As my title suggests, I am going to interrogate Susan Jarratt’s notion of a “feminist sophistic” (Rereading the Sophists). When I was invited to write a review-essay, I was also asked to discuss my own work in terms of a Third Sophistic. In dis/order “to do” both Jarratt (Feminist Sophistic) and Vitanza (Third Sophistic), I will read both semiotically across the other, that which we ­Sophists would both attend to. To begin with, however, it is problematic for anyone to discuss Sophistic-anything today, since Edward Schiappa has recently told us that the Sophists do not exist (“Sophistic Rhetoric: Oasis or Mirage?”). By now, those of us who are interested in the Sophists are aware of the Schiappa-Poulakos exchanges (debates?) on the Sophists (Schiappa, “Neo-Sophistic”; “History and Neo-Sophistic”; and J. Poulakos, “Interpret­ing”). My purpose is not to add to those debates, but to listen to what is not being said, to recall what has been deflected more importantly here by Jarratt, and then to attempt to report it and to rethink the conditions for the possibilities of hearing what, heretofore, still remains ever silenced when we­Sophists talk about the “Sophists” or Sophistic-anything. I am going to pass over Schiappa¹ who is more philological and philosophical and less sophis­ticated than Jarratt. Again, my purpose is to listen with an ear not yet attempted in our deliberations on the Sophists. Derrida says, “The ear is uncanny. Uncanny is what it is; double is what it can become. . . “(Ear 32-33); I say, I desire to listen byway of neither right nor left ears but byway of a third ear. Sara Kofman says that a third ear is what Nietzsche calls a “feminine” ear (“Nietzsche,” 48). This third ear is not essentially-biologically nor is it strategically female. It is a Third Dionysian ear, neither male nor female, but beyond disjunctive thinking altogether (see Kofman).

I. A Feminist Sophistic

The Liberal Temper: In an earlier characterization of Jarratt’s historiograph­ical principles, I interpreted Jarratt as a “liberal” (“Taking A-Count” 207), by which I mean that her reading of the Sophists is somewhat comparable to Eric Havelock’s reading; to wit, the Sophists express “a liberal temper,” or a penchant for democracy (see ch. 7).2 It can be productive to see Jarratt in this tradition of thinking, for she is an advocate of a radical democracy, that is, for the inclusion of the excluded, yet exclusively women. Jarratt’s liberal pedagogy is linked up with what is labeled today as “critical pedagogy,” that of Paulo Freire, Henry Giroux, Stanley Aronowitz, and Ira Shor (Rereading 107-12), which appears to pay its due to women as well as men.³

If Jarratt’s expressing a liberal temper, how specifically so? There are any number of ways, but I would concentrate on two: The first is by way of a middle term, nomos, to be placed between the present-day extremes of mythos and logos, or orality and literacy; the second, by way of strategic misreadings.

A Middle Term: The search for a middle term—though, not the excluded middle—is crucial for an understanding of Jarratt’s goal of emancipation. Instead of attempting to choose sides in the mythos/logos or orality/literacy debate, Jarratt situates herself historiographically by way of a middle term, nomos. Starting with social-political history, Jarratt argues, from Jean-Pierre Vernant, for an event that can be described as the historical refiguring of “political space” during the Mycenaean period. Instead of being deter­mined by way of king to council to warriors and landowners, another political locus came about. Jarratt/Vernant say, “villagers, each holding under a feudal arrangement a section of land called adamos, met in a common space” for the purposes of “negotiating” (Jarratt 40; Vernant 32-34). They continue: “It was clearly not the interior of the palace but rather a ‘middle space,’ in which ‘those who contended with words... became [even] in this hierarchical society a class of equals”’ (40; Vernant 46). This space, Jarratt suggests, “created contexts for rhetorical discourse” (40). Eventually, statutes (thesmoi, from the gods) are replaced by democratic reform (nomos) (41), which can be followed linguistically. An older form of the word, nomos, meant “pas­ture,” then “habitation,” and most importantly “habitual practice, usage, or custom” (41). Nomos becomes the locus of homologia. As nomos is refigured as middle space, so is the agent refigured. Jarratt now has a budding ethical subject.

Stategic Misreadings: At this point, Jarratt moves us from ancient Greece to our contemporary scene of logo/phallocentrism, which still favors a binary (machine) and hierarchical way of structuring society and language. Males are privileged over females; logic over emotions; history over fiction; mind over body; philosophy over sophistics; substance over style. (And oasis over mirage.) It is necessary still today not only to include women but also to rethink logos as “discourses of the ‘other”’ (63). In an attempt to further expose these exclusions, Jarratt turns to thework that “has gone on under the names of rhetoric in Nietzsche, of post-structuralist theory, which also claims Nietzsche as a forerunner, and of feminism” (Rereading 66).~ Jarratt ignores Nietzschean texts and concentrates on Derrida’s reading Nietzsche’s reading (Spurs) on the feminine, and on Gayatri Spivak’s (“Displacement”) reading Derrida’s reading Nietzsche. This is all done very exclusively, as we will hear.⁵ What Jarratt is questioning through Spivak’s reading is both deconstruction and poststructuralism—whether or not they can be helpful to feminists, or to a reclamation of women and a female-sophistic style of discourse that would be appropriate for writing histories of rhetoric and for political discourse (in the middle space, nomos). Jarratt’s answer is that deconstruction and poststructuralism cannot be helpful (66-69). There is, in Jarratt’s and many other feminists’ understandings, the problem of undecidability in deconstruction.⁶

