Corporeal Habits: Addressing

Essentialism Differently
VICKI KIRBY

Feminism could be described as a discourse that negotiates corporeality, what a

body is and what a body can do. Nevertheless, the specter of essentialism means that
the biological or anatomical body, the body that is commonly understood to be the
“real” body, is often excluded fromthis investigation. The increasingly sterile debate
between essentialism and antiessentialism has inadvertently encouraged this
somutophobia. I argue that these opposingpositions are actually inseparable, sharing
a complicitousrelationship that produces material effects.

The body is a terra incognita and there are few books specifically devoted
to its mysteries. But in one of these, The Body and Society by Bryan Turner, the
author admits that at the end of his study he is even more confounded by the
“crassly obvious” question “What is the body?” (1984, 7).’ Its curious matter
is the unruly subject that our sovereign will can only pretend to govern. It is
an anarchic substance that we all possess and are possessed by.* In “Some
Simple Reflections on the Body,’’ Paul ValEry also puzzles over the body’s
riddle, suggesting that there is something strangely disconcerting and even
alienating in the very proximity of this familiar corporeal envelope:
We speak of [the body] to others as of a thing that belongs to
us; but for us it is not entirely a thing; and it belongs to us a little
less than we belong to it. . . . This thing that is so much mine
and yet so mysteriously and sometimes-always, in the end-
our most redoubtable antagonist, is the most urgent, the most
constant and the most variable thing imaginable: for it carries
with it all constancy and all variation. (1989,398,399)
The enigma of the body, then, is captured in the troubling question of its
location. How are we to identify the fixed transience of this peculiar substance,
Hypatia vol. 6, no. 3 (Fall 1991) 0 by Vicki Kirby
 Vicki Kirby 5

that “place” that requires a doubled commentary to capture the ambiguity of

“all constancy and all variation”?
This paradox is not unrelated to the vexed question of sexual difference.
Woman’s identity has traditionally been associated with the body and nature, just
as man’s has been located in their transcendence as mind and culture. Woman is
thereby positioned as man’s attenuated inversion, as a mere specular reflection
through which his identity is grounded. The brute matter ofwoman’s embodiment
and the immediacyof her lived experienceprovide the corporeal substratum upon
which man erects himself and from which he keeps a safe distance.
Indeed, modernism/humanism can be glossed as the discourse of man,
propped up by an unacknowledged debt to woman that is figured through these
binary oppositions. Modernism’s current crisis of legitimation, a crisis that is
signaled in the term “postmodernism,” involves the faltering recognition that
this complicitous kinship of gendered binary divisions can no longer be
accepted with such complacency. If meaning and value are produced rather
than simply given, then sexual identity, like any other identity, is a relational
construct, enmeshed in language and its peculiar economy. Consequently, the
hesitations that now interrupt orthodox accounts of Truth and Subjectivity
will inevitably return us to the perplexing question of woman. If the natural
world of humanism is to be denaturalized of its most comfortable wisdoms, then
woman’s “place” in this story, her “in-corporation” into its narrative, assumes
critical importance.
It would be misleading to suggest that woman’s uncertain identity is a recent
discovery. If second-wave feminism were to risk conceiving its own concep-
tion, then perhaps its rebirthing would be identified with the emergence of
The Second Sex in 1949 and the shock of Beauvoir’s curious question “Are there
women really!” (1953,13) The question is powerful precisely because her
argument was able to sustain the scandal of its asking by delaying any easy
answer. For, according to Beauvoir and despite all claims to the contrary,
woman is not a natural subject but a cultural artifice par excellence. In the
now-famous opening lines of book 2, she asserts: “One is not born, but rather
becomes, a woman. . . this creature, intermediate between male and eunuch”
(1953,273).
Forty years after Beauvoir, how are we to understand this embodied “ground”
that is “woman”?Feminists have tirelessly sought to interrogate the meaning
of nature and culture in order to broaden woman’s horizon of possibilities. And
just as Beauvoir suggested, upon investigation there seems to be nothing very
natural about the “nature of woman.” Consequently, patriarchal attempts to
justify woman’s subordination as the destined effect of nature’s prescriptions
have had to adopt various guises.
Elizabeth Grosz offers a helpful summary of these legitimizing strategies in
her essay, “A Note on Essentialism and Difference” (1990). She divides the
prevailing arguments into kindred, although subtly differentiated, categories:
6 Hypatia

biologism,naturalism, and universalism? But the terms are easily confused and,
as Grosz suggests, each one is often made to serve as a shorthand formula for
another. A nascent feminism tended to embrace essentialism as the evidence
of sexual difference, and indeed, many feminisms have retained an allegiance
to the political efficacy of such arguments. However, in more recent years,
academic feminists have become skilled diagnosticians in recognizing the
conservative commitments invested in this syndrome of justifications and,
understandably, a sense of contamination is now associated with their pathol-
ogy. Grosz notes:
It is not surprising that these terms have become labels for
danger zones or theoretical pitfalls in feminist assessments of
patriarchal theory. . . . They are the critical touchstones of
assessment, self-evident guidelines for evaluating patriarchal
theories and the patriarchal residues or adherences of feminist
theories. These terms seem unquestionably problematic. . . .
(1990,335)
And indeed, feminism is usually quick to distance itself from the dubious
investments of such terms and to judge the worth of its practice by the success
of that distancing. However, Grosz goes on to query the advantage of such an
automatic reaction to these categories by cautioning that “their value as
criteria of critical evaluation for feminist as well as patriarchal theory is not as
clear as it might seem” (1990,335).
This qualification is pause for thought, an appeal to linger a little longer
over feminism’s own version of “doing what comes naturally.” A n interesting
detail that emerges once we step into this “danger zone” is that these conser-
vative doxa do not respect the naturelculture divide. It seems that “the nature
of things,” or, more specifically here, “the nature of woman,” is also discovered
in cultural data. For example, Grosz explains that universalism can be con-
ceived in purely social terms, with no necessary recourse to biological argu-
ments. In this case, cross cultural data that show women consigned to invariant
social categories and roles in the sexual division of labor can be offered as proof
of essential and therefore unarguable human requirements.
I t seems that the originary cause of what is interpreted as woman’s inevitable
oppression is ultimately an arbitrary determination that can be variously
secured in either nature or culture. Its equivocal and therefore questionable
location is made stable by patriarchy’s own investment in the continuing truth
of its existence. In other words, man’s desire that “the nature of things”
(namely, his privilege) might be justified and even demanded by some causal
essence in woman, displaces the need for this essential predication from the
necessity for his existence to the explanation of hers.
I t is surely a partial tribute to the effectiveness of feminism’s intellectual
persistence, to its tireless rereading of patriarchal truths, that both “the nature
 Vicki Kirby 7

