the possibility of agency and control. As Mills notes, ‘discourse theory has ... difficulty in locating, describing and even accounting for this individual subject who resists power’ (Sara Mills, Discourse (London: Routledge, 1997) 35). 117. V.N. Voloshinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, trans. L. Matejka and I. Titunik (New York: Seminar Press, 1973) 9.

222 Notes 118. Paul de Man, The Resistance to Theory (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1986) 11. 119. Terry Eagleton, Ideology (London and New York: Verso, 1991) 195. 120. Eagleton, Ideology, 222–3. 121. Habermas, Postmetaphysical Thinking, 209. 122. The term ‘forgetting’ is coined by the post-Marxist Althusserian linguist Michel Pecheux in Language, Semantics and Ideology (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992). 123. I deal with the issue of ideology and consciousness in Chapter 3. 124. Nagel, The View form Nowhere, 11. 125. Nagel, The View form Nowhere, 9. 126. Bernstein, Beyond Objectivism, 230. 127. John Llewelyn, Beyond Metaphysics?: the Hermeneutic Circle in Contemporary Continental Philosophy (London: Macmillan, 1985) 205. 128. Louis MacNeice ‘Snow’ Modern Irish Poetry: an Anthology, ed. Patrick Crotty (Belfast: Blackstaff, 1995) 78. 129. Nagel, The View from Nowhere, 118. 130. Ricoeur, ‘Phenomenology and Hermeneutics’, 37, 33. 131. Ricoeur, ‘Question of the Subject’, 264. 132. Ricoeur, ‘Question of the Subject’, 265. 133. Paul Ricoeur, ‘The Hermeneutical Function of Distanciation’, trans. John B. Thompson, From Text to Action: Essays in Hermeneutics 2 (London: Athlone, 1991) 88. 134. Catherine Belsey, Critical Practice (London and New York: Routledge, 1993) 61. 135. The musical term ostinato refers to a reiterated figure or motif, particularly in the bass line. 136. Ricoeur, ‘Question of the Subject’, 265. 137. Llewellyn, Beyond Metaphysics?, 205. 138. Llewellyn, Beyond Metaphysics?, 205. 139. Paul Ricoeur, ‘The Creativity of Language’, The Ricoeur Reader, ed. Mario J. Valdes (New York and London: Harvester, 1991) 477. 140. Madison, ‘Ricoeur and Hermeneutics’, 88. 141. Ricoeur, ‘Question of the Subject’, 266. 142. Julia Kristeva is the post-structuralist thinker who has recognised most clearly the need to move away from Saussurean langue towards a reconnection with the speaking subject of specific discourse or parole. Indeed, it was Kristeva who coined the term ‘subject in process’. Kristeva posits the speaking subject as the ‘place, not only of structure and its repeated transformation, but especially of its loss, its outlay’ (Kristeva quoted in Toril Moi, Sexual/Textual Politics (London: Routledge, 1994) 152). Yet as we have observed in Chapter 2, Kristeva’s understanding of the speaking subject is deeply coloured by Lacan’s post-Freudian psychoanalytic theory, where the speaking subject is characterised by absence and loss due to the repression of desire for the lost mother. For Lacan/Kristeva, the subject is lack: ‘that which it is not’. It is difficult, then, to see how the Kristevan model of subjectivity, endlessly alienated from itself, can ever be reconciled with the possibility of active self-reflection. Thus, despite her intial optimism regarding the speaking subject, I believe Kristeva’s analysis remains stalled at the stage of distanciation, dispossession, without hope of the positivity of reappropriation.

Notes 223 143. Jean-Luc Nancy, ‘Introduction’, Who Comes After the Subject? ed. Eduardo Cadava et al. (London: Routledge, 1991) 8. 144. Jacques Derrida, ‘ “Eating Well,” or the Calculation of the Subject: an Interview with Jacques Derrida’, Who Comes After the Subject? ed. Eduardo Cadava et al. (London: Routledge, 1991) 99–100. 145. Derrida, ‘Eating Well’, 102, 103. 146. Tallis, Not Saussure, 227. 147. Derrida, ‘Eating Well’, 97. 148. It is certainly difficult to see how the Althusserian subject (who is constituted through and through by ideology), or the alienated Lacanian subject of ‘lack’ (who is ‘where it is not’) may be ‘restored’ or ‘reinscribed’. 149. Richard Harland uses the term ‘out-conscious-ing’ to denote the poststructuralist tendency to win battles by speaking from a superior level of awareness which encompasses previous conceptual frameworks Beyond Superstructuralism, 222. 150. Taylor, Sourses of the Self, 465. 151. Derrida, ‘Eating Well’, 105. 152. Ricoeur, ‘Phenomenology and Hermeneutics’, 36. 153. Ricoeur, ‘Question of the Subject’, 255. 154. Ricoeur, ‘Question of the Subject’, 256. 155. Tallis, Not Saussure, 230. 156. Ricoeur, ‘Question of the Subject’, 266. 157. Harland, Beyond Superstructuralism, 61. 158. Harland, Beyond Superstructuralism, 61. 159. Raymond Williams, Keywords (London: Fontana, 1988) 128. 160. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. William Glen-Doepel (London: Sheed and Ward, 1979) 55. 161. Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism, trans. Harry Zohn (London: NLB, 1973) 154. 162. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 55. 163. Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire, 113. 164. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 55. 165. It is this many stranded connectivity between self and world that the post-structuralists wish to bracket off. The exasperated tone of deconstructionist Jonathan Culler’s dismissal of experience as ‘an indispensable point of reference, yet never simply there’ (Culler, 63) is typical of the poststructuralist response. 166. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 60. 167. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 60. 168. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 60. 169. Habermas, Postmetaphysical Thinking, 47. 170. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 60. 171. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 62. 172. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 62. 173. Hans-Georg Gadamer, ‘The Universality of the Hermeneutical Problem’, Philosophical Hermeneutics, trans. and ed. David E. Linge (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977) 3. 174. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 415. 175. Gadamer quoted in Linge, Philosophical Hermeneutics, xxix.

224 Notes 176. 177. 178. 179. 180. 181. 182. 183. 184. 185. 186. 187. 188. 189. 190. 191.

192. 193. 194. 195. 196. 197. 198. 199. 200. 201. 202. 203. 204. 205.

