anne-emmanuelle berger

Sexing Differances

oit-on penser la diffrance avant la diffrence sexuelle, ou partir delle? asks Derrida in Chorgraphies (103). (Must
one think differance before sexual difference or taking off from it?
reads the English translation [Choreographies 98].)
Read this sentence, that is, as Derrida would have us do, pay
attention to its idiom, dont arrest its meaning by thinking youve understood it. There is more than one message left on by the writing machine.
Derrida is not only asking himself, and asking us to ask ourselves, whether
differance might stem and start from sexual difference, that is, whether
sexual difference might engender differance, whether differanceboth
the word differance, to which the quotation marks direct our attention,
and the quasi concept it inventsoriginates in sexual difference (both
the locution, then, and whatever it designates). He is asking whether one
should think of one as taking off from the other, or rather, partir
delle. One might overlook this prepositional locution, one indeed usually tends to think of the words that provide syntactic articulations as
mere tools, secondary citizens of language. But partir de is between
quotation marks too, just like differance. A partir de literally means
Copyright 2005 by Brown University and

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parting from, that is, at the same time, departing from and therefore
partaking (part taking) in. The question, then, is not simply one of
precedence or origin. It is also a question of part(s), of the interruptions and fragmentations evolving from partir de. Since differance
and sexual difference do not simply come from one another, they may
not come back to each other, they may not come together at all, as all.
Together they part. They cut away from and across each other. A logic of
endless and impossible partition is set in motion. And precisely because
the logic of origin, the genealogics, with its hierarchical and chronological
modes of operation (inasmuch as such a logic is concerned with what or
who comes rst), is upset by such a way of phrasing the issue, the question raised begs not to be answered, and must remain, as it is, suspended,
dangling, or, as it were, dancing.
Choreographies, a well-known dialogue between Jacques
Derrida and Christie McDonald, from which I have extracted the above
sentence, rst appeared in diacritics in 1982. In this piece, Derrida answers
an interviewer eager for him to clarify his stance on feminism. He does
so, in a surprising way, by inviting her and us to try and meditate on the
connections between dance, differance, reading, and sexual difference.
Taking his cue from a maverick woman (Emma Goldman) quoted by
another woman (McDonald), he in essence says what she says she said
(and saying what the other says, that is, quoting, citing knowingly or unwittingly, is what Derrida shows we all do all the time, for instance as soon
as we say lets dance): If I cant dance I dont want to be part of your
revolution (89). (Note the I dont want to be part of.) The word dance,
noun or verb, is not part of the philosophical lexicon; it doesnt conjure up
a recognizable concept, so it looks as if it might lead him and us astray.
Yet, it is precisely this straying away, this displacement of the traditional
modes and objects of philosophical inquiry, for instance, the displacement
of the question of the place of woman raised by McDonald in her initial
comment,1 that opens up a certain path to thinking:
And why for that matter [asks Derrida] should one rush into
answering a topological question (what is the place of woman?
[quelle est la place de la femme])? Or an economical question
(because it all comes back to the oikos as home, maison, chez
soi, at home in this sense also means in French within the self,
the law of the proper place, etc., in the preoccupation with the
womans place)? Why should a new idea of woman or a new

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step taken by her necessarily be subjected to the urgency of this

