Deep Thoughts: Derrida & trauma studies

Derrida’s Deconstruction of Logocentrism: Implications for Trauma Studies – by Julie Elaine Goodspeed-Chadwick
From Reconstruction 6.2 (Spring 2006)

Abstract: This article examines Derrida’s conception of logocentrism as it is discussed throughout the entirety of his seminal work Of Grammatology , as well as in his collected interviews, Points….1974-1994 . Systematically refuting logocentrism, Derrida’s deconstruction enables exposure of the mechanisms, such as binary constructions, that exert a dominant—and domineering—influence over marginalized people, places, and concepts. Specifically, presence and the (falsehood of the) totality of the sign define logocentrism, and these terms cannot productively contribute to trauma studies because it is precisely in texts and textuality that embodied states can be studied. Texts are themselves material embodiments that display ways of thinking. At the very least, through Derrida’s deconstructive framework, the terms of logocentrism can be dismantled to discover how and why they work. The implications of the Derridian deconstruction of logocentrism is explored and detailed within the parameters of trauma studies and briefly in connection with the author’s own project on trauma and gender in order to illustrate how Derrida’s critique of logocentrism can be applied to these concerns. In particular, the significance and relevance of Derrida’s work to the work of trauma theorists such as Elaine Scarry is considered, and conclusions are proposed concerning the applicability of Derrida’s work to trauma studies as a whole and in conjunction with other trauma and poststructuralist thinkers, like Judith Butler.

<1> In Of Grammatology , Derrida defines logocentrism as “the metaphysics of phonetic writing” that is “nothing but the most original and powerful ethnocentrism,” and which, “in the process of imposing itself upon the world,” controls the concept of writing, the history of metaphysics, and the concept of science ( Grammatology 3). What Derrida is primarily interested in here is the control and power immanent in logocentrism because this ethnocentric way of understanding the world necessarily shapes how one understands people, places, and concepts. In effect, logocentrism privileges not only a certain type of communication, but it privileges above all else the falsehood (for Derrida) of origins and presence. Such privileging could lend itself to a postcolonial critique: Derrida contends that logocentrism “begins to lay hold on world culture” ( Grammatology 4). This kind of theoretical critique would attract theorists the like of Gayatri Spivak, who translates Of Grammatology . But Derrida’s critique of logocentrism extends past a localized theoretical critique of nation or place to semiotics: “The idea of science and the idea of writing[ 1]—therefore also of the science of writing—is meaningful for us only in terms of an origin and within a world to which a certain concept of the sign (later I shall call it the concept of the sign) and a certain concept of the relationships between speech and writing, have already been assigned” ( Grammatology 4). Refuting notions of origin and presence leads Derrida to refute Sassure’s rigid concept of the sign as a totality that meaningfully signifies through a pure signifier and a signified. The goal, then, for Derrida is to “reach the point of a certain exteriority in relation to the totality of the age of logocentrism” through “a certain deconstruction of that totality which is also a traced path” ( Grammatology 161-2). In other words, Derrida claims that we can only know a chain of signs, not a presence. As such, our goal should be to deconstruct signs and binary constructions to expose the existing totality of logocentrism.

<2> In “Lingusitics and Grammatology,” the second chapter in Of Grammatology , it becomes apparent that Derrida is arguing that there is no such thing as an essential presence of a thing (debunking phenomenology and Husserlian “intuition”). He counters the idea that any signified—as part of a sign—harbors any presence, other than through the play of signifiers that are themselves unstable and suggestive. On a broad scale, Derrida is refuting not only phonocentrism[ 2] but logocentrism as well. For Derrida, the ideal of Logos (the Word, presence) is false and incompetent because it simply perpetuates erroneous thinking that contradicts itself, as Derrida illustrates in his deconstructive reading of Sassure’s Course in General Linguistics . Logocentrism “has always placed in parenthesis, suspended, and suppressed for essential reasons, all free reflection on the origin and status of writing” ( Grammatology 43). In other words, logocentrism governs the very way we think because the dominant beliefs underpinning words, concepts, and essences are assumed and taken for granted. Deconstructing the relationship between speech and writing and showing that the relationship between the two depends on mutual influence allows Derrida to successfully combat phonocentrism. Indeed, Derrida goes so far as to assert that writing-in-general or arche-writing[ 3] may be the origin of speech and that it is only through the violence of hierarchy, not through any sort of worthiness, that speech is often privileged as an immediate and more accurate representation of communication. In accordance with Derridean logic, I argue that the importance of texts and textuality becomes vital to considerations of lived experience, how one is to understand one’s world and embodied state because texts are also material embodiments that display the way we think.