Gadamer, ‘Problem of Self-Understanding’, 50. Gadamer, SFR, 25. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 240. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 245. Gadamer, ‘Universality’, 9. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 267–8. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 269. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 269. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 271. Linge, Philosophical Hermeneutics, xlvii. Derrida, Of Grammatology, 60 Gadamer, Truth and Method, 315. Derrida, Of Grammatology, 61 Murdoch, Metaphysics, 193. Murdoch, Metaphysics, 215. Paul Ricoeur, ‘Hermeneutics and the Critique of Ideology’, From Text to Action: Essays in Hermeneutics 2, trans. John B. Thompson and Kathleen Blamey (London: Athlone, 1991) 285. Ricoeur, ‘Hermeneutics and Ideology’, 293–4. Nagel, The View form Nowhere, 11. Ricoeur, ‘Hermeneutical Function’, 88. Ricoeur, ‘Task of Hermeneutics’, 73. Ricoeur, ‘Phenomenology and Hermeneutics’, 52. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 320. Ricoeur ‘Hermeneutics and Ideology’, 298. Joan Scott, ‘The Evidence of Experience’, Critical Enquiry 17 (1991) 773–97. Tallis, Not Saussure, 231. It should be noted, however, that Tallis allows no place in his analysis to the deconstructive enterprise. Ricoeur, ‘Phenomenology and Hermeneutics’, 33. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 296. Scott, ‘Evidence of Experience’, 797. Ricoeur, ‘Question of the Subject’, 259. Ricoeur, ‘Structure, Word, Event’, 91.

Chapter 5 ‘Its me here’: Writing the Singular Self, Writing the Postdeconstructive Female Self 1. Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, trans. Kathleen Blamey (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992) 22. 2. Jean-Luc Nancy, ‘Introduction’, Who Comes After the Subject?, eds Eduardo Cadava, Peter Connor, Jean-Luc Nancy (New York and London: Routledge, 1991) 5. 3. Roland Barthes, ‘The Death of the Author’, Image, Music, Text, trans. and ed. Stephen Heath (London: Fontana, 1977) 142. 4. Barthes, ‘Death of the Author’, 147. 5. Sean Burke, The Death and Return of the Author: Criticism and Subjectivity in Barthes, Foucault and Derrida (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1992) 23.

Notes 225 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

16. 17.

18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

25.

26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37.

Barthes, ‘Death of the Author’, 145. Barthes, ‘Death of the Author’, 143. Barthes, ‘Death of the Author’, 146. Roland Barthes, Sade, Fourier, Loyola, trans. Richard Miller (London: Cape, 1977) 36–7. Burke, Death and Return, 51. See Introduction for a further explanation of this term. Burke, Death and Return, 27. Burke, Death and Return, 106. Burke, Death and Return, 107. Derrida remarks, ‘[Experience has its] ultimate foundation ... as archi-ecriture. The parenthesising of regions of experience or of the totality of natural experience must discover a field of transcendental experience’, (Derrida Of Grammatology, 60–1). Burke, Death and Return, 107. Michel Foucault, ‘What is an Author?’, Textual Strategies: Perspectives in PostStructuralist Criticism, trans. and ed. Josue V. Harari (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979) 144. Barthes, ‘Death of the Author’, 143. Burke, Death and Return, 172. Burke, Death and Return, 173. Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy, 46. Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977) 138. Barthes, ‘Death of the Author’, 145. Mikhail Bakhtin, quoted in Tzvetan Todorov, Mikhail Bakhtin: The Dialogic Principle, trans. Wlad Godzich (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984) 52. Michael Sprinker, ‘Fictions of the Self: The End of Autobiography’, Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical, ed. James Olney (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980) 342. Marjorie Grene, The Knower and the Known (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974) 157. Jacques Derrida quoted in Laura Marcus, Auto/biographical Discourses (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994) 212. Louis Marin, ‘Montaigne’s Tomb, or Autobiographical Discourse’, Oxford Literary Review, 4, 3 (1981) 43–58. Robert Elbaz, The Changing Nature of the Self: a Critical Study of the Autobiographical Discourse (London and Sydney: Croom Helm, 1985) 8. Elbaz, Changing Nature of the Self, 8. Elbaz, Changing Nature of the Self, 12. Marcus, Autobiographical Discourses, 183. Marcus, Autobiographical Discourses, 218. Felicity Nussbaum, The Autobiographical Subject: Gender and Ideology in Eighteenth Century England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1989) xii. Elbaz, Changing Nature of the Self, 153. Peter Dews, Logics of Disintegration: Post-structuralist Thought and the Claims of Critical Theory (London: Verso, 1987) 32. Elbaz, Changing Nature of the Self, 14, 8.