Jarratt calls on Spivak’s critique of Derrida in “Displacement and the Discourse of Woman.” About deconstruction, Spivak writes: “A deconstructive discourse, even as it criticizes phallocentrism or the sover­eignty of consciousness (and thus seeks to displace or ‘feminize’ itself according to a certain logic), must displace the figure of the woman twice over” (173). About Derrida, she writes:

What I take Spivak to be saying is that deconstruction in the hands of a man, even Derrida, can only uncover for a man “‘his own mistake”’ (173). It is important to note—for Jarratt does not point this out—that Spivak is quoting Derrida’s own autocritique in his own words.⁷ For Spivak, however, to “go somewhere else with it” (she does not say, without it) does not necessarily mean she must abandon deconstruction, as Jarratt would have us hear Spivak. I take the phrase “go somewhere else with it” to mean Spivak says that she must do something other than what Derrida does with deconstruction in relation to the feminine. While deconstruction will not remove a male from his own history but only make him aware, Spivak does not need to be made aware. (That is, until a few years later, when she writes a sequel to this article!) Therefore, if Jarratt calls on Spivak’s proper name here, we need to be aware that Spivak is not saying No to deconstruction. (It is understandable that many feminists do not want to be Derridaughters[⁸]; hence, the political necessity to reverse such a familial linkage and to displace it altogether. But let us hear it as such a strategy, namely, the putting of words in someone a mouth so that we might hear by way of the dividing practice of either right or left ears.)

But there is more at stake here than Spivak’s attitude toward deconstruction, and that is how what she says in this 1983 article on displace­ment is to be heard—either as a ground upon which to read in a feminist way or as one deconstruction before yet another or as both. Yes, I’m bringing up the issues of appropriation and undecidability. After all, as good Sophists, we should all insist on the virtues of dissoi logoi. Therefore, I want to focus on Derrida’s notion of relever, or turning the lever, so as to promote interpreta­tions that serve readers’ interests (see Derrida, Margins 88-108; 123-36). It is a matter now of learning how to hear what else is becoming-said. And yet, in dis/order to hear byway of not just two ears but a ‘third,’ we have to realize that the interests to be attended to are vaster than either female or male. Hence, my interests in going beyond simple dissoi logoi toward dissoi paralogoi.⁹ In relation to the question concerning undecideability, I want to turn a lever, showing how Spivak in a later article turns a lever so as to resituate herself via Derridean deconstruction and its reading of the question of woman.

Spivak Reconsidered: The essay that is a sequel is published six years after “Displacement and the Discourse of Woman” and is entitled “Feminism and deconstruction, again: negotiatingwith unacknowledged masculinism.” The article is difficult to summarize because often Spivak’s meaning comes from juxtaposition and quick reversals that are only reversed once ever again. We are fortunate because Spivak abstracts her own article:

What comes through in Spivak’s summary and article is that deconstruction is a way of reading and examining (political) programs and not a program in itself. To discard deconstruction because it does not have a political program in itself, or because it cannot found such a program, would be pointless; for deconstruction, in its strategies of reversal and displacement, in its various conditions, makes a politics possible, and yes, a materialist politics against the dominant discourse (see Spivak, Post-Colo­nial 46-47; 104-05). Those of us in rhetoric im/proper need to understand that the argument to reject deconstruction would be comparable to the argument to reject rhetoric itself because it has no content, truth, and politics! It is also important to understand, however, why Jarratt does not go to rhetoric to establish the conditions for the possibility of a feminist liberation, and why, instead, she, byway of an exploratory analogy, goes to the Sophists-as-alien (other) to rethink the conditions for a feminist refiguring of The History of Rhetoric. Both deconstruction (reversal and displace­ment) and especially sophistic rhetorics (dissoi logoi, parataxis) determine, underdetermine, and overdetermine content. We may displace deconstruction and traditional rhetoric but will have to replace either or both with the return of the different-yet-same.

That some writers slavishly imitate deconstruction and sophistic rheto­ric for the sheer performative play for play’s sake is inexcusable. However, some of us examine, by way of performance, our colleagues’ political­theoretical-performative activities. Let me claim in nested-boxes that some of us (men and women) examine the conditions of the conditions for the possibilities of becoming political. Having said as much, however, I am persuaded that a man such as V.V. cannot be a male feminist, if for no other reason than on provisionary ethical grounds: Women should determine their own past and destiny.¹¹ It may very well be that the only way that we-men can “help” is to self-de(con)struct the idea of masculinity in dis/respect to writing The History of Rhetoric. Spivak’s strategic essentialism suggests that this is the case. I recall her advice to a male student¹²:

In suggesting the possibility of a male speaking, Spivak goes so far as to attack topoi that would exclude as “pernicious position[s]” (62; cf. Fuss). Spivak does not mince terms: “I don’t have any problems with starting from the position that ‘Women are universally oppressed by men.’ . . . but when it becomes a door-closer, that’s when I begin to have trouble” (Post-Colonial 117). Spivak’s sophistic brilliance lies in recognizing our means of saying No to both MW and F/M ways of excluding.

Spivak in her summary of her argument points out that deconstruction is not a program in itself, but the means of perpetually investigating such programs. (I would remind us that Spivak places faith in Derrida’s search in The Ear of the Other for the means of a “new politics of reading” that does “not excuse a text for its historical aberrations,” and expects us to “admit that there is something in the text which can produce these readings” [Post-Colonial 107; Derrida Ear 3-38].) The other thing that Spivak’s summary points out is the necessity to negotiate with structures of violence and, there­fore, her own complicity. Negotiation is a word that Jarratt herself identifies with (Rereading 40-42), though perhaps she does not wish to negotiate byway of, or to admit that she is complicit with, Derridean deconstruction, but a Spivakian deconstruction, whatever that difference might be. Male or Female? Mirage or Oasis?

