Inheriting Gratefulness:On Derrida and Feminism Perry Zurn In his preface to On the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche lampoons the modern man for, in the first place, behaving as though he were a "winged creature," collecting "intellectual honey" for "the beehives of our knowledge" (Nietzsche 1887, 15). Such a man does not engage his heart or his ears, abandons any experience of the present, and ultimately lacks all self-understanding. When, then, at a seminar at Brown in 1984, Derrida refers to the university as a beehive (Derrida 2005, 142),1 one cannot help but hear echoes of Nietzsche. Derrida describes the university beehive as teleological and phallogocentric. This means that it assesses its productivity through models of progress, especially in an additive sense, and deploys that productivity in the sustenance of hierarchical knowledge. On this particular March day in Providence, it is Derrida's aim to ask whether the new field of women's studies (or gender and sexuality studies today) will be any different. Will it frustrate progress and cultivate transformation? Will it displace the Law or simply reproduce it? Derrida suggests that in fact both deconstruction and feminism share a radical potential to disrupt the beehive. For, at their best, they unravel the very foundations of power and knowledge upon which the university rests. Each field in its own way ruminates on "how not to be governed like this, by that, in the name of those principles, [. . .] not like that, not for that, not by them" (Foucault 1997, 28). Against the capitalist, patriarchal academic production mill, both deconstruction and feminism practice an endless patience with singular details and singular lives. They are, furthermore, committed [End Page 125] to tracing how meaning is translated across axes of difference, experiences, languages, and texts. One might even say that, in their attention to the margins and marginalization, deconstruction and feminism work to awaken their own ears and hearts, to engage with an experience of the present, and to develop a kind of self-understanding that destabilizes both terms. Each, in this sense, functions contre the university. Each is not apian but anthophilic. For these reasons, I am always grateful for the chance to join deconstructive and/or feminist communities. I feel a certain respite and hope—a respite from the academic production mills and a hope in new futures of care—coupled with an appreciation for those who came before me and, decade after decade, carved out these spaces. That appreciation extends especially to feminist theorists, without whom so many of us would not have found a voice. And this gratefulness has an afterlife, it reverberates and echoes within me, even after I have left, tainting my work in more normalized, administrative, and bureaucratic circles. I linger a little longer over a particular line, the ping of a word, or an argument's architecture. I reach out a warmer hand to other underrepresented scholars and students. Here in the beehive of the university. And yet, as beautiful as all of that is, what is it that haunts this gratefulness? What makes this gratefulness of mine precisely impossible? ________ In ancient Rome, the Latin grata (derived from cratis) referred to a grate or framework of parallel or crossing bars. One would often see it in latticework or crosshatching covering doors or windows or stiffening domes and archways. Whatever its use, the grate itself has always been somewhat paradoxical. Depending on its form, it might permit communication while prohibiting entrance, facilitate the movement of fluids while closing an orifice, or release heat while retaining fire. In this sense, it creates dissymmetry in registers of mobility, such that larger bodies are corralled, while voice, spit, water, air and heat, insects and rodents, ivy and snow can move about freely. Perhaps it is no surprise, then, that "grate" referred to a jail or prison throughout the modern period (between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries). Here, one would await trial and sentence literally behind bars, always uninsulated but also trapped. This is a particular sort of confinement, echoing current prisoners' reports of being both overexposed and buried. There is something apt about the structure of the grate to explain the university...
Read full abstract
Jun 22, 2017
Susan Marine + 1
Open Access