226 Notes 38. Sprinker, ‘Fictions of the Self’, 325. 39. Michael Mascuch, The Origins of the Individualist Self: Autobiography and SelfIdentity in England, 1591–1791 (London: Polity, 1997) 23. 40. Liz Stanley, The Auto/biographical I: the Theory and Practice of Feminist Auto/biography (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992) 97. 41. Shari Benstock, ‘Authorizing the Autobiographical,’ The Private Self: Theory and Practice of Women’s Autobiographical Writings, ed. Shari Benstock (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1988) 11. 42. Hegel quoted in Georges Gusdorf, ‘Conditions and Limits of Autobiography’, Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical, ed. James Olney (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980) 38. 43. Benstock, ‘Authorizing the Autobiographical’, 11. 44. Gusdorf, ‘Conditions and Limits’, 31. 45. Benstock, ‘Authorizing the Autobiographical’, 11. 46. Jacques Lacan, Ecrits: a Selection (London: Routledge, 1977) 4. 47. Dews, Logics of Disintegration, 55. 48. Benstock, ‘Authorizing the Autobiographical’, 12. 49. Benstock, ‘Authorizing the Autobiographical’, 12. 50. Benstock, ‘Authorizing the Autobiographical’, 15. 51. Dews, Logics of Disintegration, 70. 52. Benstock, ‘Authorizing the Autobiographical’, 15. 53. Benstock, ‘Authorizing the Autobiographical’, 15, 16. 55. Benstock, ‘Authorizing the Autobiographical’, 20. 55. Benstock, ‘Authorizing the Autobiographical’, 22. 56. Benstock, ‘Authorizing the Autobiographical’, 29. 57. Domna Stanton, ‘Autogynography: Is the Subject Different?’, The Female Autograph: Theory and Practice of Autobiography, ed. Domna Stanton (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984) vii. 58. Stanley, The Auto/biographical I, 92. 59. Philippe Lejeune quoted in Stanton, ‘Autogynography’, 10. 60. Stanton, ‘Autogynography’, 10. 61. Stanton, ‘Autogynography’, 9. 62. Stanton, ‘Autogynography’, 9. 63. For a discussion of the implications of Derrida’s analysis of presence, see Tallis 227ff. 64. Stanley, The Auto/biographical I, 90. 65. Stanton, ‘Autogynography’, 10. 66. Stanton, ‘Autogynography’, 11. 67. Stanton, ‘Autogynography’, 12. 68. Stanton, ‘Autogynography’, 12. 69. Stanton, ‘Autogynography’, 13. 70. Stanton, ‘Autogynography’, 13. 71. Stanton, ‘Autogynography’, 14. 72. Stanton, ‘Autogynography’, 15. 73. Stanley, The Auto/biographical, 93. 74. Stanton, ‘Autogynography’, 15. 75. Stanton, ‘Autogynography’, 15. 76. Benstock, ‘Authorizing the Autobiographical’, 21. 77. Stanton, ‘Autogynography’, 15.

Notes 227 78. Stanton, ‘Autogynography’, 9. 79. Sidonie Smith, Subjectivity, Identity and the Body: Women’s Autobiographical Practices in the Twentieth Century (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1993) 5. 80. Benstock, ‘Authorizing the Autobiographical’, 12. 81. Stanton, ‘Autogynography’, 15. 82. Smith, Subjectivity, Identity and the Body, 6,8. 83. Dews, Logics of Disintegration, 25. 84. Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 16 85. Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 22. 86. The notion of ‘arborescence’ is examined in Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987). 87. Barthes, ‘Death of the Author’, 147. 88. The term ‘speaking/spoken’ self is coined by the hermeneutic theorist G.B. Madison; it refers to the fact that the self-presence of the hermeneutic subject is always mediated by signs. Madison writes, ‘... to the degree that [the subject] exists self-understandingly it does so only as the result of the constitutive and critical play of signs, symbols and texts’ (Madison, ‘Ricoeur and the Hermeneutics of the Subject’, The Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur, ed. Lewis Hahn (Chicago: Open Court, 1995) 80). 89. Paul Ricoeur, ‘Life: a Story in Search of a Narrator’, The Ricoeur Reader, ed. Mario J. Valdes (New York and London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991) 435. 90. It will be noted that we have once more entered the boundaries of the hermeneutic circle with this assertion. If the experiences of the self are always already linguistically mediated, how can she ‘bring’ her experiences to language? Subject and object are indeed mutually implicated by this statement; there can be no response to demands for empirical verification. Nonetheless, I believe that vicious circularity is avoided by the ‘theoretical equiprimordiality’ [see chapter 4, p. 53] of the existentially situated speaking subject and language. As Ricoeur notes, ‘the circularity between I speak and I am gives the initiative by turns to the symbolic function and its instinctual and existential root’ (Ricoeur, ‘Qestion of the Subject’, 266). 91. Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 11. 92. Paul Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning (Fort Worth, TX: Texas Christian University Press, 1976) 20–1. 93. Janet Varner Gunn, Autobiography: Toward a Poetics of Experience (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982) 32. 94. Gerard Manley Hopkins, quoted in James Olney, ‘Autobiography and the Cultural Moment: a Thematic, Historical and Bibliographical Introduction’, Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical, ed. J. Olney (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980) 23. 95. Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 55. 96. Nancy, Who Comes After the Subject?, 4. 97. Smith, Subjectivity, Identify and the Body, 5–8. 98. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990) 16. 99. Butler, Gender Trouble, 17. 100. Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power (PLP) (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997) 10–11.

228 Notes 101. Butler, Gender Trouble, 145. 102. A marked example of this blurring of conceptual boundaries can be found in Butler’s discussion of the unrepresentability of women in Gender Trouble. Here Butler refers to women as ‘linguistic absence and opacity’ (Gender Trouble, 9). Yet opacity is far from synonymous with absence; for a subjectivity to be opaque, it has to be in some sense ‘there’ or present, however decentred or discursively mediated it may be. 103. Paul A. Kottman, ‘Translator’s Introduction’, Adriana Cavarero, Relating Narratives: Storytelling and Selfhood, trans. Paul A. Kottman (London and New York: Routledge, 2000) xiii. 104. Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 3, trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988) 270. 105. Nancy, Who Comes After the Subject?, 6–7. 106. Nancy, Who Comes After the Subject?, 7. 107. Nancy, Who Comes After the Subject?, 7. 108. Nancy, Who Comes After the Subject?, 7. 109. Nancy, Who Comes After the Subject?, 8. 110. Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 4, 16. 111. Kathleen Blamey, ‘From the Ego to the Self: a Philosophical Itinerary’, The Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur, ed. Lewis Edwin Hahn (Chicago: Open Court, 1995) 577. 112. Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 140. 113. Ricouer, Oneself as Another, 2–3. 114. Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 2. 115. Ricoeur Oneself as Another, 22. 116. Ricoeur Oneself as Another, 55. 117. Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, 246. 118. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957) 181. 119. Adrian Cavarero, Relating Narratives: Storytelling and Selfhood (London and New York: Routledge, 2000) 13. 120. Cavarero, Relating Narratives, 2. 121. Cavarero, Relating Narratives, 3. 122. Cavarero, Relating Narratives, 38. 123. Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, 246. 124. Paul Ricoeur, ‘Life: a Story in Search of a Narrator’, The Ricoeur Reader: Reflection and Imagination, ed. Mario J. Valdes (New York and London: Harvester, 1991) 437. 125. Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, 246. 126. Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, 246. 127. Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, 248. 128. Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, 247. 129. Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, 247. 130. Cavarero, Relating Narratives, 34. 131. Cavarero, Relating Narratives, 34. 132. Cavarero, Relating Narratives, 34. 133. Cavarero, Relating Narratives, 34. 134. Cavarero, Relating Narratives, 34. 135. Cavarero, Relating Narratives, 35.

