ROSSEN ROUSSEV
Feminism, Deconstruction, and Literary Criticism: A Deconstructive Feminist Reading of Nathaniel
Hawthorne’s Novel The Scarlet Letter with the Help of Alice Jardine and Jacques Derrida
GLOBAL CONVERSATIONS: An International Journal in Contemporary Philosophy and Culture
Volume IV, Number 01 (2021): 43-84

FEMINISM, DECONSTRUCTION, AND LITERARY CRITICISM:
A DECONSTRUCTIVE FEMINIST READING OF NATHANIELHAWTHORNE’S NOVEL THE SCARLET LETTER WITH THE HELPOF ALICE JARDINE AND JACQUES DERRIDA
Rossen I. Roussev

It is to the credit of human nature, that,except where its selfishness is brought into
play, it loves more readily than it hates.
Hatred, by a gradual and quiet process,will even be transformed to love...
Nathaniel Hawthorne

Abstract
The text explores interrelations between feminism and deconstruction for purposesof literary critique. The main theoretical sources are Alice Jardine and Jacques
Derrida, whose views of ‘gynesis’ and ‘deconstruction’, respectively, are taken ascomplementary. The views in question are discussed first in order to assemble ajoint critical perspective that brings forward their relevant conceptual intersections.
Jardine’s concept of gynesis is seen as a more specific form of deconstruction
carried from a feminist standpoint, whereas various Derrida’s concepts arebrought to bear on the notion of deconstruction in a wider sense. Subsequently,
issuing from the critical perspective thus outlined, we offer a reading of Nathaniel
Hawthorne’s novel The Scarlet Letter, in which the main characters, their actions,and specific relations in which they enter are revisited in key terms of the
vocabularies of these thinkers. More specifically, concepts like life-affirmation,
woman-in-effect, trace, patriarchy, discourse, and phallogocentrism, among others,
are transposed in a shifting horizon which carries their discussion from the realmof critical philosophical reflection into that of literary text.
Key terms: gynesis, gynema, structure, sign, différance, (auto)immunity, patriarchy,
writing, sexual difference, (phal)logocentrism

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Hawthorne’s Novel The Scarlet Letter with the Help of Alice Jardine and Jacques Derrida

A classic target of feminist literary critics, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel The Scarlet Letter: A
Romance has been also a subject to deconstructive reading. 1 In this paper, I shall aim to
combine these two approaches at once drawing mainly on Alice Jardine’s feminist view ofgynesis and Jacques Derrida’s deconstructive philosophy. Ideally, this would be a gender
mindful reading, keeping in mind especially that the notion of gender has a special importancein both feminist and deconstructionist perspectives, while being not only a sensitive but also an
open-ended issue today. Thus, much of the feminist tradition places emphasis on the ‘gender’of the author (whether writer or critic) it approaches, whereas the tradition of structuralist andpost-structuralist thought sees ‘gender’ as inherent to culture as a whole. For much of their earlyyears, though, both of these traditions most typically issued from the preconception that thegenders are essentially two, something that in our age is no longer the norm. Thus, to more fully
sustain our gender mindful reading here, we will need to stipulate in advance that using terms
like ‘feminist’, ‘patriarchy’, ‘woman’, ‘man’, ‘feminine’, or ‘masculine’, among others, need
not interfere with the demands of any gender inclusive or gender specific perspective, as theissues raised from feminist and deconstructionist standpoints could be readily identified as – atthe very least – complementary to any gender perspective. For instance, to uphold itself, any
gender specific perspective today needs to critique the traditional patriarchal culture in its
fundamentals and entirety at least as much as a feminist perspective does. Acknowledging thisneed while paying homage to Simone de Beauvoir, whose book The Second Sex marks theradical inception of feminist thought in the 20th century,2 Jardine writes that “it is up to us tocontinue moving along the collective pathways she opened for use, in a way that not onlychange gender and sex arrangements for the better, but change the world for the better,
profoundly, deeply, widely, and long term. Radically.”3With such thoughts in mind, we now approach Hawthorne’s famous novel in two main
steps. First, we assemble a deconstructive feminist critical perspective out of common andcomplementary aspects of the thought of Alice Jardine and Jacques Derrida. And second,drawing on that perspective, we offer a reading of the key developments in the novel’s plot.

A Deconstructive Feminist Perspective
The deconstructive feminist perspective which I would like to outline here will have one
essential feature, which can be described as openness to the inexhaustibility of its own field.
This feature is what I think characterizes Jardine’s notion of gynesis, as much as Derrida’s
deconstructionist philosophy, even as they articulate it in different ways. This openness isindeed as necessary as it is inevitable in the workings of discourse, as it is coded into the1Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter, Complete, Authoritative Text with Biographical Background andCritical History plus Essays from Five Contemporary Critical Perspectives with Introductions and Bibliographies,
edited by Ross C. Murfin (Boston: Macmillan/Bedford Books of St. Martin's Press, 1991).
2
Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, translated by Constance Borde and Sheila M. Chevallier (New York:
Random House, 2010); cf. Le deuxième sexe, 1, Les faits et les mythes; 2, L'expérience vécue (Paris: Éditions
Gallimard, 1949).
3
Alice A. Jardine, “What Feminism?,” French Politics, Culture & Society, Vol. 28, No. 2, SPECIAL ISSUE:
Simone de Beauvoir: ENGAGEMENTS, CONTEXTS, RECONSIDERATIONS (Summer 2010), p. 72.

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Hawthorne’s Novel The Scarlet Letter with the Help of Alice Jardine and Jacques Derrida

character of signification, from where it passes to all critique, interpretation, and culture.
Likewise, this perspective will also have another feature, closely related to its openness andindeed one that can be sustained only in the realm of its openness, namely, affirmation, which
will motivate its critical operation as an assertion of life. While affirmation is not a necessary
outcome of neither gynesis nor deconstruction, it can be a motive by choice, which we herecertainly make, as opposed to the nostalgic realization of the limits of discourse.
Jardine’s View of Gynesis
As I see it, Jardine’s notion of gynesis is an attempt to revisit and adopt elements of structuralist
and post-structuralist critique of the Western intellectual tradition and culture for purposes ofliterary and cultural critiques in feminist perspective. This move is as natural and falls into thesame (self-)reflective register as the application of universalistic expertise to solving particular
problems, or as the search for points of intersection between what I have elsewhere called“global” and “local.”4 But it is not just a move from universal to particular, global to local, or
vice versa, as in one important sense none of these takes in any way precedence over the others.
There is simply nothing like a move from cause to effect – such as, for instance, from calamity
to immunity, the thematic that motives us here – in the realm of discourse and signification tojustify its workings precedentially as this has been done for the realm of natural phenomena.
At the very best, the causal determinism is of limited use for purposes of a critique, comparedto the vast potential of the realm of signification overall.
Jardine appears well aware of this prospect and her goal is not simply to invent a unique
technique or conceptual apparatus to be applied in the feminist criticism of literature or
particular products of culture. As she puts it, “I focus on written texts, but am more concerned
about the process of (reading and writing) woman than about examining the representation of
women in literature.” 5 What Jardine seems to be looking for is to make feminist critiqueintegrative to a lasting socio-cultural change by making it an indelible part of the discourse
which is productive of culture as a whole. This, however, she does not seek to promote byadding her integrative gesture to the well-established pillars of the existent culture, and this forgood reasons. The normative and justificatory pillars of the patriarchal culture have alreadyproduced a systemic effect of domination that assigns secondary social roles for women. Hence,
she wants to start anew in a move that is at once discursive and emancipatory, critical andcreative, indeed along her suggested contribution to critical theory – the practice of gynesis.
Jardine’s eponymous book starts with questions that come from her “concern withwomen as speaking and writing subjects, their relationship to language, and how sexual
difference operates linguistically in a literary text,” which she also thinks “need to be addressedby feminists who ... are or will eventually be in dialogue with what is now commonly called‘modernity’...”.6 It is to be noted here that in recent decades the term ‘modernity’ has been

Rossen Roussev, “Global Conversation on the Spot: What Lao-tse, Heidegger, and Rorty Have in Common,"Global Conversations: An International Journal in Contemporary Philosophy and Culture, Vol. 1 (2018), pp. 1138. http://philogc.org/vol-1/
5
Alice Jardine, Gynesis: Configurations of Woman and Modernity (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press,
1985), p. 19.
6Ibid., pp. 13-14.
4

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Hawthorne’s Novel The Scarlet Letter with the Help of Alice Jardine and Jacques Derrida

loosely used to designate key developments and characteristics of the Western culture since the17th century, while being opposed to ‘postmodernity’, which has been also loosely used todesignate a period whose beginning has been variedly placed in mid 19th century, mid 20th
century, or in the 1980s.7 Jardine, in particular, has started her interrogation with the culture ofmodernity under the influence of the French post-structuralists of the 1960s and 1970s, mostnotably Julia Kristeva, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and Hélène Cixous.8 Her response to
the challenges modernity posed to feminist thought was ever since thoroughly informed bypost-structuralist critique of modernity and of the structuralist thought of thinkers, such as
Jacques Lacan and Claude Lévi-Strauss.
What she accepts from the leading French thinkers of this period on the character ofmodernity is that “the conceptual apparatuses inherited from nineteen-century Europe” haveobliterated how “our ways of understanding in the West have been and continue to becomplicitous with our ways of oppressing.” For, they have instead conditioned “the vicious
circles of intellectual imperialism and of liberal ideology and humanism,” all along “reified andnaturalized categories and concepts like ‘experience’ and the ‘natural’; or, in another mode, theEthical, the Right, the Good, or the True.” 9 Thus, beyond the conceptual mask of modernity,
undone by the post-structuralist thinkers, a new world has appeared: a world that is now
necessarily “denaturalized” and “unheimlich,” finding itself in “a series of crises oflegitimation” after its fundamental pillars – “Man, the Subject, Truth, History, Meaning” – havebeen radically called into question. 10 The ensuing attempts at “reinterpretation andreconceptualization” of what thus “eluded” the discourse of modernity – “the master narratives’
own nonknowledge” – resulted in a peculiar conceptualization and understanding of ‘woman’:“This other-than-themselves is almost always a ‘space’ of some kind (over which the narrative
has lost control), and this space has been coded as feminine, as woman.”11
Thus, for Jardine, as for the tradition of structuralist and post-structuralist thought,‘woman’ attains a peculiar cultural significance – that of alterity of the narratives of modernity,
which have been historically inaugurated by the Cartesian subject, and which have failed to7

For most authoritative discussions on the opposition modernity-postmodernity, see Jean-François Lyotard, The
Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, translated by Geoffrey Bennington and Brian Massumi(Minneapolis: University Of Minnesota Press, 1984), especially pp. xxiii-xxvff, 27-37ff, 46ff, 59ff, 79ff; cf. La
condition postmoderne: rapport sur le savoir (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1979), pp. 7-9ff, 49-63ff, 75ff, 97ff.
Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, translated by Frederick Lawrence(Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1996), especially pp. 3ff, 83ff; cf. Der Philosophische Diskurs der Moderne: Zwölf
Vorlesungen (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1985), SS. 11ff, 104ff; Anthony Giddens, “Modernism andPost-Modernism,” New German Critique, No. 22, Special Issue on Modernism (Winter, 1981), pp. 15-18; Anthony
Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), especially pp. 1-10, 45-53;
David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Cambridge,
MA; Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1991), especially pp. 10ff, 327ff; Agnes Heller, A Theory of Modernity (Malden,
MA; Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishers, 1999), especially pp. 1-18; Okwui Enwezor, Nancy Condee, Terry Smith(eds.), Antinomies of Art and Culture: Modernity, Postmodernity, Contemporaneity, (Durham, London: Duke
University Press, 2009).
8
Alice Jardine, “What Feminism?,” p. 68.
9
Alice Jardine, Gynesis, pp. 23-24.
10
Ibid., pp. 24-25.
11
Ibid., p. 25.

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Hawthorne’s Novel The Scarlet Letter with the Help of Alice Jardine and Jacques Derrida

convey that alterity. It is in this relation that Jardine sees a necessity for a new form of thinking
and discoursing, which is fitting to explore the alterity of modernity, or ‘the space codedfeminine’. She will call it gynesis:
To designate that process, I have suggested a new name, what I hope to be a believable neologism:
gynesis – the putting into discourse of “woman” as that process beyond the Cartesian Subject, theDialectics of Representation, or Man’s Truth. The object produced by this process is neither a person
nor a thing, but a horizon, that towards which the process is tending: a gynema. This gynema is areading effect, a woman-in-effect, never stable, without identity. Its appearance in a written text isperhaps noticed only by the woman (feminist) reader – either at the point where it becomesinsistently “feminine” or where women (as defined metaphysically, historically) seem magically toreappear within the discourse. The feminist reader’s eye comes to a halt at this tear in the fabric,
producing a state of uncertainty and sometimes of distrust – especially when the faltering narrativein which it is embedded has been articulated by a man from within a nonetheless still-existentdiscipline. When it appears in women theorists’ discourse, it would seem to be less troubling. The
still existent slippages in signification among feminine/woman/women and what we are callinggynesis and gynema are dismissed as “unimportant” because it is a woman speaking.12

This excerpt from Jardine’s earlier publication conveys what I see as the operational gist of hernotion of gynesis and is likewise suggestive of its interpretative potential. Gynesis is ‘the putting
into discourse of “woman”’, where ‘woman’ has the cultural significance indicated in the
structuralist and post-structuralist thought but is also indicative of a radical revision ofsubjectivity. Another important trait of gynesis is that it is a ‘process’, which in this way goesbeyond the metaphysical anticipations of modernity, for instance, in that it is not anything likea program that can be accomplished and thus finished once and for all. It is more specifically a‘process beyond the Cartesian Subject, the Dialectics of Representation, or Man’s Truth’, which
are now very much unmasked as the pillars of the original project of modernity. That process
also creates ‘neither a person nor a thing, but a horizon’ which is called gynema described as ‘areading effect, a woman-in-effect, never stable, without identity’. The gynema of gynesis is thus
nothing like a typical metaphysical product of modernity. Instead, it ‘is perhaps noticed onlyby the woman (feminist) reader’, though not exclusively, and seems to be an experience of whatis ‘insistently “feminine”’ or of ‘woman’ as ‘magically reappearing within discourse’. It can bemarked by a sense of ‘uncertainty’ or ‘distrust’, most commonly evoked by a discourse authoredby ‘a man’, but these would be ‘less troubling’ when detected in women’s works, ‘because it isa woman speaking’.
The suggestion that Jardine makes here is that a woman reader or critic appears to be ina better position than a male one would be to join in gynesis to explore the signification of the‘feminine’ – the intrinsic ‘otherness’ of the discourse of modernity. Yet, with this project she
does not aim at “painting contexts or texts, representing modernity or feminism, or defining
women or woman”; rather she aims at “foregrounding a new kind of interpretant which has
surfaced from the interactions among all of these – a ‘woman-effect’” – in the hope that it could“open new spaces for women to write in.” 13 Thus, Jardine clearly anticipates that bringing
Alice Jardine, “Gynesis,” Diacritics, Vol. 12, No. 2, Cherchez la Femme Feminist Critique/Feminine Text
(Summer, 1982), p. 58.
13
Alice Jardine, Gynesis, p. 28.
12