<3> However, language, whether written or spoken, cannot clearly denote any kind of Truth. Because the signified cannot directly relate to the signifier (Derrida’s big break with Saussurian structuralism), there cannot be a direct correspondence. Instead, signs are accompanied by traces, “the possibility common to all systems of signification” and that which “cannot be thought without thinking the retention of difference within a structure of reference where difference appears as such and thus permits a certain liberty of variations among the full terms” ( Grammatology 46-47). Like the idea of trace, Derrida’s concept of supplement undermines origin and presence. Indeed, when Derrida invokes supplément , he uses it to reference both its senses in French, substitution and addition. The supplement is always already present and signifying. According to Derrrida,

[T]he infinite process of supplementarity has always already infiltrated presence, always already inscribed there the space of repetition and the splitting of the self. Representation in the abyss of presence is not an accident of presence; the desire of presence is, on the contrary, born from the abyss (the indefinite multiplication) of representation, from the representation of representation, etc. ( Grammatology 163).

What marks Derrida’s proposed methodology[ 4] of studying language and texts is the emphasis on play and signification through a chain of signifiers that bespeak difference or similarity. But after a concept is deconstructed or a word is emptied, what does deconstruction hope to accomplish?[ 5] An emphasis on plurality is the effect, as well as a sort of celebration in dismantling what is embedded in a given construct as to be taken for granted. However, Derrida approves of Saussure’s concept of difference as the source of linguistic value, thereby keeping a tenet of structuralism for his poststructuralist project but improving upon structuralism in order to expand its purview.

<4> Because a writer is already working within a system, the writer “writes in a language and in a logic whose proper system, laws, and life his discourse by definition cannot dominate absolutely” ( Grammatology 158). In other words, we have been so constructed by the language and logic of a system that we often take for granted what seems to us to be commonsense or true. Even if one wishes to write against a language and its logic, to some extent the writer is constrained by the very system the writer is already working within and making sense of. Without the transcendental signified (the absence of the referent), Derrida’s famous tenet comes into play: “There is nothing outside of the text ” ( Grammatology 158). All that we know is confined to the context of text. For instance, what we know of Amy Lowell or Gertrude Stein in terms of their lives and their work is text and supplement; it matters how one is represented, and representation is always a text that can be read. If there is no pure signified, then it is senseless to attempt to go beyond the text to look for an absence or trace.

<5> Derrida’s concept of logocentrism and his strategies for a rigorous deconstructive reading have important ramifications for literary study in general. Literature[ 6], Derrida asserts, has often escaped a critical systematic reading which takes apart literature’s claim to transcendental meaning or concept. According to Derrida, “[L]iterary writing has, almost always and almost everywhere, according to some fashions and across very diverse ages, lent itself to this transcendent reading, in that search for the signified which we here put in question, not to annul it but to understand it within a system to which such a reading is blind” ( Grammatology 160). Thus, a deconstructive reading begins by taking as its a priori the absence of the referent. In other words, transcendent reading or meaning does not exist. But many critics of deconstruction argue that “if texts are indeed open to any number of readings with no possible appeal to standards of validity or truth—then [deconstructionists] can hardly complain that opponents have got them wrong, or that attacks on deconstruction amount to nothing more than a species of reductive travesty” (Norris 136). With charges of reductive and relative tendencies in reading and writing coming from both deconstructionists and non-deconstructionists and aimed at the opposing theoretical school, discussions of ways to read and interpret need to be addressed in the college classroom in order to introduce a new generation of readers and writers to the debate; otherwise, students, especially literature students, will surely become confused by conflicting teaching philosophies about how they are supposed to read and write.[ 7]

