Annie Leclerc Writing a Letter, with Vermeer

Abstract

In 1981 Critical Inquiry, one of the elite American journals of literary criticism and theory, published a feminist issue, edited by Elizabeth Abel. That issue whose title is and Sexual Difference betokens a feminist criticism that is interested not only in feminist social, political, and psychological issues, but also in writing, which is to say in literary issues. I first delivered the present paper at a colloquium entitled Poetics of Gender which was the eighth in a series of Poetics Colloquia. That colloquium bespeaks the same moment in the history of feminist literary criticism. We might in fact line up with writing and gender with sexual difference. Yet there is also a specific resonance in Abel's title. and Sexual Difference is a revision of Jacques Derrida's Writing and Difference, likewise published by the University of Chicago Press. If and Sexual Difference is a feminist revision of Derrida's title, then what is marked is not only feminism's entrance on the stage of high literary theory, but that this entrance occurs through the play of something translated from the French. Things from the French had already fully penetrated American literary theoretical discussion and had already insinuated themselves into American feminist criticism in a way that, I believe, made possible a feminist issue of Critical Inquiry, a certain coming together of literary theory and feminism, of poetics and gender. Conversely the colloque which had always been on la pobtique, which until recently had been conducted in French, not only proceeded in English but had among its speakers a good number of critics from English departments. The new intercourse between literary theory and feminism seems to be concomitant with a permeation of the boundaries separating French and English departments. and Sexual Difference is thus in fact the scene of a double translation: from literary-philosophical terms and Difference into sexual-feminist ones, as well as from French into English. Li'criture et la diffirence becomes Writing and Sexual Difference. And yet the two moves may be not simply