An Event, Perhaps by Peter Salmon

Author:Peter Salmon
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso Books

7

Supposing That Truth Is

a Woman – What Then?

I too would like to write like a woman. I try …

– ‘Spurs Roundtable’

Not just anyone buggers Socrates.

– The Post Card

If that rebellion was fizzling out, another was taking place, and to Derrida’s credit it was one he embraced, and embraced critically, working through its implications not only socially, not only philosophically, but for his own work.

At the 1966 Baltimore conference there were fifteen participants and another fourteen colloquists; twenty on the sponsoring and advisory committee; and ten on the student reception committee. Of these, only one, a student committee member, Margaret Meyer, was a woman; the other fifty-eight were men. Baltimore was not unique in this. If the 1960s was the time of second-wave feminism, the academy was particularly resistant to it – or was as resistant as the rest of legislative society.

In France, Simone de Beauvoir’s Second Sex of 1949 had applied existentialist philosophy to women’s oppression – if existence precedes essence, then ‘one is not born a woman, but becomes one’.1 But the general state of affairs remained oppressive. It was not until 1965 that French women won the right to work without their husband’s consent, while the legalisation of birth control did not occur until 1967, and even then was delayed several times in the courts. Derrida’s own ENS was an all-male institution, with women segregated off to the École normale supérieure de jeunes filles in Sèvres, 10 kilometres south-west of the centre of Paris. While thirty-five women gained entry between 1927 and 1940 – including Simone Weil and the Franco-Greek philologist Jacqueline Worms de Romilly – they were officially banned by a law under Vichy France. It was not until 1985 that the two campuses were merged.

The events of 1968 inspired the rise of a new radicalism, such as the 1970 formation of Mouvement de libération des femmes, which advocated for contraception and abortion rights, and women’s autonomy from their husbands. In 1971, de Beauvoir wrote the text for the ‘Manifeste des 343 salopes’ [Manifesto of the 343 Sluts], a petition of that number of women ‘who had the courage to say “I’ve had an abortion.” ’ The petition demanded both free access to contraception and free access to abortion. Alert to male hypocrisy, the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo asked male politicians, ‘Who got the 343 sluts from the abortion manifesto pregnant?’ Eventually, in 1974, abortion became legal.

If Derrida could laconically use the phrase ‘man’ in both the title of ‘The Ends of Man’ and in its main arguments, it was not a linguistic or indeed philosophical error he was wont to maintain. He was one of those men who are lucky enough to find himself among intelligent opinionated women, or at least lucky enough to be the sort of person who listens to them – if not without argument. His association with Tel Quel and its milieu had introduced him not only to Julia Kristeva, but also to Catherine Clément, who had studied at the ENS with

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.