Is Feminist Philosophy Philosophy?

4. Discussion

4 Discussion Teresa Brennan, Drucilla Cornell, Jacques Derrida, and Emanuela Bianchi (Chair) BIANCHI: Would any ofyou like to respond to one another? DERRIDA: Just two brief points [to Teresa Brennan]: Thank you for what you said. By the end of your remarks, I understood that you felt you had given too much of yourself to a reading of Lacan. And you regretted having done so. Perhaps, I don't know, but generally speaking that is precisely what a gift does. The essence, the essenceless essence of a gift is that you cannot and you should not try to take it back. First of all, it's impossible to do so. Gifts challenge the very idea of restitution. To take back what you have given, even symbolically, may make sense. I won't deny that. It makes sense to think you should not have paid so much or given so much. That certainly makes sense, but a gift doesn't make sense. It should not make sense. You waste your time, we waste our time, by assuming that it should. BRENNAN: I have to.... DERRIDA: I'm not sure you did, but ifyou think you did.... BRENNAN: Okay, no, no. I never conceived of my work on Lacan as a gift to Lacan; it would have been the kind of gift he would have had to refuse. I'm far too obsessed with other ideas. I saw Lacan as a gift to my working through those ideas. What I was really saying was that I should have just got on with it. But I agree with this very Nietzschean point you are making, that ''you can only will to have been what has been." Otherwise you end up in the rancorous situation which is the very opposite of giving, in the sense 26 27 DISCUSSION I think you are intending it. In other words, you end up in the states of regret and rancor (I feel a little bit that I am using this word "rancor" because my friend Wendy Brown influenced me here very much, in the reading of Nietzsche): of the rancorous, the ressentiment, the envy, the enormous pettiness, which is opposed to the gift. The contrast is very well drawn by Melanie Klein in her work on envy and gratitude. It is true that you can give your creative energy to explicating another thinker's thought, which can be a gift. But this "gift" is not necessarily courageous. There is a negative side to it, which I mentioned earlier, where you feel that you cannot say what you want or have to say, unless it has been exegetically approved in the form of a "fixed point." In this context, the thinking of gratitude becomes very hard. DERRIDA: It's impossible, yes. Now I want to raise two brief points with you [to Drucilla Cornell]. One has to do with the question ofcourage again. I agree that sometimes courage means the courage to face social resistance, to confront objections; to take an opposing position in a social situation dominated by a hegemonic discourse. This requires one kind of courage. Another kind [and that's what you spoke about] has to do with reading, thinking, doing justice to a concept, and so on, doing the work, the homework, with concepts: an infinite, endless task. This too requires courage. But I was thinking ofyet another kind of courage and it is needed here. It has nothing to do with social hegemony or resistance, nor with concepts in their philosophical, theoretical, or speculative form. It has to do with our own psychological, phantasmatic, archaic structures. To ask such questions, such difficult questions, requires that we change the most resistant, protected, archaic structures of our desire. If I say I am no longer a "phallogocentric" thinker or writer and make this claim publicly in verbal statements and published texts, while I remain, on another level, under the speculative layer, caught up in the phallogocentric structures ofmy own desire, ofmy own relationship with others, then nothing has changed. But in order to ask the question, to have the motivation, the energy, the clarity to read texts differently and to resist hegemony in society, you have to work from the inside out. I won't refer to the unconscious, but that is what is at stake. If you don't do this kind of homework in life, day and night, with every member of the family and with those outside the family, if you don...