topo-economical concern (essential, it is true, and ineradicably
philosophical)? This step only constitutes a step on the condition that it challenge a certain idea of the locus ( lieu) and the
place [. . .] and that it dance otherwise. (94)
To dance otherwise, as Derrida suggests we do in order to
both destabilize and deconstruct any set notion of a place, be it a new
place for women, is almost a tautological expression: to take steps that
are different from the usual kinds of steps is indeed already a way of
dancing. What does dancing consist of, if not in changing (the) place(s),
in reconguring or deconguring (the) space through motion, in stepping in, out, and aside, tracing and retracing ones steps according to a
certain rhythm that differs from the ordinary rhythm of our daily modes
of procession? Dancing, then, would be a way of stepping otherwise, of
differing/deferring, and differance, perhaps, the name of a dance
(see it dance anagrammatically), new or rather unheard of before Derrida. For differing (in space, stance, or shape) and deferring in time,
both of which are involved in the spacing or movement of the Derridean
differance, come (and de/part) from the latin verb fero (from fero, tuli,
latum, as in transfer or translation), which means to carry, hence
to deport, to move away or toward. Add the pre x di, which indicates a
process of division, of partition, and it means to move in different directions, to scatter, in Derridean parlance, to disseminate. There can be
literally no differance without a certain motion, even an inventive motion,
that carries you away. Just like a dance.
Yet, if Derrida celebrates the displacement of women and the
joyous disturbances of womens movements that bring with them the
chance for a certain risky turbulence (94); if he privileges (or enjoys) the
dancing mood of maverick women and welcomes attempts to move beyond
the positional (100), his dance stance, his deconstructive movements,
are never simply oppositional. He doesnt try to promote a philosophy of
dance against a politics of stance. Any such oppositional move would be
caught in the positional rhetoric the dancing steps purport to escape.
There is therefore no attempt on his part to dismiss the placement
efforts of organized, patient, laborious feminist struggles (95) in favor
of the atopical madness of the dance (95). What he advocates, rather, is
a relentless stepping in and out of traditional political and philosophical
con nes. If the real conditions in which womens struggles develop on
all fronts [. . .] require the preservation (within longer or shorter phases)

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of metaphysical presuppositions, one must question [them] at a later

phaseor an other placebecause they belong to the dominant system that
one is deconstructing on a practical level (97). Such a strategy, then, is not
simply utopian, nor is it simply pragmatic, much less self-contradictory.
What it requires is the opening of and constant play with a multiplicity of
places, moments, forms and forces (97): in short, it makes dancing both
possible and necessary. For, asks Derrida, how can one breathe without
such punctuation and without the multiplicities of rhythm and steps? How
can one dance? (97). It is important, even vital, that the movement not
be arrested, that the possibility of dance be opened, as the possibility of
stance, or stasis, is preserved.
The issue of reading arises precisely in the context of this
meditation on dance. Recalling his reading of Nietszche on women and
the misreadings it afforded him, Derrida writes:
In Spurs I have tried to formalize the movements and typical
moments of the scene that Nietszche creates throughout a very
broad and diverse body of texts. I have done this up to a certain
limit, one that I also indicate, where the decision to formalize
fails for reasons that are absolutely structural. Since these typical features are and must be unstable, sometimes contradictory,
and nally undecidable, any break in the movement of the
reading would settle in a counter-meaning, in the meaning
which becomes counter-meaning. (95) [. . . toute pause de lecture sinstallerait dans le contresens, dans le sens qui devient
automatiquement contresens. (Chorgraphies 101)]
One can formalize the features of a text and the contours of a
thought up to a certain limit. But there comes a moment, says Derrida,
when one has to recognize the structural instability of any construction;
at that point, any settling down, any settlement for one meaning or direction over an other, any attempt to arrest meaning by breaking the movement of reading does indeed yield meaningbut as counter-meaning,
mismeaning, or misreading. Read on, move on; move on in order to fully
read, suggests Derrida; and he goes on and far: I will go so far as to say that
it is to not read the syntax and punctuation of a given sentence when one
arrests the text in a certain position, thus settling on a thesis, meaning or
truth. That, Derrida adds, is the mistake or mistaking of hermeneutics
(96). Any freezing of meaning, stance, or position is a mistake, the mistake
hermeneutics makes. Reading is or should be an in nite and open process

