Emerson's "Scene" before the Women: The Feminist Poetics of Paraphernalia

Abstract

less arbitrary than it might at first appear. Emerson writes in response to the failing social reform of his day, and the dislocations of Experience emerge from his desire to explore the theoretical implications of that failure. In this, his confusion resembles that of critics attempting to pass empirical through the theoretical turns of deconstruction. Like Emerson, these feminists find themselves precariously situated. While deconstructionists, following the lead of Jacques Derrida, have put woman into discourse in order to reverse and ultimately displace the metaphysical tradition, they have done so by describing feminism as the logical appendix to the hermeneutic tradition they attack.3 By Derrida's account, this distrust of femninism is the legacy of the man who made a scene before the women, Friedrich Nietzsche.4 Yet deconstruction also follows Nietzsche's program for reversing the hierarchy between knowledge and life and displacing it through the balanced interaction of thought with life.5 If we engender these values as they have been en-gendered throughout history (masculine-knowledge; feminine-life), Nietzsche's transvalua-