II. Implications for Trauma Studies

<6> Because Derrida’s system is not interested in reversing the power relations inherent in a binary construction, the threat of tyranny is kept at bay. Deconstruction will not switch the terms to privilege one term over the other. Moreover, ethnocentric tendencies can also be diffused in a deconstructive reading, allowing for an examination of the mechanisms at work in a given system. In short, a systematic deconstructive reading will expose a binary and then erase or rewrite the term. Differences are not subsumed, however, which is especially important in essentialist feminism or ethnic studies. Indeed, assimilation into phallogocentric or logocentric logic often results in problems or issues relating to trauma. For Derrida, différance is necessary in the formation of meaning: Meaning comes into being through difference (differ) and distinction (deferral). Essentially, all there is left of a supposed origin is a trace. The positive aspect of the trace for marginalized groups is its refusal of closure. The trace holds all of the possible signifieds open at the same time because signification works through a chain of signifieds and signifiers that constantly defer and refer to each other and another. Thus, there is no authoritative signified (or signifier) for the sign “woman” or “African American” or “rape victim” that can accurately capture the idea or experience of a term. All we know is related to us through significations resulting in representations, and if these representations are unstable, the possibility for change or transformation is always possible. Meaning is already textual because it has to be constructed and interpreted. Unfortunately, the voice or experience of victims cannot always be represented because they are at times unreadable.[ 8] As Derrida concurs,

[T]here is also the unreadability that stems from the violence of foreclosure, exclusion, all of history being a conflictual field of forces in which it is a matter of making unreadable, excluding, of positing by excluding, of imposing a dominant force by excluding, that is to say, not only by marginalizing, by setting aside the victims, but also by doing so in such a way that no trace remains of the victims, so that no one can testify to the fact that they are victims….” ( Points 389)

In the case of victims, their status may not be recognizable in a system that further victimizes through exclusion. This supposition is important to keep in mind because it is erroneous to assume there are no victims when victims are sometimes unable to be represented for the reasons Derrida cites. Although deconstruction cannot get beyond the system of signification, it can be used to study distinctions and binaries and how they work.[ 9] As such, the study of binaries, contested terms, and logocentric logic should be integral to trauma studies. After all, “trauma” itself is a binary (trauma/healthy), a contested term (who legitimately suffers from trauma?), and part of logocentric logic (a hierarchy of trauma exists). Surely “trauma” as a term of representation, a sign of a sign, needs to be examined as well before it can be rigorously applied in any given scholarship.

<7> In my own work, I am engaged in investigating the traumatic experience of women’s lives on the home front during WWI and WWII, and how the representations of an embodied subjectivity manifests itself in the writing of arguably marginalized writing by mostly marginalized authors.[ 10 ] It is necessary to take what I classify as, broadly, a poststructuralist approach because these female authors’ war experiences were marginalized and dismissed as unimportant, and the trauma they experienced and depict in their work has been rejected by phallogocentrism.[ 11 ] Each of the authors I have selected has work that is out of print, and the writings I have selected to study are certainly not canonical. The logocentric argument leveled at female civilian writers is that they could not have any realistic or significant experience of war; to find authentic accounts of trauma, one must turn to male combatants or men who had more knowledge of war and war-related trauma than women, simply because they are men. The trauma induced by war, not to mention war itself, has long been considered a male problem. I argue instead that female authors have valuable contributions to make to war and trauma literature; oftentimes, these authors expose false binary relationships while also illustrating the trauma and suffering experienced by women on the home front. In addition, I contend that female authors depict active female survivors of war to counter the phallogocentric notions of war as an active man’s experience or activity, thereby effectively positioning war within the sphere of the domestic to illustrate a differently gendered experience of war than what a traditional binary construction of war would have us believe.