Notes 229 136. 137. 138. 139. 140. 141. 142. 143. 144. 145. 146. 147. 148. 149. 150. 151.

152. 153. 154. 155. 156. 157. 158. 159.

160. 161. 162. 163.

164. 165. 166.

Cavarero, Relating Narratives, 35. Cavarero, Relating Narratives, 35. Cavarero, Relating Narratives, 36. Cavarero, Relating Narratives, 23. Cavarero, Relating Narratives, 36. Smith, Subjectivity, Identity and the Body, 8. Cavarero, Subjectivity, Identity and the Body, 38. Cavarero, Subjectivity, Identity and the Body, 40. Cavarero, Subjectivity, Identity and the Body, 63. Cavarero, Subjectivity, Identity and the Body, 72. Ricoeur, ‘Life’, 437. Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, 246. Blamey, ‘From the Ego to the Self’, 599. Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, 248–9. Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 164. Ricoeur believes that, understood in narrative terms, identity may be called the identity of ‘the character’: that ‘set of distinctive marks which permit the reidentification of a human individual as being the same’ (Oneself as Another, 116). Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 147. Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 160. Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 161. Cavarero, Relating Narratives, 36. Cavarero, Relating Narratives, 87. Cavarero, Relating Narratives, 87. Ricoeur, ‘Life’, 435. It is important to stress here that the anti-foundationalist notion of singularity which I propose is not predicated upon a coherent, stable ‘core-self’, but operates as a series of interpretations indefinitely pursued by a finite existent whose selfhood is understood as a ‘teleology without telos’. Butler, Gender Trouble, 17. Cavarero, Relating Narratives, 23. Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 22. Although this theoretical standpoint posits the ontic level as prior to the discursive and reflective levels, it remains anti-foundationalist in the sense that pre-reflective singularity cannot be represented as radical origin since it is simply a ‘thereness’: an exposed existence without interiority, not a ‘self’. Nancy, Who Comes After the Subject?, 6. Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 162. Moreover, it is only the affirmation or attestation that ‘it’s me here!’ that protects my precarious singularity against the erosion of alterity; this attestation, which Ricoeur also refers to as ‘credence’ is ‘a trust in the power to say, in the power to do, in the power to recognize oneself as a character in a narrative’ (Oneself as Another, 22). Attestation is unable to entirely overcome what Ricoeur terms ‘suspicion’ and what we, in our hermeneutic/ deconstructive model of the experiential, termed the deconstructive moment of distanciation, where the insurmountability of hegemony’s prereflective inhabitation of experience is acknowledged.

230 Notes 167. Katja Mikhailovich, ‘Postmodernism and its “Contribution” to Ending Violence Against Women’, Radically Speaking: Feminism Reclaimed, eds Diane Bell and Renate Klein (London: Zed Books, 1996) 344. 168. Marcus, Autobiographical Discourses, 180. 169. What it means for a woman to say ‘I’, and, saying it, place it in the broader context of ‘we’, is a huge philosophical (or indeed, political, or psychoanalytical, or historical, or sociological) project; although my analysis here will be informed by an acknowledgement of the conceptual complexities which score the sexed ‘I’/’we’, I propose to focus most closely on the impact of my hermeneutic/deconstructive theoretical framework on the female autobiographical subject. 170. Linda Anderson, Women and Autobiography in the Twentieth Century: Remembered Futures (London and New York: Harvester, 1997) 2. 171. Nancy Miller, ‘Changing The Subject: Authorship, Writing and the Reader’, Subject to Change: Reading Feminist Writing (New York: Columbia Press, 1988) 106. 172. Anderson, Women and Autobiography, 2–3. 173. Nancy K. Miller, Getting Personal (New York and London: Routledge, 1991) xiii. 174. Miller, Getting Personal, 74–5. 175. Mary Ann Caws, Women of Bloomsbury: Virginia, Vanessa and Carrington (London and New York: Routledge, 1990) 2–3. 176. Stanley, The Auto/biographical ‘I’, 246. 177. Smith, Subjectivity, Identity and the Body, 156. 178. Butler, Gender Trouble, xi. 179. See Fuss (1990); Belsey (1983); Weedon (1993); Butler Gender Trouble (1990); Scott (1991). 180. Gallop quoted in Jardine ‘Demise of Experience’, 440. 181. In particular, the work of Julia Kristeva focuses on the difference and alterity operative within the concept of ‘identity’. For instance, as we have seen, in ‘Revolution in Poetic Language’ (1989) she considers how, in poetic language, identity is subverted by alterity, with particular reference to maternity as a paradigm model of alterity within identity. As Kelly Oliver notes, for Kristeva, ‘the other is always within and originary to the subject, who is always in process’ (Oliver, Reading Kristeva, 188). 182. Butler, Gender Trouble, 13. 183. Butler, Gender Trouble, 3. 184. Harland, Beyond Superstructuralism, 61. 185. Habermas, 47. 186. The problematics of ‘speaking as a woman’ in the context of a hermeneutic/ deconstructive framework will be explored in more depth later. 187. Tallis, Not Saussure, 230. 188. Battersby, The Phenomenal Woman, 22. 189. Sean Burke, Authorship: from Plato to the Postmodern: a Reader (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1995) xxi. 190. Interestingly, in her more recent work, New Maladies of the Soul (1995), Julia Kristeva notes that discourse has been standardised to the extent that it becomes meaningless, unable to account for ‘my own’ experience. She contends that ‘modern man’ [sic] is unable to represent himself; thus, argues

Notes 231

191.

192.

193. 194. 195. 196. 197. 198. 199. 200. 201.

202. 203. 204. 205. 206. 207. 208. 209. 210. 211. 212.