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together – in gynesis – the post-structuralist conjectures on the cultural significance of ‘woman’
and the American feminist tradition of literary criticism, which emphasized the gender inliterary representation, will bring a special benefit for the latter. Consequently, drawing on
feminist critics like Annette Kolodny and Elaine Showalter, 14 Jardine goes on to describe what
she calls the fundamental feminist gesture of literary criticism as “an analysis (and critique) offictional representations of women (characters) in men’s and women’s writing.” 15 Whereas
along these lines the gestures of post-structuralism and American feminism seem to be at first
divergently positioned, this only motivates Jardine to seek ways to bridge them. In fact, herthought never ceases to oscillate between them. In the process, she raises more questions thanshe offers definitive solutions, but her discussion of the issues at stake unveils how they
reappear within the perspectives of these two intellectual movements, thus availing insights inboth directions while keeping the prospects for their mutual enhancement open-ended.
Acknowledging the tension between the two perspectives, Jardine looks for points incommon and indicates three their intersections, which are of particular relevance for literary
criticism, and which she identifies along modernity’s notions of ‘self’, ‘representation’, and‘truth’. First, the post-structuralist thought, which does away with subject, self, and author, isin an outright tension with the feminist emphasis on the gender of representation. The mannerin which Jardine tackles this intersect is exemplary for her approach of making a double gesturein the directions of both perspectives. On one side, she points out that the feminist’s distrust of“this complex ‘beyonding’ of sexual identity is largely based on common sense” – precisely
the one (“sense ‘common to all’, that is, humanism”) that a true feminist critique endeavors todispel.16 On another, she makes the assertion that “when you problematize ‘Man’ (as being at
the foundations of Western notions of the self)... you are bound to find ‘woman’ – no matter
who is speaking – and that most definitely concerns feminist criticism.” 17
Second, drawing partly on Kristeva, Jardine points to the postmodernist notion ofrepresentation as a ‘process’ in a complex move from the ‘phantasies’ of the unconscious
through the ‘fantasies’ of consciousness, a process which – as “attached to no self, no stable
psychological entity, no content” – undoes the border between theory and fiction.18 This process
has found expression in “acceptably ‘feminized’ domains” such as art, literature, and religion(though not in theology), but its radical rethinking and liberation demand re-exploration of the
Greek notion of physis – “making it speak differently, in new spaces, within entirely new
structural configurations.” 19 Again, troubling as this process of representation and selfexploration might seem to be for a feminist critique, Jardine emphasizes that it “has everything
to do with woman and thus with women,” 20 a message that can be fittingly received by thepostmodernist thinkers as well.
Annette Kolodny, “Some Notes on Defining a ‘Feminist Literary Criticism’,” Critical Inquiry, Vol. 2, No. 1(Autumn, 1975), pp. 75-92; Elaine Showalter, “Towards a Feminist Poetics,” in: Mar Jacobus (ed.), Women
Writing and Writing about Women (New York, London: Routledge, 1979), pp. 22-41.
15
Alice Jardine, Gynesis, pp. 52, 57.
16
Ibid., p. 58.
17
Ibid., p. 58.
18
Ibid., p. 59.
19
Ibid., p. 59.
20
Ibid., p. 59.
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Third, drawing again on Kristeva, Jardine addresses the notion of truth in terms of the
opposition between ‘fiction’ and ‘reality’. One immediate concern that she raises in this regard
is the safeguarding of women’s “fictional heritage” from the proliferation of fictional products
in our technological world, a safeguarding which must go along with “laying bare the logical,
ideological, and historical links between that heritage and patriarchal culture.” 21 Anotherconcern she points to is the difference that a feminist theory could make, provided that “to treat
both ... theory and fiction ... as fictions is to make a gesture assumed by contemporary thought
and is also to conform to the feminist impulse.” 22 In all events, the relevance of thepostmodernist sense of truth to feminist critics amounts to a question they cannot forgo – “Is
all of this another male fiction, or is it a larger process that can begin to free women – and men– from Man's Truth?”23
This question is Jardine’s typical open-ended but is again pregnant with suggestions inboth directions, as is also her project of gynesis as a whole. Apparently, on her view, gynesis
encompasses the work of both French postmodernist thought (with its exploration of the cultural
signification of woman) and American feminist literary criticism (with its fundamental feminist
gesture) despite their noted divergence. They both venture on “a search for that which has been‘left out’, de-emphasized, hidden, or denied articulation within Western systems ofknowledge,” but gynesis in France has proceeded “away from a concern with identity to aconcern with difference, from wholeness to that which is incomplete, from representation tomodes of presentation, meta-discourse to fiction, production to operation, and from Universal
Truth to a search for new forms of legitimation through para-scientific (when not mathematical)
models.”24 It would appear, though, that for Jardine each of the two perspectives by itself alone
will not be as efficient in gynesis as both of them together. For,... a radical reconceptualization of the speaking subject and language is, in particular, essential to
the rethinking of feminism as concept and practice in the late twentieth century. At the same time,the explorations of “woman,” with reference to both, in contemporary French thought, are notenough to do so because of the ways in which reality and its fictions have been deemphasized. The(American) feminist in dialogue with (French) contemporary theory may be in a special position toapproach this problem by remediating and rethinking the feminist insistence on personal experience
as practice with the movement of these theoretical fictions as experience and practice – thus
working, potentially, toward a new disposition of the ethical grounded in symbolic process.25

We shall seek for such ‘a new disposition of the ethical grounded in symbolic process’ in ourreading of Hawthorne’ The Scarlet Letter, but we will also need to draw attention to several
other elements of Jardine’s view of gynesis to complete our idea of it. Such elements may notnecessarily make the usage of gynesis for purposes of text reading any easier, as they point also
– beyond any good intentions – to difficulties that might seem unsurmountable obstructions.
And yet, even as Jardine has warned us that she is not offering definitive solutions, guided by

21

Ibid., p. 60.
Ibid., p. 60.
23Ibid., p. 61.
24
Ibid., p. 36.
25
Ibid., p. 47.
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the belief that insights can only be more useful for the purpose than any conceptual
irreconcilability, we could readily face them and see what we can get out of them.
One such element that poses difficulties for feminist critics is that, whereas it is inspired
and guided by the signification of ‘woman’ and the representation of women, gynesis may notnecessarily be about women, whereas “feminism is necessarily about women – a group ofhuman beings in history whose identity is defined by that history’s representation ofsexuality.” 26 Jardine is certainly aware that Hélène Cixous’ view of écriture féminine(‘women’s writing’) is essentially an attempt to differentiate and thus invent a specificallywoman’s discourse as distinct from the traditional man’s discourse which misrepresents
women.27 Jardine also admits that “within traditional categories of thought, women can (have)exist(ed) only as opposed to men,” that within a postmodernist perspective “women, especiallyfeminists, who continue to think within those categories are, henceforth, seen as being men,”and that this constitutes a problem for feminist critics as “it explicitly negates their own status
as readers” – “genderizing the texts” effectively “problematized the gender” to the point ofmaking it unavailable as both subject and object of text criticism. 28
This by itself already consigns both postmodernist and feminist thought to crises oflegitimation,29 as modernity’s grand narratives 30 can no longer work for either of them in thissense. What is more important, though, is that, no matter what form the resolution of such crises
might take, the concerns for feminist criticism remain intact, for regardless of the acuteness ofthe postmodernist critical interventions into the narratives of modernity, for Jardine, they do
not “seem to get beyond gynesis as it transpires within a male economy.”31 Likewise, evenwhen “the demise of Truth,” viz., “Man’s Truth,” is proclaimed, something that a feminist “willmost certainly welcome,” other key concerns will still remain; namely, “the very conceptual
systems” that have inaugurated it, as well as the presence of these systems into “feminist
thinking” in the form of “systems of defining the self, perception, judgment, and, therefore,
morality.”32
For Jardine, the way out of the conceptual conundrums in the wake of the crises oflegitimation can only be gynesis. “The demise of the Subject, of the Dialectic, and of Truth has
left modernity with a void that it is vaguely aware must be spoken differently and strangely: as
woman, through gynesis.”33 Following Kristeva, who designates the intrinsic relation between
truth (vérité) and the Lacanian real (réel) adopted in postmodernist thought with the neologism
vréel,34 Jardine describes the latter as “a kind of ‘she-truth’” noting that it is also suggestive of
Alice Jardine, “Introduction to Julia Kristeva's ‘Women's Time’,” Signs, Vol. 7, No. 1 (Autumn, 1981), p. 8.
Hélène Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa,“ translated by Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen, Signs, Vol. 1, No. 4(Summer, 1976), pp. 875-893.
28
Alice Jardine, Gynesis, p. 63.
29
Ibid., pp. 65ff.
30
Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, pp. xxiii-xxvff, 27-37ff, 46ff, 59ff, 79ff; cf. La condition
postmoderne, pp. 7-9ff, 49-63ff, 75ff, 97ff.
31
Alice Jardine, Gynesis, p. 144.
32
Ibid., p. 153.
33
Ibid., p. 154.
34
Julia Kristeva, “The True-Real,” in Toril Moi (ed.), The Kristeva Reader, translated by Sean Hand (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1986), pp. 216-217; cf. “Le vréel,” in Julia Kristeva and jean-Michel Ribette (eds.),
Folle Vérité – Vérité et vraisemblance du texte psychotique (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1979), p. 11.
26
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the French elle (she) and thus of the truth-as-woman in gynesis.35 The ‘Real’ is a key concept
in the psychoanalysis of Lacan, where it is understood as what remains beyond the ‘Imaginary’and the ‘Symbolic’, and has been also associated with Kant’s thing-in-itself.36 Lacan links it toa specific knowledge which he characterizes as “prohibited (interdit),” “impossible,”“censured,” and “forbidden,” but which becomes accessible “if you write ‘inter-dit’appropriately,” for “it is said between the words, between the lines.” 37 Lacan also links the‘truth’ of that knowledge to ‘woman’ and acknowledges that, although he “does not know how
to approach” it, “something true can still be said about what cannot be demonstrated.” 38 Seizing
upon these conclusions, Jardine asserts that “the true, after Lacan, can only be inter-dit, locatedbetween words, between lines,” that it is intrinsically interlinked with the Real and femininejouissance, and that they are thus all “im-previsible”; that is, “unseen and unforeseeable...surging out of the unconscious, as terrifying as any God, no matter what name the latter
carries.”39
We need to keep in mind here that, as she explores the interlinkage in question, Jardine
always does so with a view to feminist critique and the possibility that the conceptual apparatus
of modernity with its front-runner – the speaking subject, dismantled as it is in postmodernist
thought, be put to new uses at least provisionally. Lacan is also the psychoanalytic theorist who
has offered a landmark discussion of jouissance and its links to the subject with its epistemic
aspirations that has been most influential on the post-structuralist tradition. Opposing
jouissance to the philosophical concept of ‘being’, at one point he declares that “thought isjouissance” and that “there is jouissance of being,” 40 and at another – that “the ‘I’ is not a being,
but rather something attributed to that which speaks.” 41 More categorically, though, heannounces that,
The world, the world of being, full of knowledge, is but a dream, a dream of the body insofar as it
speaks, for there’s no such thing as a knowing subject. There are subjects who give themselvescorrelates in object a, correlates of enjoying speech qua jouissance of speech.42

In trading the subject for jouissance, Lacan has also dwelled on feminine jouissance. For him,
it is a jouissance which is “supplementary,” “beyond the phallus,” 43 “of the Other,” and so“radically Other that woman has more of a relationship to God than anything that could have
Alice Jardine, Gynesis, p. 154. See also Alice Jardine, “Opaque Texts and Transparent Contexts: the Political
Difference of Julia Kristeva,” in Nancy Miller(ed.), The Poetics of Gender (New York: Columbia University Press,
1986), pp. 96-115.
36
Adrian Johnston, “Jacques Lacan,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2018 Edition), Edward N.
Zalta (ed.), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2018/entries/lacan/>.
37
Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XX, Encore 1972-1973, translated by Bruce Fink (NewYork, London: W. W. Norton & Company), p. 119; cf. Le séminaire, livre XX, Encore 1972-1973 (Paris: Éditions
du Seuil, 1975), p. 108.
38
Ibid., pp. 119-120; cf. p. 108.
39
Alice Jardine, Gynesis, p. 167.
40
Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XX, Encore 1972-1973, p. 70; cf. p. 66.
41
Ibid., p. 120; p. 109.
42
Ibid., pp. 126-127; p. 114.
43
Ibid., pp. 73-74; cf. pp. 68-69.
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been said in speculation in antiquity....”44 Also, woman is said not to know it, not to “breathe aword” about it, which leads Lacan to conjecture a primary presence for the phallic jouissance, 45
as well as – to liken the feminine jouissance to “the essential testimony of the mystics,” who“say that they experience it, but know nothing about it.” 46 The unknowability and mysticism of
feminine jouissance is due to the status of “the phallus” as “signifier that has no signified” but“is based, in the case of man, on phallic jouissance.”47 Feminine jouissance thus appears to be‘beyond the phallus’, or a sort of surplus, an “extra (en plus),” 48 which will always make‘woman’ appear in phallic presentation as “not-whole (pas-tout).”49
With such considerations in mind, Lacan makes two important assertions that are ofparticular relevance for feminist, as well as for any other, critical perspective: 1) that “if theunconscious has taught us anything, it is first of all that somewhere in the Other it knows (çasait),” and 2) that “it knows because it is based precisely on those signifiers with which thesubject constitutes himself.”50 That is, there is a certain kind of knowledge that is beyond thephallic signifier, is associated with the ‘unconscious’ and ‘woman’, is governed by femininejouissance, and is based on and availed by that signifier which inaugurated the traditional
subject. From here the notion of ‘woman subject’; that is, a subject governed by femininejouissance, is just a step away. Hélène Cixous’ famous notion of l'écriture féminine presupposes
this subject and also exacts it:
When I say “woman,” I’m speaking of woman in her inevitable struggle against conventional man;and of a universal woman subject who must bring women to their senses and to their meaning inhistory.51

Cixous clearly gives more than just theoretical import to the ‘universal woman subject’ which
she also sees as a carrier or impetus of change. This subject of change has also a clear object ofchange – the phallocentric tradition with its entire history of writing and reason:
Nearly the entire history of writing is confounded with the history of reason, of which it is at oncethe effect, the support, and one of the privileged alibis. It has been one with the phallocentric
tradition. It is indeed that same self-admiring, self-stimulating, self-congratulatory phallocentrism. 52

Jardine sees Cixous’ work as “a step farther” in the postmodernist tradition that
advances the cultural significance of ‘woman’ and ‘l'écriture féminine’, largely because Cixous
has suggested that even “if feminine writing does not require the signature of a woman, women
nonetheless, today (after psychoanalysis and Derrida), do have a privileged access to it” to the44