of woman” and indeed “nature itself” have still to be reckoned. Given the
continued instability of the culture/nature division, maintaining anti-essen-
tialism versus essentialism as the respectively good and bad sides of any
argument can install a dubious moral agenda. It also denies feminism’s achieve-
ments and the mutability of feminism’s own identity in negotiating and
challenging the different meanings that inform this division within shifting
historical contexts. If the field of signification is politically volatile and
historically specific, then the continuation of Beauvoir’s enterprise might
today be more effectively realized, at least by a certain academic feminism, in
a reversal of the apparent direction of its original critique. Refiguring feminism
so that it maintains its critical tenacity and relevance, we might now venture
a different set of questions. For example, is it possible that our vigilant
opposition to arguments that associate woman and nature has become so
automatic and prescriptive that it risks intellectual complacency? Or, more
specifically, can we always be sure of just what it is that our vigilance would
defend or deny?
The need to confront such awkward questions was given dramatic expres-
sion during the presentation of a paper at a recent philosophy conference.
Arguing for the usefulness of Luce Irigaray’s work, the speaker had assumed
that much of her audience would need convincing. In anticipation of the
charge of essentialism that is commonly leveled at this particular French
feminist, a preliminary clarification was offered in her defense. We were told
that corporeality in Irigaray’s writing was to be understood as a decidedly
literary evocation. Those notorious “two lips” were a figurative strategy, a
metaphor through which the significance of woman’s embodiment could be
reinterpreted as m~rphology.~ And finally, to extinguish any lingering doubts
that this argument may nevertheless harbor a naturalizing impulse, the ana-
tomical or biological body was safely located outside the concerns of Irigaray’s
interventionist project.
But ifmost of the audience seemed reassured by these remarks, requiring this
explanatory caveat before the paper could be taken seriously, I was left
wondering just what danger this exclusion had averted. What does the nomi-
nation “biological or anatomical body” refer to? Or, to put this another way,
what secures the separation of its supposed inadmissible meaning from the
proper purview of Irigaray’s textual interventions?When I asked a question to
this effect, it was met with a certain nervous incomprehension. Deciding,
perhaps, that I must still be immersed in a precritical notion of the body, the
speaker dismissed me with a revealing theatrical gesture. As if to emphasize
the sheer absurdity of my question, she pinched herself and commented, “Well,
I certainly don’t mean this body.”
Ofcourse, from my particular perspective it is not the question that should
produce Consternation but rather an answer that presumes to engage the
problematic of feminism and corporeality by denying the relevance of this
8 Hypatia

particular, lived body. Just where should we suppose that other body might be
located? And how is it so quickly and decidedly dissociated from the flesh of
this one? What this anecdote illustrates is the pervasive yet unpalatable belief
that the anatomical body is indeed the unarguably real body, the literal body,
the body whose immovable and immobilizing substance must be secured
outside the discussion. This improper body is quarantined for fear that its
ineluctable immediacy will leave us no space for change, no chance to be
other-wise, no place from which to engender a different future. According to
this view, the politics of representation remain separable from what is com-
monly understood as the biological facts of the body’s existence. And inevita-
bly, the sexlgender, real/representation distinction will reassert its comfortable
wisdom precisely because it reiterates the most adequate conceptualization of
materiality as something fundamentally other than its interpretation.’
However, various forms of critical theory informed by Continental philos-
ophy have attracted attention precisely because they disrupt this base/super-
structure model. Indeed, they suggest possibilities for rethinking the question
of how reality means. Of course, feminism has actively participated in this
radical enterprise. Yet even in feminisms that are informed and empowered by
this same critique of a restricted notion of materiality, an accompanying
maneuver can “naturally” exclude the biological body from critical attention.
If pinching oneself is indeed a reality test, albeit within the ironized quotation
marks of a certain theoretical savvy, then announcing that reality’s substance
is of no matter uncovers a lingering belief that it matters too much. Such an
announcement evidences an unshaken faith in patriarchy’s foundational
truths, for what we have located here is something believed to be essentialism’s
superlative-what is most essential, most incontrovertibly real, and most
decidedly significant. The anatomical body remains reality’s harshest truth at
precisely that moment when we determine to banish its substance by simply
dissolving the accompanying notions of “reality” and “reference” through
which it is made manifest.
Nevertheless, there have been hesitant yet increasing signs over the last
several years that essentialism as it is commonly understood is not necessarily
“something” from which we could, or should, dissociate ourselves.6Nor is this
view bought by any failure to recognize that essentialism is indeed a subject
that involves considerable difficulties for feminism. For example, in the
aforementioned article by Elizabeth Grosz, she acknowledges:
Any theory of femininity, any definition of woman in general,
any description that abstracts from the particular, historical,
cultural, ethnic and class positions of particular women verges
perilously close to essentialism. (1990,341)
Grosz goes on to cite Tori1 Moi, who also insists that “to define ‘woman’ is
necessarily to essentialize her.” Yet Grosz is alert to an attendant irony in this
 Vicki Kirby 9