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or movement: a kind of dance. 2 Reading Derrida dancing therefore entails

that we in turn dancewith him.
Now, you may ask: what does sexual difference have to do
with dancing and reading? I would say that Derridas invitation to
dance is also, necessarily, an invitation to rewrite and reinscribe sexual
difference as (and in) sexual differances (with an a and in the plural),
that is, as a multiplicity of divided steps that resist stable formalizations,
a differing (and also deferring) dance if you will, that shakes subjects as
much as it shapes them in the movement(s) that draw them toward and
away from one another. Let me expand on this formulation.
In Choreographies, Derrida sums up his criticism of both
the Heideggerian and the Levinasian positions on the issue of sexual difference. As in Geschlecht: Sexual Difference, Ontological Difference,
he questions the neutrality of the Heideggerian Dasein, insofar as such a
neutrality amounts to an erasure not only of sexual difference itself, if it
exists as such, but even of the very question of its relevance for any attempt
to think, for instance and to begin with, about being in the world. As in At
This Very Moment in This Work Here I Am, he interrogates the philosophical secondarization of sexual difference by Levinas. But his attention to
the ways in which sexual difference gures or not and occupies or not a
certain place or space in philosophical endeavors that he reads and values
(Nietszche, Heidegger, Levinas) does not amount to a simple endorsement
of such a notion. As all his readers know, his interest in sexual difference
is precisely what leads him to forcefully question, hence deconstruct, the
binary logic that underwrites traditional notions of sexual difference and
of sexuality in general (to begin with, the oppositional divide between
heterosexuality and homosexuality). All aspects of what he calls sexduality come under his critical scrutiny. He doesnt leave sexual difference at
rest: he doesnt leave it in place. And as always, the effect (rather than the
result) of deconstruction is not one of dismissal of the deconstructed terms
or notions, but one of multiplication. In his recent seminar, La Bte et le
Souverain, he warned his audience: Chaque fois quon remet en question
une limite oppositionnelle, loin den conclure lidentit, il faut multiplier
au contraire lattention aux diffrences, raf ner lanalyse dans un champ
restructur (444). [Each time one calls into question an oppositional limit,
far from drawing a conclusion about the identity of the deconstructed terms,
one should, on the contrary, multiply ones attention to the differences,
re ne ones analysis in a restructured eld (my trans.)]

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To upset sexual difference, to show how shaky its concept is

and how unsettling its effects, shouldnt lead one to get rid of it too quickly.
Rather, one should pay attention to the ways in which it divides itself to the
point of escaping conventional limitations, trespassing borders (to begin
with, the borders that separate man and woman) and multiplying
sexual possibilities.
Still, you may ask, if most conventional notions of sexual difference reinforce patterns of sexduality, why keep the idiom of sexual
difference at all? Why not get rid of such a loaded expression rather
than pluralize it as Derrida likes to do to indicateand performthe
multiplication of deconstructed sexual differences?
There are indeed a number of important reasons for which
Derrida remains attached to the idiom of sexual difference (in the plural)
at the very moment he calls its assumptions into question. I will try and
address them all too brie y, in an order that in no way reects a chronology
or hierarchy of causes.
Remember, Derrida inherits sexual difference. He inherits
the locution from the French language, a gendered language in which
difference is feminine, 3 and the notion from a certain intellectual and
epistemological history, precisely the kind of history Foucault attempted to
account for in the rst volume of his History of Sexuality. The words that
make up the locution are of course old Latin words, but they made their
way in French in their current sense at a time that corresponds to what
Foucault termed the Age of sexuality. 4 More specically, sexual difference gained currency as a locution at the end of the nineteenth century
and owes its status as an epistemological problem to psychoanalysis.
Using the term (at quoting distance so to speak) or even
abusing it in a playful way is therefore a way of acknowledging a certain
history, of referring (oneself and the reader) to it. As his readers know, Derrida is a relentless exponent of the complications and obligations involved
in inheritance and debt. Dissenting from the legacy of a certain tradition
involves acknowledging it, working through ones debt to history. Derridas
faithfulness to the idiom of sexual difference is a token of his faithfulness to history as both a process and an issue. It is, in this case, one of the
ways in which he stages and problematizes his relation to modernity (the
term and the notion): no doubt in a different way than Foucault but with
an equally deep sense of the historicity of discourses. Indeed, and contrary
to what some detractors say, by affirming the inescapability of inheritance

