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Revolutionizing the Feminist Field

The starting point of our paper will be the specific irreducibility of the subject of sexual difference on the one side and the question and questioning of literature on the other side to individual essays or books in Derrida’s oeuvre, since both are at the same time “everywhere” and impossible to “index” in his writing. Having this in mind, we will consider the contribution of Derrida’s concept of literature – especially in its complicity with the law, the genre, and the archive – to the field of feminist theory and literary criticism, underlining its relevance for contemporary feminist discussions. From the formation of feminist approaches to literature in the late 1960s and early 1970s in the Anglo- American and French milieu, simultaneous to Derrida’s work on the deconstruction of the Western philosophical canon, Derrida’s thought has always implicitly participated in the feminist debates, through readings which included its critical potentials in the questioning of sexual/textual ethics and politics. We can follow the involvement of deconstruction through the later polemics on the aims, methods, and institutional (dis)place(ment) of feminist criticism, such as Peggy Kamuf’s and Nancy K. Miller’s discussion of authorship in the 1980s, to its influence on Butler’s concept of performativity which is central to contemporary discussions. In this framework, we will follow both Derrida’s and Kamuf’s readings of Hélène Cixous, one of Derrida’s most prominent interlocutors regarding sexual difference and literature. From the perspective of their readings of Cixous, we would discuss the (decentered) centrality of literature, as a privileged domain of questioning of the ontological question, in today’s possibilities of Derrida’s revolutionizing the feminist field in its political and ethical dimensions.

Jacques Derrida, sexual difference, literature, Helene Cixous

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