<8> The power of a deconstructive reading lies in its discernment of binary structures and its concern in exposing and dismantling them. For example, in my project, men are not the only active participants in war, nor are they the only ones who legitimately suffer from war-related trauma. This logic is directly tied to phallogocentricism and is so prevalent that a body of work and writers has subsequently been dismissed as unimportant, even though the quality of writing is as good as, if not better than, that of their successful male contemporaries. In many ways, deconstruction is a very liberal and progressive project in its aim to evenly distribute privilege and diffuse power. The power of logocentrism, what legitimates binaries, is emphasized by Derrida. Logocentrism “has always placed in parenthesis, suspended, and suppressed all free reflection and status of the origin” ( Grammatology 43). The facility to get inside the inside/outside dichotomy defeats the binary but, in turn, presupposes potential trauma for the logocentric system. For instance, “[N]ature is affected—from without—by an overturning which modifies it in its interior, denatures it and obliges it to be separated from itself. Nature denaturing itself, being separated from itself , naturally gathering its outside and its inside, is catastrophe , a natural event that overthrows nature, or monstrosity , a natural deviation within nature” ( Grammatology 41). In other words, “the sign dominates the horizon of contemporary thinking because it is no longer regarded…as a secondary instance which represents or communicates a prior entity; on the other hand, just when it assumes this primary position, it moves into crisis” (Beardsworth 7). When the outside impinges on the inside, a breakdown of boundaries, albeit arbitrary, occurs, in which the inside must be reconfigured, resulting in a traumatic occurrence. It is relatively easy to see how trauma can ensue when boundaries are erased: What constitutes the inside privileged space and the outside corrupting force? When a binary breaks down, the monstrous outside must be understood as part of what defines and constitutes the inside, thus resulting in what some may consider to be a catastrophe. This situation plays out remarkably clearly in trauma studies, especially in Elaine Scarry’s work The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World . Scarry gives one such example from her chapter “The Structure of War: The Juxtaposition of Injured Bodies and Unanchored Issues”:

Driving down the road to X (freedom, authority), we suddenly found many people had stepped onto the road…and they were run over. To describe those who die as an ‘accidental entailment’ is as dismissive as to say they are a not particularly useful by-product in the first vocabulary. It is interesting that in the road metaphor…the human mind comes very close to articulating and understanding the nature of injury of war, but then shifts the metaphor so that the very thing that must have been intuited when the mind reached for that metaphor slipped from view. (74)

The outside has been incorporated into the inside, and the result is a catastrophe—and yet the mind reels at being confronted with horror and wants to shift terms to diffuse the situation. Scarry argues that war simultaneously inflicts and disowns injury on civilians and combatants alike. According to Scarry, the structure of war is such that “the main purpose and outcome of war is injuring” (63), and yet war requires “the eventual disowning of the injury so that its attributes can be transferred elsewhere” (64). Indeed, would we have war at all if the structure of war were laid open and the destructive and traumatizing effects on male combatants and female civilians exposed? What if war were no longer considered to be a male activity? War is comprised of many dangerous logocentric binaries: war/peace, male/female, active/passive, conservative/liberal, necessary/unnecessary, patriotic/unpatriotic, etc. It is imperative that these binaries be deconstructed in order to understand the terms and structures that engender war.

<9> Amy Lowell’s poem “Dreams in War Time” (1919) deconstructs the patriarchal binaries underpinning war and war rhetoric. It focuses on the traumatic experience of war through the dreams of a female persona. Rather than a political, male activity fought in a contained battlefield, “Dreams in War Time” depicts war as an unconstrained activity that explodes binaries; war permeates the domestic sphere and even the unconscious dreams of the female persona in the poem. We know the persona is female (and Lowell’s personas usually are) because she is introduced in the first stanza as wandering through “a house of many rooms,” signifying the domestic economy, a conventional representation of femininity through association of place. But Lowell subverts traditional femininity through her invocation of a rose, a traditional symbol of female beauty and sexuality. The persona is trailing her fingers along a wall when

Suddenly my hand shot through an open window,
And the thorn of a rose I could not see
Pricked it so sharply
That I cried aloud. (5-8)

The injury is symbolic of war injury, and it is the rose that attacks and gives offense or offers defense for survival purposes. As such, women are rewritten through this rose imagery as assailants, capable of the business of war, injury, but women are also constituted both as survivors and as victims. Thus, women feasibly fill both roles available during wartime, active battle (i.e., survival on the home front) and passive victimization.