Ibid., pp. 82-83; cf. p. 77.
Ibid., p. 60; cf. p. 56.
46
Ibid., p. 76; cf. pp. 70-71.
47bid., p. 81; cf. p. 75.
48
Ibid., p. 77; cf. p. 71.
49
Ibid., pp. 7, 60; cf. pp. 13, 56.
50
Ibid., pp. 87-88; cf. p. 81.
51
Hélène Cixous, “The Laugh of Medousa,” translated by Keith Cohen & Paula Cohen, Signs, Vol. 1, No. 4(Summer, 1976), pp. 875-876.
52
Ibid., p. 879.
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point that “women ... seem to be, almost intrinsically, proto-postmodernists.”53 The notion of‘woman subject’ having a ‘privileged access’ to the ‘feminine writing’ adds up a good deal of
impetus to the potential of Jardine’s project of gynesis for feminist critique and literary
criticism, even as she has acknowledged the differences in focus and emphasis, to which thatthe postmodernist thought has awakened the French and American texts. Jardine actually
believes that a continued dialogue between the French and American feminist writers can only
help discover “new configurations of woman and modernity,” as well as decide “the future ofgynesis” and its relevance “for women.”54
In this regard, and from the view point of feminist literary critique, Jardine notes that“the writing strategies intrinsic to modernity,” which she identified in her discussion of theFrench postmodernists, are also at work “in the contemporary male American novel” but are
imbedded in a “process” that is “qualitatively different” – “an external process, manipulating
language and exploding the semantic spaces of the referent, rather than an internal one,
imploding the signifier itself.” 55 Indeed, Jardine claims that, grounded in an “ideology” of“unconditional freedom and originality of the author-self,” the contemporary male American
writer has “remained sovereign, never putting the authority of his own discourse into questionin any radical way.”56 Thus, his text has remained arguably deaf to the “maternal,” rather than
“exploding paternal identity, concepts, and narrative to get at their feminine core, through ... aradical rearrangement of gender.” 57 Nevertheless, on Jardine’s view, this text has made an
entrance into gynesis “at the level of representation,” though in its own way, in which gynesis
appears again “as the primary problem for any ‘narrative’ or ‘subject-in-narrative’” but“without necessarily problematizing either one.” 58
We take it from here that, whereas it may have been limited, this entrance could by itself
become a point of departure for a deconstructive feminist critique which uncovers the aspectsof gynesis alongside the patriarchal ones as coded within a literary text. We can also assume
that such an approach can be applied to earlier modern texts as well, as they have been exposed
to an even lesser critique of the writing strategies of modernity than the contemporary ones. We
hope this approach will be further facilitated if we throw light on Derrida’s sense of
deconstruction, to which we turn next.
Derrida’s Philosophy of Deconstruction
Like Jardine’s notion of gynesis, Derrida’s view of deconstruction does not emulate a specificmove between binary oppositions, even though he acknowledges their inevitability indiscourse. His gesture of bringing Claude Lévi-Strauss’ ethnological research to bear on thedeconstruction of the structure of discourse is not a move from particular to universal, fromlocal to global, or the other way around. These binary oppositions grow increasingly flexible
as they are deployed – through the abstractions of discourse and culture – away from the53

Alice Jardine, Gynesis, p. 262.
Ibid., p. 264.
55
Ibid., p. 234.
56
Ibid., pp. 234-235.
57
Ibid., p. 236.
58
Ibid., p. 236.
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visualities of nature to the point of their significatory self-disbandment, self-annihilation or,otherwise, deconstruction. This process is certainly more subtle and sophisticated than the
discourse can convey, especially as the latter inevitably faces in it its own self-disarmament andstructural incapacity to proceed beyond itself. It is nonetheless a process in which, as Derrida
has shown, discourse becomes increasingly aware of its own “finite” capacity as a “field” which“excludes totalization.”59
The sense of deconstruction 60 which Derrida conveys comprises a number ofdevelopments in what he calls the “history of meaning” and is tied with the concept of‘structure’ that is central to the work of such figures as the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss,the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, and the linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, among others. As istypically understood, ‘structure’ is what introduces order, organization, and systematicity indiscourse to make it intelligible, for, as Saussure, the foremost originator of structuralism, puts
it, “in language there are only differences without positive terms.” 61
Structure, Sign, and PlayIn the opening of his most widely read essay “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the
Human Sciences,” Derrida speaks of an “event” which constitutes a “rupture” in “the conceptof structure,” and which he links to the very sense of “the structurality of structure.” Morespecifically, he points out that “although it has always been at work, [structure also] has always
been neutralized or reduced, and this by a process of giving it a center or of referring it to apoint of presence, a fixed origin.” 62 For Derrida, the center of the structure plays the specialrole of ensuring its stability, organization, coherence, and thus intelligibility, but mostimportantly – of “limiting what we might call the play of the structure.”63 The center of thestructure “closes off the play which it opens up and makes possible,” but itself remains
insusceptible to “permutation or transformation” and thus, despite its special function, ”escapes
structurality,” which is why it was thought of, “paradoxically, within the structure and outsideit.”64 In other words,
The center is at the center of the totality, and yet, since the center does not belong to the totality (isnot part of the totality), the totality has its center elsewhere. The center is not the center. The conceptof centered structure – although it represents coherence itself, the condition of the episteme as
philosophy or science – is contradictorily coherent.65

59

Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, translated by Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978),p.289; cf. L'écriture et la différence (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1967), p. 423.
60
It is to be noted that, even as he used the term ‘deconstruction’ and its derivatives extensively, Derrida was not
happy with the label ‘deconstructionist’ for his philosophy, which came to be applied to it rather by popularconsent.
61
Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, edited by Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye, incollaboration with Albert Riedlinger, translated, with an introduction and notes by Wade Baskin (New York: The
Philosophical Library, Inc. 1959), p. 120; cf. Cours de linguistique générale, publié par Charles Bally et Albert
Sechehaye, avec la collaboration de Albert Riedlinger (Paris: Payot, 1971), pp. 194-195.
62
Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, p.278; cf. L'écriture et la différence, p. 409.
63
Ibid., p.278; cf. p. 409.
64
Ibid., p.279; cf. pp. 409-410.
65
Ibid., p.279; cf. p. 410.

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Derrida points out further that throughout the intellectual tradition of the West that center has
been taking different “forms or names,” different “metaphors and metonymies” – such as“eidos, arche, telos, energeia, ousia (essence, existence, substance, subject), aletheia,transcendentality, consciousness, God, man, and so forth” – but it has always aimed at “thedetermination of Being as presence in all senses of this word.”66 Thus, it became historically
clear “that the center could not be thought in the form of a present-being, ... that it was not a
fixed locus but a function, a sort of nonlocus in which an infinite number of sign-substitutions
came into play” to the point that “everything became discourse,” or “a system in which thecentral signified, the original or transcendental signified, is never absolutely present outside asystem of differences,” thus “extending the domain and the play of signification infinitely.” 67
Whereas, for Derrida, there is no particular event or doctrine that marks the beginningof the rupture of the concept of structure, he has singled out the discourses of Nietzsche, Freud,and Heidegger, in which its “work” has found “its most radical formulation.” 68 Yet, for him,such discourses are inevitably involved in a “unique circle” which is indicative of “the relation
between the history of metaphysics and the destruction of the history of metaphysics,” andultimately – of the impossibility of deconstructing metaphysics without using its concepts:
There is no sense in doing without the concepts of metaphysics in order to shake metaphysics. We
have no language – no syntax and no lexicon – which is foreign to this history; we can pronounce
not a single destructive proposition which has not already had to slip into the form, the logic, andthe implicit postulations of precisely what it seeks to contest.69

One example that Derrida gives in this regard is the concept of sign, a key concept ofstructuralist thought, which – as metaphysical concept – has to be “rejected,” but which at thesame time cannot be dispensed with in such a rejection.70 The concept of the sign cannot securea transcendence of, or a radical distance from, the metaphysical oppositions it enables (such as
the one “between sensible and intelligible,” as Lévi-Strauss had hoped); for we cannot annul its
very own metaphysical “self-identity” (of an opposition between signifier and signified)
without annulling also its functional capacity – we cannot annul its “metaphysical complicity
without also giving up the critique we are directing against this complicity.”71
In this relation, Derrida speaks of a “classical way” of annulling or “erasing thedifference between the signifier and the signified,” which involves “submitting the sign tothought,” as opposed to his own, which contests “the system” of operation of the former one,and most of all – “the opposition between sensible and intelligible.” 72 More particularly,
Derrida points to what he calls “the paradox ... that the metaphysical reduction of the signneeded the opposition it was reducing,” suggesting – in a circular fashion – that “the opposition
66

Ibid., pp.279-280; cf. pp. 410-411.
Ibid., p. 280 (emphasis added); cf. p. 411.
68
Ibid., p. 280; cf. pp. 411-412.
69
Ibid., pp. 280-281; cf. pp. 411-412.
70
Ibid., p. 281; cf. p. 412.
71
Ibid., p. 281; cf. pp. 412-413.
72
Ibid., p. 281; cf. p. 413.
67

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is systematic with the reduction,” which in his view applies “to all the concepts and all thesentences of metaphysics, in particular to the discourse on ‘structure’,” and “explains themultiplicity of destructive discourses and the disagreement between those who elaborate
them.”73 This means that no ‘system’ is possible without differences and oppositions, which
are necessary for the ‘reduction’, explanation, or elaboration within its perspective, andultimately – for the deconstruction of that system itself and its structural elements. That is,regardless of its primary purpose, every usage of metaphysical concepts, including those madewithin the “destructive discourses” of the likes of Nietzsche, Freud, and Heidegger, “brings
along with it the whole of metaphysics.” 74 This also means that the metaphysical deconstructionof metaphysics (indeed its only possible deconstruction) needs to make usage of metaphysicaloppositions, as much as to face the impossibility of accepting them, as in the case of LéviStrauss’ ethnological research, where his fundamental opposition between nature and culture
collapsed in the explanation of the universal normativity of incest prohibition. 75
For Derrida, this indicates that “language bears within itself the necessity of its own
critique,” which he suggests could be done in two manners: one “questioning systematicallyand rigorously the history of these concepts,” but in a way different from that of the “classic
historian of philosophy,” and instead – in a “step ‘outside philosophy’”; and another,
instrumental one, which, while questioning their truth-value, “conserves” their methodologicalutility.76 He sees Lévi-Strauss’ notion of bricolage as an example of the latter manner in thesense in which the bricoleur utilizes various tools that come handy, regardless of the purposes
for which they may have been made originally. 77 What Derrida emphasizes here is that thevalue of bricolage is not just “intellectual” but also “mythopoetical,” which for him emulates“the stated abandonment of all reference to a center, to a subject, to a privileged reference, toan origin, or to an absolute archia.”78 Thus, the important recognition that Derrida makes, alongwith Lévi-Strauss, is that the study of the myths is itself mythomorphic, “itself a kind of myth”– “the myth of mythology,” answering “the arbitrary demand for a total mythological pattern,”
as much as “the philosophical or epistemological requirement of a center.” 79
Employing discourse for totalization, then, is in an important sense useless andimpossible, but for Derrida this is not just because of the empirical impossibility for a finite
subject to master the infinite field of its totalizing endeavor; most fundamentally, it is “because
the nature of the field – that is, language and a finite language – excludes totalization.”80 It israther that field’s nature of “nontotalization” that needs determination and here Derrida reaches
out to the concept of play:
This field is in effect that of play, that is to say, a field of infinite substitutions only because it isfinite, that is to say, because instead of being an inexhaustible field, as in the classical hypothesis,

73

Ibid., p. 281; cf. p. 413.
Ibid., p. 281; cf. p. 413.
75
Ibid., p. 283; cf. pp. 415-416.
76
Ibid., p. 284; cf. pp. 416-417.
77
Ibid., p. 285; cf. p. 418.
78
Ibid., pp. 285-286; cf. pp. 418-419.
79
Ibid., pp. 286-289; cf. pp. 420-423.
80
Ibid., p. 289; cf. p. 423.
74

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instead of being too large, there is something missing from it: a center which arrests and grounds
the play of substitutions. One could say ... that this movement of play, permitted by the lack or
absence of a center or origin, is the movement of supplementarity. One cannot determine the centerand exhaust totalization because the sign which replaces the center, which supplements it, taking thecenter’s place in its absence—this sign is added, occurs as a surplus, as a supplement.81

This passage condenses a great deal of Derrida’s view on the nature of discourse anddeconstruction. It suggests that both discourse and deconstruction are products of the work or‘movement’ of what he calls play. The field of language is the field of play – ‘a field of infinite
substitutions’. It is ‘a field of infinite substitutions only because it is finite’. It is both ‘a fieldof infinite substitutions’ and ‘finite’ because ‘there is something missing from it: a center’. It isthus both finite and infinite but that paradox would hold sway as paradox (in its proper senseof contradiction) only in an empirical (or otherwise logical) perspective; in the play of a centerless discourse it would stand as the normal state of affairs. In the ‘absence of a center’, the‘movement of play’ is ‘the movement of supplementarity’, because ‘the sign replaces thecenter’ without being a center and thus adds up to the play, becomes ‘a surplus’ or ‘asupplement’. And yet, that this ‘supplement’ is only “a floating one,” serving only “a vicarious
function” to make up for “a lack on the part of the signified,” 82 already suggests that all
significatory discourse – with all its presumably centering but fundamentally arbitrary
structurality – is duly owed a deconstruction. In other words, discourse already carries within
itself its own deconstruction, which only needs to be read out, provided that one knows how toread it.
In this relation, Derrida speaks of certain tensions of the concept of play with those ofhistory and presence, which he identifies in Lévi-Strauss as well. First, on Derrida’s view, thetension between the concepts of play and history denies the latter its “classic” oppositionist
stance to, and instead points to its “complicity” with, the metaphysics of presence:With or without etymology, and despite the classic antagonism which opposes these significations
throughout all of classical thought, it could be shown that the concept of epistēmē has always called
forth that of historia, if history is always the unity of a becoming, as the tradition of truth or thedevelopment of science or knowledge oriented toward the appropriation of truth in presence andself-presence, toward knowledge in consciousness-of-self.83

In other words, historia is always already epistēmē, if, in ‘the tradition of truth’, ‘history is theunity of a becoming’ as apperceived – along ‘truth in presence and self-presence’ – by a subject;that is, as ‘knowledge in consciousness-of-self’. For Derrida, then, grasping “the internal
originality of a structure” – including that of the “structure of structures, language” – would
require “a neutralization of time and history,” a sort of suspension of all “its past conditions,”
which would see that structure’s emergence as, in Lévi-Strauss’ words, “born in one fell
swoop.” 84 Now, for Lévi-Strauss, ‘born in one fell swoop’ does not mean ‘created out of
nothing’, as certain “process” and “transformations” are assumed to be at work there, but – on
81

Ibid., p. 289; cf. p. 423.
Ibid., p. 289; cf. p. 423.
83
Ibid., p. 291; cf. p. 425.
84
Ibid., p. 291; cf. pp. 425-426.
82

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Derrida’s view – he saw the suspension of all factuality as necessary for “recapturing thespecificity of a structure.”85
On the other ‘tension’, the one between play and presence, Derrida points that whereas“presence” is a signification “inscribed in a system of differences,” “play is the disruption ofpresence” and is thus a “play of absence and presence,” which, “thought radically, ... must beconceived of before the alternative of presence and absence.” 86 In this sense, for Derrida,“Being must be conceived as presence or absence on the basis of the possibility of play and not
the other way around,” a stance which appears to condition two approaches to the “impossible
presence”:
Turned towards the lost or impossible presence of the absent origin, this structuralist thematic ofbroken immediacy is therefore the saddened, negative, nostalgic, guilty, Rousseauistic side of thethinking of play whose other side would be the Nietzschean affirmation, that is the joyous
affirmation of the play of the world and of the innocence of becoming, the affirmation of a world ofsigns without fault, without truth, and without origin which is offered to an active interpretation.
This affirmation then determines the noncenter otherwise than as loss of the center. And it plays
without security. For there is a sure play: that which is limited to the substitution of given andexisting, present, pieces. In absolute chance, affirmation also surrenders itself to genetic
indetermination, to the seminal adventure of the trace.87

