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christie mcdonald

Notes on an Unfi nished Question

W hen differences asked me to write about the importance of


Derrida’s work for me in this issue of tribute to his thought, I immediately
thought I would write about choices and how we make them. Easy: just look
at why Derrida’s works had such an impact as of the 1960s starting with
the formative years of my graduate studies, although I was never a student
of his. But I quickly realized that this was no small challenge. Whatever I
can say will be too little compared with what I learned and what a genera-
tion has taken (positively or negatively) from his work.
A little background. I’ve started to go to reunions, marking
dates and periods. Such events trigger memories that well up and com-
plicate even as they elucidate how one came to be who one is. I was born
into a family of painters and a writer, and I needed to fi nd a language
of my own. I began to study the French language in a remarkable high
school in New York City that was deeply engaged with civil rights and the
arts, but I can’t remember when I decided I couldn’t live without French
as part of my life. Was it during the summer in the Massif Central (Le
Collège Cévenol) in a school that saved thousands of Jews during World
War II? When my maternal aunt returned from the Belgian Congo (now

Copyright 2005 by Brown University and d i f f e r e n c e s : A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 16:3
36 Notes on an Unfinished Question

drc) where the lingua franca was French as well as Swahili? Or during
the time I lived in Paris as a third-year college student? Did I make a deci-
sion or did my “formation,” as we say in French, slowly give shape into a
career? Before leaving for Paris, I had discovered philosophy and the long
tradition beginning with Plato. I studied both literature and philosophy
in Paris, from Spinoza and Kant to Jean Wahl’s lectures on Heidegger and
Nietzsche. It was 1963. I discovered Proust the same year: the obsession
with truth and an aesthetic of the metaphor. In graduate school, I locked
on to Rousseau, his resistance to authority and narrative plans for a bet-
ter world, as I buffeted through the mid-sixties, a period for which I—as
perhaps most of my generation—was ill prepared.
So that when I read De la grammatologie in 1967, the year it
came out, I sensed that, despite its complexity, in its complexity (there
was no one to explain it), it was a very important book. Derrida’s reread-
ing of a literary and philosophical tradition became at once compelling:
writing that both commented on and at the same time reflected upon a
new sense of writing and gave a model for maintaining contradictions
(abundant in Rousseau’s work) without the need to simply resolve them.
In those turbulent times, Derrida’s questioning of received assumptions
through writing and difference resonated with what I had been reading,
though it would take years and much work before I understood the far-
reaching challenge.
As one might notice, although I didn’t at the time, all the models
I was reading were male; all my teachers were male, and I was living life
in translation. Then I began teaching French literature and thought at the
Université de Montréal, a francophone university (in which the French
Department played a role equivalent to the English department in an
American university) where I was always on the inside out (an American
teaching Québecois students French and even, at times, Québecois litera-
ture). I talked with and read my feminist friends and colleagues (among
others, my old friend, Naomi Schor), who were asking about the place of
women in literature and society, even as I still struggled to fi gure out my
place and identification as a woman within the French language. Granted,
I was in a department that, amazingly, was almost fi fty percent women,
and Hélène’s Cixous’s semester visit left a distinct mark as did the work
of my feminist colleague, Monique Bosco. Then Cynthia Chase asked me
to participate in a special issue of diacritics on feminism. I asked Derrida,
whom I had invited with my colleague in philosophy, Claude Lévesque, to
a conference in Montreal.1 Derrida agreed.
d i f f e r e n c e s 37

I understood the task of the written interview, which I would


translate as “Choreographies,” as a way to bring together his work with
the question of woman. I began by quoting Emma Goldman, the maverick
feminist from the late nineteenth century who famously said of the femi-
nist movement, “If I can’t dance I don’t want to be part of your revolution”
(66); I referred to Goldman less “because of the [. . .] historical matrix than
because of those characteristics which defi ne them” (67). “On August 26,
1970, a group of women calling themselves the Emma Goldman Brigade
marched down Fifth Avenue in New York City with many other feminists,
chanting: ‘Emma said it in 1910 / Now we’re going to say it again’ ” (68n2).
I asked two questions: is there a “new” concept of woman and what is the
place of woman now? In his answers, Derrida elaborated on his thinking
about these questions in 1982 and warned that progress was problematic
for the women’s movement, as was dualistic thinking opposing man to
woman. 2
But as I reread my notes, there was a third question in draft
form that I did not ask because it seemed as yet too unresolved:

You have written that “if style were a man (much as the penis,
according to Freud is the ‘normal prototype of fetishes’), then
writing would be a woman” ( Éperons/Spurs 57). My last ques-
tion concerns the genderization of writing.
You suggest in La Carte postale that “to say ‘I’ alone, I do
not unveil my sex, I am subject without sexual predicate [. . .]”
(193). This leads, in an argument far too complex to summa-
rize here, to the conclusion that between the addressor and the
addressee of a text, it is the addressee (as the other) who by his/
her signature determines my gender. Not for always and forever,
but in each case differently, depending upon the addressee. That
is, before all forms of propriation (say, in the appropriation of
a name), there was no sexuality ( Éperons/Spurs 111). Thus the
signs of sexual opposition may be changed as man and woman
exchange places and masks without end.
A man or woman, however, is only an “accomplice” to
the text. And accomplices pass while the text remains. The text
that remains is signed by you or by me, those for whom the
“event” of the text is one of a “structurally posthumous necessity”
( Éperons/Spurs 137). Marcel Proust remarked that “a book is a
huge cemetery in which on the majority of the tombs the names
38 Notes on an Unfinished Question

are effaced and can no longer be read” ( In Search 6:310). Texts


indeed remain. And they are signed. Therein lies, among others,
the perplexing question of gender, of female gender.
If most of the texts of Western culture are addressed to
women, they have been so by and for men. What remains of
woman since Sappho’s time is less than clear. So while it is true
that woman may know, I may know what it is that I can say
better as man (the trap, according to some, of the feminist who
aspires to be like a man ( Éperons/Spurs 65), what can man say
better, what can you say better as a woman?

In a sense the editorial work that was done while I was translat-
ing the questions to which Derrida did respond performed a kind of visible
and invisible signature exchange. As translator-editor, I took the liberty
of proposing to Derrida that the end of his fi rst answer would perhaps be
better at the end of his second response on the “dream” of a “multiplicity
of sexually marked voices” and the invention of “incalculable choreog-
raphies.” This then became the conclusion that also provided the title of
the interview (and caused some controversy about a kind of utopianism).
Derrida had already in the original French response supplied a footnote
attributed to the translator (me), referring to himself in the third person
and then quoting from comments by him on a text by Levinas in which
Levinas refers to a common humanity before sexual difference (marked
by masculine spirituality). 3
The failure to ask this third question seems to have come out
of an incoherence on my part that would soon allow me to think about
language and translation—not only linguistic but among the arts—and
biography along with autobiography. Not long after, I began to teach a
course on motherhood in literary and philosophical texts and another
called “Life Writing,” in which Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, Sarah
Kofman, and Carolyn Heilbrun figured strongly.
In a way, I believe that Derrida had already answered the
unasked question in the works quoted in the question. And yet, I think
Derrida continues in Le monolinguisme de l’autre, where he writes about
a relationship to the maternal language; there, he sets out the perplex-
ing Franco-Magrebin autobiographical speaker who is monolingual and
yet speaks a language that is not his own. Of course, he writes, one can
speak many languages, and there are competent speakers who do speak
more than one and even write several languages at once in translation.
d i f f e r e n c e s 39

