Introduction to the Symposium

The following papers were presented at Kingston University's London Graduate School Summer Academy, which focused in 2016 on Derrida and Gender. Prefatory to my own contribution, which asks how to live affirmatively as feminists, taking its inspiration from Derrida's meditations on khōra, I will briefly introduce the other contributions. Both my own and Ewa Ziarek's essay orbit, albeit differently, the symbolic authority of the law, problematizing the terms in which Derrida characterizes those who come to represent the institution of women's studies within the university. Questioning Derrida's suggestion that in one of its modes women's studies simply reproduces the law of the university, Ziarek asks if a feminist iteration of the law is ever simple, juxtaposing Kimberlé Crenshaw's parables of the law with Derrida's meditation on Kafka's parable "Before the Law." If professors of women's studies are in danger of becoming guardians of the law according to Derrida, Ziarek suggests that there are those whose invisibility prevents them from even becoming supplicants before the law, let alone its representatives. Although in plain sight, the racialization of the law remains invisible to those guardians of the law who are too blinded by their own privilege to see it. Ziarek suggests feminists and race theorists who interrogate this invisibility inhabit a new relation to the law.

The binary law of gender is coming under increasing scrutiny by scholars of transgender studies. Marie Draz attends to theorists who resist diluting the fight against women's subordination in the proliferation and remixing of genders. Showing why we need a transgender feminism that is not genderneutral, Draz demonstrates that Derrida's emphasis upon neutralizing gender opposition resonates with theorists of transgender studies who diagnose hierarchies even as they push against the binary gender system. She thereby makes good on Derrida's critique of philosophy as phallogocentric. If our very conceptual system is relentlessly and thoroughly masculinist, there can be no truth of woman that does not capitulate to the phallogocentrism of binary, hierarchical gender categories that privilege the phallus as standard bearer of truth. Only if we render neutral the hierarchical opposition between the sexes in ways that contest the cisgender origin of the phallus as founding meaning, is it possible to proliferate gender differences in a way that does not reinscribe traditional sexism. An intersectional transfeminism must not only work against heteronormative cisgender binaries, but also continue to dismantle the asymmetry between male and female, and the systemic hierarchies that structure racism, classism, and ableism.

Focusing upon Derrida's interpretation of femininity in Nietzsche, Willow Verkerk points out that, while Nietzsche's and Derrida's embodiment of a feminine style might loosen up the fixity of gender in one way, in another way these male philosophers cast themselves as defenders of the cisgender system, by disciplining women to remain feminine while granting themselves the freedom to play with feminine roles, thereby becoming feminine. In doing so, they perpetuate a double standard, advocating polyvalence for themselves, while seeking to hold women to a standard of femininity that they themselves define. If woman functions as a trope for dismantling the coherence of a metaphysical system of truth, it is not enough for Nietzsche and Derrida to disrupt the binary gender system in becoming woman, while continuing to exploit their prerogative as male philosophers to dictate the options available to women. An approach to transgender is needed that both divorces gender from the material referentiality of the sex to which genders have traditionally been assigned, thereby disrupting the ostensible truths of the cisgender system for both genders, and at the same time refuses to endorse the phallus as the origin and guarantor of meaning, whereby any symbolic position is circumscribed in advance by masculine privilege.

Emily Apter's appreciation of the undoubted importance Catherine Malabou's work has acquired for a generation of scholars also addresses trans issues. She raises the question of whether the larger body of Malabou's work implicitly pursues the question of sexual difference explicitly interrogated in her book Changing Difference. Apter succeeds in avoiding the dual trap of either reducing Malabou...