Thus, both the ‘negative, nostalgic Rousseauistic side’ and the ‘joyous, affirmative Nietzscheanside’ of thinking the play are two interpretative approaches, “two interpretations ofinterpretation, of structure, of sign, of play,” which while “absolutely irreconcilable” find theirways into the common “field” of the human sciences.88 These two ways of responding to theapparent lack or ‘loss of the center’, to ‘the noncenter’ of the structurality of structure, appear
to posit two key aspects of the deconstructive critique, two demands which are as exacting as
they are inevitable, and as non-binding as they are indeterminate: 1) the demand for a recurrent
substitution of significations in a system of differences, a system of presence; and 2) the demand
for the affirmation of play, of the adventure of life; that is, for life affirmation. Still, Derrida
does not think we have a “question of choosing” here; rather our first task is to “try to conceiveof the common ground, and the différance of this irreducible difference,” a task which opens
up a “glimpse” at the question of “facing the as yet unnamable,” the question whose treatment
portends promises, risks, and delusions that can only provisionally announce themselves in a
metaphorics of “childbearing,” “nonspecies,” and “monstrosity.” 89
The Play of Différance
Derrida’s view of différance adds up to the sense of his deconstructive approach by exploring
interrelations of structurality with key concepts of the metaphysical tradition, including
difference, being, becoming, causation, subject, time, space, trace, consciousness, andunconscious, among others. While fairly complex and demanding a close reading to get into its
85

Ibid., pp. 291-292; cf. p. 426.
Ibid., p. 292; cf. p. 426.
87
Ibid., p. 292; cf. pp. 426-427.
88
Ibid., pp. 292-293; cf. p. 427.
89
Ibid., p. 293; cf. pp. 427-428.
86

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sense, we will limit its discussion here to only some of its aspects that indicate the openness of
deconstruction to literary texts.
Initially described as “neographism,” différance obtains through the imposition of theletter “a” in place of the letter “e” in the French word différence. 90 As a mere “graphic
difference,” the a of différance can be “read or written,” but it would remain inaudible in the
spoken French language:
The a of différance, thus, is not heard; it remains silent, secret and discreet as a tomb: oikesis. And
thereby let us anticipate the delineation of a site, the familial residence and tomb of the proper inwhich is produced, by différance, the economy of death. This stone – provided that one knows how
to decipher its inscription – is not far from announcing the death of the tyrant.91

Drawing on the links of the Greek word oikos (house) with ‘tomb’ (oikesis) and ‘economy’(from oikonomia or “household management”), Derrida here associates the ‘tomb of the proper’with ‘the death of the tyrant’. This ‘economy of death’, which is an effect of différance, involves“the pyramidal silence” of the letter a in “the graphic difference”92 and points to the need of‘deciphering its inscription’. Further on, drawing on Saussure's discussion of structurality oflanguage, Derrida speaks of différance as “play of differences,” which is “the possibility ofconceptuality, of a conceptual process and system in general,”93 as much as it is “the condition
for the possibility and functioning of every sign.” 94 Yet, this seemingly transcendental
characterization will be duly stripped of its transcendentality, as différance will be seen not only
as “what makes possible the presentation of the being-present,” but also as what “is neverpresented as such, … never offered to the present,” nor “to anyone.” 95 Thus différance will
reappear as evading the language of presence very much as its letter a evades being detected inspeech. We can conjecture here that as the silent a of différance can only be deciphered in its
inscription, so too différance itself – in its non-presence, lack of being, transcendental
inaccessibility – remains open to discussion, viz. interpretation, as much as anything belonging
to the margins of the text. And yet, as “différance is neither a word nor a concept,” and is thus
“what is most irreducible of our ‘era’” (and indeed without ‘is’), 96 its discussion, which is to
unfold inevitably in the language of presence, can only be paradoxical or non-literal.
Within the terms of this language, Derrida has traced two aspects of différance along
the two senses of the French verb différer (and its Latin predecessor differre) – rendered in
English respectively with ‘defer’ and ‘differ’ – as temporization and spacing: the former
implying “an economical calculation, a detour, a delay, a relay, a reserve, a representation”; thelatter – “dissimilar otherness or ... allergic and polemical otherness, an interval, a distance.” 97

90 Jacques Derrida, “Différance,” in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: The University of Chicago

Press, 1986), p. 3; cf. Marges de la Philosophie (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1972), p. 4.
91
Ibid., pp. 3-4; cf. p. 4.
92
Ibid., p. 4; cf. p. 4.
93
Ibid., p. 11; cf. p. 11.
94
Ibid., p. 5; cf. p. 5.
95
Ibid., pp. 5-6; cf. p. 6.
96
Ibid., pp. 6-7.
97
Ibid., p. 8; cf. p. 8.

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These two aspects of différance point to the fundamental categories of the metaphysicaltradition ‘time’ and ‘space’, which in Derrida’s discussion thus appear in perspective. A key
pointer here is that the a of différance is understood as “immediately deriving from the present
participle (différant), thereby bringing us close to the very action of the verb différer, before it
has even produced an effect constituted as something different or as différence (with an e).” 98
In this sense, différance reappears as the overall dynamics that underlays or makes possible
thinking in terms of language as differences; that is, it makes possible thinking, categorial
thinking, metaphysical thinking, as well as writing, altogether.
The elusive character of différance has compelled Derrida to appeal in its discussion to
Freud’s concept of trace (Spur) and to Heidegger’s usage of the same term, both of which aresuggestive of a non-literal rendering of what otherwise appears unpresentable. Thus, Derrida
has associated “the movement of signification” towards “the scene of presence”; that is, the“constitution of the present” of the language of presence – via differences and intervals, or
temporization and spacing – with “archi-writing, archi-trace, or différance.” 99 He uncovers
différance as spacing within Freud’s “concepts of trace (Spur), of breaching (Bahnung), and of
the forces of breaching,” by pointing that they “are inseparable from the concept of difference,”
as “there is no breach without difference and no difference without trace.” 100 Then, he identifies
différance as temporization by pointing that “all the differences in the production of
unconscious traces and in the processes of inscription (Niederschrift)” can be interpreted as“putting into reserve,” because Freud regards “the movement of a trace ... as an effort of life toprotect itself by deferring the dangerous investment, by constituting a reserve (Vorrat).”101
Likewise, Derrida links his notion of différance with the defining concepts of themetaphysical tradition via Heidegger’s usage of ‘trace’ as well. Heidegger’s stance that the“oblivion of Being belongs to the self-veiling essence of Being,” as “even the early trace (diefruhe Spur)” of the ontological difference between Being and beings “is obliterated whenpresencing appears as something present,” for Derrida, points to différance as “other thanabsence and presence,” as what “traces,” and is thus the “erasure of the early trace ofdifference,” as much as “its tracing in the text of metaphysics.” 102 For Derrida, such a ‘tracing’is possible via “an inversion of metaphysical concepts” in which “the present becomes the signof the sign, the trace of the trace,” and because, like Heidegger, he thinks that, even if lost, “the‘early trace’ of difference” can still be “sheltered, retained, seen, delayed,” precisely “in a text,”
which is a “form of presence.”103
Not surprisingly then, for Derrida, such a ‘tracing’ leads where Heidegger found thefirst indication of the ontological difference – in Anaximander’s usage of to khreon, which istypically translated as ‘necessity’ but – drawing on its etymology – Heidegger translates as

98

Ibid., p. 8; cf. pp. 8-9.
Ibid., p. 13; cf. pp. 13-14.
100
Ibid., p. 18; cf. p. 19.
101
Ibid., p. 18; cf. p. 19.
102
Ibid., pp. 23-24; cf. pp. 24-25.
103
Ibid., pp. 23-24; cf. pp. 24-25.
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usage’ (Brauch).104 Heidegger’s choice of ‘usage’ issues from his attempt to think “the oblivionof Being,” the ontological difference, in the preconceptual terms of the early Greek thinkers.105
Thus, rather than keeping to its restrictive sense of compelling necessity, “of what ‘must be’,”he sees to khreon in its principally unbound sense of “handing over of presence which
presencing delivers to what is present, and which thus keeps in hand, i.e. preserves inpresencing, what is present as such.”106 If “usage delivers what is present to its presencing” andis in this sense “the distribution of presencing into disorder,” then it “conjoins the dis-”107 –indeed the dis- of any difference and distinction, of the ontological difference, of the difference
between usage and necessity, of différance. Heidegger then links ‘usage’ with ‘trace’ writing,
What properly remains to be thought in the word “usage” has presumably left a trace (Spur) in τὸχρεών. This trace quickly vanishes in the destiny of Being which unfolds in world history as Western
metaphysics.108

Whereas this statement can be read as telling us that ‘usage’ and ‘necessity’ blend in to khreon
in a not immediately discernable difference, it is also suggestive that – as Heidegger
demonstrates – ‘presencing’ in preconceptual terms is traceable, as it leaves a ‘trace’, precisely
in ‘usage’, in to khreon, as the non-causal rising of the ontological difference, as an effect ofdifférance.
Such a tracing, though, cannot be literal. For, as Derrida has acknowledged along with
Heidegger, “clearing the difference (Lichtung des Unterschiedes) ... cannot mean that thedifference appears as difference.” 109 In this sense, there can be no “proper essence ofdifférance,” nor “a Being nor truth of the play of writing such as it engages différance,” nor “aunique word” or “a master-name” that can properly name it on the language of presence. 110
Instead, what we are left with for différance is to keep in mind that,
This unnameable is the play which makes possible nominal effects, the relatively unitary and atomic
structures that are called names, the chains of substitutions of names in which, for example, thenominal effect différance is itself enmeshed, carried off, reinscribed, just as a false entry or a false
exit is still part of the game, a function of the system.111

The unnameable différance, the play that conditions the ‘nominal effects’, is itself a ‘nominal
effect’ which is to be traced in writing. It is ‘enmeshed’ in ‘chains of substitutions of names’ inMartin Heidegger, “The Anaximander Fragment,” in Early Greek Thinking, translated by David Farrell Krelland Frank Capuzzi (New York: Harper and Row, 1975), pp. 50-51; cf. Holzwege (Frankfurt am Main:
Klostermann, 1957), SS. 365-366.
105
For insightful discussions of Heidegger’s rendering of to khreon see W. Julian Korab-Karpowicz, The
Presocratics in the Thought of Martin Heidegger (New York, Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2017), pp. 84ff; aswell as Michael Eldred, Social Ontology of Whoness: Rethinking Core Phenomena of Political Philosophy (Berlin,
Boston: Walter de Gruyter, 2019), 8.1.1.6.
106
Martin Heidegger, “The Anaximander Fragment,” p. 52; cf. Holzwege, S. 366.
107
Ibid., pp. 53-54; cf. SS. 368-369.
108
Ibid., p. 54; cf. S. 369.
109
Ibid., p. 51; cf. S. 365 (translation mine here).
110
Jacques Derrida, “Différance”, pp. 25-27; cf. Marges de la Philosophie, pp. 27-28.
111
Ibid., p. 27; cf. p. 29.
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whose ‘structures’ it can reappear only as ‘a false entry or a false exit’. And yet, it is still ‘carriedoff, reinscribed,’ ‘still part of the game, a function of the system’, still leaving its trace inwriting. While its eventual tracing cannot be smooth, or ever fixed, it has certainly become aventure in the history of metaphysics and its writing, where through the clearing of nominal
effects différance has reappeared as the margin of its own text, leaving us with two alreadyfamiliar options. What is certain, though, is that Derrida’s preference is clear here:
There will be no unique name, even if it were the name of Being. And we must think this without
nostalgia, that is, outside of the myth of a purely maternal or paternal language, a lost native countryof thought. On the contrary, we must affirm this, in the sense in which Nietzsche puts affirmation
into play, in a certain laughter and a certain step of the dance.112

Nietzsche’s affirmative philosophy is here offered as the alternative to the ‘nostalgic’
metaphysical thinking that anticipates the ‘unique word’ on the language of presence. This does
not mean that Derrida suggests that the nostalgic thinking is to be fully abandoned, for in acertain sense this is never possible, either. This however does signal that the putative
traceability of différance can be availed by way of a reinvention of its nominal effects inlanguage. Such a reinvented language will not be necessarily literal but it will be in an important
relation with the literality of the language of presence; that is, in différance with that language.
The Unconscious and the Becoming Literary of the Literal
It is in this sense, then, that Derrida draws attention to a necessary becoming literary of theliteral, which he sees as indicated in Freud’s investigations on the unconscious and its interplay
with its repressive consciousness. The becoming literary of the literal is not an immediate
consequence of Freud’s insights, even if he himself has used them as means of literary critique,but one that Derrida elicits via a juxtaposition of Freud’s concepts with the fundamental
concepts of the metaphysical tradition. Of key importance here is Freud’s concept of repression.
Derrida sees the Freudian “repression” as different from the “historical repression andsuppression of writing,” which inaugurates “philosophy as episteme” and the “truth as the unityof logos and phone,” in that it is neither “forgetting” nor “exclusion” but rather a harboring of“an interior representation.”113 However, he also sees the “Freudian concepts” too “without
exception” as “belonging to the theory of metaphysics, that is, to the system of logocentric
repression,” which is the repression of “forgetting” and “exclusion” of “the body of written
trace as a didactic and technical metaphor,” or otherwise – the “repression of writing” that
represses “that which threatens presence and the mastering of absence.” 114 Thus, Freud will go
on a search for ‘an interior representation’ which – due to the character of its subject-matter –could not be possibly rendered literally within the terms of the language of presence.
Freud, therefore, will not assert its presence by straightening out its absence. Instead, hewill use metaphors, such as ‘trace’, ‘mystic writing pad’, ‘life’, and ‘death’, to invoke thefundamental involvement of consciousness with the unconscious, only to assert through this112

Ibid., pp. 26-27; cf. p. 28.
Jacques Derrida, “Freud and the Scene of Writing,” in Writing and Difference, pp. 196-197; cf. “Freud et lascène de l'écriture,” L'écriture et la différence, pp. 293-294.
114
Ibid., p. 197; cf. pp. 293-294.
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metaphorics the enigmaticity of that involvement. For Derrida, this is an assertion that suggests
the enigma of writing itself and is likewise “a movement unknown to the classic philosophy ...,
somewhere between the implicit and explicit.” 115 Indeed, the ‘classic philosophy’ strives for
lucidity keeping away from enigmaticity, whereas within the Freudian terms the enigma ofwriting is asserted, thus keeping writing open to interpretation as an endeavor of mediation
between implicit and explicit, between unconscious and conscious.
Here, a translation in the usual sense will not be possible because there is no code
available for its materilization, no signifier for signified. What we have is only the resistanceto the repression, which is the way of life; that is, the resistance of ‘life’ to ‘death’ that places“death at the origin of life,” for life “can defend itself against death only through an economy
of death, through deferment, repetition, reserve,” through “repetition, trace, différance(deferral).”116 It is thus by such a life-protective resistance (or deferral) that in the lack of atranslation code the unconscious can find its way to consciousness – not as “a transcription
duplicating an unconscious writing,” but as “originary and irreducible.” 117 This however comeswith a fundamental implication for writing in all its forms:
Since consciousness for Freud is a surface exposed to the external world, it is here that instead ofreading through the metaphor in the usual sense, we must, on the contrary, understand the possibilityof a writing advanced as conscious and as acting in the world (the visible exterior of the graphism,of the literal, of the literal becoming literary, etc.) in terms of the labor of the writing which
circulated like psychical energy between the unconscious and the conscious.118‘Consciousness’ is not a substance on its own, which is radically differentiated from its other –it is ‘a surface exposed to the external world’, and therefore to the unconscious. Thus, rather
than ‘reading through the metaphor in the usual sense’ – the sense of presence and of
consciousness’ own self-sufficiency in self-presence – it is that inevitable ‘labor of the writing’that oscillates in undecodable manner ‘like psychical energy between the unconscious and theconscious’, to which our understanding of writing must remain open. For, “the trace is theerasure of selfhood, of one’s own presence,”119 that is, of consciousness, and of consciousness’
self-sufficiency in self-presence.
When it comes to the field of the literal becoming literary, Derrida makes a rather
straightforward statement that “despite several attempts ... a psychoanalysis of literature
respectful of the originality of the literary signifier has not yet begun,” thus suggesting that
addressing the ‘labor of writing’ as a ‘circulation between the unconscious and the conscious’aiming to trace that ‘originality’ is still wanting. For,
Until now, only the analysis of the literary signifieds, that is, nonliterary signified meanings, hasbeen undertaken. But such questions refer to the entire history of literary forms themselves, and to115