Kristeva, the role of the psychoanalyst is ‘to restore psychic life and to enable the speaking entity to live life to the fullest’ (Kristeva, New Maladies, 9). Post-structuralism has provided us with many insights into the discourses at work within the experiences of pregnancy, birth and motherhood. In particular, ‘Stabat Mater’ (1989), Julia Kristeva’s study of the Virgin Mother, explores the psycho-social functions of the ‘cult of the virgin’ on contemporary women’s experiences of motherhood. Kristeva calls for a new, ‘postvirginal’ discourse on maternity, a ‘herethics’; she asks, ‘what are the aspects of the feminine psyche for which the representation of motherhood does not provide a solution or else provides one that is felt as too coercive by twentieth-century women?’ (Kristeva, ‘Stabat Mater’, 182). Moreover, in Powers of Horror (1982), Kristeva explores the way in which the bodily secretions – blood and milk – of the abject maternal body represent the forces of nature, and thus operate as a threat to the boundaries of the social subject’s identity. She remarks that ‘the abject confronts us ... with our earliest attempts to release the hold of maternal entity ... It is a violent, clumsy breaking away, with the constant risk of falling back under a power as securing as it is stifling’ (Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 13). Michelle Stanworth, Reproductive Technologies: Tampering with Nature?, Feminisms, eds Sandra Kemp and Judith Squires (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997) 485. Judith Butler, ‘Gender as Performance’, Interview with Peter Osborne and Lynne Segal, Radical Philosophy 67, 33. Erwin Straus, Psychiatry and Philosophy (New York: Springer Verlag, 1969) 29. Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (New York: Norton, 1976) 63. Iris Marion Young, ‘Pregnant Embodiment’, Body and Flesh: a Philosophical Reader, ed. Donn Welton (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998) 276. Young, ‘Pregnant Embodiment’ 280. Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 40. Stanley, The Auto/biographical I, 97. Stanton, ‘Autogynography’, 15. I refer the reader to the list of textual/referential polarities implicit in poststructuralist feminist accounts of female autobiographies supplied in this chapter 5. Smith, Subjectivity, Identity and the Body, 17. Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 162. Stanley, The Auto/biographical I, 97. Smith, Subjectivity, Identity and the Body, 11. Of course, insofar as the subject ‘takes up’ her experiences, she is also ‘taken up’ by the discursivities which enable and control these experiences. Virginia Woolf, ‘A Sketch of the Past’, Moments of Being, ed. Jeanne Schulkind, 2nd edn. (London: Hogarth Press, 1985) 65. Cavarero, Relating Narratives, 74. Stanley, The Auto/biographical I, 20. ‘Desire’ here refers to the desire for truth, for possible meaning. Cavarero, Relating Narratives, 71. Stanley, The Auto/biographical I, 242–3.

232 Notes 213. Rosi Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994) 115. 214. Cavarero, Relating Narratives, 60. 215. Adrienne Rich, ‘The Problem of Speaking for Others’, Cultural Critique 30 (1991–92) 20–1. 216. Denise Riley, ‘Does Sex have a History?’, New Formations 1 (Spring 1987) 35. 217. Kate Soper, ‘Feminism, Humanism, Postmodernism’, Feminisms, ed. Sandra Kemp and Judith Squires (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997) 289. 218. This stance also reinvokes in a new form the self as ‘isolato’: this self may lack the coherence and autonomy of the unified, transcendental subject, but it remains closely associated with the notion of individual consciousness. 219. Paul Ricoeur, ‘The Hermeneutic Function of Distanciation’, From Text to Action, eds Kathleen Blamey and John B. Thompson (London: Athlone, 1991) 88. 220. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception (London and New York: Routledge Humanities Press, 1962) 85.

Conclusion 1. Hans-Georg Gadamer, ‘Letter to Dallmayr’, Dialogue and Deconstruction, ed. Diane P. Michelfelder and Richard E. Palmer (New York: State University of New York Press, 1989) 97. 2. Sean Burke, Authorship: from Plato to the Postmodern (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1995) xxi. 3. Peter Dews, Logics of Disintegration (London and New York: Verso, 1987) 34. 4. John Llewellyn, Beyond Metaphysics?: the Hermeneutic Circle in Contemporary Continental Philosophy (London: Macmillan, 1985) 205. 5. Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 317. 6. Gadamer, ‘Reply to Jacques Derrida’, 57. 7. Ricoeur, ‘Phenomenology and Hermenutics’, 38. 8. Stanton, ‘Autogynography’, v. 9. Kristeva quoted in Alcoff, 442. 10. Nancy, Who Comes After the Subject?, 8. 11. Butler, Gender Trouble, 13. 12. Derrida in Kearney, Dialogues, 113. 13. Derrida in Kearney, Dialogues, 124. 14. Derrida, Limited Inc, 116. 15. Derrida, Limited Inc, 119. 16. Louis MacNeice, ‘Western Landscape’, Modern Irish Poetry: an Anthology, ed. Patrick Crotty (Belfast: Blackstaff, 1995).

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Bibliography 239 Quentin Kraft, ‘Toward a Critical Re-Renewal’, Beyond Post-structuralism, ed. Wendell V. Harris (Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania University Press, 1996). Julia Kristeva, About Chinese Women, trans. Anita Barrows (London: Boyars, 1977). —— Polylogue (Paris: Seuil, 1977). —— Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, ed. Leon S. Roudiez (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980). —— Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia UP, 1982). —— ‘A New Type of Intellectual: The Dissident’, The Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril Moi (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989). —— ‘Revolution in Poetic Language’, The Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril Moi (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989). —— ‘Stabat Mater’, The Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril Moi (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989). —— ‘The System and the Speaking Subject’, The Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril Moi (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989). —— ‘Women’s Time’, The Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril Moi (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989). —— New Maladies of the Soul, trans. Ross Guberman (New York: Columbia UP, 1995). Jacques Lacan, Ecrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York and London: Routledge, 1989). Teresa de Lauretis, Alice Doesn’t (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1984). —— ‘The Essence of the Triangle or, Taking the Risk of Essentialism Seriously’, The Essential Difference, eds Naomi Schor and Elizabeth Weed (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1994). Leonard Lawlor, Imagination and Chance: The Difference Between the Thought of Ricoeur and Derrida (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992). Lawrence D.H., Quoted in Mapping Literary Modernism. Ricardo Queinone. (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1985). John Lechte, Julia Kristeva (London and New York: Routledge, 1991). Vincent Leitch, Deconstructive Criticism: An Advanced Introduction (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983). Dorothy Leland, ‘Lacanian Psychology and French Feminism: Toward an Adequate Political Psychology’, Revaluing French Feminism: Critical Essays on Difference, Agency and Culture, eds Nancy Fraser and Sandra Lee Bartky (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1992). Anika Lemaire, Jacques Lacan, trans. David Macey (London: Routledge,1977). Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1981). David Linge, ‘Editor’s Introduction’, Philosophical Hermeneutics, Hans-Georg Gadamer, ed. and trans. David Linge (Berkeley: University of California, 1977). John Llewelyn, Beyond Metaphysics?: The Hermeneutic Circle in Contemporary Continental Philosophy (London: Macmillan, 1985). Louis MacNeice, ‘Snow’, Modern Irish Poetry: An Anthology, ed. Patrick Crotty (Belfast: Blackstaff, 1995). —— ‘Western Landscape’, Modern Irish Poetry: An Anthology, ed. Patrick Crotty (Belfast: Blackstaff, 1995). William McNeill, and Karen S. Feldman eds, Continental Philosophy: An Anthology (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998).