Spivak Reconsidered (again): What is it that Spivak now understands about Derridean reading practices? She says that it is the concept-metaphor woman. This understanding is crucial, for Spivak is concerned in this article as usual with female sexuality—specifically, its pre-ontological, ontological/ epistemological, and axiological conditions. (Again, it is such conditions of possibility that deconstruction uncovers and examines.) What Spivak ac­knowledges is that whoever deals with female sexuality at the level of the pre­ontological—again, whoever, which, I take, to include both males and fe­males, for Spivak is speaking of Jacqueline Rose and of herself, too—whoever deals with female sexuality must inevitably use this pre-ontological notion of female sexuality, or concept-metaphor woman, and must use it “inside male-dominated historical narratives of propriation” (“Feminism” 210).

Spivak offers no alternative to rethinking woman outside of this narra­tive.¹³ This concept-metaphor woman in male-dominated narratives con­tributes, she claims, to “the emergence of woman as ‘catachresis,’ as a metaphor without a literal referent standing in for a concept that is the condition of conceptuality” (211). What Spivak suggests here is that narra­tive per Se^t4 is “masculine” and consequently creates the effect/supplement of woman as catachresis. However, what Jarratt and few critics bother to point out—and yet Spivak does—is that in Derridean thinking the critique of phallocentrism, in search of The Truth (of the end of man), began with a critique of anthropomorphism. Spivak says, “Derrida. . . see[s] that anthropos is defined as ‘man’ as a sign that has no history. So Derrida then begins to worry about the history of ‘woman’ “ (Post-Colonial 14; cf. 53; see Derrida, Margins 109~36).15

Spivak continues: “Any programme [feminist(s) or otherwisej which assumes continuity between the subject of epistemology/ontology and that of axiology (the assigning ofvalues) must also assume that the latter is a referent for the former” (“Feminism” 211). In more Derridean-Nietzschean terms, now, Spivak says:

To ask the question What is X (Sophist, woman)? is already to have answered it, because the pre-ontological terms predetermine the answer to the question. Hence, the violence of negative dialectic! Similarly, as Althusser/Spivak say, we think ideology first, history second (Spivak, Post-Colonial 54). We must attend to the naming of Sophist and woman and others, but how we attend is always already predetermined, no matter who we are, by way of structures/narratives of violence. (Is it more clear now that liberation requires more than a middle space! and that, according to Spivak, there is no getting away, at least in negative essentialism, from structures of violence!)

At this point in the article, therefore, Spivak deconstructs her previous position. Pulling another lever, she says:

Therefore, again, the question: Can deconstruction be used in naming of woman? Spivak says Yes, because it is best suited for negotiating with structures/narratives of violence. The strategy is misreadings or essentialism. The steps are reversal and displacement. Their source? Jarratt claims Spivak (Rereading 70; Spivak, “Displacement” 186). Spivak, Derrida,¹⁶ who claims Nietzsche and Heidegger.

Having taken note of Spivak’s reversal of her earlier reading, let us look at how Spivak returns to and refigures Derrida’s reading in Spurs of Nietzsche’s proposition concerning “woman.” (Jarratt rejects Derrida’s reading outright [see Rereading 66-67].) Spivak says that we-men and we-women can “read Nietzsche’s text in a way that suggests that the name of woman makes the question of propriation indeterminate.” (Here, to make it indeterminate is good, at least, initially.) Spivak continues: “Let us look at the Nietzschean sentence: ‘there is no truth of woman, but because of that abyssal self­-apartness of truth, this non-truth is “truth””’ (“Feminism” 211). This passage from Derrida’s Nietzsche is Spivak’s translation. Barbara Harlow’s translation is different: “There is no such thing as the truth of woman, but it is because of that abyssal divergence of the truth, because that untruth is “within. Woman is but one name for that untruth of truth” (Spurs 51). This last sentence, “Woman is but one name for that untruth of truth,” allows us to hear that “woman” is a concept-metaphor, which Spivak did not earlier recognize.

After reading this proposition on the question of propriation—Spivak suggests, as Nietzsche does—that the concept-metaphor “woman” can be displaced/replaced with another concept-metaphor.¹⁸ It can be replaced with “man,” which had always already been replaced with “woman,” because of the impossibility of anthropos/”man.”¹⁹ What was previously privileged becomes supplementary. Other terms that “truth” can be replaced with, besides “man” and “woman,” are “power,” “writing,” and “differance.” (We have nothing but concept-metaphors.) Now that it is understood that “woman” is another concept-metaphor, all is interchangeable. Such is simple negative deconstruction.²⁰ And yet...

While such a deconstructive move might be good for we-men, Spivak argues, it is not good for we-women, or many feminists, because such indeterminism (lack of substantial woman²¹) makes it impossible to be political. In this way, apparently, once the truth of “woman” becomes a concept-metaphor and no longer a fixed concept, it must be reclaimed and restabilized for strategic, political purposes. While we-deconstructionist­men, then, would be indeterminate, we-feminist-women would be strategi­cally determinate. Hence, the theater of a Feminist Sophistic!