Ibid., p. 199; cf. p. 296..
Ibid., pp. 202-203; cf. pp. 300-302.
117
Ibid., p. 212; cf. p. 314.
118
Ibid., p. 212; cf. pp. 314-315.
119
Ibid., p. 230; cf. p. 340.
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the history of everything within them which was destined precisely to authorize this disdain of thesignifier.120

What Derrida seems to suggests here is that ‘the analysis of the literary signifieds’ takes place
within the field of ‘nonliterary signified meanings’; that is, within the peculiar type ofcirculation of the signifier which belongs to the metaphysics of presence. This circulation isitself marked by the repressive ‘disdain of the signifier’, which materializes in writing. For its
part, the ‘disdain of the signifier’ stems precisely from, has been ‘authorized’ by, ‘the historyof everything within the literary the forms’, which has been (‘destined’ to be) repressed by that
disdain. Here, it is important to note that this repressive procedure is inevitable and directconsequence of the radical differentiation of the signifier from the signified within the conceptof the sign.
Here, we also need to keep in mind that the circulation of the signifier within the terms
of presence is marked by the literality of presence itself; whereas the ‘literary’ is a deviationfrom that literality – a yet another delay, detour, différance of what ‘must’ be present in theinevitability of writing. It is thus the character of this detour that needs to be explored inliterature, and through literature. For, the literary presence is not just – like any presence
inaugurated by the signifier – a delayed presence, or a veiled absence; it is also an availed
absence, an indicated absence, which is itself indicative, and indeed indicative of how thesignifier reappears – within the socio-political metaphorics of Freud – as disdainful, repressive,
exploitive, sublimatory. Still, one will have to know how to read such indications, which are –realistically – only pointers demanding a shuttled journey between presence and absence,
between conscious and unconscious, a journey more suggestive than pinpointing, more literary
than literal.
Style and Woman
As Derrida has linked deconstruction to affirmation, has also linked it to “the question of style”
and the socio-cultural sense of “woman.”121 Drawing very much on Nietzsche’s posthumously
published notes, as well as on thinkers like Freud and Heidegger, he traces pointers ofsignificance relevant to both feminist and deconstructive critique that bring to the fore theaffirmative sense of “woman.” Derrida admits that Nietzsche’s discussion of women is mostly
anti-feminist but focuses on those of his comments that are “apparently feminist.” 122 This is notwithout Derrida’s own interpretation but the affirmative sense of “woman” is detected in
opposition to the values of the metaphysical tradition, such as “essence,” “identity,” and “truth”– values which Nietzsche himself has already rejected in his own way, which Derrida aims todeconstruct, and against which now “woman” is seen as “one name for that untruth of truth.” 123This sense of “woman” is further juxtaposed with the metaphysical thinking which – in
its apparently distorting operation – is incapable of grasping it. Instead, “woman” never
succumbs to that operation but always evades it and points to its deconstruction:
120

Ibid., p. 230; cf. p. 340.
Jacques Derrida, Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles/Éperons: les styles de Nietzsche, French-English edition (Chicago,
London: University of Chicago Press, 1979), pp. 36-37.
122
Ibid., pp. 56-57.
123
Ibid., pp. 50-51.
121

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there is no truth, that truth has no places here and that no one has a place for truth. And she is awoman precisely because she herself does not believe in truth itself, because she does not believe inwhat she is, in what she is believed to be, in what she thus is not.124

Here Derrida is quite clear – the lack of ‘place for truth’ for ‘no one’ cannot satisfy the searchesof ‘the dogmatic and credulous philosopher’, even as he ‘believes in the truth that is woman’,for he knows ‘nothing of truth, nor anything of woman’. It is instead ‘woman’ who ‘knows that
there is no truth’ and thus ‘does not believe in what she is, in what she is believed to be, in what
she thus is not’. Thus, Derrida concludes,
Woman (truth) will not be pinned down. In truth woman, truth will not be pinned down.
That which will not be pinned down by truth is, in truth – feminine. 125

It is to be noted here that this statement concerns the socio-cultural signification of “woman”
previously discussed, which evades the conceptual instrumentarium of the metaphysicaltradition, and is not to “be hastily mistaken for a woman’s femininity, for female sexuality, orfor any other essentializing fetishes” that could motivate someone sharing in the operation ofthat tradition.126 That is, what inaugurates the metaphysical tradition, the ‘truth’, has no powerover ‘woman’ and ‘will not pin her down’. And even if ‘woman is truth’ – what is sought after,
what is fetishized – ‘she herself does not believe in truth itself’; she is beyond the truth, evenas she instates that truth. Thus, she is actually “playing” with the truth and her relationship totruth is markedly “artistic” – her philosophy is an “artist’s philosophy” while her “power isaffirmative.”127
Consequently, Derrida associates “woman” with “writing” and thus inevitably with“style,” conjecturing in particular that “if style were a man (much as the penis, according to
Freud is the normal prototype of fetishes’), then writing would be a woman.” 128 Thus, “thequestions of art, style and truth” are inevitably bound with “the question of the woman,” andyet Derrida acknowledges that it is impossible to answer the latter; that is, to search and capture
the dimensions of “woman” in terms of metaphysical presence, as much as “it is impossible toresist looking for her.”129
Thus, Derrida focuses on the relation of “woman” to the metaphysical tradition, drawing
particularly on Nietzsche’s sense of “becoming woman,” which, in Derrida’s view, Heidegger
has ignored, focusing instead primarily on Nietzsche’s oppositional relation to that tradition. 130
Derrida links Nietzsche’s sense of “becoming woman” with Plato’s sense of “idea,” and moreparticularly he sees the “becoming female” as a “process of the idea” (Fortschritt der idee)
124

Ibid., pp. 52-53.
Ibid., pp. 54-55.
126
Ibid., pp. 54-55.
127
Ibid., pp. 66-69.
128
Ibid., pp. 56-57.
129
Ibid., pp. 70-71.
130Ibid., pp. 84-85ff.
125

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where “idea” is understood as “a form of truth’s self-presentation.” 131 Thus, “truth” and“woman,” which previously have not always been bound together, now “together both form ahistory,” indeed the history of the epoch in which “the becoming-female of the idea is thepresence or presentation of truth.”132 We need to keep in mind here that, in Derrida’s view, thispeculiar inauguration of history has placed a “distance” between “the philosopher” and “thetruth,” such that the former begins aspiring for the later which in turn “becomes transcendent,
inaccessible, seductive,” such that “he can now only follow in its trace.” 133
We are already familiar with the clue of the ‘trace’ and its involvement with ‘writing’,and how – along the latter – Derrida also links it to ‘woman’ and her productive bondage withthe ‘idea’ and the ‘truth’. Now, another suggestive additive to this network of relations that hemakes – again following Nietzsche – is the relation of ‘woman’ to the Christian religion.
Nietzsche associates “becoming female” with “becoming Christian,” which Derrida reads as“she castrates (herself)” because Nietzsche regards Christianity as “castratism (Kastrismus).” 134
As Christianity has used castration to “kill the passions,” Derrida now sees Nietzsche’s
discussion of castratism as pointing to a subjection of “the truth of woman-idea” to “ablation,
excision, extirpation.”135 Further on, as, for Nietzsche, “an attack on the roots of passion means
an attack on the roots of life,” for Derrida, “the Church is hostile thus
to woman also who is herself life.”136 But Nietzsche is the philosopher of life and for him‘passions’ stand for life, whereas the worst of them come into play exactly in those who have
tried to most drastically kill them. For him, the true spiritualization is spiritualization ofpassions, not one that proceeds from excision/castration; Derrida quotes him:
The spiritualization of sensuality is called love: it represents a great triumph over Christianity.
Another triumph is our spiritualization of hostility. It consists in profound appreciation of the valueof having enemies...137

Nietzsche’s affirmation of life, as drawing on spiritualized passions, is thus the affirmation of‘woman’, even as this affirmation finds no consistency in the “heterogeneity” of his text andstyle. It is thus arguable that at a certain point his anti-feminism is simply confronted anddeposed by his feminism, and for Derrida this means that “woman is recognized and affirmed
as an affirmative power, a disimulatress, an artist, a dionysiac,” who “affirm herself, in and ofherself, in man,” rather than the other way around. 138 Accounting for Nietzsche’s heterogenous
approach, Derrida writes,

131

Ibid., pp. 86-87.
Ibid., pp. 86-87.
133
Ibid., pp. 86-89.
134
Ibid., pp. 88-91.
135
Ibid., pp. 90-93.
136
Ibid., pp. 92-93.
137
Ibid., pp. 92-93. Cf. Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, or, How to philosophize with the hammer,
translated by Richard Polt (Indianapolis, Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1997), p. 26; cf. Götzen-Dämmerung,oder Wie man mit dem Hammer philosophiert, im Nietzsche’s Werke, (Leipzig: Druck und Verlag von C.G.
Naumann,1899), Band VIII, S. 86.
138
Jacques Derrida, Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles/Éperons: les styles de Nietzsche, pp. 96-97.
132

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Nietzsche might well be a little lost in the web of his text, lost much as a spider who finds he isunequal to the web he has spun. Much as a spider indeed, several spiders even. Nietzsche’s spider.
....
He was, he dreaded this castrated woman.
He was, he dreaded this castrating woman.
He was, he loved this affirming woman.139

But Nietzsche is not disturbed by such a predicament, for he does not believe in the truth, neither
his own, nor of his own text, nor of “style in itself,” nor of his own style, even as he speaks of“my truths” or of his being “capable of many kinds of style.”140
Ultimately, Derrida links Nietzsche’s discussions of ‘woman’, the sexes, love, anderoticism, to what he calls the “process of propriation,” which he traces also in Heidegger. 141
As Derrida sees it, marked by the exchange of “give and take,” “possess and possessed,”
propriation determines the sexes as much as sexuality, but it advances also a point of
undecidability, as in the structural relation that it is “man and woman change places” or“exchange masks ad infinitum.”142 Derrida also thinks that “propriation ... is more powerfulthan the veil of truth or the meaning of being,” but he warns against the naivete of simply
ignoring the question of being, or of thinking that “the question of proper-ty is thus available
to direct examination.”143 He further sees Heidegger’s conjecture of propriety with the questionof being or with the metaphysical tradition (as in the case of Nietzsche’s thought) as aquestionable gesture, which points to “proper-ty’s abyssal structure.”144 This abyss is actually
the truth’s “bottomless abyss as non-truth, veiling and dissimulation,” which obtains when “thequestion of production, doing, machination, the question of the event ... is uprooted fromontology” to leave us with “proper-ty” as “proper to nothing and no one.”145 Derrida associates
this abyss of non-truth with “the style’s form and the no-where of woman” of Nietzsche’s, aswell as with the undecidability of the “give/take” structure in the characterization of the sexes
and sexuality.146 His point appears to be that, if Heidegger’s reading of Nietzsche as belonging
to the metaphysical tradition is deconstructed along with that structure, then Nietzsche’s
thought opens up a new field of exploration, “an enormous field of dimensions immeasurable– except perhaps by the steps of a dove.”147 This field is that of ‘the style’s form and the nowhere of woman’ and can be measured only ‘perhaps by the steps of a dove’, which is indeed
the ‘trace’ – the resistance of life to death, to poison/pharmakon which would be the price andvalue of that field’s gift as indefinitely suspended.
The field of ‘woman’ thus lies open to style leaving traces in writing. Such traces will
be open to interpretations very much as Nietzsche’s seemingly isolated and contextuallyindeterminate note “I have forgotten my umbrella.” But, as Derrida has noted, such hermeneutic
139

Ibid., pp. 100-101.
Ibid., pp. 103-105.
141
Ibid., pp. 108-109.
142
Ibid., pp. 110-111.
143
Ibid., pp. 110-113.
144
Ibid., pp. 114-117.
145
Ibid., pp. 118-119.
146
Ibid., pp. 120-121.
147
Ibid., pp. 122-123.
140

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exercises may not necessarily produce results of any worth and may just signal that “there is‘no totality to Nietzsche’s text’, not even a fragmentary or aphoristic,” and equally – that“unprotected” as one may thus be against the weather, one may as well be “exposed to thethunder and lightning of an enormous clap of laughter.” 148 This exposure to the uncharted
territory of time/weather/‘woman’/différance/ unconscious in the wake of such ‘forgetting’leaves us facing our lack of knowledge of it. It thus points to the need of deconstruction of its
essentialist interpretations, as well as of turning in our searches to nonessentialist ‘traces’ ofreading, writing, unconscious, ‘woman’, différance. Hence, as searching for the “meaning offorgetting” points “to bringing the question of forgetting back to the question of being,” withall ensuing associations in hand, we need to assert that “the forgetting of a being (an umbrella)”
is not commensurable with “the forgetting of Being,” for the latter cannot be grasped
factologically.149 Thus, our search will not amount to the putative essence of forgetting, though
it will bring us deeper into the meaning of Being. As Heidegger puts it,
Forgetting ... not only attacks the essence of Being (das Wiesendes Seins) inasmuch as it isapparently distinct from it, it belongs to the nature of Being (Sie gehört zur Sache des Seins) andreigns as the Destiny of its essence (als Geschick seines Wesens).150

In this sense, outside the factology of beings, Being is very much only a ‘trace’ of beings,
turning their putative essences, as well as its own ‘forgetting’, into traces as well. And yet, thetraces of Being and its forgetting are not commensurable with the traces of beings. Outside
factology, traces are outside commensurability; they are ‘traces’.
Immunity and Autoimmunity
As we began thinking the ‘trace’ within the terms of resistance of life to death, topoison/pharmakon, we embarked on the theme of calamity and immunity, which we now findsuspended – along a good many of the oppositions deconstructed by Derrida – between life anddeath, give and take, possessing and possessed, conscious and unconscious, style and ‘woman’,as they join in the workings of writing. In Derrida’s work, immunity has been linked withcalamity in various ways and has been explored extensively for purposes of literary criticism,
especially as autoimmunity.151 Here we will focus specifically on its relation with some of the
key terms of Derrida’s thought that we already discussed in a search for pointers to theaffirmative dimension of the deconstructive critique in literature.
As early as his Specters of Marx, Derrida links the terms of ‘life’, ‘death’, ‘ego’, ‘thesame’, ‘other’, and ‘différance’ with those of immunity and autoimmunity:
148