240 Bibliography Madison, G.B., ‘Gadamer/Derrida: The Hermeneutics of Irony and Power’, Dialogue and Deconstruction: The Gadamer – Derrida Encounter, eds Diane P. Michelfelder and Richard Palmer (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989). —— ‘Beyond Seriousness and Frivolity: A Gadamerian Response to Deconstruction’, Gadamer and Hermeneutics, ed. Hugh J. Silverman (London: Routledge, 1991). —— ed. Working Through Derrida (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern UP, 1993). —— ‘Ricoeur and the Hermeneutics of the Subject’, The Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur, ed. Lewis Edwin Hahn (Chicago and La Salle, Illinois: Open Court, 1995). Paul De Man, The Resistance to Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1986). Laura Marcus, Auto/biographical Discourses (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1994). Louis Marin, ‘Montaigne’s Tomb, or Autobiographical Discourse’, Oxford Literary Review, 4, 3 (1981) 43–58. Michael Mascuch, The Origins of the Individualist Self: Autobiography and SelfIdentity in England 1591–1791 (London: Polity, 1997). Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London and New York: Routledge/Humanities Press, 1962). Diana T. Meyers, ‘The Subversion of Women’s Agency in Psychoanalytical Feminsm’, Revaluing French Feminism: Critical Essays on Difference, Agency and Culture, eds Nancy Fraser and Sandra Lee Bartky (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1992). Diane P. Michelfelder, and Richard Palmer eds, Dialogue and Deconstruction: The Derrida – Gadamer Encounter (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989). Katja Mikhailovich, ‘Post-modernism and its “Contribution” to Ending Violence against Women’, Radically Speaking: Feminism Reclaimed, eds Diane Bell and Renate Klein (London: Zed Books, 1996). Nancy Miller, ‘Changing the Subject: Authorship, Writing and the Reader’, Subject to Change: Reading Feminist Writing (New York: Columbia Press, 1988). —— Getting Personal (New York and London: Routledge, 1991). Sara Mills, Discourse (London: Routledge, 1997). Mitchell, Juliet and Jacqueline Rose Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the Ecole Freudienne (New York: WW Norton 1982). Toril Moi, Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory (London and New York: Routledge, 1994). Henrietta Moore, ‘Paul Ricoeur: Action, Meaning and Text’, Reading Material Culture: Structuralism, Hermeneutics and Poststructuralism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990). Kate Mosse, Becoming a Mother (London: Virago, 1993). Iris Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (London: Penguin, 1993). Thomas Nagel, The View from Nowhere (Oxford: OUP, 1986). Jean-Luc Nancy, ‘Introduction’, Who Comes After the Subject?, eds Eduardo Cadava, Peter Connor et al. (London: Routledge, 1991). Thomas Nenon, ‘Transcendental Phenomenology: Husserl’, The Edinburgh Encyclopedia of Continental Philosophy, ed. Simon Glendinning (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1999). Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale (New York: Random House, 1967).

Bibliography 241 Christopher Norris, Deconstruction: Theory and Practice (London and New York: Routledge, 1991). Felicity Nussbaum, The Autobiographical Subject: Gender and Ideology in Eighteenth Century England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1989). Andrea Nye, ‘Women Clothed with the Sun: Julia Kristeva and the Escape from/to Language’, Signs, 12, 664–86. Kelly Oliver, Reading Kristeva: Unraveling the Double-bind(RK) (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1993). —— Subjectivity Without Subjects: From Abject Fathers to Desiring Mothers (SS) (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 1998). Dorothea E. Olkowski, ‘Feminism and Phenomenology’, The Edinburgh Encyclopedia of Continental Philosophy, ed. Simon Glendinning (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1999). James Olney, ed., Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1980). Jacob Owensby, ‘Philosophy of Life and Historical Understanding’, The Edinburgh Encyclopedia of Continental Philosophy, ed. Simon Glendinning (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1999). Richard Palmer, ‘The Scope of Hermeneutics and the Problem of Critique and the Crisis of Modernity’, Texte, 3 (1984) 223–39. Michael Payne, Reading Theory: An Introduction to Lacan, Derrida and Kristeva (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993). Michel Pecheux, Language, Semotics, Ideology (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992). Steve Pile, and Nigel Thrift ‘Introduction’, Mapping the Subject: Geographies of Cultural Transformation, eds Steve Pile and Nigel Thrift (London: Routledge, 1985). Plato, Timaeus and Critias trans. Desmond Lee (London: Penguin, 1977). Elspeth Probyn, ‘Materializing Locations: Images and Selves’, Feminisms, eds Sandra Kemp and Judith Squires (Oxford and New York Oxford UP, 1997). Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (New York: W.W. Norton, 1976). Paul Ricoeur, ‘Appropriation’; ‘Word, Polysemy, Metaphor: Creativity in Language’; ‘The Human Experience of Time and Narrative’; ‘The Function of Fiction in Shaping Reality’; ‘Mimesis and Representation’; ‘Narrated Time’; ‘Life: A Story in Search of a Narrator’; ‘The Creativity of Language’; ‘Myth as the Bearer of Possible Worlds’; ‘World of the Text, World of the Reader’, —— A. Ricoeur Reader: Reflection and Imagination, ed. Mario J. Valdes (New York and London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991). —— ‘Existence and Hermeneutics’; ‘The Question of the Subject’; ‘Structure, Word, Event’, are essays in the collection The Conflict of Interpretations, ed. Don Ihde. —— The Conflict of Interpretations: Essays in Hermeneutics, ed. Don Ihde (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern UP, 1974). —— Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, ed. and trans. J. Thompson (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1981). —— ‘Preface’; ‘Phenomenology and Hermeneutics’; ‘The Task of Hermeneutics’; ‘The Hermeneutical Function of Distanciation’; ‘What is a Text?’; ‘Explanation and Understanding’; ‘The Model of the Text: Meaningful Action considered as Text’; ‘Hermeneutics and the Critique of Ideology’, From Text to Action, eds Kathleen Blamey and John B. Thompson (London: Athlone, 1991).

