Is Feminist Philosophy Philosophy?

3. Opening Remarks: Timing Is All

3 Opening Remarks: Timing Is All Teresa Brennan BIANCH!: Professor Brennan, would you like me to repeat the questions before you start? BRENNAN: No, please don't, Emma. Emma, our noble chair, rang me a couple of nights ago before 1 flew across to tell me what the questions were. 1 felt filled with a kind of preexamination dread, the sort 1 have not had for manyyears. 1thought, "I can't answer these questions." And 1 can't. Butwhat I'd like to do is to build on themes that Professors Cornell and Derrida have introduced, and move toward some sort ofsynthesis of ideas in this discussion. Maybe through that synthesis the questions will reemerge in different forms. 1 think one of the most important things that 1 have heard for some time was Derrida's statement, in this highly specific context, that sexual difference has a history. Of course, he did not mean that sexual difference has a history in the received sense (which it obviously does). Derrida did not mean the history of sexual difference as such, or that sexual difference is sociohistorically constituted. It is. Rather, 1 take it that Jacques Derrida means that the concept of sexual difference-in relation to Heidegger's ontology-needs to be thought historically. Now, 1want to unpack that a bit. What 1 see in the significance of rethinking ontology in this way, placed alongside the other statement that some attempt at rethinking the neutral might be helpful (that it is not always negative and tacitly aligned with masculinity), is that this is a revolutionary statement from Derrida. He has spent much of his 17 18 TERESA BRENNAN life trying to go beyond duality and insisting on the necessity of going beyond it. I want to cross-reference this insistence to Drucilla Cornell's beginning with the idea that sexual markings were in some way, for the Heideggerian, secondaryrather than prior; ontic rather than ontological. The way I will try to tie these things together lies in an essay that some of you may still use. It is one of the best things written about the subject of sexual difference, and it is Gayatri Spivak's reflections on Derrida's Spurs.! The context is the figure of woman standing in for the figure of truth, a figure who is always veiled, as Derrida, like Nietzsche, describes her. Spivak first takes up Derrida's remark that Heidegger's critique ofNietzsche on metaphysics has been "idling offshore" ever since it ignored Nietzsche's figure of the woman as truth (I am quoting very approximately) . Spivakwent on to look at howfar Derrida himselfactually interrogated the significance of the tie between the figure ofwoman and the figure of truth. It is always difficult to represent someone else's position with any degree of accuracy, but as I understand it, in that paper and subsequent papers, Spivak is giving equal weight to two issues. On the one hand she is saying: "Look, unless we interrogate the actual specificity, and it is in some sense always an historical specificity, of the tie between woman and truth, of that which is behind the veil, we are not going to move." And on the other hand, "Because this tie keeps being made it is probably standing in for something. Whatever it is standing in for is something that needs to be addressed, something that we have not begun to properly formulate." This two-sided approach has returned many times in the course of the last decade. The most recent instance I am aware of is Kelly Oliver's outstanding treatment ofDerrida in her book, WomanizingNietzsche.2 This two-sidedness seems to recur especially in relation to various concepts which are meant to be prior, "behind the veil," but which partake of the "unsaid" history ofsexual difference insofar as they ally the prior with the feminine. This is true ofthe founding ofmetaphysics; we find it in Plato's idea ofthe chora. I thinkitis true ofthe Lacanian ideaofthe Real. I think it is presupposed yet again in the Derridean concept of the "beyond." All of these concepts attempt to think that which is beyond representation, that which is not speakable. All of them align the unrepresentable with the feminine to some degree. The question of whether this alignment with the feminine is right is the question that keeps coming up. As Thomas More said, "I hope I make myself obscure." I do not want to pretend that these concepts can be...