Reviews 229

Freud's bizarre obsession with the Shakespeare-Bacon controversy,

in which he was so thoroughly convinced by the theories of the
appropriately named Thomas Looney that he revoked his own
Oedipal interpretation of Hamlet in The Interpretation of Dreams —
without, however, removing the interpretation itself. According to
Royle, the first advocate of the Bacon-as-author-of-Shakespeare
thesis was herself called Bacon: he then takes us through the names
of other 'anti-Stratfordians' including Sherwood E. Silliman and
George M. Battey, though the most compelling combination of name
and title has to be Our Elusive Willy, by Ira Sedgwick Proper.
After Derrida gives the reader the scopic satisfaction of what the
world rewritten by Jacques has come to look like, and in doing so
convinces us of what initially seemed like Royle's most unpromising
thesis: Jacques Derrida as a great comic writer. Or maybe it is
rather Royle himself who is the comic hero of the book, the witty
narrator of his own Shandyesque-Joycean quest. At times the weight
of the sins of the father demands that he put on the ponderous
discourse of the dreaded 'rigorous' reading. But otherwise Royle
shows himself to be the master of a new comic theoretical genre of
which this book is but the fascinating furtive foretaste.

The marriage of a limitation with an opportunity

Diane Elam, Feminism and Deconstruction: Ms. en Abyme

(Routledge, 1993), 154 pp.

Sarah Wood

'I am not going to tell the kind of story in which feminism learns to
love the hand that corrects the error of her ways ... Nor am I going
to propose that what we need is a kinder and gentler deconstruction
...' (p.l). Diane Elam's vigorous, patient book immediately and
sustainedly renounces the wish for convergence between feminism
and deconstruction. The broad scope of its references gives the book
an extra value as a survey of recent scholarship, but that really isn't
the point either: 'What will be different about this book is not its
230 Oxford Literary Review

content (there are other discussions of deconstruction and feminism),

but rather the kind of metonymic links or enchainements that it
makes possible between and within elements' (p.2). This ambitious
concern with the performative possibilities of what the book will
have been to its readers compromises the descriptive retrospection
of reviewing. It is particularly clear that we do not yet know what
Feminism and Deconstruction: Ms. en Abyme can do.
Why the idiomatic subtitle? Elam's account of mise en abyme
articulates the exciting and awkward effects of the figure for
feminism. No more fascination with objectification of women when
the assumed laws of representation give way to the experience of an
object that, without loss of visual definition, 'slips away into infinity'
(p.28). No more requirement that in order to become subjects women
'conform to specified and calculable representations of themselves as
subjects', when mise en abyme faces the subject with its 'inability to
know what it knows, to see what it sees' (pp. 29, 28).
Mise en abyme opens up thinking about how Feminism and
Deconstruction might be read. There is nothing slippery or
incapacitating about the book's engagement with other writing.
Precis and paraphrase make Derrida's SpurslEperons, for instance,
almost unrecognisable. No longer difficult — or beautiful — no
l
longer concerned with styles or 6criture: the intriguing Elle (s')ecrit'
gets glossed in terms of Cixous' notion of'writing the body', allowing
the reader to ignore the questions of distance, return and the
psychoanalytic fetish with which Derrida surrounds the proposition.
The nearest body in Spurs is not only human, not simply rhetorical:
'(machination, cri, vol et pinces d'une grue)/(the screeching
machinations of a hooker or crane, its flight and clapping claws)'
describes the quotation marks that mark a (feminine) divergence
within truth in Nietzsche's writing:
This divergence within truth elevates itself. It is
elevated in quotation marks (...). Nietzsche's writing
is compelled to suspend truth between the
tenter-hooks of quotation marks — and suspended
there with truth is — all the rest. Nietzsche's
writing is an inscription of the truth. And such an
inscription, even if we do not venture so far as to
Reviews 231

call it the feminine itself, is indeed the feminine

'operation'.
Because woman is (her own) writing, style must
return to her. [Elle (s')ecrit. C'est a elle que revient le
style.] (Spurs 57)
Derrida's, and deconstruction's, working of the graphic and
rhetorical is not always compatible with the demands of producing
what the back cover of Feminism and Deconstruction calls 'a
no-nonsense and stimulating guide through one of the mazes of
contemporary theory'. One of the main purposes — and pleasures —
of a maze is to lose oneself and to wander without signposts. Where
deconstruction is concerned, the risks go beyond the designed
indirection of a maze, beyond even the horizontal plane of its
prolongations and dead-ends. The guide courts the fall (tombe) that
surfaces in Spurs/Eperons, in Signepongel Signsponge and 'My
Chances/Mes Chances' where the phenomenality of 'writing or the
trace in general' leads up to 'a certain divisibility or internal
difference of the so-called ultimate element (stoikheion, trait, letter,
seminal mark)' ('My Chances ...' 10). When Elam describes how 'For
Derrida ... bodies are always discursive, inscribed and inscribing:
rhetorical hymens and invaginations are intended to denaturalize
the body, create different distributions of sexual markings', the
chancy, literary movements of his work become a 'strategy at work
between the recognised poles of natural and discursive. No more
amazement.
The apotropaic work of chapter 1 ('Unnecessary Introductions')
wards off hasty formulations of the relationship between
deconstruction and feminism: the two 'share a parallel divergence
from... politics and philosophy (p.l). Yet the texture of the book's
prose glides over the possible incommensurability suggested on page
2: 'Deconstruction upsets the way we think about philosophy
because its analysis of the philosophical tradition is inseparable
from an attention to the performative effects of the discourse of
analysis itself.' I'd argue with the framing that restricts the upset
to thinking about philosophy, and limits what befalls reading and
writing in deconstruction to contemplative 'attention to performative
effects'. The second chapter 'Questions of women' takes off from mise
en abyme to interrogate four apparent alternatives 'Undetermined
232 Oxford Literary Review

or determined', 'Her-story or his-story?', 'Gender or sex?', 'Linguistic

or material girl?'. A third chapter, 'Towards a groundless solidarity',
draws attention to the inadequacy o f a conventional understanding
of the political' for deconstruction and feminism, and suggests a
shift into ethical thinking about responsibilities and obligations
(p.69). Between this chapter's exploration of subjectivity in
conjunction with undecidability, and the achieved goal of the last
chapter ('Groundless solidarity'), intervenes a series of'Institutional
interruptions', miming the materiality of the institutional
placements of deconstruction and feminism. There might have been
a place for closer thought about writing, about writing guides and
coursebooks, about systems of marks (not only linguistic marks) and
the effects of these 'upon the problem of situating the debate
between feminism and deconstruction' (p.3). (The index excludes
language, literariness, mark, name, trace, writing... Is this omission
adequately covered by the disclaimer that the book and its
arguments are 'not meant to be exhaustive'?) Chapter 4,
'Groundless solidarity*, explores the 'necessary linkage of politics
and ethics in the absence of the subject' (p. 106). Here the emphasis
on risky 'foundationlessness' and excessive responsibility makes an
inspiring end.
Feminism and Deconstruction succeeds in its aim of providing
arguments for partisans on either side to take the other seriously.
With its scholarship and energetic clarity of thought, the book's
various approaches to the category of experience, to the notion of
politics and to the idea of determination will open up all sorts of
intellectual possibilities.

Mark Wigley, The Architecture of Deconstruction: Derrida's Haunt

(MIT Press: London, 1995), xv + 278 pp.

Vance Adair

At a time when 'spatial politics' are an increasing focus of concern

for would-be combatants of the postmodern malaise, Mark Wigle/s
book is likely to become a seminal contribution to the debate.