Phallogocentrism, sexual difference, and the deconstruction of 'woman': is the deconstructive use of 'woman' as figure for the undecidable a rigorous philosophical move or an erasure of empirical women?

Jacques Derrida, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

The position in brief

Phallogocentrism — the structural collusion of phallocentrism (the privileging of the phallus as the marker of authority and full presence) with logocentrism (the privileging of the logos as the medium of ideality) — is a structural feature of Western metaphysics, not a contingent prejudice some philosophers shared. The deconstruction of "woman" as philosophical figure (in Spurs on Nietzsche, in the Levinas writings on the feminine, in the Geschlecht series on Heidegger, in the conversations with Hélène Cixous) is not the erasure of empirical women but the working out of how the figure of "woman" has been deployed to organize the metaphysical hierarchy of truth, presence, identity, and the proper.

As I said in "Choreographies" (1982), sexual difference is "not yet thought" — the question remains open, and the rigorous structural intervention does not foreclose it. The politico-empirical concerns of feminist critics about the use of "woman" as a figure for undecidability are legitimate and have to be engaged on their own ground; they do not refute the structural claim about phallogocentrism.¹²³

Sources

1. The authority you are granted becomes a sort of capital that it is convenient to put at the service of a just cause. But if possible without ever giving up questioning its presuppositions or its axioms. It is often difficult to do both at once, in the same movement, but I always try to. spire: Very early on there was one cause that rightly mobilized you, the cause of women.

   Paper Machine, p. 154

2. Whatever the assumed attitude of the author on the matter, the effect can be paradoxical and sometimes " deconstructive." But we shouldn't talk generally, there are no rules here such that each singular work would be merely a case or example of them, a sample.

   Acts of Literature, p. 59

3. D.A. The kind of historical re-reading I referred to in my previous question is perhaps most advanced in some feminist criticism, which takes as its goal the demonstration of the phallocentric assumptions of literary texts over a long period, as well as of commentaries on those texts. Does this work overlap with your own?

   Acts of Literature, pp. 57–58

Where the argument is made

• Spurs: Nietzsche's Styles (1978, Harlow trans., Chicago) on the figures of woman, truth, and the styles in Nietzsche
• 'Choreographies' (1982, an interview with Christie V. McDonald in diacritics, reprinted in Points) where I called sexual difference 'not yet thought'
• Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question (1987) on Geschlecht and the privilege of Versammlung
• Geschlecht I-IV (especially Geschlecht III, Bennington & Crépon eds., 2020)
• 'At This Very Moment in This Work Here I Am' (1980) on Levinas and the feminine
• the conversations with Hélène Cixous (Veils, 2001
• Geneses, Genealogies, Genres, and Genius, 2003)

How the argument was received

The deconstructive engagement with sexual difference is one of the most contested areas of the reception. Spivak's translator's preface to Of Grammatology (1976) and her later essays inaugurated a productive postcolonial-feminist deployment. Drucilla Cornell's The Philosophy of the Limit (1992) and Beyond Accommodation (1991) develop a systematic deconstruction-and-feminism project. Naomi Schor in "Dreaming Dissymmetry" (1987) and the early Irigaray raised the worry that the figure of "woman" is appropriated from a structurally masculine position. The conversations with Hélène Cixous (over decades, culminating in the late texts) are productive collaboration. The agent must hold the structural rigor of the phallogocentrism critique while engaging the feminist literature substantively; the "not yet thought" status of sexual difference is what I myself maintained, in the Choreographies interview and afterward.