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and indebtedness while questioning or rather exposing the ctionality of

genealogical narratives, Derrida shows himself to be, if not a historian
in any ordinary sense of the term, at least a dedicated and most original
thinker of the historical and historicizing processes.
There is another question of memory, albeit of a different kind.
Sexual difference brings back the linguistic memory of the cut it stems
from, as it were. Sexualis in Latin comes from secare, sectum, which means
to cut, to cleave, to divide in parts (hence words of Latin origin such as
section, dissection, etc.). To belong to one sex, then, insofar as one does,
would mean to have a certain cut, to be cut a certain way and to be cut
away from something or somebody else .
We know the crucial role a certain problematics of the cut
(coupure) has played from the very beginning in Derridas work. The
deconstruction of binary oppositions involves questioning the formation,
logic, and decisiveness of any clear-cut distinction and, conversely, understanding the relation of structure to suture. Indeed, when it comes to
cuts, and to all manners of cutting operations, for instance, circumcision,
Derridas memory is always fresh, fresh from the cut, still bleeding, as
Hlne Cixous masterplayfully shows in Portrait of Jacques Derrida as a
Young Jewish Saint. Which means also that the insistence on the cutting
edge of sexual difference and the typically Derridean attempt to cut the
cut, to rescind it (rather than suture it) to the point of undecidability, is
not simply a question of language, of reference and reverence toward etymology. If the cut is in a certain way decisive in Derridas work, if it lends
itself for that matter to the operation of deconstruction that will render it
undecidable, it is thanks to a cluster of conditions, accidents, or events, at
the intersection of collective history, personal history, and language.
One begins to understand why Derrida would rather keep alive
the memory of the idiom of sexual difference even ifand becauseit
prompts the utmost deconstructive gesture on his part (cuttingthrough
the cut) than adopt the dominant idiom of today, that of gender construction.5 Not only because sexual difference makes sense and reference
in French, whereas gender (or genre) does not, or much less so, and
points to a different direction, linguistically and historically. But also, as
we have seen, because sexual difference opens up like a Sesame word
the psychic archive of cut, wound, partition, divisioncastration?that
the word gender is quick to close for a philological mind attuned to the
histories of language.

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Elsewhere, for instance when he deals with issues of literary

genres, with what he calls the law of genre, or with a certain history
of the aesthetic category of the genius, Derrida stresses the familial
connections of the words genre and gender with idioms and notions of
genetics (hence of natural production or reproduction), genealogy, genericity, and generality. All those terms play an important role in traditional
modes of philosophical thinking and in what Derrida calls the history of
metaphysics. As such, they might lend themselves to potentially regressive
political uses. 6
Does Derridas insistence on problematizing the cut(s) of sexual
difference amount to an endorsement of psychoanalytic theory, for which
sexual difference, or rather sexual identity, is predicated on a certain
psychic experience of castration? Does his philosophical resistance to
totalizing gestures as well as to the (narcissistic) fantasies of wholeness
and sameness that can arise as a form of defense against both castration and castration theory, or either of them, suggest that Derrida indeed
endorses or yields to castration (theory)? Not exactly, not only. One might
say that Derrida does not resist it (castration, its theory). But he doesnt
stop at it. He is not stopped by it. He stepsaside. Remember: the cuts of
sexual differences (in the plural) as he reads them yield multiple parts.7
Cuts yield parts, parts multiply without necessarily cohering. Decastration, then. In- nitude without sovereignty of the deconstructed, I mean,
a decastrated subject. In this sense and at this point, Derridas thought or
trail of writing parts ways with the Levinasian notion of the nitude of
the subject, such as informs Irigarays conception of the ethical subject
as not-all, not-whole, hence not almighty.
Decastration? Isnt this a dream? A dream word and his dream
of the impossible? Yes, it may be a dream, a dream of what may be. Derrida is an avowed dreamer. More exactly, as Cixous points out in her Portrait and in Fichus et Caleons, he dreams of dreaming, of making and
reading the world, of taking part(s) in it in a dream in different and new
ways, that is, as one may do in a dream, as one actually does in a dream,
thanks to the dream. Does the dream itself not prove that what is dreamt
of must be there in order for it to provide the dream? asks Derrida in
Choreographies (108). Il faut rver, he often says. One must, one ought,
to dream. And to dream in French involves dancing, or, to speak like
Derrida, pre-dancing or arche-dancing steps, since rver, a strange word
with an uncertain and mixed originhalf popular Latin, half Gallic