Ibid., pp. 134-135.
Ibid., pp. 140-143.
150
Ibid., pp. 142-143; cf. Martin Heidegger, “On the Question of Being,” Pathmarks, edited by William McNeill(Cambridge, UK; New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 314; Zur Seinsfrage (Frankfurt am Main:
Vittorio Klostermann, 1967), S. 35.
151
See, for instance, Yasemin Karaağaç, “Hostility, Hospitality, and Autoimmunity in Kadare’s The Fall of The
Stone City,” Global Conversations: An International Journal in Contemporary Philosophy and Culture, Vol. 4(2021), especially pp., 11-15, 20ff, http://philogc.org/vol-4/; as well as, Catherine MacMillan, “Looking for theRogue: Democratic Autoimmunity in José Saramago’s Seeing,” Global Conversations: An International Journalin Contemporary Philosophy and Culture, Vol. 4 (2021), especially pp. 27ff, http://philogc.org/vol-4/.
149

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The living ego is auto-immune.... To protect its life, to constitute itself as unique living ego, to relate,as the same, to itself, it is necessarily led to welcome the other within (so many figures of death:différance of the technical apparatus, iterability...), it must therefore take the immune defenses
apparently meant for the non-ego, the enemy, the opposite, the adversary and direct them at once
for itself and against itself.152

Derrida suggests that ‘the living being is autoimmune’ because it goes against its own ‘defenses
meant for the non-ego, the enemy, the opposite, the adversary’ as well. It manages to sustain
itself, ‘to protect its life, to constitute itself as unique living ego, to relate, as the same, to itself’by ‘welcoming the other within’ itself, even as the other is ‘so many figures of death’. Here theoperation of autoimmunity appears to join forces with the intervention of the other, the calamityof the other, against the ego’s immunity; that is, with the forces of death against life, but it isultimately what the ego needs to maintain its immunity, to protect itself from the forces ofdeath, as well as from its own (auto)immunity. This basically means that a sustainable living
being needs to ‘direct its defenses at once for itself and against itself’; that is, to be at once
immune and autoimmune. Thus, immunity and autoimmunity go together in the sustenance oflife and need to be maintained through and through. The ‘living ego’ maintains them by playing
them against each other, by playing life against death in life; that is, by welcoming death in life,
by welcoming différance.
Other terms that later on add up to the sense of immunity and autoimmunity in Derrida’s
work include ‘reason’, ‘unconscious’, ‘conscious’, ‘representation’, and ‘pharmakon’. In his
view, not only is “reason” not entirely on its own in its workings, but we also need to “besuspicious of rationalizations” precisely “in the name of reason,” for we can no longer just leaveaside “the logic of the unconscious” availed to us by what can be seen as “a psychoanalytic
revolution.” 153 Quite to the contrary, it was the intervention of, “among other things, thispoisoned medicine, this pharmakon of an inflexible and cruel autoimmunity that is sometimes
called the ‘death drive’,” that has made it possible for us to realize that “the living being” is not
reducible “to its conscious and representative form.”154 Thus, the ‘living being’, with all its
rationality and conscious representations, has been shown to be intertwined with its ‘other’,including with what is most detrimental to it and threatens its own life, such as the poison ofpharmakon or the cruelty of autoimmunity, which thus will need to be accounted for in all of
its workings.
The Perspective of Deconstruction
Derrida’s work has fundamentally revisited the Western philosophical and cultural traditionand has left its mark on both philosophy and literary criticism. His deconstructive critique hasbrought to the fore the fundamental interrelatedness of concepts like structure, sign, play,
152

Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx, translated by Peggy Kamuf (New York; London: Routledge, 2006), p. 177;
cf. Spectres de Marx (Paris: Éditions Galilée, 1993), p. 224.
153
Jacques Derrida, Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, translated by Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), p. 157; cf. Voyous: Deux essais sur la raison (Paris: Éditions
Galilée, 2003), p. 215.
154
Ibid., p. 157; cf. p. 215.

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différance, being, nothing, metaphysics, presence, language, literature, literary, literal, style,woman, authenticity, property, life, death, ego, instincts, trace, the same, the other, reason,
unconscious, conscious, representation, and pharmakon, among others. It has thus helped dispel
undue preconceptions in, as well as open new horizons for, understanding the culturalachievements of our era which has not always been able to come to terms with its own past in
the best of ways. While adding up to those who throughout the tradition were able to expose
the futility of its most ambitious metaphysical aspirations, Derrida stands for an approach thatis alternative to the ‘nostalgic’ attitude of those who pledged all their hopes on the conscious
rationality of the human knowing subjectivity. Drawing most of all on thinkers like Nietzsche,Freud, Heidegger, and Levinas, he saw – in the wake of the metaphysics – the deconstructionof the workings of the self-identical subject-consciousness as an affirmation that upholds theways of life against the background of its threats. It would be thus the life-asserting effect of
deconstruction that will induce most interest in its deployment in revisiting our culturalachievements and their ‘truth’. This effect, which among other things is meant to assert writing
through différance, life through death, style through woman, or immunity through calamity, isalso meant to dispel the elements of metaphysical presence which it inevitably deploys, thus
leaving only its ‘trace’ amidst the traces it would point to. This is also the effect that inaugurates
the becoming literary of the literal, for which literature would be the resource.
In Summary
In our critical perspective here, the feminist perspective of Alice Jardine and thedeconstructionist one of Jacques Derrida are seen as both intersecting and complementary. The
main points of intersection and complementariness that interest us here are detectable in thejuxtaposition of Jardine’s terms gynesis and gynema with Derrida’s deconstruction and trace
respectively. Gynesis as ‘putting into the discourse of woman’ and deconstruction as
dismantling the phallogocentric discourse of the tradition overlap in that they are bothunderstood as a movement into the open socio-cultural territory designated as “woman.” They
complement each other in that gynesis is meant specifically as literary critique mindful of
feminist perspectives, whereas deconstruction is a fundamentally philosophical rethinking of
the tradition of writing as a whole. On the other hand, the supporting terms gynema as productof gynesis and trace as the product of deconstruction intersect in that they are non-fixed effects
of reading and writing, while they complement each other in that they carry critical literary andphilosophical insights respectively. As availing non-fixed effects of reading and writing, bothgynesis and deconstruction respond to the need of critical reflection over the becoming literaryof the literal, a field which opens up from dismantling the phallogocentric structures of
discourse, and for which literature is a vast resource for exploratory insights.
A pivotal point in our critical perspective is affirmation in the life-asserting sense ofNietzsche, which Derrida opposes to the ‘nostalgic’ Rousseauistic sense of lost presence. It
would be thus those exploratory insights which mark the affirmation of life (as opposed to those
invoking a nostalgia over the dismantled discourse) that would be in focus here. They would
be the pointers to the (auto)immunity of life, which – as contradictorily presentable within theterms of discourse – affirms itself, affirms life, even as it attacks itself, attacks life. As
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in its continuous struggle against death – even as it may appear as bogged in contradictions,absurdities, feelings, or ‘errors’ of untruth of any kind (be they tragic, comic, or anything in
between), still always and inevitably affirms itself by its own means. It would be thus thesemeans that would be in focus in our critical perspective here, which remains open to them as
they leave their ‘traces’ in what is made present in discourse as a product of writing.

Reading Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter
Our intended deconstructive feminist reading of Hawthorne’s famous novel will not aim toexhaustively present – and still less to define – all elements and aspects of this literary text thatbear relevance to other possible feminist or deconstructionist perspectives. Such an ambitious
task would in fact go against the precepts of our critical perspective and would reinstate whatthat perspective was meant to do away with by exposing it – the phallogocentric structures of
discourse. Instead, we shall endeavor to bring out the ‘traces’ which a deconstructive reading
aims to point at, while staying mindful for its feminist import or ‘gynema’. For, both gynesis
and deconstruction make the same gesture here – they seek to search through and bring to light
aspects of the socio-cultural significance of ‘woman’. In this way, they would also contributeto the exploration of ‘the becoming literary of the literal’ – the field which legitimately opens
up for exploration upon the deconstruction of the phallogocentric structures of discourse andwhich we approach here through Hawthorne’s literary work.
The traces or gynema, which we aim at, will prove to be chains of infinite substitutions,
without fixed identities. For, regardless of the exigencies demanded by the phallogocentric
structures of discourse, which relies on such fixities, it would be the joint work of gynesis anddeconstruction that plays out its effects in the literary text in a way that is – in its very source –unstructured. The literary text, in its very creation as a cultural product and as art, is always
already a subject to the play of differences designated as différance. When applied in reading
affirmatively, that is, in deconstruction, the sense of différance deconstructs that text, making
at the same time a life-asserting gesture. When joining in deconstruction, gynesis detects theaffirmative feminist aspect of ‘woman’. What more particularly makes gynesis different fromdeconstruction is its mindfulness of the power structures that bear relevance to the status of‘woman’ from a feminist perspective. In other words, whereas both deconstruction and gynesis
join in dismantling the phallogocentric discourse of the tradition, and by the same token – in
exploring the socio-cultural space ‘woman’, gynesis plays its peculiar role of keeping in sight,of never missing from its sight, the feminist aspect of that dismantling, an aspect which a
deconstruction, so to speak, per se, may as well forgo for other aspects of interest. In this sense,
gynesis becomes a necessary element of any critical reading of a text that is meant to be at once
deconstructive and feminist.
Characters and Setting
The novel The Scarlet Letter carries with itself numerous significatory pointers that can playout elements of our critical perspective. Central of these pointers are the novel’s main charactersof men and women, whom Hawthorne present as closely involved in the communal life the

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1640s Boston. In this largely Puritan community, the characters appear in various relations bothpublic and private, including with power structures, religious values, cultural precepts, social
statuses, other races, nature, as well as of spirituality, piety, service, love, friendship, andparenting, amongst others. They are also presented as acting in several scenes that determine
the plot of the novel and are connected by Hawthorne’s explicative narrative.
The main scenes of actions include: the public ignominy of the main female character
Hester Prynne, Hester’s interview in the governor’s house, minister Arthur Dimmesdale’s vigil,
the meeting of Hester and Dimmesdale in the forest, Dimmesdale’s public confession and death.
Some other scenes of significance include encounters and conversations between Hester andher daughter Pearl, Hester and her former husband Roger Chillingworth, Dimmesdale andChillingworth, Dimmesdale and his elder colleague Reverend Mr. John Wilson, Dimmesdale
and Pearl, Dimmesdale and the “witch-lady” Mistress Ann Hibbins, Hester and MistressHibbins, Pearl and Mistress Hibbins.
A characteristic dimension of the novel is the time horizon of its events. Besides theseven years of the plot we have time pointers for at least one year before its opening event, as
well as for the years of Hester’s life and in part the lives the remaining characters after its
closing event. Likewise, Hawthorne makes a number of references to the time before and after
these events, up to the time of about two hundred year to the actual writing of the novel. These
include mentions of historical personages and events, as well as of changes in the overall ethosof the colony, which contextualize the plot chronologically as well as culturally.
Hawthorne’s narrative connecting all the scenes of the plot in a unity is alsocharacterized by a claim to objectivity, which he backs up with a reference to a script“authorized and authenticated” by Mr. Surveyor Jonathan Pue:
The original papers, together with the scarlet letter itself, – a most curious relic, – are still in mypossession, and shall be freely exhibited to whomsoever, induced by the great interest of thenarrative, may desire a sight of them.155

We can note here that it was perhaps due to this claim to objectivity that his attitude towards
his main characters show variations, rendering with equal rigor and depth their positive, as wellas their negative traits. This is most obvious with regard to Hester, Dimmesdale, Chillingworth,and Pearl.
Thus, Hester Prynne, the main female character of the novel, is described as “anoteworthy personage,” “a voluntary nurse,” “an angel,” but also as “an intruder and a
nuisance,” 156 with "passion...imprisoned in the same tomb-like heart.” 157 She is the woman
whom the colony deems to have committed the sin of having a child out of wedlock, a proof ofwhich is her baby girl Pearl, in conjunction with the absence of her long-awaited husband. As
a punishment, she is ordered to wear a scarlet letter “A” fastened conspicuously on her clothing
and is placed on the town’s scaffold for a time of public ignominy. Asked to make known thename of the father of her child, she answers categorically “Never! It is too deeply branded.” 158
155

Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter, p. 44.
Ibid., p. 43.
157
Ibid., p. 144.
158
Ibid., p. 68.
156

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Afterwards, her life, although difficult and full of hardships, is an example of genuine penanceand even a removal of the scarlet letter “A” is considered.
Arthur Dimmesdale, the main male character, is described as “a young clergyman”
having “all the learning of the age,” “melancholy eyes,” “a vast power of self-restrain,” “thespeech of an angel,”159 but at the same time “all that violence of passion.” 160 Having won thehearts of the town with his inspiring speeches, he visibly suffers from an unclear disease of theheart. He is the unknown father of Pearl and Hester’s accomplice in what Hawthorne calls their“mutual crime.”161 After publicly confessing his sin, he dies at the end of the final scene of theplot.
Roger Chillngworth is described as “a man of skill,“ “with such a rank in the learned
world,” “an eminent Doctor in Physic,” 162 “a wise and just man,” but also “a fiend,” 163 “anenemy,” “a devil,” “with cruel purpose,” and “malignity.” 164 He is Hester’s long-awaited
husband who finally arrived but keeping it in secret upon witnessing her public ignominy. As
the physician, friend, and enemy of Dimmesdale, he displays an eclectic array of both admirable
and despicable traits, which has become a reason for this character to be associated with theJohann Wolfgang von Goethe’s famous protagonist Faust. 165
Pearl, as an incarnate evidence of her mother’s sin, is described in polar terms as well.
She is “a lovely child” with “a brilliant beauty” and “a look so intelligent,” but “sometimes somalicious” and “accompanied by a wild flow of spirits,” “a demon offspring,” or an “elfchild.”166 In her portrayal, Hawthorne never seems to drop an initial concern, apparently wellembedded in his mind, that she, as a “sin-born infant,” could easily go astray of the right morals.
Conveying some community fears of her predisposition towards witchcraft, he makes
Dimmesdale remark on her characteristic “passion” that “in Pearl’s young beauty, as in thewrinkled witch, it has a preternatural effect.” 167
In this regard, another female character that gains relevance in our reading is MistressHibbins. Hawthorne straightforwardly associates her with the occupation of ‘witchcraft’, ofwhose prosecution, he admits, some of his direct ancestors were guilty. Although this character
seems to be of marginal importance in the novel’s plot, it acquires a particular significance ina critical reading in terms of gynesis, as in the patriarchal culture witchcraft – especially whenassociated with woman (as has been predominantly the case) – has been a subject of an utmost
denunciation. When Hester encounters Mistress Hibbins after the scene in governor’s house,
and when Dimmesdale encounters her after his meeting with Hester in the forest, the “witchlady” appealed them to join the “merry company” of the Black Man. 168 She appears also in the159