<10> Moreover, in the second stanza, the persona concerns herself with the work of digging a grave. She exerts “infinite care” (10) in preparing the grave, exerting great effort in the digging of it. However, it is her own grave that she is preparing:

I stooped, and dug, and never turned,
For behind me,
On the dried leaves,
My own face lay like a white pebble,
Waiting. (16-20)

War causalities include civilians, those managing the home front economy during wartime, all the while waiting for the traumatic ramifications of war to manifest and wreck havoc. There is no distinction between war and peace because war has no contained boundaries; in this poem, it is only a matter of time before civilians are implicated in the wartime death toll.

<11> Gender is not a marker that signifies in any important manner. Being female does not protect one from the ravages of war since the home cannot be a sanctuary. The persona’s home is damaged by her neighbors, mimicking the rape of land that is the province of war. The neighbors celebrate the destruction, but the persona “covered my face and wept,/For ashes are not beautiful/Even in the dawn” (41-43). War destroys and demoralizes, and the persona is quick to note the trauma she endures over the ashes that once represented part of her home. The persona actively experiences war through injury and grieving, even though she is a civilian and removed from the front lines (where the activity of war, a battle between men, is conventionally thought to take place in the traditional war narrative). The conception of peace fostered by women on the home front during wartime, while men are fighting war, is erroneous because the binaries are unstable constructions that prove false.

<12> Lowell emphasizes futility in assigning gender to an active or passive role in regards to war. Women actively participate in and experience war, and Lowell rewrites the binaries of war/peace, male/female, active/passive in stanza five to include women in what has been written and gendered as male experience in war literature or narrative.

I followed a procession of singing girls
Who danced to the glitter of tambourines
Where the street turned at a lighted corner,
I caught the purple dress of one of the dancers,
But, as I grasped, it tore,
And the purple dye ran from it
Like blood
Upon the ground. (44-51)

Like the stereotypical parade of men marching off to war amid music and fanfare, the girls march off to their foreshadowed destruction, foreshadowed by the torn dress and the blood simile. They, too, are participating in the war effort, but their effort is metaphorically portrayed. The closing of this stanza with the image of blood running into the ground suggests the injury and death brought by war, regardless of gender and geography.

<13> Even patriotism implodes in “Dreams in War Time.” The persona exhibits staunch patriotism as represented by her eager tending to her kite in the last stanza. The kite is reminiscent of the United States flag with its stars and white and red coloring. Although a female civilian and a civilian who has suffered from the war, the persona revels in her patriotism, proving that civilian status does not automatically translate into unpatriotic behavior or attitudes (just as serving in the armed forces does not necessarily translate into patriotic behavior or patriotic attitudes). The persona’s friends urge her to take in her kite, arguing that a storm is brewing and danger is on the horizon. The danger of the brewing storm suggests war, and the persona’s happiness in flying her patriotic kite and displaying her patriotism in the face of war and contention bespeaks the depth of her patriotic feelings. However, the lightening appears and strikes down the persona’s kite. The end of the poem (“But still I walked on,/In the drowning rain,/Slowly winding up the string” [75-77]) is wonderfully ambiguous, denying an easy either/or binary position in relation to the persona’s attitudes towards patriotism and war. The persona, like a soldier, preserves in the face of war in spite of the promise of death (“drowning rain”), and yet we do not know whether she remains patriotic as she slowly collects the remnants of her patriotism, symbolized by the flag. Throughout “Dreams in War Time,” Lowell successfully explodes—in an especially resonant manner since Lowell herself lived through WWI—false binaries concerning war rhetoric and war experience.