242 Bibliography Paul Ricoeur, ‘History and Narrative as Practice’, Interview with Paul Ricoeur by Peter Kemp, Philosophy Today (Fall 1985) 217. —— Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning (Fort Worth, Texas: Texas Christian University Press, 1976). —— Oneself as Another, trans. Kathleen Blamey (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). —— ‘Reply to G.B. Madison’, The Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur, ed. Lewis Edwin Hahn (Chicago and La Salle, Illinois: Open Court, 1995). —— Time and Narrative (Vol. 3), trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer (Chicago and London: University of Chicago, 1998). —— Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation, trans. P. Savage (New Haven: Yale UP, 1970). Denise Riley, ‘Am I that Name? Feminism and the Category of “Women” in History’, Feminisms, eds Sandra Kemp and Judith Squires (Oxford and New York: Oxford UP, 1997). —— ‘Does Sex Have a History?’, New Formations, 1 (Spring 1987) 35. Richard Rorty, ‘Philosophy as a Kind of Writing’, The Consequences of Pragmatism – essays 1972–1980 (Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 1982). Bertrand Russell, The Problems of Philosophy (London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1973). Madan Sarup, An Introductory Guide to Poststructuralism and Postmodernism (London and New York: Harvester, 1988). Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, ed. Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye, trans. Wade Baskin (London: Peter Owen Ltd., 1960). —— ‘Reading Like a Man’, Men in Feminism, eds Alice Jardine and Paul Smith (New York and London: Routledge, 1989). Robert Scholes, ‘Eperon Strings’, The Essential Difference, eds Naomi Schor and Elizabeth Weed (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1994). Naomi Schor, and Elizabeth Weed eds The Essential Difference (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1994). Joan Scott, ‘The Evidence of Experience’, Critical Enquiry, 17 (1991) 773–97. John Searle, ‘Literary Theory and its Discontents’, Beyond Poststructuralism, ed. Wendell V. Harris (Pennsylvania University Press, 1996). Jonathan Shear, ‘Experiential Clarification of the Problem of Self’, Models of the Self, eds Shaun Gallagher and Jonathan Shear (Thorverton: Imprint Academic, 1999). Jane Silverman van Buren, The Modernist Madonna: Semiotics of the Maternal Metaphor (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1989). Robert Smith, Derrida and Autobiography (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995). Sidonie Smith, Subjectivity, Identity and the Body: Women’s Autobiographical Practices in the Twentieth Century (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1993). Kate Soper, ‘Feminism, Humanism, Postmodernism’, Feminisms, eds Sandra Kemp and Judith Squires (Oxford and New York: Oxford UP, 1997). Charlene Spretnak, ‘The Disembodied Worldview of Deconstructive Postmodernism’, Radically Speaking: Feminism Reclaimed, eds Diane Bell and Renate Klein (London: Zed Books, 1996). Michael Sprinker, ‘Fictions of the Self: The End of Autobiography’, Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical, ed. James Olney Princeton (NJ: Princeton UP, 1980).

Bibliography 243 David Stafford-Clark, What Freud Really Said (London: Penguin, 1992). Liz Stanley, The Auto/biographical I: the Theory and Practice of Feminist Auto/ biography (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1992). Domna C. Stanton, ‘Autogynography: Is the Subject Different?’, The Female Autograph: Theory and Practice of Autobiography, ed. Domna Stanton (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984). —— ‘Difference on Trial: A Critique of The Maternal Metaphor In Cixous, Irigaray and Kristeva’ (DT), The Poetics of Gender, ed. Nancy K. Miller (New York: Columbia UP, 1986). Michelle Stanworth, ‘Reproductive Technologies: Tampering with Nature?’, Feminisms, eds Sandra Kemp and Judith Squires (Oxford and New York: Oxford UP, 1997). George Steiner, ‘Real Presences’, No Passion Spent: Essays 1978–1996 (London: Faber, 1996). Erwin Straus, Psychiatry and Philosophy (New York: Springer Verleg, 1969). Raymond Tallis, Not Saussure: A Critique of Post-Saussurean Literary Theory (London: Macmillan, 1988). Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989). Thompson, E.P., The Poverty of Theory (London: Merlin, 1978). Thompson, J., ed. and trans., Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1981). Christopher Tilley, ed., Reading Material Culture: Structuralism Hermeneutics and Poststructuralism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990). Tvetzan Todorov, Michail Bakhtin: The Dialogic Principle, trans. Wlad Gadzich (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1984). Nancy Tuana, The Less Noble Sex: Scientific, Religious and Philosophical Conceptions of Woman’s Nature (Bloomington UP, 1993). Nancy Tuana, and Rosemarie Tong eds, Feminism and Philosphy (San Francisco: Westview Press, 1995). Mario J. Valdes, ed., A Ricoeur Reader: Reflection and Imagination (New York and London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991). Gianni Valtimo, The Adventure of Difference: Philosophy after Nietzsche and Heidegger, trans. Cyprian Blamires (London: Polity Press, 1993). Voloshinov, V.N., Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, trans. L. Matejka and I. Titunik (New York: Semiar Press, 1973). Kristin Waters, ‘(Re) turning to the Modern: Radical Feminism and the Postmodern Turn’, Radically Speaking: Feminism Reclaimed, eds Diane Bell and Renate Klein (London: Zed Books, 1996). Patricia Waugh, Feminine Fictions: Revisiting the Postmodern (New York and London: Routledge, 1989). —— ‘Modernism, Postmodernism, Gender: the View from Feminism’, Feminisms, eds Sandra Kemp and Judith Squires (Oxford and New York: Oxford UP, 1997). Chris Weedon, Feminist Practice and Poststructuralist Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993). Donn Welton, ed., Body and Flesh: A Philosophical Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998). Raymond Williams, Keywords (London: Fontana, 1988). Ludwig Wittgenstein, Remarks on Colour, ed. G.E.M. Anscombe (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978).