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literally means to stray and stroll with the mind, to step outside the
trodden paths, to take unforeseeable steps, like a vagrant being.
See how he dreams toward the end of Choreographies:
What if we were to approach here [. . .] the area of a relationship
to the other where the code of sexual marks would no longer
be discriminating? The relationship would not be a-sexual, far
from it, but would be sexual [or sexed: sexu says the French]
otherwise: beyond the binary difference that governs the decorum of all codes, beyond the opposition feminine/masculine,
beyond bisexuality as well, beyond homosexuality and heterosexuality, which come to the same thing. As I dream of saving
the chance that this question offers I would like to believe in the
multiplicity of sexually marked voices. I would like to believe in
the masses, this indeterminable number of blended voices, this
mobile of non-identi ed sexual marks whose choreography can
carry, divide, multiply the body of each individual, whether he
be classi ed as man or as woman according to the criteria
of usage. (108, my emphasis) [Je voudrais croire la multiplicit
de voix sexuellement marques, ce nombre indterminable
de voix enchevtres, ce mobile de marques sexuelles non
identi es. (11415)]
Derrida dreams of a sexual relationship, albeit sexed otherwise: not one that is divided into two parts, played by two recognizable
partners, but one that is inscribed in multiple ways. And thats one more
reason to cling to the memories conjured up by the idiom of sexual difference. Sexual difference evokes and entails sex, contrary to the
idiom of gender. One could say that, for Derrida, sex (the word and
whatever it designates in French and in English), the cuts of sexes (be
they, as Derrida dreams them, indeterminable and innumerable), are
a condition of both love and dance. Without sex or section, without interruption, without what Derrida also calls punctuation, would there be
rhythm, would there be dance? Do not dancing steps, like poetic writing,
require the halting play of a certain caesura?
Without sex (and sexes), would a sexual relation be possible?
Without cuts of sorts, there might be no differences, be they internal or
external, no difference, for instance, between auto- and allo-eroticism, no
interruption and alteration of self-love, which is the condition by which a

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love of the other might be possible. Indeed, without separations, partitions

of sorts, the chance for an other, any other(s) to come might be lost.
Derridas dream brings about a wish scene of lovemaking
between voix enchevtres: not exactly blended or blending voices
as the English translation suggests, but entangled or criss-crossed and
therefore connected-disconnected voices, a necessary condition for a new
polylog to emerge as opposed to the unison of conjugated voices in a traditional choral composition. The voices, he dreams, would perform a choreography that could carry, divide, multiply the body of each individual,
whether he be classied as man or as woman according to the criteria
of usage. Thanks to its choreography, such a performance would achieve
the reinscription or rewriting of sexual difference in and as sexual differances, giving rise to differences not only between subjects but within
each of them, making it impossible to assign identities, to recognize who
is speaking or singing, since each individual s body would divide and
multiply at the entangled voices call and therefore change places indenitely, in nitely changing our set notions of place. What kind of a dance
would there be, asks Derrida in a nal dream-stroke,
or would there be one at all, if the sexes were not exchanged
according to rhythms that vary considerably? In a quite rigorous sense, the exchange alone could not suffice either, however,
because the desire to escape the combinatory itself, to invent
incalculable choreographies, would remain. (108)
Obviously, Derrida, unlike Foucault, 8 doesnt take issue with sexuality
(quite the contrary), only, as he says, with sexduality.
I have little space left to devote to Derridas erotics, which is
such an important aspect of his work, one that pervades his thinking and
informs his writing in so many ways, beyond its explicit and insisting
thematization. So close to the end assigned to my contribution, let me just
begin to broach the subject.
Ill start with endings. A great many pieces devoted primarily
to the exploration of the topic of sexual difference end up with scenes
that evoke lovemaking in a variety of ways. I have just quoted from the
last paragraph of Choreographies. Whether lovemaking is conjured up
dreamily and wishfully, as in Choreographies, allegorically, as in Fourmis, which toys toward the end with the gure of what Derrida calls the
fte de la diffrence sexuelle (the festival of sexual difference) among