But his question in this work goes, as always, beyond anything practical:
do multilingual speakers seek the absolute idiom and the promise of an
unknowable (unheard) language? (126). Now, I wonder if “speaking as a
woman” is not the gender equivalent of the Franco-Magrebin speaker from
Algeria within the sexually marked French language? In which case, the
explanation in his fi nal interview in Le Monde (published as Apprendre à
vivre enfin. Entretien avec Jean Birnbaum) reinforces, though it only indi-
rectly alludes to anything gendered, the shared difficulty of any relation
to a universal, centralized language (39): being committed to and caring
about French, more acutely perhaps even than a French speaker from
France, because one is taken in or received as a foreigner, or stranger
(“étranger”).
What is the extraordinary vantage of fi nding oneself an out-
sider in, or on the inside out—in language, in gender, and in geographical
remove? These are questions still in need, perhaps more than ever in need,
of analysis in an increasingly globalized world. The feminist revolution
questioned the accepted canon and began deconstructing gender hierar-
chies, challenging gender assumptions both in literature and in society;
differences was a part of that movement. Since the 1980s and 1990s, the
disciplinary fields in French literary and cultural studies, traditionally
defi ned temporally in terms of centuries, have been challenged by spatial
and geopolitical models outside the Hexagon. Paris remains the intellec-
tual capital of “Francophone” culture, but possibilities for new thinking
are emerging as this new millennium begins.
In a year when my university has undergone a seismic crisis
about women in science and women in the university generally, the ques-
tion of woman as intellectual, her place in society and what one can say
and do as a woman, seems freshly and acutely pertinent. How one chooses
to follow a path (whether learning a language or studying mathematics)
can be traced to, without fully explaining, a series of inherited models
and personal discoveries that one makes early on. Some projects come to
us late but seem to have been there from the beginning; such is the book I
just completed, in collaboration with several colleagues, Images of Congo:
Anne Eisner’s Art and Ethnography 1946–58. It is about a woman who lived
in Africa, learning French and a local dialect of Swahili to live in a mul-
ticultural community but whose “own” language—both traditional and
idiomatic—was in fact painting; this was my aunt. Touching on biography
and ethnography, the collaborative work (by women) on this woman’s
voice and what she might better say as a woman was part of my answer
40 Notes on an Unfinished Question

to the unfi nished question. That Derrida’s writings remain, analyzing in


rhythms idiomatic to his style the presuppositions of thought, and continue
to press questions, answered and unanswered, is something for which I
am deeply grateful.

christie mcdonald is Chair of the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures and
Smith Professor of French Language and Literature at Harvard University. She is the editor
of Images of Congo: Anne Eisner’s Art and Ethnography 1946–58 (Five Continents, 2005) and
the author of The Proustian Fabric (University of Nebraska Press, 1991).

Notes 1 The proceedings from the confer- 2 See my contribution to the pmla
ence later appeared in French, forum, “The Legacy of Jacques
then in English as The Ear of the Derrida.”
Other.
3 See “En ce moment même” 195–
96; and “Choreographies” 72n5.

Works Cited Derrida, Jacques. Apprendre à vivre enfi n. Entretien avec Jean Birnbaum. Galilée: Paris:
2005.

. La Carte postale: de Socrate à Freud et au delà. Paris: Flammarion, 1980.

. “Choreographies. An interview with Jacques Derrida and Christie McDon-


ald.” diacritics 12.2 (1982): 66–76.

. The Ear of the Other: Otobiography, Transference, Translation: Texts and Dis-
cussion with Jacques Derrida. Trans. Peggy Kamuf and Avital Ronell. Ed Christie McDonald.
Lincoln: u of Nebraska p, 1988.

. “En ce moment même dans cet ouvrage me voici.” Textes pour Emmanuel
Levinas. Ed. F. Laruelle. J.-M. Place: Paris, 1980. 21–61.

. Éperons: les styles de Nietzsche. Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles. Trans. Barbara


Harlow. Chicago: u of Chicago p, 1978.

. Le monolinguism de l’autre. Paris: Galilée, 1996.

McDonald, Christie. Forum. “The Legacy of Jacques Derrida.” pmla 120.2 (2005): 481–82.

Proust, Marcel. In Search of Lost Time. Trans. Andreas Mayor and Terence Kilmartin. Rev.
D.J. Enright. Vol. 6. New York: Modern Library, 2003.

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