<14> War rhetoric and war experience, text and textuality, are closely intertwined. Derrida has always been clear about his stance on text and textuality. For Derrida, there cannot be an outside; our own interpretive practices concerning how to read, for instance, bodies or a textbook, all pivot on our ability to interpret signs within a system and the ability to tease out contradictions and multiplicities in meaning/signification. However, Derrida cautions that, while there is nothing beyond the text, reading strategies must be learned in order to read both the book, like Derrida’s own critical work, and a cultural sign, like a body. Indeed, Derrida says explicitly, “That’s why South Africa and apartheid are, like you and me, part of this general text, which is not to say that it can be read the way one reads a book” (“But, Beyond” 167-8). Bodies are already being read, whether constructed in a political (con)text like black bodies in racist settings or read as texts into texts, as in Amy Lowell’s poem “Spring Day,” in which some of her reading public ridiculed the idea of an overweight lesbian taking a bath outdoors in the first section of the poem, “Bath”: The suggestion was scandalous because Lowell’s body was read into the text of the poem as the text, exposed in a sort of palimpsest design, and the effect was condemned as indecent, thereby making her and her poetry readings notorious. Bodies as texts have long been read and received as such, but the rigorous reading method of deconstruction that makes explicit the mechanisms or structures underpinning our assumptions or understanding about text and textuality is not as palatable to detractors of deconstruction—probably because there are political implications of a deconstructive critique.

<15> For instance, Derrida argues that deconstructive readings and writings are “also effective or active (as one says) interventions, in particular political and institutional interventions that transform contexts without limiting themselves to theoretical or constative utterances even though they must also produce such utterances” (“But, Beyond” 168). These interventions lend themselves to trauma studies. For instance, one of the influences in the formation of apartheid is logocentrism, the prevailing system of Word/presence akin to hegemony when pushed to its extreme limits. Derrida demonstrates in his open letter to McClintock and Nixon that Europe and the U.S. were implicated in the South African situation of apartheid (see especially his poignant “Postscript” in this regard). However, unlike the hegemonic influence of logocentrism, any given system, such as economics, is fraught with contradictions. And contradictions and multiplicity are precisely what deconstructionists prefer to revel in because acknowledging such conditions perhaps can stave away a monstrous, centralized power structure; there are other factors at play, and exposing the workings of the structure may begin the work to dismantle it. Asserts Derrida, “[I]n fact deconstruction begins by deconstructing logocentrism, the linguistics of the word, and this very enclosure itself. On one side and the other, people get impatient when they see that deconstructive practices are also and first of all political and institutional practices” (“But, Beyond” 168). Rather than being apolitical or ahistorical as many detractors of deconstruction have argued, deconstruction is, from Derrida’s perspective, immensely political and historical. Indeed, how can it be otherwise when the very material deconstruction analyzes or concerns itself with is already political, historical, and overdetermined?

<16> In a political move, Derrida wishes to retain the term apartheid as a word that witnesses and is circulated when necessary so that the calculated and regimented monstrosity of apartheid will not be repeated in the future: “And if I ask that we keep the word, it is only for the future, for memory, in men’s and women’s memory, for when the thing will have disappeared” (“But, Beyond” 159). In this way, then, the mark of trauma is imprinted on the word apartheid to function as testimony to the atrocities of the meaning of apartheid ; when considered in its constructed (false) totality, the sign will resonate with the historical ramifications.

<17> To extend Derrida’s work, one could argue that the body is a battlefield. As Judith Butler observes, “To be female is, according to that distinction, a facticity which has no meaning, but to be a woman, to compel the body to conform to an historical idea of ‘woman,’ to induce the body to become a cultural sign, to materialize oneself in obedience to an historically delimited possibility, and to do this as a sustained and repeated corporeal project” (405). The body becomes intelligible when it is marked with cultural meanings; there is no essentialist presence in Butler’s writing on embodiment. Along with Derrida, Butler cites “social temporality” (402) as crucial to signification.[ 12 ] When Derrida was asked in an interview about his seemingly disengaged position in the political field, he replied: “Ah, the ‘political field’! But I could reply that I think of nothing else, however things might appear” ( Points 86). Later on, Derrida explains that deconstruction is not limited to a certain domain or study by a certain type of scholar: “The singularity of philosophy is that a domain is not given to it in advance. If there is philosophy, it is a mode of questioning or of research that does not let itself be closed up at the outset in a region of discourse or in a region of knowledge” ( Points 376). As such, deconstruction is not necessarily apolitical; it can be successfully appropriated by other discourses or knowledge communities, such as feminism or trauma studies. From a deconstructionist point of view, the body is a sign that must be read and interpreted. In this process, the body becomes a text. Especially in trauma studies, bodies are violated, contested, and injured: These bodies can be read and explored through deconstruction. In order to gain a better understanding of how trauma is construed and perhaps why trauma is inflicted or experienced by a certain subject, one can employ Derrida’s critical reading strategies and concepts to traumatic situations.