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ants (90), or whether it is performed textually as in At This Very Moment

in This Work Here I Am, which ends (or de-ends, since the performance
starts after the end of the philosophical argument proper) with an erotic
dialog, a fragmented and panting speech made up of interrupted and
entangled sentences uttered by two sexually indeterminate voices (I have
called it elsewhere a polyduo), 9 Derridas text does not so much thematize
the connection between the workings of sexual differances and love as
he performs it.
I sound as if there were no separation(s), no interruption(s), in
short, no differences for him between what conventional wisdom and psychoanalysis alike distinguish under the terms sex and love. There are
many, of course, and therefore one may have to nd deconstructive ways
to undo and outdo them. It seems to me that, in the texts I just mentioned
as well as in many others, where sex and love are inextricably intertwined, to the point, perhaps, of being unrecognizable as such, Derrida tries
to formulate relations between them other than the ones made available
and understandable by psychoanalysis (which entails working through
psychoanalysis, of course, rather than ignoring or discarding it).
After all, you may also say, love is an old philosophical topic.
Perhaps what distinguishes Derridas stance or dance here is that his is
not, or not only, a discourse on love but rather of love and that he is not
so much concerned as philosophers traditionally are with what love is or
appears to behe is always weary of the ontological mode of questioningas he is busy nding the formulas that might (re)invent it, as would
a poet, as did Rimbaud for instance.10
Not only are the genders and numbers of Derridas lovemakers
indeterminate, hence potentially multiple (not because Derrida embraces
a perverse notion of the desirability of multiple partnership, but as a
philosophical effect of the divisibility of the subject), but it would be difficult, indeed misguided, to try and say who or what is making, that is,
(re)inventing love in Derridas dreams of other sexual possibilities. At the
end of Choreographies, it is, as we have just seen, entangled voices
that dance Derridas love dance; it is voices, in other words, that are
sexed and sexing, sexualizing utterances. Not that Derrida is suddenly
reneging on his deconstructive analysis of voice as linked to notions of
self-presence and self-affection; the paleonymic use of the word voice(s)
(in the plural) hereby seeks to designate a certain process and location of auto-hetero-affection in (and as) writing. In this sense, Derridas
appeal to voices, and more specically entangled voices, should be

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understood as a catachrestic trope for a certain eroticization of writing.

The criss-crossing of voices that cut through, double, and interrupt one
another with a loving and soft violence, thereby multiplying tonalities,
mirrorsindeed, guresthe differantial play of the letter, of all letters
together parting while partaking in the same game, as Derrida conceives
it. With more time I could expand on Derridas love of language, on his
notion of language as a wall-less chamber or playground in which writing
may be allowed (or may allow itself) to perform its erotic dance. Let me
just say that Derridas notion (and fantasy) of writing, of the unstoppable
incisiveness of all forms of tracing, of style as an art of punctuation, of
productive caesuras, of surprising cuts (and decuts, dcoupes) between
and within words, which jolt thinking into making new or rather different
connections11 (hence, perhaps, his attraction to Celans interrupted lines
and his interest in Cixouss breathtaking play with the conventions of
punctuation), bear a close relation to his reading ofand interest inthe
multiple hence undecidable cuts of sexual differences.
Voices, then, not subjects, not even bodies, dance the dream
of other sexual choreographies. And yet, the body, or rather the word
body, is everywhere in Derridas writing; it comes to his mind and pen
when he comes to writing or when writing comes to surprise him. He frequently resorts to such phrases as un corps dcriture (a singular body
of writing, not the body of writing in general) or le corps de la lettre
(the body of the letter). The Derridean body of writing shouldnt be confused with the conventional designation of a corpus of texts as a body of
writings, or a body of works, even if Derrida obviously plays with this
traditional catachresis. Just like modern poets do (modern poetry and
literature in general have busied themselves turning linguistic memory
and idiom archives into weapons of verbal reinvention), he unburies and
reactivates the old Latin locution in the very movement (and at the very
moment) of its displacement. Such a displaced and literate replay of the
notion of corpus shouldnt be read too quickly either as signaling a desire
to write the body, or to write through the body. As if one knew for sure,
once and for all, Derrida might say, what the body is and what the word
body designates. In other words, because it is not grounded in a preconception of the body, the mention of the body of writing serves no easy
referential function. In a similar fashion, Derridas attraction to the corps
de la lettre (body of the letter), that is, to the letter of such a formula, in
no way indicates a naive belief in what was called in the nineteen-seventies
the materiality of the signier. Derrida has exposed the philosophical

