ALICE JARDINE'S 1985 study Gynesis traces the explosive putting-intodiscourse of woman and her textual effects recent theoretical discourse, particularly the work of Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, and Gilles Deleuze. Jardine names this process and suggests that the privileging of Woman these exemplary texts of modernity represents a logical reaction to the deconstruction of phallic authority and privilege. Man, once at the center of all systems of truth, has become decentered, and with him, all notions of paternal authority and mastery. According to Jardine, it is the breakdown of the paternal metaphor that leads male theorists to gynesis; arguing that woman a new rhetorical space is inseparable from the most radical moments of most contemporary disciplines (38), she establishes a causal link between a crisis (masculine) subjectivity and the increased attention to all things feminine contemporary critical discourses. Jardine argues that, in the search for new kinds of legitimation, the absence of Truth, anxiety over the decline of paternal authority, and the midst of spiraling diagnoses of Paranoia, the End of Man and History, 'woman' has been set motion both rhetorically and ideologically (36, my emphasis). While Jardine presents an impressive study of configurations of woman and modernity, her interest gynesis as a rhetorical strategy tends to obscure the ideological stakes this new theoretical orientation.' Admitting that these male philosophers often resort to traditional and recognizable metaphors of the feminine, Jardine nevertheless fails to question the logic buried the move away from Man, and toward Woman--or, better, what that move puts into play terms of a discursive economy of subject-object configurations. I highlight anxiety her comment order to suggest that the inscription of woman modernity's texts can be read as a paranoid reaction which reproduces a certain castration scenario relation to the death of the paternal metaphor. Here, I will focus on two Derridean texts as they intersect with the psychoanalytic problematics of castration and fetishism, Spurs and Glas.