Ibid., p. 66.
Ibid., p. 130.
161
Ibid., p. 153.
162
Ibid., p. 103.
163
Ibid., p. 140.
164
Ibid., pp. 152-153.
165
David Leverenz, “Mrs. Hawthorne’s Headache: Reading The Scarlet Letter,” in Nathaniel Hawthorne, The
Scarlet Letter, pp. 270-1.
166
Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter, pp. 81-88, 94ff.
167
Ibid., pp. 64, 165.
168
Ibid., pp. 150, 172.
160

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night of the minister Dimmesdale’s vigil, as well as in the final scene of the novel’s plot, where
she makes the same appeal to Pearl, too. 169 All the time, the “bitter-tempered” lady shows aconsiderable insight, or at least suspicion regarding the relationship between Hester and Arthur,as well as regarding their inner states. Besides generally portraying Mistress Hibbins in negative
terms, Hawthorne appears to suggest that source of her insights is linked to her secretoccupations. “Dost thou think,” she asks Hester, “I have been to the forest so many times, andhave yet no skill to judge who else has been there?”170 In this relation, it is also remarkable that
Pearl proves capable of such insights and suspicions as well – she can suppose that Hester wears
the scarlet letter “A” “for the same reason that the minister keeps his hand over his heart!” 171
Patriarchy, Puritanism, and Phallogocentrism
The relationships of these characters cannot be fully understood without a reference to therigorous morality of the Puritan religion, which reigns within the community of seventeen
century’s Boston. Feminist critique has already linked the Christian religion with “patriarchy”
that sends – by the token of the scarlet letter – a “double message about sin and seduction,”
which “Hester passes on to Pearl,” thus producing the effect of “gendered psychosexual
identity” beyond “her individuality” to make of “woman” a symbol of ‘frailty and sinful
passion’.”172 In other words, this religion, as well as its ethics, represents by its symbolic forms
a culture dominated by man, a culture which at the same time advances a certain gendervaluation (indeed a ‘gendered’ valuation) that confers upon ‘woman’ a more or less fixed‘identity’, distinct moral character, and respective social role of lower value to the effect ofconstituting her as a threat to the moral foundations of that culture.
In our reading, it is important to emphasize that in the Puritan community depicted by
Hawthorne, the main female character, Hester Prynne, is present to wear the symbol of the sin,
the scarlet letter “A” standing formally for “adulteress.” At the same time, her naturally
presumed male ‘accomplice’ in what that community, and apparently Hawthorne himself,
deems to be a “crime” remains unknown. In fact, Hester’s refusal to point out his name opens
the possibility this to be every man in the community; very indicatively, though, while not in
the know, that male dominated community refuses to accept such a sinner in itself, insteadreferring to him as its outcast – the Black Man in the forest. Thus, the signification of evil inthat community appears as ‘woman’ only. Ironically, yet significantly still, the person speaking
from the name of patriarchy’s discourse on the day of her public ignominy, Arthur Dimmesdale,is actually this real accomplice and the letter “A” could equally properly be placed on him, as
well as stand for his name. In his public appeal to her to utter the name, in fact his own,
Dimmesdale – regardless of his inner struggles, motives, and expectations – in the end assertsthat this name remain unuttered: “She will not speak.”173 This assertion is de facto a formal
confirmation of the status quo of power relations and guild distribution in the public discourse.

169

Ibid., p. 187.
Ibid., p. 186.
171
Ibid., p. 143.
172
Shari Benstock, “The Scarlet Letter (a)doree, or the Female Body Embroidered,” in Nathaniel Hawthorne, The
Scarlet Letter, pp. 299ff.
173
Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter, p. 68.
170

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In our critical perspective we also emphasize that, even as Hester Prynne accepts to keep
the secret and to wear the scarlet letter “A” as symbol of the sin imposed on her by the
patriarchy, she refuses to accept the sin as her, of the woman, identity. If sin at all, the sin has
been committed by two – a woman and a man – and cannot have one identity only. She only
accepts the suffering and the formal sanction of the redemption for a guilt that – if guilt at all –is not entirely her own: “And would that I might endure his agony, as well as mine.” 174 The
scarlet letter “A,” the token of the sin, is just a signification forcibly attached to her, the woman.
Nevertheless, even as patriarchy’s religion presupposes, the real redemption escapes all
kinds of formality, and the sinner cannot remain hidden behind the mask of a symbolism heauthorizes himself. In terms of gynesis, we can assume that this symbolism has been createdalong with the crime itself in the attempts to conceal that crime from the public eye from theposition of power, by ascribing it to the one who does not have that power, the woman. It should
be clear, though, that just because of that, this same symbolism is equally a failure on its own– it already presupposes and thus indicates the crime it aims to conceal.
Arthur Dimmesdale embodies the suffering for the sin hidden behind the public
discourse. Another paradox of patriarchy’s discourse is that it not only ascribes the ‘guilt’ forthe sin to woman, it also misrepresents the actual consequences of this concealing for man
himself. In the scene of Dimmesdale’s public confession, witnessing his suffering while
performing his “mission” to service the formal inauguration of man’s power and symbolism(“the new Governor was to receive his office”) 175 – “his mission to foretell a high and glorious
destiny for the newly gathered people of the Lord” – the public discourse demonstrates its
inability to adequately judge within its own terms: “This earthly faintness was, in their view,
only another phase in minister’s celestial strength.” 176
In our critical perspective, such a misjudgment is indicative for that the public discourse
is begging for deconstruction. For, Arthur Dimmesdale, while serving man’s world(presumably his own, if it is really his own), actually demonstrates that this seemingly celestial
manifestation goodness is in reality a cover-up for evil (in a dual sense, as the sin in a Puritan
sense and as his own suffering in a life-affirmative deconstructive perspective). Thus, hedemonstrates – what in the terms of discourse could reappear only paradoxically – that‘happiness’ is actually unhappiness, that the discourse is failing him, as it does not add up to
his well-being, but only conceals his own desolation. He demonstrates that the men’s worldthat oppresses woman at the same time oppresses man, since power, like gender, can be verymuch a fiction, a socio-cultural invention, a construct, no matter who has it or who is who.
When we say ‘he demonstrates’ here we mean that we take the character of Dimmesdale
as a symbol of the patriarchal culture and revisit it in a life-assertive deconstructive perspective,
in which its symbolism reappears as powerless or inadequate. Thus, as a reinvented symbol in
our critical perspective, Dimmesdale, regardless of the extent in which he as a character realizes
that, conveys the message – indeed the ‘trace’, the ‘gynema’ – that the public discourse isdeconstructed. In this sense, he has lost his ‘identity’ as ‘man’ in men’s world, as Hester has
lost her ‘identity’ as ‘woman’ in that same world. The possibility that remains for their identities
174

Ibid., p. 68.
Ibid., p. 175.
176
Ibid., pp. 191-193.
175

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is that of “infinite substitutions,” what Derrida attributed to the character of play inaugurating
writing.177
Another character showing a ‘lack of identity’ with herself is Pearl. Hawthorne has
demonstrated his and community’s confusions with regard to her on a number of occasions.
While she has been directly associated with the scarlet letter itself, 178 much of the uncertainties
about her spring from a certain lack of consistency in her appearance and development in life
from the standpoint of the public eye, to which Hawthorne himself attests:
How strange, indeed! Man had marked this woman’s sin by a scarlet letter, which had such potent
and disastrous efficacy that no human sympathy could reach her, save it were sinful like herself.
God, as a direct consequence of the sin which man thus punished, had given her a lovely child,
whose place was on that same dishonored bosom, to connect her parent for ever with the race anddescent of mortals, and to be finally a blessed soul in heaven!179

That this statement is marked by Hawthorne’s own patriarchal and religious bias is not soimportant for us here as that it is meant to be ‘authentic’. For, in our deconstructive perspective
we are most of all interested to expose the failure of the arbitrary structures of the patriarchal
discourse to recapture what inevitably evades it – the unfixed identity of gender. It appears herethat – in a logocentric gesture – through God’s symbol of the sin is justified the man’s symbolof the same sin. That is, that the symbol of God’s, Pearl, has the same denotation as the symbolof man’s, the scarlet letter “A.” And this denotation is, according to Hawthorne, the ‘woman’ssin’, (indeed as ‘marked’ and ‘punished’ by ‘man’). However, the criticism as gynesis discerns
in this attempt to link ‘woman’s sin’ with woman’s identity through a kind of logic, which thenfalls apart along the ‘strangeness’ of life, just another phallogocentric failure of discourse. It is
the kind of logic that ventures to impose to Hester and to the reader thoughts like these:
She knew that her deed had been evil; she could have no fight, therefore, that its result would be forgood.180
It was a look so intelligent, yet inexplicable, so perverse, sometimes so malicious, but generallyaccompanied by a wild flow of spirits, that Hester could not help questioning, at such moments,
whether Pearl was a human child. 181

In our critical perspective, this logic spectacularly fails to capture the trajectory of Pearl’s life,
as it disintegrates into a genuine confusion. The latter ensues from the decentering structures of
discourse, which become traceable in a deconstructive perspective, traceable precisely due toHawthorne’s clam to ‘authenticity’.
The confusion in question brought a commonly-felt anxiety for Pearl’s future, which
prompted a meeting-interview of the nobles of the town with Hester and her child set at theGovernor’s house. The spirit of the age related the wrong direction in the development of
177

Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, p. 289; cf. p. 423.
Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter, pp. 57, 81, 90.
179
Ibid., p. 81.
180
Ibid., p. 81.
181
Ibid., p. 83.
178

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female infant with the predominantly women’s field of ‘witchcraft’, which in the perspectiveof gynesis can be seen as opposed to science, at the time a much-honored field of endeavorlargely reserved for men. Among the novel’s characters, Mistress Hibbins and Roger
Chillingworth are fitting representatives of these two fields respectively. On the occasion of themeeting, Chillingworth, who had sought to extend his scientific searches over Dimmesdale’s
disease of the heart, Hester’s secret, and Indian medicine, among others, could only qualify
Pearl “A strange child!,”182 which in our critical perspective is indicative of a yet another failureof the phallogocentric discourse to get its hold on the identity of ‘woman’. On the other hand,the above-mentioned remark of Dimmesdale and intention of Mistress Hibbins regarding thechild show a tendency in the community’s thinking that Pearl’s growing up with Hester could
lead to her future commitment to ‘witchcraft’. Hawthorne’s narrative is unambiguous aboutthat:
The spell of life went forth from her ever creative spirit, and communicated itself to a thousand
objects, as a torch kindles a flame wherever it may be applied. The unlikeliest materials, a stick, abunch of rags, a flower, were the puppets of Pearl's witchcraft, and, without undergoing any outward
change, became spiritually adapted to whatever drama occupied the stage of her inner world. 183

Along with the status of her mother, Pearl’s spirits, thoughts, speech, plays, creativity, objectsof interests all contributed to the public concern that led to the meeting in the Governor’s house.
We already pointed that she was be capable of some unusual insights or suspicions similar to
those of Mistress Hibbins as well. And now that her worrying image in the public eye was also
sanctioned by the scholar’s discourse as ‘strange’, it had to take the intervention of Dimmesdale– in his decentered, indeed dual, symbolic capacity – to leave her within the custody of her
desperate mother.
We will need to bring Dimmesdale’s intervention within the terms of our perspective,
as it marks a landmark victory of the life-asserting thinking over the logic of the patriarchal
discourse which proved impotent on the occasion and throughout the novel, including in its
most phallogocentric version exemplified by Chillingworth. In our reading, Dimmesdale’sintervention amounts to a gesture on his part to preserve ‘the spell of life that went forth fromher ever creative spirit’, which also proves significant. For, with all the projective skepticism
and uncertainty of the public eye regarding the future of the child, at the end of Hawthorne’s
narrative we are told that “Pearl was not only alive, but married, and happy.” 184 She did not
become a witch, and thus did not find her identity in terms of the phallogocentric patriarchal
discourse. Instead, she defied that discourse and survived ‘to be finally a blessed soul inheaven’.
For her part, Mistress Hibbins found her death and got an identity in this same discourseas ‘witch-lady’. For, her opposition – radical as it was – to the predominant male culturalsymbolism did not prove life-asserting; her intelligence – remarkable as it was – could not finda viable way outside the terms of the patriarchy. Instead, it can be argued that witchcraft is an
opposition to the patriarchal culture within the terms; that is, with the symbolic means, of that
182

Ibid., p. 100.
Ibid., p. 85.
184
Ibid., p. 200.
183

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culture itself. For, it run against the mainstream patriarchal discourse only the discourse of the‘Black Man’ – just another man who thought his terms were better. As a representative of thisalternative patriarchy, Mistress Hibbins marked with her death the deconstruction of its
discourse.
Similarly, Roger Chillingworth died at the end of the novel, since along with thedeconstruction of the patriarchal discourse pronounced by the Dimmesdale’s death his
logocentric conquest became impossible and had to come to terms with its inevitable limits.
Indeed, he had to come to terms with all that was left to motivate and move his own life andexistence, which Dimmesdale’s utmost deconstructive gesture – epitomized by his final service,discourse, welcome of woman, and impending death – placed under a grave threat:“Madman, hold! What is your purpose?” whispered he. “'Wave back that woman! Cast off this child!
All shall be well! Do not blacken your fame, and perish in dishonor! I can yet save you! Would you
bring infamy on your sacred profession?”185

Chillingworth, though, could save neither Dimmesdale nor himself, for he was not only
depleted from but also misguided and consumed by his logocentrism, which led him astrayfrom life in the direction of death along revenge. He could no longer play his patriarchal
precepts of ‘fame’, ‘honor’, and ‘sacred profession’ against the interpolation of life – ‘woman’and ‘child’. He could now only witness in desperation the formless face of his own
phallogocentric impotence:
Old Roger Chillingworth knelt down beside him, with a blank, dull countenance, out of which thelife seemed to have departed.
“Thou hast escaped me!” he repeated more than once. “Thou hast escaped me!”186

It is remarkable that Hawthorne regards Dimmesdale’s death as a “work of the devil”
performed by Chillingworth. In this sense, like Mistress Hibbins, Chillingworth too is given a
determinate identity in the patriarchal discourse. Termed ‘devil’ or ‘unhumanized mortal’, hecould find no more life nor happiness but only death along his quest for revenge:
This unhappy man had made the very principle of his life to consist in the pursuit and systematic
exercise of revenge; and when, by its completest triumph and consummation, that evil principle wasleft with no further material to support it, - when, in short, there was no more devil’s work on earth
for him to do, it only remained for the unhumanized mortal to betake himself whither his Masterwould find him tasks enough, and pay him his wages duly.187

The criticism as gynesis uncovers here Hawthorne’s patriarchal bias that does not allow him tosee the death of the patriarchal discourse. For, he seeks the reason for Dimmesdale’s death insome of the oppositional terms of the patriarchal discourse – the devil. Within our perspective
this means that he links the death of the religious patriarchal discourse to the non-religious
science and philosophy, which Chillingworth does indeed represent. However, Chillingworth
185

