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5 Matricidal Writing: Philosophy’s Endgame
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183 5 Matricidal Writing: Philosophy’s Endgame Christine van Boheemen‑Saaf the measure [. . .] by which our Outis cuts his truth. —James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (493.24) Derrida’s most recent publication on Joyce, “The Waking Woman: ‘[Reading ] in the Book of Himself,’ ” is a preface to Jacques Trilling’s psychoanalytic reading of Ulysses, entitled James Joyce or Matricidal Writing (1973).1 Although an occasional piece, this preface is important. It bears on the contamination of philosophy by literature in Derrida’s writing. It is important for feminist philosophy, because it hinges on sexual difference. In the piece Derrida makes a claim regarding the need to separate the mother from motherhood; but its emancipatory intention is undermined because the concept of “matricidal writing” lures the philosopher into a self-deconstructive struggle with the specter of the (m)other. The piece is also important to Jewish studies, because it reveals Derrida’s attempt to escape the bond to the mother in relation to the “Jewish question” of psychoanalysis (at a time when Derrida was also writing his plenary address on Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle). Repetition compulsion and the splitting of the ego—selfconsciously performative—enact the ineluctability of the bond. The suggestion of the following analysis will be that Derrida’s close identification with Joyce’s modernity effectuated a process of transferential self-analysis which eventually produced the articulated desire to relinquish the truth claims and drive for power characteristic of philosophy since Plato staged Socrates in dialogue with the bard Ion. Derrida’s piece, dated on Derrida’s birthday, playing on the signature, shows philosophy in a fatal struggle with the materiality of inscription: the mark. 184 DERRIDA AND JOYCE Derrida begins with a claim. He will speculate on a working hypothesis , which, while it entails a risky act of differentiation, he will nevertheless sign. At issue is the difference between the figure of the mother and maternity: “To distinguish between the mother and maternity, to sort them out [trier], to draw an infinitely fine but indivisible line between them, even when the thing seems undecidable—that, I would say, is Trilling’s decisive gesture, his critical operation, his krinein. And this operation takes place at the very moment he reminds us of the inevitability or fatality for the one who writes, and par excellence for Joyce, of a certain matricide” (NW 88/8). While Derrida here speaks of the distinction between mother and motherhood in relation to the signature style of writing, he elsewhere speaks of it as a sociopolitical issue, relating to the peculiar construction of maternity in contemporary, technological society. In For What Tomorrow . . . : A Dialogue with Elisabeth Roudinesco, the distinction between motherhood and maternity receives extensive attention. And there, with a reference to Joyce and to “The Waking Woman,” Derrida brands his attempt to differentiate between the mother and motherhood as emancipatory. “[T]he identity of the mother (like her possible juridical identification) depends on a judgment that is just derived, and on an inference that is just as divorced from all immediate perception, as this ‘legal fiction’ of a paternity conjectured through reason (to use a phrase from Joyce’s Ulysses referring to paternity).”2 In a patriarchal culture, understanding motherhood, like paternity, as a “legal fiction” might undo social inequality. The Joycean reader will recall that, in Ulysses, Joyce’s character Stephen Dedalus had spoken of paternity as unverifiably a “legal fiction,” in contrast to maternity, which is materially evident. To contextualize Derrida’s surprising turn to motherhood, our discussion must return to “Ulysses Gramophone: Hear Say Yes in Joyce.” There Derrida, citing Molly Bloom’s repetitive “yes, I will yes,” had affirmed the Becoming Woman of Joyce’s modernity—in recalling the figure of woman in Spurs. Both Spurs and “Ulysses Gramophone” received substantial scholarly discussion, especially from feminist critics. The main critical question was whether Derrida/Joyce’s recourse to female figuration to denote the difference of their signature style of writing did not, in fact, amount to a double dispossession of women, rather than an emancipatory advance?3 Derrida’s recent essay also employs gendered figuration, the mother rather than the woman, and it moves beyond Nietzschean affirmation to isolate the interminable drive to undo maternity as the motor of performative writing. From identification with the positionality of the female figure, the relationship has shifted to the desire for differentiation and the undoing of the bond, but the connection with Joyce’s Ulysses remains. Significant here, is that [3.88...