assertion to which Moi remains blind. Moi’s description of essentialism,

especially when she describes it as the defining attribute ofLuce Irigaray’s work,
represents an unequivocal judgement against such definitions, a condemna-
tion of their fixed investments, a casting out of their error. Moi witnesses
something unholy in Irigaray’s work and censures her for “fall[ing] for the
temptation to produce her own positive theory of femininity” (1988,139). For
Moi rightly understands that “any attempt to formulate a general theory of
femininity will be metaphysical” (1990,341). However, Grosz elaborates the
paradox that this criticism enacts:
if women cannot be characterized in any general way . . . then
how can feminism be taken seriously? What justifies the
assumption that women are oppressed as a sex? What, indeed,
does it mean to talk about women as a category? If we are not
justified in taking women as a category, then what political
grounding does feminism have? (1990,341).
In her fervid desire to remain unsullied by essentialism, Moi forgets that
essentialism is the condition of possibility for any political axiology: the
minimal consensual stuff that political action fastens onto is already
essentialism’s effect. There is no “outside” this entanglement. Consequently,
the task is not to dream of deliverance, of yet another theology that promises
to transcend this contamination. Rather, it is to begin to real-ize that we are
inextricably immersed within that contamination and that our own fundamen-
tal complicity with it is, strangely, its enabling moment.
If we return to Beauvoir’s defiant question “Are there women really?”both
Tori1 Moi and the speaker in my anecdote would seem to answer its challenge
with a definite no. But such an answer, indeed any definitive answer, misun-
derstands the political purchase that the question commands precisely because
it sustains an interrogative force within what we now call phallocentrism. That
is to say, the “other” of phallocentrism resides within its house, albeit in an
uncanny location.
Rethinking essentialism, then, is not a dispute about its meaning, at least
not within the order of its commonplace understanding. The weight of that
understanding as the burden of its lived reality is not in contention here. If
anything, what is being questioned is how we can pretend to bear this burden
so lightly. It is not so much the meaning of essentialism that requires further
consideration but “the how” of that meaning. How is “essence” entailed, made
proper, installed “as such))and naturalized within our thought and our being?
How does it congeal into an embodied reality? If we assume that when we
locate essentialism we identify it and corral its dangers the better to determine
the virtue of our own practice, then we have merely embraced another of
essentialism’s many mutations and one that finds us right inside the belly of
the beast.
10 Hypatia

Essentialism is not an entity that can be identified and dissolved by saying

yes or no to it. When Tori1 Moi says no to the category “woman,” to “the
mine-field of femininity and femaleness” (1988, 148), she imagines herself a
witness to the truth of (the) matter, or more precisely, to truth‘s essence
(assuming that there could be such a thing), to t h e nontruth of
phallocentrism’s truth, namely, to the truth of its error. But even if we were to
grant that essentialism is unarguably wrong-morally, politically, and logi-
cally-we still haven’t addressed the ways in which its errors “work”; how
essentialism’s scriptures “come to matter,” how they come to write/right
themselves.
To put this in a way that better suggests that we are always/already in the
grip of essentialism’s reflex, we might ask, where is the evidence for either
essentialism’s error or antiessentialism’s truth to be situated and of what does
it consist? Or, against what criteria or with what “matter” is the category
“woman” considered incommensurable?Surely the “place” from which both
essentialism and anti-essentialism make their claims is “something” of a
“shared accommodation,” a strange abode in which their contradictions
cohabit. And this abode recalls a body that demonstrates its anti-essentialism
by pinching its essentialism,a body that denies the violence of identity on the
one hand by violently grasping its identity with the other.
Essentialism has always been of interest to feminism, but only recently has
this interest been thought to pay dividends. Emerging discussions of essential-
ism are attempting to confront feminism’s anxieties in order to exorcise the
somatophobia that underpins the legacy of phallocentrism’s mindbody split.
Yet this issue still conjures fear as well as fascination, even, or perhaps
especially, among critical theorists. In a recent article, Diana Fuss suggests:
Perhaps more than any other notion in the vocabulary of recent
feminist poststructuralist theory, “essentialism” has come to
represent both our greatest fear and our greatest temptation. . . .
Essentialism is the issue which simply refuses to die. (1989,62)
Accordingly, the subject is commonly approached with a certain sense of
hesitation and guilt. Fuss notes the apologetic tone that accompanies the
question’s reconsideration, with critics consistently describing their enterprise
as one of “risking” or “daring” to consider essentialism’s revaluation.
Although rethinking essentialism marks an avowed return to the body, the
reunion is always be-ing deferred. It is certainly not an easy homecoming.
Perhaps commerce with the body is considered risky business because the
border between the mindbody split, the border across which interpretations
of the body might be negotiated, just cannot be secured. This fear of being
discovered unwittingly behind enemy lines, caught in the suffocating and
powerful embrace of that carnal envelope, menaces all conciliatory efforts.
Feminism needs courage to mount even quite small and furtive reconnaissance
 Vicki Kirby 11