Or so it might seem, for as I have been pointing out Spivak is not necessarily marking this point about deconstruction and strategy in this later article. She writes: “My previous position on this essay of Derrida’s [Spurs] was polemical. I suggested that it was not correct to see the figure of woman as a sign for indeterminacy... . But today negotiating, I want to give the assent for the moment to Derrida’s argument” (emphasis mine, “Feminism” 212). “For the moment” is a typical Spivakean qualification made even about strategic feminism: “I must say I am an essentialist from time to time” (emphasis mine, Post-Colonial 11; cf. 32-34, 117-118; and “in a Word”). This qualification is typical of deconstructive processes. Spivak always has to put into question the name of the name (see Derrida, Margins 27), which is guarding the question, whatever the question of being or becoming might be.

Now comes Spivak’s very different move. While she admits deconstruction cannot be done without and is willing to negotiate with it, she announces that the concept-metaphor “woman” must be done away with! (We are now a long way from where Jarratt begins and ends with Spivak! Are you, Dear Reader, hearing something different yet?) While Spivak will continue to use other such metaphors as “power” and “writing,” she will no longer here employ “woman.” Why? Because couched in the midst of structures of violence, the term begins to take on masculine characteristics.²² Spivak says: “We must remember that this particular name, the name of woman, misfires for femi­nism. Yet, a feminism that takes the traditionalist line against deconstruction [comparable to Jarratt’s?] falls into a historical determinism where ‘history’ becomes a gender-fetish.” She continues: “Guarding this particular name for the graphematic structure is perhaps the most essentialist move of all.... If we lose the ‘name’ of woman for writing, there is no cause for lament.” (Spivak’s emphasis, “Feminism” 217).

Ironically, therefore, it is the un/name of “woman” that challenges not just men but women themselves. Losing the name of woman (in both senses) does not mean, however, losing deconstruction. Spivak writes: “Let us say that we have to deconstruct our desire for the impasse, neutralize the name of ‘woman’ for deconstruction and be deconstructive feminists in that sense. If we want to make political claims that are more useful all round than the general bourgeois academic feminist toothsome euphoria this seems now to be the only way” (218). To recapitulate: What must be lost is both a naive notion of woman-as-real and a deconstructive notion of “woman”-as-con­cept-metaphor. Spivak is displacing anything known as “womanly” or “feminine,” and yet is not, for she engages in a replacing (a negotiating and a sublating) of something, so that she might continue the struggle against sexisms.

Spivak/Derrida and Derrida/Spivak: Now, let us ask, What does it mean for Spivak (and not Jarratt) to negotiate? Or as Spivak also puts it, say Yes to the text twice? As I have tried to suggest—at times, in terms of Jarratt’s language; at other times, in my Own—to negotiate is to situate ourselves in the middle space of such concept-metaphors as differance, though not as “wom­an.” This is important: For to say that any of us does not negotiate in this way, but practices strategic misreadings in another way, and without “differance,” such as Jarratt claims must be done, is to forget where the conditions of such possible misreadings come from, unnamely, differance. (Nomos, as a middle term, is not differance, which is the excluded middle!) Therefore, it may be possible to forget the concept-metaphor “woman” but not that of “différance” (or “writing,” “power”). Spivak does not forget, for she is well aware that to forget is finally to fall into being determined by conditions in some prior but nameless sense.²³ Spivak writes: “Differance is. . . only one name for the irreducible double bind that allows the very possibility of difference(s). Différance as the ungraspable ground of propriation is.. . sexual difference (“Feminism” 214). Sexual difference? How many? One, Two, or Count­less?²⁴

What I do not understand in Spivak’s discussion and revision of her former article, however, is Why it is not equally possible to throw away the concept-metaphor “man,” which Derrida states is being replaced? I again have in mind Derrida’s closing discussion in “the Ends of Man” (in Margins). It is here that he speaks of “The strategic bet” and “A radical trembling [that] can only come from the outside” (134). He points to two possible strategies that we-men might dis/engage in: One being “To attempt an exit and a deconstruction without changing terrain. . . . Here, one risks ceaselessly confirming, consolidating, rehfting (relever), at an always more certain depth, that which one allegedly deconstructs”; and a second, “To decide to change terrain, in a discontinuous and eruptive fashion, by brutally placing oneself outside, and by affirming an absolute break and difference” (135). To realize these ends, Derrida calls for “A new writing [that] must weave and interlace these two motifs of deconstruction. Which amounts to saying that one must speak several languages and produce several texts at once” (135). Derrida speaks of “a change of ‘style’; and if there is style, Nietzsche reminded us, it must be plural” (135). Toward the end of this discussion, Derrida begins to speak in terms of a passing beyond outside of sexual identity altogether.

The first of these strategies is negative deconstruction; the second, affirmative deconstruction. While the first stays in the binary, the second calls out to the other so as perhaps to pass out of the binary to countless genders and sexes (see Derrida and McDonald; cf. Derrida “Law”).

At this point, let us re/turn to the question of exactly Why Spivak is willing to negotiate with structures of violence? For Spivak it is impossible not to, for the pre-ontological reasons demand so. And yet, What might she additionally mean by this impossibility? To answer this secondary question, let us first take another look at what Spivak has in mind in negotiating, and then align it with Derrida’s strategic bet. Jam most concerned about Spivak’s attitude toward affirmative deconstruction. While she will engage in it, she will not disengage by way of it. (Which is where I cum we are going!)

