Rhetorical Space Research Articles

On metaphors of suffering: mapping the feminist political imagination

This article suggest that the contemporary feminist imagination is informed by the ways in which feminist argumentation has drawn upon notions of race, blackness and slavery as approximations of the condition of womanhood. The moral weight that islent by such analyses might be rendered as inaccurate, opportunistic or even racist. However, rathe than a rejection of such arguments as simply 'wrong' (which would involve some mode of evaluation) it is also possible to suggest that, at the same time, one might reread the decisions involved in making such arguments as metaphors; and if metaphors are, as Ricocur suggests, imaginative moves that operate not in spite of but through difference, then these arguments can be regarded as making and marking a rhetorical space that has requently been threatened by the erasure of the very argument it sets out to achieve. Such a reading pulls apart the purity of gendered suffering and exposes the decisions to argue in this mode as moments in the creation of a political community of community, the process of becoming historic, that requires monitoring for its problematic incorporations.

Coriolanus: Body Politic and Private Parts

POLITICAL THINKING AND, CONSEQUENTLY, WRITING ABOUT politics have traditionally made use of certain master tropes that remain constant in principle even when the nature and content of political discourse change. At the foundation of Western political thought, for instance, is the trope of the dialectical relationship between man in the state of nature (that is, man fending for himself and caring for the propagation of his species) and man in the domain of culture (that is, man in the embrace of community, of polis, of an organism that, ideally, is himself writ large, but that also dominates him, subjecting him to a necessity beyond the easily graspable one of his own needs and instincts). Among the archetypal scenes of politics are those that reveal the reverberation between these poles of unity and fragmentation, wholeness and separation. Achilles sulking in his tent, the tribes of Israel retreating after the death of Solomon, the Roman plebs leaving the city for the Mons Sacra in the time of Coriolanus, the secession to the tennis court in prerevolutionary France: we recognize in such historical and fictional scenes ur-configurations of political intercourse. An organism purporting to be a whole (a kingdom, a republic, a military expedition, an assembly) splits into parts, revealing itself to be an uneasy association of warlords, a hierarchy of classes, or a tenuous alliance of tribes. Politics is about division more than it is about unity. But the discourse of politics (as opposed to the history of political action), a discourse that occupies a rhetorical space between the opposing poles of fragmentation and wholeness, exploits the resources of both extremes, deriving as much energy from images of wholeness and totality as it does from the language of dismemberment and fission. Political writings that attempt to analyze and describe the phenomena of the great wealth-creating and labor-exploiting industrial cities of the nineteenth century inevitably grapple with a spectacle of pervasive division. The city (London, Manchester, Paris) is a mass of people living in close proximity, but the people are separated from each other by great barriers of money and class. In Capital Marx quotes a London newspaper that describes not a riot or a rebellion but quotidian urban life during a severe economic depression in 1867:

Misappropriations of the "Feminine"

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.