missions across that border. Any exchange between the mind and the body
will demand explanation, a minimal reassurance that incursions into the body’s
foreign spaces will be temporary and provisional, a “tactical” or “strategic”
necessity that justifies the risks. Through all of this, it would seem that the
body is still figured as a dangerous and hostile territory. Apparently, it demands
a cautious itinerary if it is to be approached at all.
The body of Luce Irigaray’s work has become a synecdoche for these larger
threats.’ To involve oneself in her “writing (of) the body” is a venture that has
come to require justification. Routinely, these justifications will stress Irigaray’s
theoretical and philosophical sophistication and the ways in which the plea-
sures of her texts are enabled by the crisis of confidence in orthodox under-
standings of referentiality and materiality. The question, however, is what to
do with what Jane Gallop describes as Irigaray’s apparent “referential nayvet&,”
the seduction that Irigaray enacts by way of a thinking through of anatomical
reference. The speaker in my earlier anecdote decided to solve this apparent
problem by discarding anatomy as something outside the play of textual
intervention. As a result, Irigaray’s “two lips” were considered to be a fotm of
figuration and not a literalization.
Jane Gallop is of a different persuasion. In “Quand Nos Levres S’Ecrivent:
Irigaray’s Body Politic,” she argues that anatomy is inextricably caught up in
its interpretation:
Discourse about the body seems to represent a point of unusu-
ally suggestive tension about the referent. Yet perhaps the most
far-reaching effect of her [Irigaray’s]inwhsemblable stand on the
labia is to force the reader to reconsider the status of anatomical
referentiality. (1983, 8319
Gallop goes on to conclude that “the gesture of a troubled but nonetheless
insistent referentiality is essential” (1983, 83). She defends this opinion by
way of a slippery rhetorical gambit that demonstrates that the referent is a
necessary anchor for any argument, even as it remains elusive and ambiguous.
Gallop opens her maneuver by remembering Freud’s famous dictum “Anat-
omy is destiny.” She notes that Irigaray “seems” to endorse what she describes
as Freud’s folly in this assumption but advises, “let us beware too literal a
reading of Irigarayan anatomy” (1983, 78).” Gallop answers this too literal
reading by reminding us that Irigaray’s object is not genital anatomy but the
symbolic interpretation of that anatomy, the ways in which a phallomorphic
logic reconstructs anatomy in its own image. But having put this corrective
into place, Gallop openly admits that her argument entails some sticky dealings
with an extra-textual referent, a male anatomy that somehow informs
phallomorphism. It seems, then, that although the body is always understood
through its interpretation, the power of this interpretation induces an “effet
de reel,’’ or “referential illusion,” as Gallop describes it (1983, 79). It is an
12 Hypatia

illusion, it would seem, that insists as anatomy. Hence, for Gallop, all realities
are mediated by textuality:
Belief in simple referentiality . . . cannot recognize that the
reality to which it appeals is a traditional ideological construc-
tion. . . . Traditional ideological constructs which are not rec-
ognized as such . . . are taken for the “real.” (1983,83)
An illustration of this misrecognition might be feminism’s own participation in
the either/or sexology of vagina or clitoris. Gallop discovers in this debate an
unwitting commitment to a phallo-logic whose sense of choice (between clitoris
as phallus-same or vagina as phallus-opposite) is, consequently, quite mistaken.
According to Gallop, Irigaray’s genius is that she is not similarly duped:
Irigaray seems to be advocating a female sexuality that replaces
the anxious either-or with a pleasurable both: vagina and clito-
ris. But Irigaray ultimately chooses not both but neither, and the
spark of her genital poetics rather comes to light on the lips.
(1983,81)
As Gallop would have it, the empirical appeal of clitoris and/or vagina is
rejected because:
Irigaray is interested in a plurality that is not reducible to aseries
of singular elements. In the list of female genital parts, only the
lips are already plural. (1983,82)
However, Gallop’s reading of the body in Irigaray’s writing is itself a dissec-
tion of female genital parts, a selection from a series of singular (even when
plural) elements. For Gallop secures the valued plurality of the %vo lips” only
by an excision that removes both vagina and clitoris. I t seems that Gallop’s
notion of plurality is a strangely restricted one and one that is bought at
considerable expense. Perhaps Gallop can afford to pay the price that these
circumcisions incur because, after all, “the place” that is be-ing re-formed is a
textual site, a plastic space that can be remade through the clever surgery that
writing performs. Hence, according to this view, there is “really” no price to
be paid. Reinterpretation negotiates an “efet de riel,” a “poe‘tique du corps” that
recreates embodiment and thereby re-views the status normally accorded to
an immutable, anatomical referentiality.
If we translate this re-formation into the familiar terms of the naturelculture,
essentialism/anti-essentialismdivision, then it appears that Gallop dissipates
a certain anxiety about what to do with anatomy (nature, essence) by arguing
that what we take to be anatomy is just another moment in culture’s refiguring
of itself. In other words, anatomy is an illusion of sorts, albeit a very powerful
one, and one that Gallop imbues with a certain political efficacy. Understand-
ably, it is this belief in anatomy’s political efficacy that motivates its reinter-
 Vicki Kirby 13

pretation. According to Gallop, the body “as such,” its “essential matter,” is
always/already deferred because of “the absence of any certain access to the
referent” (1983, 82). It follows from this that the anxieties that accompanied
the mind/body border crossing were largely unfounded. There was no enemy
waiting in ambush. Indeed, in essence, it seems that there was no-body there
at all.
But what about biology? Does Gallop’s interpretation of Irigaray’s virtuoso
rewriting (of) the body include in its textual adventure the peristaltic move-
ments of the viscera, the mitosis of cells, the electrical activity that plays across
a synapse, the itinerary of a virus, and so on? In other words, is this a “text”
and a “writing” that includes all the oozings and pulsings that literally and
figuratively make up the stuff of the body’s extra-ordinary circuitry?Apparently
not-certainly Gallop is careful never to say as much.” Returning to the
problematic of essentialism and corporeality, it seems that I must now take my
turn and dare to ask, again, “But why not?” Is this perhaps because within such
an inquiry all the brave rhetoric of our risk taking finally threatens to deliver
up the full reality of its promise?And just what is this full reality anyway?
It should be said up front that Gallop’s interpretation of Irigaray is a welcome
relief from the sober, flat-footed, and largely uninformed commentaries that
so often advise against the complexities of her work.’* Gallop’s writing scintil-
lates. It playfully and provocatively explores the resonances between female
sexuality and modernist textuality in Irigaray’s corporeal poiisis, and its value
is not in dispute here. Rather, my argument concerns the way that Gallop,
along with other of Irigaray’s more subtle and careful interpreters, has actually
underestimated the creative force of Irigaray’s writing, and indeed of their own.
Gallop acknowledges the confounded nature of any argument that claims
to separate the supposed brute matter of anatomy from its interpretation.
Nevertheless, the purchase of Gallop’s corrective against those who would
confuse Irigaray’s “effet de riel” with “the real,” or conflate “referential illusion”
with “referential nai’ved,” is predicated on the necessity for just such a
separation. Gallop is able to resolve this contradiction because she reads
“anatomy” in a restricted sense, as the body’s surface-the forms that are to be
re-formed, the text that is to be re-inscribed. Consequently, “morphology” is
accorded its narrowest interpretation as the metaphorization of sexual differ-
ence, the unity of phallomorphism, the split-that-is-not-one of vulvomorph-
ism. Within this reading, Irigaray’s writing traces its artistry over the surface
of the body as writing pad, beating a tattoo that suggests different patterns of
meaning through which the body’s substance may be ciphered. Gallop offers
a concise annotation to the inflection that motivates this performance:
“Irigarayan poitique du corps is not an expression of the body but a poiisis, a
creating of the body” ( 1983,79). But how does Gallop determine the difference
between ‘‘a creating of the body” and “an expression of the body,” and why is
this division necessary?
14 Hypatia