Ibid., p. 193.
Ibid., p. 196.
187
Ibid., p. 198.
186

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represents more particularly the logocentric discourse and he dies with the death of thepatriarchal discourse as well, which points to an intrinsic connection between patriarchy andlogocentrism as well. Thus, another opposition within the patriarchal culture has been
deconstructed – the one between its religious and logocentric discourses; for they both comportto the signification of ‘man’; that is, to phallogocentrism, thus excluding, reducing, repressing
the signification of ‘woman’.
Hawthorne’s bias is also obvious in the characters with ‘lack of identity’ and has beenpractically proved by his claim to ‘authenticity’. Within our perspective, the authenticity of thenarrative accounts for the author’s bias, even as the author may not be aware of this bias at all,while at the same time upholding the denouement of the novel as an ‘authentic proof’ for themain point of our critique. This ‘proof’ is not logical and is thus a “proof” only in quotation
marks. For, as deconstruction and gynesis impel us to think, it cannot be conveyed by the meansof the phallogocentric discourse of modernity, which was shown anticipating its dismantling.
It could be rather conveyed with the help of – and in the extent availed by – what post-modernist
and (post-)feminist critiques have not yet deconstructed: “in-between-the-lines,” the margin,
the trace, the gynema.
Gynesis and Deconstruction as Life-affirmation of the Characters with Lack of Identity
As Jardine suggests, what is “in-between-the-lines” is availed by practicing criticism as gynesis
and announces itself as a reading effect which disturbs the phallogocentrism of patriarchy. At
the same time, we expect this reading effect to have the character of what Derrida has called an‘event’, which would leave its ‘trace’ on behalf of the deconstructive criticism. For, pointing tothe ‘lack of identity’ of a character does not by itself amount to an affirmation of this ‘lack ofidentity’. In our critical perspective, this ‘event’, gynema, or trace is the life-asserting
denouement of the novel for the characters with lack of identity.
Not only Pearl, but also Hester was able to survive under the burden of the scarlet letter“A” – a symbol imposed on her by the patriarchal culture. Holding off herself up and againstthat symbol meaning “adulteress,” she gave the letter “A” new connotations such as “able,” or“angel”. Within our critical perspective, we can see the scarlet letter “A” as meaning also
“alive,” “assertion,” and “affirmation,” because Hester shows her capacity to affirm and assert
herself – throughout her life, on behalf of her life, on behalf of life – by substituting therepressing patriarchal signification without limit. We can also see it as meaning “Arthur,” notonly as its literal sense, and not only as a symbol of the deconstructed patriarchal discourse
epitomized by the dead Dimmesdale, but also as a symbol of substituted meanings that uphold
Arthur’s life – he may be dead as patriarchal discourse, but the alive Hester, the woman, is his
viable alternative, his being alive. Indeed, she was the one who brought him back to life, evenas he thought he was “irrevocably doomed,” 188 by ‘buoying him up with her own energy’ togive him meaning and will to live:“Thou art crushed under this seven years’ weight of misery,” replied Hester, fervently resolved tobuoy him up with her own energy. “But thou shalt leave it all behind thee! It shall not cumber thy
steps, as thou treadest along the forest-path; neither shalt thou freight the ship with it, if thou prefer

188

Ibid., p. 158.

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to cross the sea. Leave this wreck and ruin here where it hath happened! Meddle no more with it!
Begin all anew! Hast thou exhausted possibility in the failure of this one trial? Not so! The future isyet full of trial and success. There is happiness to be enjoyed! There is good to be done! Exchange
this false life of thine for a true one. Be, if thy spirit summon thee to such a mission, the teacher andapostle of the red men. Or, - as is more thy nature, - be a scholar and a sage among the wisest andthe most renowned of the cultivated world. Preach! Write! Act! Do any thing, save to lie down anddie! Give up this name of Arthur Dimmesdale, and make thyself another, and a high one, such as
thou canst wear without fear or shame. Why shouldst thou tarry so much as one other day in thetorments that have so gnawed into thy life!- that have made thee feeble to will and to do!- that will
leave thee powerless even to repent! Up, and away!”189

Fueled with the woman’s vital power, Arthur is back to life thanks to his ‘angel’:“Do I feel joy again?“ ... “Methought the germ of it was dead in me! 0 Hester, thou art my betterangel! I seem to have flung myself – sick, sin-stained, and sorrow-blackened – down upon these
forest-leaves, and to have risen up all made anew, and with new powers to glorify Him that hathbeen merciful! This is already the better life! Why did we not find it sooner?”190

Thus, paradoxical as it may seem at first, in our critical perspective Dimmesdale survives, too.
For, his presumed identity too is a subject to substitutions. He is dead as a symbol of thepatriarchal culture, but with his death – the deconstruction of the public discourse – he outlived
this discourse and is alive as a “symbol” of the life-affirming deconstructive discourse. Here
“symbol” is in quotation marks, since in the deconstructed discourse the structures ofsymbolism are actually set apart, dismantled, de-logocentered, and thus without symbolic
identity in the modern sense of the term. As a “symbol,” he now signifies as a trace, gynema or“woman-in-effect.”In our critical perspective, the most compelling survival is Hester’s. We deem it so,
because with all her hardships and doubts about the meaning of life, she quietly but relentlessly
affirms life, in all her doings, in all her circumstances. Reading through Hawthorne’s biases
and insights – which left us wondering, indeed authentically so, whether he was a feminist or
sexist, both, or none, before we realized that he has no fixed identity, either – we find that her
natural philosophical searches did not deter her from getting the better of life. Her aspirations
for meaning and the meaning of ‘woman’, did not leave her at the logocentric dead end of
discourse, never broke her will to live, no matter how her thought swung:Indeed, the same dark question often rose into her mind, with reference to the whole race of
womanhood. Was existence worth accepting, even to the happiest among them? As concerned her
own individual existence, she had long ago decided in the negative, and dismissed the point as
settled. A tendency to speculation, though it may keep woman quiet, as it does man, yet makes her
sad. She discerns, it may be, such a hopeless task before her. As a first step, the whole system ofsociety is to be torn down, and built up anew. Then, the very nature of the opposite sex, or its longhereditary habit, which has become like nature, is to be essentially modified, before woman can beallowed to assume what seems a fair and suitable position. Finally, all other difficulties being
obviated, woman cannot take advantage of these preliminary reforms, until she herself shall haveundergone a still mightier change; in which, perhaps, the ethereal essence, wherein she has her truest
189
190

Ibid., pp. 156-157.
Ibid., p. 159.

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life, will be found to have evaporated. A woman never overcomes these problems by any exerciseof thought. They are not to be solved, or only in one way. If her heart chance to come uppermost,they vanish.191

While Hawthorne’s biases here are to be watched for, drawing on his claim to authenticity, we
find useful insights that could help uphold the sense of ‘woman’ in our perspective. Hester’s
thought went over the meaning of life and the status of her gender but did not leave her stuck
into a powerless desperation, as the one Chillingworth displayed at the deconstructive discourseof Dimmesdale. The need of change, which Hawthorne surmises and nails into his terms, issomething that she lives. He has a sense of ‘the ethereal essence, wherein she has her truest
life’, as well as that it ‘will be found to have evaporated’, but this sense could become
affirmative only in terms of a deconstruction and gynesis, as in his own discourse it can still beseen as charged with patriarchal bias. A change of the perspectives thus impels itself. That ‘awoman never overcomes these problems by any exercise of thought’, in our critical perspective
can only mean that the socio-cultural sense of ‘woman’ evades any viable phallogocentric
reduction; likewise, that ‘problems are not to be solved, or only in one way’, for us can only
mean that we will not seek for their solutions in a logocentric operation; and finally, that ‘if herheart chance to come uppermost, they vanish’, for us can only mean that gynesis anddeconstruction of discourse become necessary when discourse impedes life.
In our reading, Hester’s survival emulates the thinking that resists phallogocentrism.
She survives despite the latter’s tumultuous intervention in her life, despite all the threats it
unleashed for her and her child, despite her acute sense of lack of meaning of her life. No
calamities were able to break her immunity. Calamity only strengthened her immunity to a liveasserting autoimmunity. The same applies for Pearl as well, unlike Mistress Hibbins and Roger
Chillingworth, who were victims of their own autoimmunity, of the defense mechanisms that
kept them alive until they did only to put them to death. Dimmesdale is a special case due tohis dual discursive signification. On one hand, as a symbol of the patriarchal discourse, he diesfrom the intervention of life into that discourse due to a lack of immunity, viz., power to resist
death; one other hand, as joining in the deconstruction of the same discourse he upholds life
achieving in his renewed motivation for life, as well as in the alive and happy Pearl, a lifeaffirming autoimmunity.
Thus, by upholding herself (indeed her own self) against the interventions of thephallogocentric culture to the point of a life-affirmative autoimmunity, Hester reappears – if
the words would allow it in our literary tracing – literally as “woman-in-effect.” For the
becoming literary of the literal is tracing, tracing the literal in the literary, tracing it as a trace,
which in gynesis is “woman-in-effect”; that is, a literary, and indeed a literal literary. But how
she did it? What is her secret? Does she have one?
She accepted her fate under the burden of the scarlet letter “A,” and she just worked.
Not letting faulted thinking sink her life, she was able to come out on top of it continually as adoer. That is, she, the woman, was able to constantly substitute her imposed identity, to uphold

191

Ibid., p. 134.

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herself, and to survive by her doings.192 In this regard, Hawthorne’s authentic insights could
not help acknowledging that she became a “destined prophetess.” 193 And this is why she
returned – the woman returned, as she was destined to return, as prophetess. It was the gestureof her life that brought her back, which is also her prophetic gesture. Wise, helpful, “giving
advice in all matters, especially those of the heart,” 194 she appears again in the community. Her
prophecy is that “of her firm belief, ... at some brighter period, when the world should havegrown ripe for it, in Heaven’s own time, a new truth would be revealed, in order to establish
the whole relation between man and woman on a surer ground of mutual happiness.” 195
Hawthorne himself, in his quest for authenticity, could not help forming a very suggestive idea
for the mission of the woman, and although his patriarchal bias did not let him see Hester as apossible performer of this mission, she is the one who inspires him to proclaim,
The angel and apostle of the coming revelation must be a woman, indeed, but lofty, pure, andbeautiful; and wise, moreover, not through dusky grief, but the ethereal medium of joy; and showing
how sacred love should make us happy, by the truest test of a life successful to such an end! 196

Indeed, ‘woman’ will be at the heart of the ‘future revelation’ – she will bring ‘happiness’
through ‘love’ emulated ‘by the truest test of a life successful to such an end’. It is remarkable,
though, that frequently as Hawthorne speaks about ‘love’ throughout the novel, his essential
sense of it ‘sacred’. Whereas he appears to associate love between people with ‘passion’claiming that “hatred and love” are “two passions” that “seem essentially the same.” 197 Thus,
he sees the encounter of Hester and Arthur in the forest as “their sad and passionate talk,” 198
claiming that her “passionate love has brought the man to ruin.” 199 Indeed, although they bothdecided on leaving the colony together, we did not witness any confession of feelings toward
each other there apart from some hints done by Hester. Hawthorne thus did not see Hester’s
return as related to her love for Arthur, but rather as related to ‘sacred’ love:
Here had been her sin; here, her sorrow; and here was yet to be her penitence. She had returned,
therefore, and resumed, – of her will, for not the sternest magistrate of that iron period would have
imposed it, – resumed the symbol of which we have related so dark a tale.200

Actually Hawthorne advances a straight Puritan notion of love, in which sexuality is only ameans for reproduction of the human kind and thus its pleasure “should not be made an end in
192

There is a very characteristic notion for the predestination in the Protestant ethics, identified by Max Weber.
Unlike in Catholicism, the duty of the protestant citizen is to serve God on their work place; that is, in the real life,
rather than in church or monastery. See Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, translated
by Talcott Parsons (New York & London: Routledge Classics, 2001); cf. Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist
des Kapitalismus (Wiesbaden: Springer VS, 2016).
193
Ibid., p. 201.
194
Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter, p. 43,
195
Ibid., p. 201.
196
Ibid., p. 201.
197
Ibid., pp. 185, 199.
198
Ibid., p. 185.
199
Ibid., p. 153.
200
Ibid., p. 200.

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itself.”201 The straightforward implication of this notion of sexuality is that, while masculine
jouissance can be accepted as necessary for the good purpose, feminine jouissance is inprinciple not acceptable, except if it just happened. Thus, if feelings of love between woman
and man appear in their reproductive relations, for Hawthorne, they would fall into the realmof “sinful passion.”202
In the perspective of gynesis and deconstruction, however, Hester’s return merges intoa different reading, not least because of the novel’s (often neglected) subtitle – “A Romance,”
which attests to Hawthorne’s ‘authenticity’ despite his – often logocentrically derailed –valuative confusions. She, the woman, returned where Dimmesdale, the man, with whom she
had committed the ‘sin’ of love, had died. She returned because this love ‘defined’ her life, wasimpending in her life, and kept it going affirmatively to its very end. Her love was the true
‘symbol’ of her life – the true ‘denotation’ of the scarlet letter “A” in the deconstructeddiscourse of the patriarchy. She still wears the scarlet letter but now it conveys many otherconnotations in the public discourse, which the “woman-in-effect” makes “never stable” anddully deconstructs. Thus, she survives in ‘the truest test of life’.
The symbol of the phallogocentric discourse may be still on her, but its putative meaning
in that discourse has been affirmatively deconstructed. She does not manifest herself in this
discourse; she manifests herself ‘in-effect’, in her doings (including in her demonstrated
sexuality by which she affirmed herself in a sexual difference). That she wears the letter “A”
only shows that it is always around her, like ‘the lines’ of the deconstructed phallogocentric
discourse. And yet, the “woman-in-effect” is in “between-the-lines”; her dwelling is in“between-the-lines.”
Now she returned to her man who is in the lines as deconstructed discourse. Actually,in her struggle with the oppressive patriarchal culture, the woman, in her opposition to man,was coming closer and closer in reaching to “her man,” indeed – even as she distanced herself
from him. Dimmesdale is her man, Chillingworth is her former husband.
In the end, she found her place next to her man. She found him in death. “It was nearthat old and sunken grave, yet with a space between, as if the dust of the two sleepers had noright to mingle. Yet one tombstone served for both.” 203 That ‘man’ and ‘woman’ ‘had no rightto mingle’, Hawthorne’s ‘authentic’ narrative had to put inevitably in suspension – in an ‘as if’;for they do need to mingle in love to affirm life. Indeed, her man was waiting for her in death,but it was by the injunction of life; it was life that made their reunion inevitable, to affirm lovein death, life in death, love in life, and life in love. He was waiting for her amidst thedeconstructed discourse of the patriarchy, in the gynema which occasions a different reunionof the ‘lines’ and ‘between-the-lines’, a closer reunion, a reunion of life in love that lets thembe what they are, as each of them, and as both:
All around, there were monuments carved with armorial bearings; and on this simple slab of slate –as the curious investigator may still discern, and perplex himself with the purport – there appeared
the semblance of an engraved escutcheon. It bore a device, a herald’s wording of which might serve
201

Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, pp. 105, 233-235; cf. Die protestantische Ethik
und der Geist des Kapitalismus, SS. 145-147.
202
Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter, p. 201.
203
Ibid., p. 201.

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for a motto and brief description of our now concluded legend; so sombre is it, and relieved only by
one ever-glowing point of light gloomier than the shadow: –“ON A FIELD, SABLE, THE LETTER A, GULES.” 204

We reach to the margin of our reading, where its gynema must leave its trace. The tombstone,
in its presence, is rather a symbol of the death of the patriarchal discourse, where it joins inHawthorne’s biased authenticity and nostalgic grief, and a “symbol” (only in quotation marks)of the alive and life-asserting “woman-in-effect” in the eternity of time.

204

Ibid., p. 201.

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