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shortcomings of such an understanding of the signier, which depends

on the upholding of the binary division of the sign between content and
form and that ultimately reinforces the metaphysical opposition between
the sensible and the intelligible.12 The frequent mention of the body, its
multiple appearances on different and sometimes surprising philosophical occasions, cannot be simply understood as an index of a materialist
stance, all the more since materialism, or at least most materialisms
in the history of Western thought, still subscribe in Derridas view to the
metaphysical assumptions they purport to contest.
But, you may say, what about dancing? Can one dance or dream
of dancing without relying on material bodies, if not in reality, at least
in fantasy? Just as entangled voices are not bodies as such, but call for
them, as it were; just as cuts might serve to draw the psychic contours
of bodies, inscribing their necessity, prior to any recognizable shape or
gure; just as the experience of the wound, of multiple wounds, sets off
the process of self-affection through which and thanks to which a relation to ones body might at some point be imagined and articulated, the
dance of sexual differancesand sexual differances as a dancedelineate
the holographic and moving contours of bodies to come, of bodies as they
might come. No simple materialism, then, and no simple realism either,
but rather, when he writes about writing as when he thinks about sexual
difference, when he sexes differances in writing, the multiple indexation
of an affective and passionate cathexis of . . .
Why I love Derrida? Because he loves.

p.s. The very fact that Derrida took such issues as sexual difference or various forms and claims of feminism seriously strikes me
today, and sadly so, as an almost unique philosophical gesture on his part.
The current acclaim of discourses that do not bother with such issues and
are not in the least bothered by them, the quiet reassertion of a Western
centeredness undisturbed by the closure of its metaphysical tradition
and by the possible limitations of its cultural and historical framework,
in short, the return to center stage of what Derrida aptly called phallogocentrism, throws into relief the boldness of his attempt to interrupt
and complicate (without ever naively claiming to break away from) the
set course of Western philosophy.

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d i f f e r e n c e s

anne-emmanuelle berger is Professor of French Literature at Cornell University and Visiting Professor at the Centre de Recherches en Etudes Fminines at Paris VIII University. Her
recent publications include Algeria in Others Languages (Cornell University Press, 2002)
and Scnes daumne: Misre et posie au XIXe sicle (Champion, 2004). She is currently
writing on Derrida.

Notes

Christie McDonald starts by asking Derrida: [. . .] if the question of sexual difference is not
a regional one (in the sense of
subsidiary), if indeed it may no
longer be a question, as you suggest, how would you describe
womans place? (89).

To dance is not simply, however,

a wild and indiscriminate way of
shaking ones body. One has to
learn to dance, to follow and create rhythms, to calculate steps,
to choreograph displacements.
Conversely, to read as one dances
means that one cannot read whatever one pleases to see in a text.
One has to be aware of the texts
dance, of its own disturbing
calculations, be they unconscious
on the part of the author.

Derrida never fails to show how

language tricks us and plays
with us, with him, in his idiom.
Hence his attention to the play
of grammatical genders and the
differences they create or add
in French (to begin with, that
gender is a masculine word
and difference is gendered
feminine).

The adjective sexuel in the

modern sense is rst attested in
French in the middle of the eighteenth century. In Latin, sexualis refers to the feminine sex, as
in the now outdated expressions
in French le sexe or le beau
sexe (the fair sex).

On this issue, see Peggy Kamufs

The Other Sexual Difference.