Explaining Derrida’s notion of saying Yes to the text twice,²⁵ Spivak describes the first step as “keeping the question alive” or “guarding the question” (or “the question of the difference between the epistemological/ ontological, and the axiological”); and the second as “calling to the absolutely other” (or “If sexual difference is indeed pre-comprehended by the ontolog­ical question then, miming Derrida’s Nietzsche, we might think ‘philoso­pher,’ byway of the same historical narrative that gave Nietzsche ‘woman,’ as our wholly other. And thus we ‘women’ might indicate, or even figure forth and thus efface, that call to the wholly other as taking the risk of saying yes “to Heidegger, Nietzsche, and Derrida”) (“Feminism” 212). Let us recall, howev­er, that in the second instance saying Yes to Heidegger and others is only saying Yes semiotically across a new protocol of reading politically. While Spivak will engage in negative deconstructions and affirmative ones, she will not disengage in or by way of the latter. (Will not, in other words, dis/engage herself from narrative, the structure of violence, which she would negotiate with!) The reasons, obviously, are political.

In her post-colonial interviews, Spivak explains that when Derrida moved from his negative to his affirmative phase, “I think what he began to realise is not that you have to say no to whatever positive stuff you’re doing, that is to say ‘keeping the question alive.’ But that deconstruction obliges you to say yes to everything. You have to say yes to that which interrupts your project” (emphasis mine, Post-Colonial 46-47). Consequently, “you can’t have a political program which doesn’t say no to something. So, a political program cannot base itself upon affirmative deconstruction, because then it will very quickly come to resemble pluralism, and I think pluralism, as a political program, has already shown its dark side, especially in the United States” (47). She continues:

What am I saying? Neither argument nor polite, logical philosophical redescriptions will change the writing of The History of Rhetoric! But there is terrible power in saying Yes to everything. Especially, to all that has been systematically excluded. (To the trace. To everything in the outside of the excluded middle!) Especially to the incomprehensible. Terrible powerful re­Juvenalizations in the perennial return of the ever-repressed. If someone follows logic, as Spivak insists on here, s/he wins (i.e., loses). If someone cum a radical many desires change, it is necessary “to Yes” everything. Even and especially the incomprehensibles. The heretofore disposables. To Yes the excluders by saying No to their No. By saying No to all reactionary thinking and acting. In another word, by denegating the excluders’ No. So as to let flow that nonpositive-affirmative desire imminent in all of us. I say: Yes ‘em to death!

Nothing is more powerful in bringing about change than a universal YES. I, too, would negotiate with structures of violence, but by way of parodic YESs. YESs. YESs. Not Yes in any submissive way. But in the most disruptive, farcical way. YES is uncountable!²⁷ YES is neither masculine nor feminine, both of which are (signs of) NOs. Yes to everything, therefore, must run along side Yes and No as Spivak believes she must employ negation in the particular case. Major revolutionary force (desire, will), however, must be brought to bear on sexism—and all the other conditions of exclusion—so that eventually the more normal force of argument—again, No in Spivak’s particular case—might seek out its secondary ways. If such ways are even necessary!

Change is not a matter of “evolution” as Jarratt suggests (Rereading nor is it a matter of saying “let us non the less name (as) ‘woman’ that disenfranchised woman whom we strictly, historically, geo-politically cannot imagine, as literal referent” (“Feminism” 220). This is all too inconsequen­tial in the short and long run. Change, call it revolution, is brought about because of massive campaigns of tactical disruptions against the dominant, strategic discourse. By way of massive redescriptions. Change is brought about by reintroducing “the excluded third.” The trace. The excluded middle, which some NOers would call the (ludic) muddle. And yet, this is not to say enough, for it must also be said that change must be perpetual. Change can be not just in the form of No, which, given the structures of violence, can mean Yes, but also in the form of Yes, which can mean No. Nes/Yo.

There is a time for trickery—not just historical deception (apate)—so as to cut up and scatter The History. The Narrative. Tmesis. Tmesis. Tmesis. Not just parataxis. Which falls inevitably back into hypotaxes. But Tmesis today; Tmesis tomorrow. Tmesis will have been. The History of Rhetoric, just as Foucault says about knowledge (Language 154), is for cutting up. Laughter?! As Nietzsche says, Yes, “Even laughter may yet have a future” (Gay Science 74). As Deleuze in Nietzsche’s im/proper names says, Yes, “Laughter—and not meaning. Schizophrenic laughter or revolutionary joy, this is what emerged from the great books” (“Nomad Thought” 147; cf. Deleuze and Guattari,Anti-Oedipus 316-18).

(lam getting ahead of myself).²⁹ Let’s get dizzy and topple ahead: Cixous writes, “I make a point of using the qualifiers of sexual difference here [masculine and femininel to avoid the confusion man/masculine, woman/ feminine: for there are some men who do not repress their femininity, some women who, more or less strongly, inscribe their masculinity” (Cixous and Clement, Newly Born 81). Musical genders?

Lest I be (too) misunderstood, I have not argued throughout the forego­ing, nor in what is to come, that Jarratt has not done her homework. Such an argument would be rather here nor there; for I am persuaded, given my understanding of a feminist’s necessity to determine (or over- and under-determine) her own terms, that Jarratt is warranted in her performances to stretch casuistically her terms whatever way and wherever she so desires. Let flow, flow, freely flow y/our ship of fools. (We all do it; some of us, however, simply are not aware of it or will not acknowledge it. And perhaps for political un/reasons!) As Cixous says: “Thanks to a few [writers] who were fools about life” (99). Thank you, Susan! I would, therefore, say Yes to your text. Yes. And then, continue to give (gift) my own foolish redescriptions and stretchings. And How would I continue? By way of Georges Bataille’s general economy, not a restricted one, that is, by way of a libidinal economy (see The Accursed Share).

