Elle-memethe place of woman in the discourse of Jacques Derrida.

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dc.contributor.authorSchraefel, Monica M. C.en_US
dc.date.accessioned2024-08-15T18:20:29Z
dc.date.available2024-08-15T18:20:29Z
dc.date.copyright1988en_US
dc.date.issued1988
dc.degree.departmentDepartment of English
dc.degree.levelMaster of Arts M.A.en
dc.description.abstractThe language of the post-modernist/deconstructionist discourse is genderized. It is set in a language of violence directed against Woman. In it, Woman, who has always existed on the edge of the phallic discourse, is pinned up as a model for the displaced, phallocentrically failed, Post Modernist Man. He prescribes how She lives on the margin -­ without ever asking Her to corroborate his story of Her -- and resolves to strive after her mode of being, though conveniently without ever surrendering his phallic, prescriptive power to it. Woman, meanwhile, is continuously pushed outside the discursive process for which she is taken as model, pinned on its hinge by the unrelenting, appropriating, raping phallus. She remains forced into silence. In looking in this thesis particularly at Derrida's work Spurs. Nietzsche's Styles. I consider the double process of how Woman becomes inscribed like this on the edge of discourse. In the first chapter, I consider how She is transformed from enimical Other into non-other, non-being, into becoming nothing more than the operation of the phallic, appropriating pen. In the second chapter, I consider how this transmogrification is prescribed into Her through the language of violence/rape. Having problemitized the ongoing positioning of Woman within Derrida's post­modernist discourse, I come no closer, however, to freeing Her/me from it. For if Woman were to speak out against Man's prescriptive gesture, She would be accused in the very act of speaking "I," as becoming subject and so of desiring to essentialize herself as speaking subject, as Man. The reciprocal assumption to this is that if Woman does not speak out, She therefore accepts the role prescribed into Her. I cannot accept 'this either/or threat. Therefore, what I can say is happening within these pages is the jamming of the spaces between the dichotomy of Man/Woman which forces Woman into becoming no more than Man's conduit. Once the appropriating rapier's thrust across the space between Man-Woman is anatomized, the gesture is exposed as a desire for the anathema prescence in its demands for both woman's distant silence and her reception of the appropriating mark. Put another way, the stylistic process demands a witness to its mark, which makes it present, if only fleetingly, while at the same time it demands that the witness be a continually disolving horizon within which the mark disappears, leaving only a trace, nothing definite, in order to erase its desire and focus instead on the failing action of posession. Threatened into her position of silence, Woman becomes the ideal witness. Without voice she can only, as Tostevin puts it, "bear witness" Csophie, 49) to the mark imposed upon her; she can never speak out and bear witness against the inscriber without, so the logic goes, becoming that inscriber. Any way one looks at it, Woman can never speak/can never speak herself. This silence is deadly when it is understood as consent. Thus, by exposing (which may not be the same thing as disseminating) the space between the dichotomy's terms--a space Derrida considers as only "distance" or as the non space: the abyss-- as a place before the stylistic mark is received, Woman /women/I may find a(n other) way within it to discover and to communicate without compromise, Woman, elle-meme.
dc.format.extent111 pages
dc.identifier.urihttps://hdl.handle.net/1828/19607
dc.rightsAvailable to the World Wide Weben_US
dc.titleElle-memethe place of woman in the discourse of Jacques Derrida.en_US
dc.typeThesisen_US

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