Gallop appears to conceive writing, or po&s, through its phenomenal

analogue, as an activity whose effects are passively received and recorded upon
a surface. However, in other arenas feminism is wise to the dubious sexual
economy that informs this notion of writing. The model of a tubuhrasa whose
inert matter merely receives and then bears an inscription without in any way
rewriting its significance is surely a familiar story. Within patriarchy the
body/woman, as that specular surface, is routinely denied any efficacy in the
reproduction of value.
Gallop’s hermeneutic secludes biology behind anatomy’s dermal veil. Per-
haps the referent is also hidden behind that veil, deep within the body’s opaque
depths. I t will be remembered that Gallop describes the complexities of the
referent in terms of accessibility. And this closure that installs an inaccessible
“before” or “behind” is consistent with Gallop’s reliance on a psychoanalytic
narrative that traditionally posits the body before language. Psychoanalysis
does not engage the body as itself, always/already a field of language, but rather
as something that precedes and then enters the field of language.” Gallop also
draws on contemporary literary theory that has preferred to read the notion of
“textuality” or “writing” back into the confines of a convenient hermeneutic
horizon, as if to preserve and contain “context” within the covers of a b00k.l~
The consistency with which literary critics continue to conflate Derrida’s
notion of “writing in the general sense” with writing in the phenomenal sense
is evidence of this.I5
Rethinking essentialism is a thinking through the body, and this is the
thinking through of closure, essentialism’s identifying gesture. But how do we
think this “corporealplace,” this envelope of immanence that our disembodied
speculations would render “separable” and “other”?Again we are reminded of
a body that pinches itself within the reflex of a Mobius loop. Enacting the
circuit of a contradiction, anatomy grasps its own excess, the neither/nor of
essentialism and anti-essentialism that nevertheless, and at once, embraces
them both, the literal and figural tissue of their mutual implication. Biology’s
scriptures cannot be left out of this account. Biology is volatile, a mutable
inter-texture, the stuff that informs our interventions. And such is the impli-
cation of biology that Irigaray’s “poitique du corps” might also be thought as
biology rewriting itself.
The involution of such a circuit conjures Derrida’s provocative discussion
of the writing machine in Freud’s “neurologicalfable”-the mystic writing pad.
An analogy for the workings of the psyche, the pad’s mystery was embodied in
the receptive innocence of its writing surface, a surface whose virginity was
infinitely recuperable as the marks of violation were erased and forgotten. The
underlying wax surface, however, continued to bear the permanent mnemonic
traces of these previous inscriptions such that the pad’s “memory” provided an
infinite reserve. From this child’s toy, Freud found a way to reconceptualize
causality by questioning the apparent autonomy and temporal spacing between
 Vicki Kirby 15

such divisions as stimulus/response, surface/depth, present/past, passiv-

ity/activity, and conscious/unconscious. He hypothesized that perception is
made possible by the discontinuous distribution of previous perceptions (writ-
ings). However, the temporal fabric of these “previous” spacings is not an
archaeological layering of past historical strata, for this is a past that was never
simply present. Derrida elaborates this point:
Let us note that the depth of the Mystic Pad is simultaneously a
depth without bottom, an infinite allusion, and a perfectly
superficial exteriority: a stratification of surfaces each of whose
relation to itself, each of whose interior, is but the implication
of another similarly exposed surface. It joins the two empirical
certainties by which we are constituted: infinite depth in the
implication of meaning, in the unlimited envelopment of the
present, and, simultaneously,the pellicular essence of being, the
absolute absence of any foundation. (1985a, 224)16
Derrida’s “infinite allusion” should not be confused with Gallop’s “referen-
tial illusion” or “effet de reel”: Derrida attempts to interrupt and reinscribe the
economy that underpins Gallop’s hermeneutic, with its unwitting reliance on
an original/simulacrum, real/representation split. Following Derrida, if we
think the body as the scene of writinglreading, then propriation is indetermi-
nate, for the notion of a causal essence or explanatory ground is “constituted
only in being divided from itself, in becoming space, in temporizing, in
deferral” ( 1981,29). Consequently, the difference that is supposed to separate
essentialism from anti-essentialism, or reality from its interpretation, is not the
dividing interval of a third term but a spacing that already inhabits the two
terms. This is a spacing that Derrida has also termed diffiran~e.’~ Thus we move
from two apparently independent moments of analysis to their paradoxical
implication.
Derrida calls this system of differentiation a political economy because it
operates through a force field of hierarchical oppositions whose disjunction is
at once undermined even as it is also maintained. The irreducible tension or
difference that inhabits this system of “writing in the general sense” is inflected
through a sexual diacritics, or what Sarah Kofman has called “a sexualization
of the text” and “a textualization of sex” (as quoted in Jardine 1985, 182). As
nothing precedes diffirance and spacing, woman is an effect of signification,
inscribed in the textual play of presence/absence, value/lack. Woman is held
in place, indeed becomes the place that must inherit the burden of a difference
that is no difference, phallogocentrism’s logic of the same.
However, as woman is ceaselessly re-figured as an absence such that man
can be rendered present in every account, the very repetition of this mode of
reckoning exceeds the “logic of the same.” Woman is the embodied place in
which essentialism comes to reside, albeit uncannily. Essentialism is transfor-
16 Hypatia