Strategic Misreadings, Once Again: Jarratt turns now, as a “case,” to Hëlène Cixous. Jarratt’s turn is very brief (Rereading 7 1-74) and then highly selective. I will not spend as much time with what Cixous variously says as I did with Spivak, but will only refer to a few passages in The Newly Born Woman and later books to qualify and problematize (re-open, for a new hearing) Jarratt’s refiguring. But a caveat: From here/hear on the music, not from the sirens but from the excluded middle or third, might drive you schizo. The seduction will have been to sublime to avoid!

In introducing Cixous, Jarratt compares Cixous’s writing style to that of the Sophists, then, qualifies this analogy by saying, “I would like to argue that the way she situates her practice rhetorically—within a cultural, political, historical context—tempers the charge. Cixous describes women’s writing as bisexual, partaking in the heterogeneity of bisexuality. Right now, she says, it is only women who are capable of such a performance” (emphasis mine, Rereading 71). This is the passage that Jarratt quotes from Cixous and Clement: “For historical reasons, at the present time it is woman who benefits from and opens up within this bisexuality beside itself, which does not annihilate differences but cheers them on, pursues them, adds more: in a certain way woman is bisexual—man having been trained to aim for glorious phallic monosexuality” (Newly Born 85; cf. “Laugh” 254).

Again Jarratt reads this passage as saying “it is only women who are capable of such a performance.” This is quite a stretch. Only women! Jarratt indirectly acknowledges that Cixous is not a naive essentialist and, therefore, speaks of her in terms of custom, convention (local nomoi).³⁰ Cixous does say, “[men havej been trained to aim for glorious phallic monosexuality.” I will not quibble with this statement’s meaning as to whether it intends some or all men. Obviously, it is some men. How many? I suspect less than (some) more. I would argue with Jarratt, however, over Cixous’s meaning as to whether she intends all women or some women. For Cixous speaks ofwomen as also being under the sign of negation, castration.³¹ The real question here, however, is not degree but kind (sexuality, gender). Cixous does not say here or anywhere else that I can locate only women and not men. Against the charge only women, Cixous would say:

The issue here I will claim is that for Cixous—men and women, male and female—are not fixed biological or cultural categories. Moreover, for Cixous the words “men/male” and “women/feminine” are not exclusively biological; they are, instead, concept-metaphors.³² I agree with Cixous when she exclaims: “There is phallocentrism. History has never produced or recorded anything else—which does not mean that this form is destinal or natural. Phallocentrism is the enemy. Of everyone. Men’s loss in phallocentrism is different from but as serious as women’s. And it is time to change. To invent the other in history” (83). The issue, as Cixous says, is not whether is someone is biologically-essentially either male or female but whether someone is “dispersible, desiring and capable of other” (89).³³ Or whether someone is capable of One cum Radical Multiplicities. Of entering difference.³⁴ Cixous is playing around with libidinal economy, which she refers and alludes to repeatedly. She, as I spoke of Bataille earlier, is interested in a general economy and not a restricted one (see 78-83). She is, like Deleuze and Guattari, interested in “becoming-woman” (85), interested also in women becoming-woman, “the other woman she will be” (89). Interested in woman becoming-animal. Many men and fewer women, in one sense, are both fixed, that is, determined semiotically across the sign of negation/lack. Women, as well as men, must become sovereign, sublime subjects-that-would-not-be-subjects. Cixous—no doubt about it—is influenced by Bataille. Her novel Portrait dii soleil is predicated on Bataille’s notion of a general, libidinal economy as put forth in his first volume of The Accursed Share (see Shiach 81-82).

Again, these women are not biological women, but a concept-metaphor for a general, not a restricted, economy excessively becoming. If women must disengage by becoming-women, so are men, by becoming-woman.³⁵ For it is in Kleist or Shakespeare or others that we find some radical multiplicities or

The Case of Kleist: Cixous recalls, “I said I owed my life to Kleist. For a long time I lived on the knowledge that he had existed. I owed him not only the will to live but the will to live several lives. To be more than one feminine one and one masculine one, to catch fire and burn, to die of life because he caught fire, took on body, pain, and death for me” (112). The references to catching on fire are to Cixous’s earlier comment about and allusion to Bataille’s image of the sun, as a denegated sign of excess, as a general, instead of a restricted, economy.³⁶ This is her image of being “a bit vulture, a bit eagle” (perhaps a phoenix), being consumed in flames and rising out of the ashes (99; cf. 88).

The Case of Genêt: It is after this earlier description of men who are capable of becoming woman that Cixous writes, “I inhabited Jean Genët” (99). Verena Andermatt Conley points out,

The case of imund: As Cixous recalled, “I owed my life to Kleist,” I in turn can recall: I owe my life to Cixous.³⁷ And I-man again can produce discourse. It is one thing to rage against the masculine discourse that has silenced we-men (as Spivak argues we should do), and quite another lobe “‘imund,’ [i.e.,] to be unclean with joy” (Cixous, Three Steps 117), to write this imund as Cixous suggests.³⁸ To come un/clean when writing? However, I cannot stress enough that what Cixous is saying comes from Clarice Lispector, her novel The Passion According to G.H., in which the consuming of the unclean is the means of misidentifying with, attending to, the other. But this other is not the beggar in the street who would exist in our minds as the object of our charity, but this other is the nonhuman: Lispector is calling for the de-negation of the human species, of species-analytics, of differentiation altogether. (We will return so that we might hear all this somewhat better in terms of a Third Sophistic, for Cixous has very little, if any, to do with a Feminist Sophistic, as limited by Jarratt, and more to do with a perpetual moving toward a Third.)