In a piece titled The End of

Sexual Difference? Judith Butler

shows how the politics (and the

polemics) surrounding the use of
the word gender in feminist and
queer theory, particularly AngloAmerican theory, have produced
new readings of it, which have
in turn contributed to shift its
semantic course by adding unexpected meanings to it. She recalls
in particular how, at the United
Nations Meeting on the Status of
Women that took place in Beijing
in 1995, the Vatican decided to
strike off the word gender from
its document because such a word
was considered by the Catholic
hierarchy to have become a code
word for homosexuality, that
is, unnatural or anti-natural
sexual behavior and identity
(42324). Such a philological
deprogramming (all the more
striking since the Church speaks
Latin and is aware of the naturalizing implications of genus,
generis in Latin) and the consequent political reprogramming
of the word are an example of the
ways in which different contexts
(i.e., specic historical, cultural,
or political con gurations, be
they lasting or provisional) can
and do affect meaning and even
the fate of language(s). Derrida
forcefully addresses the issue of
such recontextualizations, for
instance in This Strange Institution Called Literature. According to him, the very iterability of
any trace or mark (for instance,
of the word gender) opens it up
to alterations. The same goes for
works of literature. Certain texts
fully grounded in a precise
history that prompts them into
existence, texts that are loaded
with historical references to their

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Sexing Differances

own context of formulation, can

nonetheless lend themselves to
fruitful readings whose frames of
reference are very distant from
the original time and place of
the texts read. This, he tells
Derek Attridge, has to do
with the structure of a text,
with [. . .] its iterability, which
both puts down roots in the unity
of a context and immediately
opens this non-saturable context
onto a recontextualization. [. . .]
The iterability of the trace (unicity, identication and alteration
in repetition) is the condition of
historicity [. . .] (This Strange
63). Derrida, however, would
probably not consider the resemanticization of gender by the
Vatican to be a legitimate or pertinent alteration of the mark,
since it leads (and amounts) to
a mere gesture of erasure. Such
an erasure deprives the word
of any historical becoming and
deprives us, by the same token,
of the memories it carries with it.
Butler uses this example to make
an argument, which, though it
proceeds from a different logic
(and from a kind of philosophical wisdom rather than from a
philosophy of history), ends up on
the same side, that is, the side of
delity to linguistic memory conceived as the condition, or rather
one of the conditions, at which
a future can remain open. Noting that attacks against the ways
certain issues are worded or the
dismissal of certain phrases on
political or ideological grounds
(masquerading as philosophical objections) all too often lead
to prohibition and censorship,
she uses the example of what the
Pope does with the word gender
to caution against dropping too
quickly any reference to the locution sexual difference.

One could add that

to replace a word or phrase by
another without displacing the
system within which it functions
or without at least questioning
its basic assumptions would not
only leave such a system in place;
it might also, as Geoffrey Bennington rightly points out, when,
following Derrida, he cautions
against naive appeals to a radically new terminology, produce
an amnesia that might actually
help consolidate the system in
place (see Jacques Derrida,
The Sign, No. 12, 3536).
7

I dont have time to expand

here on this important distinction. Sexual difference(s), for
Derrida, do not give themselves to
see; they are not a question of perception, much less of evidence,
nor even of fantasy. They lend
themselves to reading and
to reading only. (On this topic,
see Fourmis.)

Foucaults complicated argument

with sexuality deserves
a lengthy qualication I cant
provide within the framework
of this paper.

See Pas de deux.

10

Lamour est rinventer, on

le sait [Love is to be reinvented,
one knows it], says Rimbauds
infernal spouse in Dlires I
(Une Saison en enfer).

11

It would take another paper, one

which I think is called for, to
explain why Derrida might prefer the word other (as in other
sexual choreographies) to the
word new to designate the event
or advent of yet unread, unseen,
or unheard of (im)possibilities.

12

On this issue, see Geoffrey Benningtons summary of Derridas

problematics of the sign in his
Jacques Derrida 2742.

67

d i f f e r e n c e s

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Century. Ed. Elisabeth Bronfen and Misha Kavka. New York: Columbia up, 2001. 41434.
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. Portrait of Jacques Derrida as a Young Jewish Saint. Trans. Beverley Bie
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