mational: it is never identical with itself. Consequently, woman embodies the

“play” of essentialism’s difference from and within itself in the mode of
production of man. This “play” that accompanies the exchange of value can
also be described as “work” because the signifying operation engenders mate-
rial effects: the production of inscription.”
Woman is the embodiment of phallocentrism’s infinite essentialisms, the
tissue of their complicitous interlacings. Woman is the manifestation, the
“reality,” that “references” essentialism’sconstitutive violations. And her body
is indeed essentialism’ssuperlative because it matters too much, because it bears
the habit of too many meanings, too many contradictions, too many questions
that defy resolution and that stay alive in the paradoxical spacing of their
peculiar assemblage. Within the space of this inter-texture and con-texture,
between and within the interstices of essentialism’s textile, a persistent and
radical singularity insists. And this singularity or radical difference always
remains essentialism’s accomplice: the “constant variable” that allows essen-
tialism to play the imposture of “invariant constancy.” This spacing “is” the
impossible complexity that women really are and whose morphology women
incorporate.
Morphology, then, is not anatomy, or indeed biology, although it must
nevertheless include them.” In what can only be a shorthand gesture toward
other ways of reading and therefore other ways of rewriting the social text, we
might approach the complexity of morphology as “the how” of the valorization
of value. This involves trying to think both Michel Foucault’s “how” of power,
which enacts the materiality of inscription, and Derrida’s political economy of
value as “writing in the general sense”-an odd couple perhaps, but one that
appreciates, however differently, that writing/discourse and power are insepa-
rable.20If we return to the question of the referent as it pertains to woman’s
embodiment and think it as morphology in this broader sense, then Gallop’s
earlier discussion of its accessibilityremains inadequate to this complexity. The
referent isn’t so much hidden, or out of reach behind the adumbration of an
“effet de reel,” as it is an immanence, a semiological complicity or binding
together of traces. And the complexity of this textual weaving is such that it
never quite coincides with itself. Not so much a veiling, then, as a partition-
ing-an intricate and infinite fabric-ation.*’
Perhaps I can finish where I began, that is, with Beauvoir’s question “Are
there women really?” I have argued that a feminist practice cannot afford to
offer a simple yes or no to this question, any more than it can afford to embrace
the impasse. However, what we can do is attend to “the how” of “becoming
woman,” as that process by which the answer’s undecidability is determined.
The political purchase in the question “what is woman really?” is embodied in
“the grammatical mark of identity”-the copula For “woman” is never
identical with herself-the copula is alwayslalready a supplement. However,
the process of woman’s becoming is not the counternarrative of the decentered
 Vicki Kirby 17

subject doing battle with phallocentrism’s centered subject. “Woman,” the

subject of morphology, is not cognizable. Morphology cannot be secured as a
way that women “with theory” might practice their own peculiar form of
consciousness-raising.23
Beauvoir’s “woman question,” then, has political efficacy because it
broaches the possibility that man could be the object of this question. Gayatri
Spivak, exploring this possibility and acknowledging that the economy of
sexual difference is a complicitous one, asks, “What is man that the itinerary
of his desire creates such a text?” (1983, 191). “Becoming woman” is written
in the space of inscription, and we might well name that spacing with the
non-name diffirunce. However, “woman” should not be thought as the non-
name diffirunce. Lacking propriety, the two may appear the same. And indeed,
Derrida has used “woman” as a name for diffirunce, thereby acknowledging the
paleonymic burden of the word’s undecidability ( 1979). Nevertheless,
diffirunce is the condition of possibility, the spacing, in which woman’s embod-
iment is inscribed. This isn’t a reversible notion. Consequently, diffirunce
should be thought as an exceeding, that is, again, in excess of “the excess that
is woman.” In other words, when we insist that the copula is not adequate to
represent woman’s be-ing, let us not turn this into a nonsense whereby woman
is denied an embodied existence. We are surely attempting instead to acknowl-
edge something of the complex process through which this existence is formed
and lived.
Related to this point, Gayatri Spivak has made a valuable intervention
against feminism’s desire to read “woman” as the privileged space of a general
alterity that is coincident under the catachresis difiirunce. Spivak encourages
us to think the difference within the spacing of diffirunce: “Let us divide the
name of woman so that we see ourselves as naming, not merely named.” And
with all due caution to the violence of turning a name into a simple referent,
she suggests:

Today, here, what I call the “gendered subaltern,” especially in

decolonized space, has become the name “woman” for me.
(1989,220)

Through the provocation of Spivak‘s work, I have also come to think the
disenfranchised subaltern subject as the other of woman.24However, I prefer
to mark that difference, an unimaginable difference, with the catachrestical
name diffirunce. I am not persuaded that the name “woman” can be thought
of as just a name, a catachresis without a literal referent. I have tried to argue
that this wrong name, although not a proper name, is never immaterial. For if
women matter at all, it is as this word’s embodied realization.
18 Hypatia