<18> Properly applied, Derrida’s notions of logocentrism, especially with regards to war activity and rhetoric, can shed light on the situation and terms of victim and victimizer. Deconstruction enables the reader to examine subjectivity and power relations, especially with binary structures, and this critical methodology allows for an understanding of how and why violence takes form. Ideally, deconstructionists desire to see a diffusing of power; the binary terms are dismantled to show a plethora of terms and subject positions that speak to and define the former privileged and disenfranchised terms. New ways of reading and understanding would open up and counter existing ideas and structures and perhaps offer a new system of logic. In our time of violence, it is imperative that no terms or structures go unquestioned or unexamined. And, according to Derrida, trauma is something that we can never avoid; the future always brings the promise of monsters. According to Derrida, “[T]he future is necessarily monstrous: the figure of the future, that is, that which can only be surprising, that for which we are not prepared, you see, is heralded by species of monsters. A future that would not be monstrous would not be a future” ( Points 386-7).[ 13 ]

Works Cited:
Beardsworth, Richard. Derrida and the Political . New York: Routledge, 1996.
Borradori, Giovanna. Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida . Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2003.
Butler, Judith. “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory.” Writing on the Body: Female Embodiment and Feminist Theory . Eds. Katie Conboy, Nadia Medina, and Sarah Stanbury. New York: Columbia UP, 1997. 401-17.
Derrida, Jacques. “But, Beyond…(Open Letter to Anne McClintock and Rob Nixon).” Trans. Peggy Kamuf. Critical Inquiry 13 (Fall 1986): 155-70.
---. Of Grammatology . Trans. Gayatri Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1998.
---. Points…Interviews, 1974-1994. Ed. Elisabeth Weber. Trans. Peggy Kamuf, et al. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1995.
Graff, Gerald. Beyond the Culture Wars: How Teaching the Conflicts Can Revitalize American Education . New York: Norton, 1992.
Lowell, Amy. “Dreams in War Time.” 1919. The Complete Poetical Works of Amy Lowell . Boston: Houghton, 1955.
Norris, Christopher. What’s Wrong with Postmodernism: Critical Theory and the Ends of Philosophy . Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1990.
Scarry, Elaine. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World . New York: Oxford UP, 1985.

