Jacques Derrida by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 1818126
Publisher: Taylor and Francis

III. Women’s becoming animal

To return to the themes explored by Derrida in Beast and Sovereign, and to the conversation such themes might broach with Mary Wollstonecraft, how might the beast and the sovereign be haunted by sexual difference in Vindication?

One could conclude there is no sexual difference in Vindication of Rights of Woman. Rather we encounter the travails of becoming animallike. The only depiction of femininity we are offered is presented as a defective and aberrant version of the human. Moreover, it is consistently – if variably – associated with a range of forms of animality. In fact, Wollstonecraft problematises not just women’s becoming feminine, but also men’s becoming feminine, so we are offered very hostile accounts of men described as effeminate and vain. There is, arguably, no room for anything Wollstonecraft herself identifies as femininity in an account of a human she favours. This does not mean she defended an ideal of women becoming masculine. Rather she promotes a range of qualities – such as modesty, benevolence, and civic virtue. They are valued as sex neutral, praised where they appear in men, lamented where they don’t appear in women.

But a curious form of sovereignty is going to be attributed specifically to feminine women, making their scene before men – it relates to the empire or sovereignty of sex. This form of the woman’s becoming sovereign (becoming hyper feminine) is also presented as a kind of becoming animal, this time as less than human in the sense of not worthy of the human, as when she comments:

How grossly do they insult us, who thus advise us only to render ourselves gentle, domestic brutes. For instance, the winning softness, so warmly, and frequently recommended, that governs by obeying. What childish expressions, and how insignificant is the being – … who will condescend to govern by such sinister methods! “Certainly,” says Lord Bacon, “man is of kin to the beasts by his body; and if he be not of kin to God by his spirit, he is a base and ignoble creature!”

(Wollstonecraft 1995: 87–88)

While Wollstonecraft’s elaborate analogical calculus may not occur in the same terms as Derrida’s analysis, it prompts further thought about a question Derrida did in fact pose. How to understand some of the ways in which sexual difference can blur the relationship of the beast and the sovereign? And in thinking about the conditions of feminism, I have found it helpful to remember that “animal” is also a word (as is “slave,” and “savage,” and “primitive”) that women have given themselves the right to give, and very elaborately, in the formulation of right’s claims.

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