NOTES

1. The three recent volumes published in the Zone series, Feher, Naddaff, and Tazi,
4 s . (1989), promise a suggestive miscellany of essays that could redress the body’s
apparent absence from cultural discussion. Unfortunately,most of these essays presume,
as the collection’s title suggests, that there is just one human body that is variously
interpreted across historiesand cultures. For furtherdiscussion of this collection,see Kirby
(1989a).
2. Impossible as it may seem, not everyone does find themselves in possession of a
body. See, for example, Head (1920); Schilder (1950);and Sacks (1985).
3. Grosz’s point is that essentialism is, ironically, a slippery notion that defies
definition. This fiied essence may be discovered in biology, psychology, or culture. Very
briefly, she describes essentialism and its cognates as follows: Essentialism: “. . . the
existence of fixed characteristics,given attributes, and ahistorical functions which limit
the possibilities of change and thus of social reorganization” (1990, 334). Biologism:
. ..
“women’sessence is defined in terms of their biological capacities. In so far as biology
is assumed to constitute an unalterable bedrock of identity, the attribution of biologistic
characteristicsamounts to a permanent form of social containment for women” (1990,
..
334). Naturalism: “. may be asserted on theological or on ontological rather than on
.
biological grounds. . . it may be claimed that women’s nature is derived from God-given
attributes which are not explicable or observable simply in biological terms. . .. More
commonly however, naturalism presumes the equivalence of biological and natural
properties” (1990, 334). Universalism: “the attributions of invariant social categories,
functions and activities to which all women in all cultures are assigned” (1990,334).
4. The “two lips” refers to the essay “ThisSex Which Is Not One” in the collection
of the same name (1985b).As the concept of morphology is a difficult one, the following
explanation of the term is offered:
The concept of morphology, a term Irigaray uses frequently, mediates
between a purely anatomical and a purely psychological account of the
body and its pleasures. It denotes the determinacy of the body’s form in
the formation of the imaginary body or body image (cf. Lacan’s mirror
phase for the construction of the libidinal and identificatory relation to
the child’s own body as constitutive of the boundaries and structuresof its
ego in Lacan [1977b] and [1953]). The body’s morphology is thus both
constitutive of and constituted by how it is inscribed, marked and made
meaningful. (Campioni and Grosz 1983, 140-41)
5. For an incisive analysis of the unquestioned assumptions that accompany the
sexlgender distinction, see Gatens (1983).
6. See, for example, Heath (1978); Spivak (1983); Schor (1986 and 1987); Fuss
(1989);Jardine (1987);Braidotti (1989);Grosz (1990);Vasseleu (1991);differences (“The
Essential Difference: Another Look at Essentialism”) 1, 2 (Summer 1989), especially
essays by Schor and Fuss and interview with Spivak.
7. See for example, Moi (1988, 138-39). Moi regards Irigaray’s work as tainted
because she has presumed to enter discourse as a woman. She mentions Margaret
Thatcher to illustrate the folly of a woman entering a man’s arena us a woman. For
inevitably woman must act as if she were a man and thereby deny the specificity of her
difference. Moi cites the battery of questions that Shoshana Felman raises regarding the
place of enunciation in Irigaray’spark femme,and Irigaray stands condemned, with no
 Vicki Kirby 19

further argument. Moi seems to have no understanding of the Derridean strategy that
levers a text open by attending to the differences that always inhabit it, even as they are
finessed and suppressed. She misinterprets Derrida when she refers to his claim that there
is no outside of metaphysics, drawing the conclusion that Irigaray’s project is therefore
doomed to failure because there is ultimately no escape. Derrida argues from the inside
out, trying to articulate an “inside” of metaphysics where “the logic of the same” cannot
maintain its supposed self-identity. And clearly, Irigaray makes use of this strategy to
reread phallogocentrism for women. Against the philosophical complexity of Irigaray’s
work, Moi’s argument can only work as ressentiment. It is as though Moi believes she can
escape the question of enunciation in her own work and prove that she is outside the
“Thatcher effect” by pointing to error and guilt elsewhere. We might well ask, from what
position does Moi speak?
8. Much of Irigaray’s writing is still untranslated. Among Anglophone readers her
better known works include “Women’s Exile” (1977); Speculum of the Other W m n
(1985a); This Sex Which Is Not One (198513); and “Is the Subject of Science Sexed?”
(1985~).
9. “Quand Nos Lhvres S’Ecrivent: Irigaray’s Body Politic,” Romanic Review, also
appears in a slightly revised version as “Lip Service,” in Gallop (1988). I have concen-
trated on this article because, as Fuss comments, Jane Gallop is a noted defender of Irigaray
and one whose work represents “the most promising line of argument to follow” (Fuss
1989,65).
10. By way of defending a too literal reading of Irigaray, it may be that Gallop has
engaged in a too literal reading of Freud. Certainly the ambiguities in Freud’s work are
provocative and suggest that other interpretations are possible.
11. Gallop is not alone in excluding biology from consideration. There seems to be
an almost consensual agreement among Irigaray’s most sophisticated defenders that a
limit must be determined with regard to the notion of materiality, textuality, or anatomy
in Irigaray’s texts. See, for example, Whitford (1986, 7), and (1989, 121-23). Whitford
is careful to exclude biology from Irigaray’s interventions: “She [Irigaray]is speaking not
of biology but of the imaginary, in which one may make male or female identifications,
regardless of one’s biological sex” (Whitford 1986,7). “Biology” in this account is
immutable, the “given” of sex that sexuality then interprets.
See also Burke (1981, 303-4).A certain interpretive “play” within Burke’s writing
tends to sustain the uncertain nature of the body’s materiality. Burke suggests that “the
problematic intersection of sexuality and representation” could be thought through an
attention to the notion and use of figurative language, a study that has still to be
undertaken. This seems to imply that figuration may involve some material efficacy, that
it may not be the “other” of literalization. Burke goes on to cite Nietzsche, who muses as
to whether all philosophy “has not been merely an interpretation of the body and a
misunderstanding of the body.” Of course, “body” is ambiguous here. It could be the
subject or the predicate of the sentence, or their performative implication. The mindbody
split is made unstable in this statement, and this undecidability suggests the inextricable
nature of language and materiality, indeed, of language as materiality. However, Burke
confines the ambiguity in the passage to the semantic involvement between the words
“interpretation” and “misunderstanding.” This tends to “read” the body back into the
position of object, burying its substance beneath the debris of our understandings or
misunderstandings. Consequently, Burke is only able to acknowledge the worth of
reinterpreting the “conceptual” systems through which the body is understood. And
although the conclusion to this piece evokes the possibility that reading is a n action, that
20 Hypatia

