Derrida's Impossible Genealogies

Question: If you had a choice, what philosopher would you have liked to be your mother?

Derrida: . . . It’s impossible for me to have any philosopher as a mother. My mother couldn’t be a philosopher. A philosopher couldn’t be my mother. Because the figure of the philosopher, for me, is always a masculine figure. This is one of the reasons I undertook the deconstruction of philosophy. All the deconstruction of phallologocentrism is the deconstruction of what one calls philosophy which since its inception has always been linked to a paternal figure. So a philosopher is a father not a mother. So the philosopher that would be my mother would be a post-deconstructive philosopher, that is, myself, or my son. My mother as a philosopher would be my granddaughter, for example. An inheritor. A woman philosopher who would reaffirm the deconstruction.

- Jacques Derrida in Dick and Ziering Kofman, Derrida.

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When, in an interview with Derrick Attridge, Derrida described the literary texts about which he had written, it seemed there was little place for women. He had engaged with authors such as Mallarmé, Joyce, Celan, Artaud, and Blanchot, who asked what literature is and how it is possible (Derrida with Attridge 1992, 41). Virginia Woolf and Gertrude Stein should perhaps have been, but weren’t, given their place. Along with Cixous (the only woman writer to whom Derrida gave sustained attention in his work) they were mentioned to Attridge in a note of reserve against simplistic feminist criticism: “who will calmly believe that George Sand, George Eliot, or immensely great modern writers like Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, or Hélene Cixous, write texts that are simply non- or anti-phallogocentric?” (1992, 59).

Despite the absence of an engagement with women writers (striking when one considers the range of writers and artists with whose work he did engage) Derrida’s controversial alliance with feminism could be located in his foregrounding of the sex of the philosophers,¹ and in his naming logocentrism phallogocentrism. But as Geoffrey Bennington notes, “Derrida’s relationship with feminism . . . has never been an easy one” (Bennington 1993, 225). He was accused of appropriating women’s interventions into philosophy, or of fudging the difference between displacement and double displacement, or between the death of the subject as applied to those who have and have not been traditionally attributed the subject position. There were Derrida’s notoriously wary comments in “Women in the Beehive” (1987) and “Choreographies” (1982) about the institutionalisation of women’s studies and there were the feminist readers who responded negatively to Derrida’s reading of Nietzche on women in Spurs (1979).

In works such as The Politics of Friendship (1997), Of Hospitality (2000) and Voyous (2003) and in what some saw as a “turn” in Derrida’s work towards “the political” (though in Voyous he rejected the view that there had been such a turn, identifying politics in his earliest deconstructive readings of différance, see Derrida 2003, 64) he offered, although commentators have not given this much attention,² a new route for reflection on his relationship with feminism. The Politics of Friendship discusses the tradition of fraternity as a conceptual basis of political association, as an exclusion of “the feminine or heterosexuality, friendship between women or friendship between men and women” (Derrida 1997, 277). Without referencing her, Derrida raised a problem long discussed by feminists such as Luce Irigaray — that women might eventually occupy a position of seeming legal, institutional or structural equality, while being “neutralized” insofar as they thereby took up a position of implicit equality to men:

The fratriachy may include cousins and sisters but, as we will see, including may also come to mean neutralizing. Including may dictate forgetting, for example, with ‘the best of all intentions’, that the sister will never provide a docile example for the concept of fraternity.

(Derrida 1997, viii)

However one might emphasize this debt, political association could be described as the “exclusion of the feminine” (Derrida 1997, 279) in its traditional form. When Derrida argued not just that women are excluded from social and political bonds between men but also that, at least historically, the...