Notes:
[1 ] Derrida defines the scientific study of writing as grammatology. See his footnote ( Grammatology n.4, 323). Derrida wishes to distance semiology—what he replaces with his “grammatology” ( Grammatology 51)—from linguistics. (Unfortunately, he fails to distinguish how exactly grammatology differs from semiology; it may simply be a matter of renaming and emptying out the meaning of one term to give its value to another.) According to Derrida, linguistics cannot claim scientificity when it is informed by phonology and logocentrism. He proposes grammatology as a corrective because it will constitute the science of signs, which will “give to the theory of writing the scope needed to counter logocentric repression and the subordination to linguistics” ( Grammatology 51). [ ^]
[2 ] Phonocentrism is the idea that the signifier, the sound image, has some sort of natural bond with the signified, the concept; the concept of phonocentrism is also used to regulate writing as something secondary, imitative, and monstrous in its corruptive influence. [ ^]
[3 ] Arche-writing is the “general possibility of inscription” (Beardsworth 8). For Derrida, trace is “the necessary violence of any mark, and, thus of any institution” (Beardsworth 50). [ ^]
[4 ] I refer to deconstruction variously as Derrida’s methodology, analysis, and critique, but Derrida himself refers to it as “intervention” because “deconstruction’s work is so minutely tailored to the specificity of its object” (Borradori 138). [ ^]
[5 ] In her discerning book Philosophy in a Time of Terror , Giovanna Borradori defines the project of deconstruction: 1. identify conceptual constructions; 2. highlight hierarchical ordering of pairs; 3. invert or subvert ordering, “inversion reveals that the hierarchical arrangement reflects certain strategic and ideological choices rather than a description of features intrinsic to the pairs”; 4. produce a third term for the binary construction, “which complicates the original load-bearing structure beyond recognition” (138). [ ^]
[6 ] For Derrida, [W]hat we call production is necessarily a text, the system of a writing and of a reading which we know is ordered around its own blind spot” ( Grammatology 164). [ ^]
[7 ] See Gerald Graff’s Beyond the Culture Wars: How Teaching the Conflicts Can Revitalize American Education . Graff argues that students are exposed to conversations revolving around texts, ideas, and values throughout their coursework, and students cannot begin to enter the conversation until they understand the parameters of the debate, what the terms are or even what the debate is about. Notes Graff, “If it goes without saying in [Young Female Professor’s] class that literature is inevitably political and it goes without saying in [Old Male Professor’s] class that such a view is preposterous, the results are likely to be profoundly confusing for the student who goes from one to the other” (57-8). [ ^]
[8 ] Derrida associates the value of the perfect victim with what is unreadable. “One of the meanings of what is called a victim (a victim of anything or anyone whatsoever) is precisely to be erased in its meaning as victim. The absolute victim is a victim who cannot even protest. One cannot even identify the victim as victim. He or she cannot even present himself or herself as such. He or she is totally excluded or covered over by language, annihilated by history, a victim one cannot identify” (Derrida, Points 389). Derrida identifies the tragedy of 9/11 as “an unnamable event” (Borradori 140). [ ^]
[9 ] In fact, Judith Butler agrees that the most important task feminists can take to liberate the categorical exclusion of women is the dissection of binary relationships: “Yet, in this effort to combat the invisibility of women as a category feminists run the risk of rendering visible a category which may or may not be representative of the concrete lives of women. As feminists, we have been less eager, I think, to consider the status of the category itself and, indeed, to discern the conditions of oppression which issue from an unexamined reproduction of gender identities which sustain discrete and binary categories of man and woman” (407). [ ^]
[10 ] In particular, I have selected the following authors and genres to study for my book project: Amy Lowell’s war poetry, H.D.’s war poetry and autobiographical writing, Gertrude Stein’s war novels and autobiographical writing, and Djuna Barnes’s letters and novel. [ ^]
[11 ] I completely agree with Derrida in his interview, located in the chapter “Passages—from Traumatism to Promise” in Points when he discusses the texts that are initially rejected as aberrant: “Texts and discourses that provoke at the outset reactions of rejection, that are denounced precisely as anomalies or monstrosities are often texts that, before being in turn appropriated, assimilated, acculturated, transform the nature of the field of reception, transform the nature of social and cultural experience, historical experience. All of history has shown that each time an event has been produced, for example in philosophy or poetry, it took the form of the unacceptable, or even of the intolerable, of the incomprehensible, that is, of a certain monstrosity” (387). Amy Lowell was ridiculed in her time for performing her poetry as an overweight woman who insisted on writing poetry that was feminist and concerned with embodiment. Attention to the literature treating H.D.’s painful war experience has been usurped by canonical attention focusing on her early (and less contentious) Imagist work. Gertrude Stein’s novel Mrs. Reynolds was dismissed as treating war too superficially because the entire novel is dedicated to a female civilian’s experience of war. Djuna Barnes’s novel Nightwood contains a motif of war, and yet too few critics have mentioned the influence of war on Nightwood . Barnes herself died in virtual obscurity after T.S. Eliot broke ties with her and refused to champion her later work. [ ^]
[12 ] For Butler, “[G]ender is in no way a stable identity of locus of agency from which various acts proceede [sic]; rather, it is an identity tenuously constituted in time —an identity instituted through a stylized repetition of acts ” (402; first italic emphasis mine). [ ^]
[13 ] Derrida says the future must be monstrous; otherwise, it would be a “predictable, calculable, and programmable tomorrow”