reading enacts differencesand therefore has effects, the interpretive model through which
this is argued inevitably privileges mind over matter. As Burke suggests, “we may find
that we emerge from this difficult reading process with our minds, literally, changed.”
And see Grosz (1989,xix-xx). Grosz’s discussion of morphology (see note 4 above) sets
up a surface/depth model, a culture/physiology (biology) split. An inevitable result is that
the productive force of Irigaray’s parler femme is confined to the notion of “inscription”
on the body’s surface. Anatomy is interpreted as the body’s corporeal shape.
My own argument is not in opposition to these excellent readings; indeed, I am entirely
indebted to their intelligent provocations. Rather, I see my intervention as a further
elaboration of this work, an attempt to read it to the letter. In other words, although I
agree with Carolyn Burke that our minds are literally changed, I want to entertain the
idea that our bodies are also.
12.See, for example, Plaza (1978);Moi (1988,127-49); Kuykendall(l984,263-74);
and Sayers (1986,42-8).
13.See, for example, Lacan (1977,30-13). Elizabeth Grosz has suggested to me that
perhaps a radical reading of Lacan’s mirror stage would go towards generalizing Lacan’s
field of language. Such an interpretation promises an interesting and provocative line of
inquiry. Another direction might be the Deleuzian reading of Desire as production rather
than lack. For example:
...
If desire produces, its product is real. Desire does not lack anything; it
..
does not lack its object. . Desire and its object are one and the same
..
thing. Desire is not bolstered by needs, but rather the contrary; needs
are derived from desire: they are counterproducts within the real that
desire produces. , . . (Deleuze and Guattari 1983,26-27,29)
14. A glaring illustration of this tendency to ignore the possibility of a Derridean
reading of “writing,” “language,”or “textuality” is evidenced in Gallop (1982,283-290).
Gallop’s intervention takes up an oversight or blind spot in the collection, an inability
to take account of what Barbara Johnson describes as “not a difference between. . but.
a difference within. Far from constituting the text’s unique identity, it is that which
subverts the very idea of identity.” Johnson describes this as a “literature that inhabits
the very heart of what makes sexuality problematic for us speaking animals” (1982,284).
Gallop quickly assumes that “Johnson’s puzzling remark could best be explained by
recourse to Lacanian psychoanalysis,”although she does go on to admit that “my attempt
to explain Johnson’s provocative remark is far from satisfactory” (1982,285). It seems
strange that Gallop has chosen to ignore the original context in which Johnson’s
apparently enigmatic words appeared. See The Critical Difference: Essays in the Contem-
pmary Rhetoric ofReading (1980).Johnson is quite specific in describing this volume as a
working through of a Derridean notion of diffkrance,“the record of one reader’s struggles
to come to grips with the problems posed by contemporary so-called deconstructive
critical theory” (1980,xi). When Gallop confines this enterprise to the problematic of a
psychoanalytic narrative, a “critical difference” is thereby elided.
15. Several critics have noted the way that Derrida’s work has received a sanitizing
translation as it crossed the Atlantic. See, for example, Gaschk (1979);Johnson (1985);
Spivak (1984);Weber (1987);and Kirby (1989b).
16. It strikes me that the title of Gallop’s article, “Quand Nos Levres S’Ecrivent,” a
play on Irigaray’s “Quand nos levres se parlent,” could also be read through the circuit of
the mystic writing pad. The reflexive casts an ambiguity that has the lips being written
at the same time they are writing themselves.
 Vicki Kirby 21

17. Derrida’s neologism diffhance is an attempt to mark the difference within differ-
ence itself. The graphic differencebetween the “e” and the “a” is inaudible in the French,
a difference that goes unnoticed, as if “without trace.” Through this visual metaphor
Derrida emphasizes that diffirance is not the opposite of difference. The play of diffhance
marks the condition of possibility of difference as an identifying force. However, within
this same movement diffirunce endlessly delays and displaces the unity of identity as
something that is fixed and independent. For an elaboration of d i f f h n c e see Derrida
(1982b).
18. As the notion of “play” within writing has been so consistently misunderstood,
it is worth quoting Derrida himself on this word:
Play, not in the sense of gambling or playing games, but what in French
we call jouer, which means that the structure of the machine, or the
springs, are not so tight, so that you can just try to dislocate; that’s what 1
meant by play. (Quoted in Ferrell, forthcoming)
19. Irigaray has often been taken to task over her cryptic comment “I think we must
go back to the question not: of the anatomy but of the morphology of the female sex”
(1977,64). Also see, for example, Moi (1988,143);Fuss (1989,77); Plaza (1978,31). A
more complex understanding of morphology, one enabled by a deconstructive reading,
would not be so puzzled by Irigaray’s comment. Having said this, I am not assuming that
this interpretation is necessarily Irigaray’s. Rather, my intention here is to offer what
might be a more useful reading of this problematic. I would like to acknowledge that my
interpretation of morphology derives from material studied in a seminar “Theory, Femi-
nism, Marxism, and the Third World” given by Gayatri Spivak at Stanford University in
the Spring semester, 1988.
20. For a suggestive discussion of writing as power, see Derrida (1979a). I should also
note here that although Foucault’s notion of “inscription” implies writing on a surface,
this surface is, as in Derrida’s notion, an exceptional one that includes the body’s depths
and, indeed, questions the division between interior and exterior. For example, Foucault
argues that genealogy traces the workings of history as it “inscribes itself in the nervous
system, in temperament, in the digestive apparatus” (Foucault 1977, 147).
21. On the question of the referent, Derrida has often been accused of abandoning
reference altogether. However, he insists:
It is totally false to suggest that deconstruction is a suspension of refer-
ence. . . . Deconstruction tries to show that the question of reference is
much more complex and problematic than traditional theories supposed.
(1984,123)
22. See Derrida (1982a). It is interesting to note that the French word est (is) is a
homophone of et (and).
23. For an example of this tendency in an otherwise careful and inspired reader, see
Johnson (1984).
24. I have written about this elsewhere. See, for example (1989~).

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