244 Bibliography Monique Wittig, ‘One is not Born a Woman’, Feminisms, eds Sandra Kemp and Judith Squires (Oxford and New York: Oxford UP, 1997). Richard Wollheim, The Thread of Life (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1984). Virginia Woolf, ‘A Sketch of the Past’, Moments of Being, ed. Jeanne Schulkind (London: Hogarth Press, 1985). Yeats, W.B., ‘Among School Children’, The Norton Anthology of English Literature, ed. M.A. Abrams. 5th edn (New York and London, 1986). Iris Marian Young, ‘Throwing Like a Girl’, Body and Flesh: A Philosophical Reader, ed. Donn Welton (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998). —— ‘Pregnant Embodiment’, Body and Flesh: A Philosophical Reader, ed. Donn Welton (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998).

Index Abrams, M.H., 8 Alcoff, L., 77 Althusser, L., 91–95, 96, 97, 101–108, 110, 112, 144, 145 Anderson, L., 184 Arendt, H., 175 Aristotle, 8 Barthes, R., 157–159, 170 Belsey, C., 91, 98 Benstock, S., 163–165, 168–169, 185, 193 Benveniste, E., 161 Betti, E., 113 Blamey, K., 130 Braidotti, R., 77 Bredin, H., 20, 75 Burke, S., 159–160, 190, 197 Butler, J., 62, 64–65, 172, 190 Camus, A., 29 Cavarero, A., 173, 175–180, 182–184 Caws, M.A., 186–187 Cixous, H., 65 Deleuze, G., 84, 170 Derrida, J., 1–4, 6–25, 33, 37, 39–41, 43–45, 48–50, 58, 63–64, 74–77, 82, 84, 85–92, 95–97, 100–102, 106, 110, 112, 114–115, 117, 120, 122–124, 126–128, 131, 133, 137, 143–145, 148, 150–153, 161, 200 Dews, P., 15, 22, 25, 28–29, 31, 126, 197 Dilthey, W., 132, 146 Eagleton, T., 6, 18, 139 Elbaz, R., 162–163 Eliot, T.S., 127 Fischer, M., 77 Foucault, M., 124–125, 139, 144 Fraser, N., 46–47

Freud, S., 30, 32, 34, 47, 60, 66–69, 84, 89–90, 128–132, 141, 144 Fuss, D., 22–23, 34–36, 91, 92 Gadamer, H.G., 3, 82, 110–112, 146–153, 155, 198 Gallop, J., 188 Geertz, C., 125 Gramsci, A., 107, 154 Gusdorf, G., 164 Habermas, J., 82, 106, 109, 112, 116, 135, 139 Harland, R., 6, 86, 90, 117, 122–124 Hegel, G.W.F., 72 Heidegger, M., 1, 16, 72, 83–84, 100, 113–115, 127, 148, 157 Hirsch, E.D., 113 Howie, G., 41 Husserl, E., 13, 18, 24–25, 54, 72, 80, 100, 108, 111, 113, 127, 129 Irigaray, L., 65, 73 Jameson, F., 72 Jouve, N.W., 73 Joyce, J., 57, 59 Kearney, R., 26, 200 Kierkegaard, S., 82 Kraft, Q., 26–27 Kristeva, J., 4, 42, 47, 48–71, 74, 76–78, 198 Lacan, J., 2, 29–39, 40, 41, 45–52, 54–55, 58, 60–64, 66, 70, 74, 77–78, 93, 96, 102–104, 106, 144–145, 164–165 Lauretis, T. de, 78 Lautréamont, Le Comte de, 57 Lawrence, D.H., 127 Lejeune, P., 165 Leland, D., 47 245

246 Index Madison, G., 82 Mallarmé, S., 57 Man, P. de, 139 Marcus, L., 162–163, 184 Marin, L., 161 Marx, K., 144 Merleau-Ponty, M., 142, 196, 197 Meyers, D., 69 Miller, N., 184–185, 186 Murdoch, I., 80–81, 89, 99, 100–101, 106, 112 Nagel, T., 140 Nancy, J-L., 143, 171, 173–174, 182 Nietzsche, F., 23, 83–84, 127, 137, 144, 157 Norris, C., 133 Nussbaum, F., 162–163 Peirce, C.S., 16 Plato, 52–53 Popper, K., 125 Pound, E., 127 Proust, M., 127 Rich, A., 191, 195 Ricoeur, P., 3, 82, 111, 112–124, 128–133, 135–137, 141, 153, 157, 170, 173, 184, 192 Rilke, R.M., 127 Rorty, R., 24 Russell, B., 8

Sartre, J.P., 72 Saussure, F. de, 1, 6–7, 9–10, 19, 20, 35, 47, 60, 70, 75, 98, 127, 134 Schleiermacher, F., 113 Scholes, R., 43–44, 76 Scott, J., 99, 106 Searle, J., 27–28 Simmel, G., 147 Smith, S., 171–172, 186, 188 Sprinker, M., 161 Stanton, D., 57, 75, 165–169, 185, 192–193, 198 Stanworth, M., 190 Steiner, G., 83 Straus, E., 191 Tallis, R., 21, 25–26, 36–38, 71–72, 75–76, 97, 111, 132, 144, 154, 189 Taylor, C., 125, 127–128 Thompson, E.P., 103, 105–106 Valéry, P., 126 Vattimo, G., 1 Voloshinov, V.N., 138 Waugh, P., 45, 72–74 Weedon, C., 42, 81, 91 Williams, R., 145 Woolf, V., 194 Young, I.M., 191

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