In Cixous’s references to Kleist and Shakespeare becoming-women, she says, “Her appearance causing, if not a revolution, harrowing explosions” (Newly Born 98). At the end of the Spivak section, I raised the question of Evolution? or Revolution? or Explosion? An answer? It is in Cixous, in her writing, that we find radical multiplicities saying Yes to evetything else. To we­ Sophists who would write histories of rhetorics, she says, “We have no woman’s reason to pay allegiance to the negative” (85). Oh, to be sure!, Cixous says No to the negative (to “He-Bible”³⁹), which allows her, thereaf­ter, to say Yes to everything else: By which I mean, she says Yes to The Excluded, The Abominable, The Repressed. The un/clean. The Unhuman. She writes:

What I have tried to indicate, thus far, about Cixous is that she has not locked out males. She does not say “only women.” Moreover, I have suggested and will continue now to suggest what Cixous is up to as she explores the body and the imund, the unclean, or that which is excluded, because forbidden. Cixous moves to a consideration of a third (beyond subject/object) positions.

Threes: Women more than men, Yes. Women and Men and the “femi­nine”/”becoming-woman,” Yes. A Woman’s body, a man’s body, “the third body,” Yes. Cixous is moving in threes, moving toward what will have been. Her movement is neither toward One nor Two but a 1001. Her movement is toward desiring machines; toward the future-anterior; downward toward death, dreams, and roots (see Three Steps). Toward a Third Dionysus.

In The Third Body (Le troisième corps, 1970), written five years before La jeune née (1975) and “Le rire de la Méduse” (1975), there was and will be (will have been) a reading as writing. As Verena Andermatt Conley explains: “A third body is synthesized from biography and quotation, self and other, writer and reader. Writing is not born as much from ‘experience’ or the description of a pre-existing reality.” Instead, “it is invented from reading, from the investment of affect in living and textual ‘scenes”’ (17). The writing, drawn from many sources (Jensen, Kleist, Freud, Kafka, Poe, Joyce, Lispector, Genêt, and others) is a pastiche effect of third bodies of literature.

Still in Revolution pour plus d’un Faust (1975), Cixous is playing with threes, a paralogic of nonsynthesized thirds, to shatter mirrors and theaters of representation. Cixous writes:

Space (locus )for Cixous, as Conley argues, is a search “for passages, doors or exits to the female’s imprisonment. ... ‘Sorties’ is written in medias res. It locates moments of exclusion in various discourses of the past and projects openings toward the future. History is not a discourse of abstraction but is comprised of personal, singular stories” (38-39; cf. 41-42; also see Shiach 78-79; Cixous, Coming to Writing 1-58).

Space as Writing (unnatural, forbidden writing, as consuming and iden­tifying with the ugly, despicable, the other) is what Cixous rethinks. (Actu­ally, what Lispector thinks.) Why do Lispector/Cixous want to write in this way? They want to write the “‘imund,’ to be unclean with joy” (Cixous, Three Steps 177; cf. Lispector 63-65). It is a space outside, yet paradoxically inside. As Lispector’s G.H. says: “The cockroach is inside out. No, no, I don’t mean that it has an inside and an outside; I mean that is what it is. What it had on the outside is what I hide inside myself: I have made my outside into a hidden inside” (69). G.H. takes within herself “the cockroach mass” (163). Yes, she eats the unspeakable creature (172). But when she consumes the ugly—the other, that which is now on the outside of the roach—she breaks “the law” (the negative) and says “I should live with person-matter and not cockroach-matter” (163). Now with libidinal matter. And when eating it, experiences a release into a sublime, ugly-but-not-ugly “vastness” (97), into “nonperson” (165), and experiences an “attentiveness to living” (43). G.H. undergoes absolute denegation and experiences life in a general economy, un/namely, that of becoming animal. She leaves her species to be with an Other: “life is divided into qualities and species, and the law is that cockroaches will be loved and eaten only by other cockroaches; and that a woman, at the moment of her love for man, that woman is experiencing her own species” (163).

Dear Reader, How do you respond to such writing/thinking? Do you laugh Hollywood’s laughter? Snicker the cynical laughter? Laugh (Bataille’s) laughter. Kafka’s “Metamorphosis” is also humorous. Poor Gregor Samsa, poor Gregor. And Mark Amerika’s The Kafka Chronicles? Yes, we are supposed to laugh. A minoritarian literature is humorous (see Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka). But laugh a laughter as affirmation without reserve. There is no irony here (or should not be), but humor (see Irigaray, Speculum 349; Deleuze and Parnet 68-69). Kafka’s prose is filled with human beings becoming-Other-beings. Cockroach, dog, ape. Are you repulsed at the thought? Good. For then you have experienced your negative relationship with the other. G.H. says that attending to the other is not even comparable to “kissing a leper” (Lispector 162). It is more despicable than such. It is a joining with the absolute other:

Let us return to Cixous, who wants to reclaim the unclean, and reclaim with joy. (Pessimistic joy; joyful pessimism.) She wants to know how to give. What is it that “woman” wants? Cixous wants to know how to attend to the other. Not woman. She does not make the stupid mistake that Freud or Lacan makes. She wants to know How to give. And without expected return. Her answer is Go to the nether (Hell) world (cf. Lispector 113, 119,124). She takes us there and teaches us (allofus),with the help of Kafka-Lispector, how to give, without expecting a return. This is the giving of Bataille’s sun: “an economy without reserve” (Cixous and Clement, Newly Born 86). This is the giving of a general, libidinal economy:

Space as nature (physis) is what Cixous primarily reclaims, but it is a space (locus) thoroughly denegated. In Three Steps, Cixous speaks very directly about her view of nature and culture (nomos):

This space is reclaimed not only by climbing the ladder down but also by a rapid crossing of borders (switching of codes). Outside, while paradoxically inside. Yet denegated. Cixous writes: “we [we-creatures] could go back ten thousand years, before the time of ‘country,’ and imagine the birth of borders. ... Who invented borders? Borders [species + genus, the negative] don’t exist.... They are as incredible as unicorns. Thus we might enter [crossing borders, switching codes] History, which is always a History of borders. Today . . . People are swollen with home-neid (home envy).” Cixous continues: It is primarily a need for the proper, for a proper country, for a proper name, a need for separation and, at the same time, a rejection of the other.... I want the word dépays (uncountry); I’m sorry that we do not have it since the uncountry is not supposed to exist... . People like Genêt or Clarice are inhabitants of the uncountry, of the incountry, the country below, the country underneath” (Three Steps 131).42

It is in this space (the zone of a denegated nature, or as I have signified it elsewhere asphysisnonPositive affirmation) and this depays/”uncountry” (recall Lyotard’s pagus) that Cixous writes and reclaims histories. Reclaims the excluded. First, however, she must negate the excluded force. She must undergo self-denigration. Far from Spivak, Cixous does not take the risk of strategic essentialism; instead, she risks:

Her Politics?⁴³ As Conley explains, a politics of the end of the necessity of politics, which would be “located beyond the exclusions” (47; cf. Shiach 6-37). Is this space beyond the nomos? Yes!, for such is ever a locus of exclusion: the modes of cooperation are modes of being co-opted and excluded. Consensus is cohersive. The nomos perpetuates the principle of excluded middle/muddle! Then, where is this non-Euclidean space? As stated previously, it is nature (physis), but Ovid’s depays (uncountry) and not the nature of the binaryphysis/nomos (see Three Steps 129-31), both of which are constructed under the sign of the negative. Ovid’s nature—”uncountry” is the nonpositive—affirmative, a “third” (or radical infinity) beyond nega­tive/positive. It is becoming without the traditional philosophical principles of identity, non-contradiction, and the excluded middle. It is practice (praxis) of the imund.

II. ‘Some More’ Différances

What I have been attempting to say—by way of rereading both Spivak and Cixous, though they are very different⁴⁴—is that there is always the danger in using words like “men” and “women,” “male” and “female,” in reactionary thinking, and in engaging in a dividing practice (diaeresis), that is, a form of negative essentializing, that would further drive a counterwedge between two sets of human species.

Yes, strategic essentialism is a form of negative essentializing! And yet, it is not always the case, for in great part how it is to be read is owing to what I would call the history of its use by a particular critic. I think that Spivak is careful and vigilant enough to interrogate herself perpetually; she is the most sincere and performative in attempting to look around corners, asking herself constantly What is it that I have subjectively invested in making such a statement? Therefore, I think any expositor of what Spivak performs textually must make this as evident as possible⁴⁵; if not, then Spivak’s name and constantly self-questioned intentions get ap/propriated as an alibi for only negative essentializing.

But let us return to the problematic of doubleness. The words—”men” and “women,” etc.—are used in a double sense throughout much of the writing done by feminists. I would add now that this doubleness is a tactic and perhaps necessary confusion. (Spivak is very careful, however, to point out how Derrida uses these and similar terms in quotes, as cues to help readers from being confused; Cixous does not use such diacritical marks but nonethe­less makes implicit and explicit distinctions. Both Spivak and Cixous intermittently call on their readers to be careful when they think that they might go astray in fixing these words into literal “things.”) It is one defense among others in the war that women have been forced to fight against sexism, against their exclusion throughout what goes for (The) HIStory (of Rheto­ric), yesterday and today. If this tactic/strategy were denied them, by any arguer, there would be nought.⁴⁶

I would now turn to a Third.

It is, therefore, a Third Sophistic that I espouse. A denegated essential­ism. It is the risk of a strategic (nonpositive affirmative) essence that I espouse. Having re/announced such an espousal, however, I make no pretense that other theorists, paratheorists, pragmatists, historians/historiographers, ma­gicians, freaks should or ought to follow. There is no following. There is only drifting. A fractal drifting. A folding and refolding into fractals, which is asubjectivity. I am not the fool of the epistemic-court, not of social-production (a binary-machine); lam the fractalized fools of desiring-produc­tion (a schizo-becoming).⁴⁷ Which will have been. All outside. Is it happening? It is happening!

As I proceed through the Vastness of the future-anterior, which is now-coming, I would perform by way VVolfean vvaves⁴⁸) of a general, libidinal economy. As I have said, it is not a matter of male/female or female/male; it is everything that has been excluded because of this silly disjunctive logic, which gives us congregation (consensus, community) byway of segregation. Instead, I would trek with the conditions of the possibilities put forth by Anne Fausto-Sterling: Five sexes and still counting. I am with Cixous. Je suis in Sick-zoo. (Unto the death of Death):