anne-emmanuelle berger

Sexing Differances

“D oit-on penser la ‘différance’ ‘avant’ la différence sex-

uelle, ou ‘à partir’ d’elle?” asks Derrida in “Chorégraphies” (103). (Must
one think ‘differance’ ‘before’ sexual difference or taking off ‘from’ it?”
reads the English translation [“Choreographies” 98].)
Read this sentence, that is, as Derrida would have us do, pay
attention to its idiom, don’t arrest its meaning by thinking you’ve under-
stood it. There is more than one message left on by the writing machine.
Derrida is not only asking himself, and asking us to ask ourselves, whether
“differance” might stem and start from sexual difference, that is, whether
sexual difference might engender “differance,” whether “differance”—both
the word “differance,” to which the quotation marks direct our attention,
and the quasi concept it invents—originates in “sexual difference” (both
the locution, then, and whatever it designates). He is asking whether one
should think of one as “taking off ‘from’ ” the other, or rather, “ ‘à partir’
d’elle.” One might overlook this prepositional locution, one indeed usu-
ally tends to think of the words that provide syntactic articulations as
mere tools, secondary citizens of language. But “à partir de” is between
quotation marks too, just “like” “differance.” “A partir de” literally means

Copyright 2005 by Brown University and d i f f e r e n c e s : A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 16:3
d i f f e r e n c e s 53

“parting from,” that is, at the same time, “departing from” and therefore
“partaking (part taking)” in. The question, then, is not simply one of
precedence or origin. It is also a question of “part(s),” of the interrup-
tions and fragmentations evolving from “ à partir de.” Since “differance”
and “sexual difference” do not simply come from one another, they may
not come back to each other, they may not come together at all, as “all.”
Together they part. They cut away from and across each other. A logic of
endless and impossible partition is set in motion. And precisely because
the logic of origin, the genealogics, with its hierarchical and chronological
modes of operation (inasmuch as such a logic is concerned with what or
who comes fi rst), is upset by such a way of phrasing the issue, the ques-
tion raised begs not to be answered, and must remain, as it is, suspended,
dangling, or, as it were, dancing.
“Choreographies,” a well-known dialogue between Jacques
Derrida and Christie McDonald, from which I have extracted the above
sentence, fi rst appeared in diacritics in 1982. In this piece, Derrida answers
an interviewer eager for him to clarify his stance on feminism. He does
so, in a surprising way, by inviting her and us to try and meditate on the
connections between dance, differance, reading, and sexual difference.
Taking his cue from a “maverick woman” (Emma Goldman) quoted by
another woman (McDonald), he in essence “says” what she says she said
(and saying what the other says, that is, quoting, citing knowingly or unwit-
tingly, is what Derrida shows we all do all the time, for instance as soon
as we say “let’s dance”): “If I can’t dance I don’t want to be part of your
revolution” (89). (Note the “I don’t want to be part of.”) The word “dance,”
noun or verb, is not part of the philosophical lexicon; it doesn’t conjure up
a recognizable concept, so it looks as if it might lead him and us astray.
Yet, it is precisely this straying away, this displacement of the traditional
modes and objects of philosophical inquiry, for instance, the displacement
of the question of “the place of woman” raised by McDonald in her initial
comment,1 that opens up a certain path to thinking:

And why for that matter [asks Derrida] should one rush into
answering a topological question (what is the place of woman?
[quelle est la place de la femme])? Or an economical question
(because it all comes back to the oikos as home, maison, chez
soi, at home in this sense also means in French within the self,
the law of the proper place, etc., in the preoccupation with the
woman’s place)? Why should a new “idea” of woman or a new
54 Sexing Differances

step taken by her necessarily be subjected to the urgency of this

topo-economical concern (essential, it is true, and ineradicably
philosophical)? This step only constitutes a step on the condi-
tion that it challenge a certain idea of the locus ( lieu) and the
place [. . .] and that it dance otherwise. (94)

“To dance otherwise,” as Derrida suggests we do in order to

both destabilize and deconstruct any set notion of a “place,” be it a “new
place” for women, is almost a tautological expression: to take steps that
are different from the usual kinds of steps is indeed already a way of
dancing. What does “dancing” consist of, if not in changing (the) place(s),
in reconfiguring or deconfiguring (the) space through motion, in step-
ping in, out, and aside, tracing and retracing one’s steps according to a
certain rhythm that differs from the ordinary rhythm of our daily modes
of procession? Dancing, then, would be a way of stepping otherwise, of
“differing”/“deferring,” and “differance,” perhaps, the name of a dance
(see it dance anagrammatically), new or rather unheard of before Der-
rida. For “differing” (in space, stance, or shape) and “deferring” in time,
both of which are involved in the “spacing” or movement of the Derridean
“differance,” come (and de/part) from the latin verb fero (from fero, tuli,
latum, as in “transfer” or “translation”), which means “to carry,” hence
to deport, to move away or toward. Add the prefi x “di,” which indicates a
process of division, of partition, and it means to move in different direc-
tions, to scatter, in Derridean parlance, to “disseminate.” There can be
literally no differance without a certain motion, even an inventive motion,
that carries you away. Just like a dance.
Yet, if Derrida celebrates the “displacement of women” and the
“joyous disturbances of women’s movements” that bring with them the
“chance for a certain risky turbulence” (94); if he privileges (or enjoys) the
dancing mood of maverick women and welcomes attempts to “move beyond
the ‘positional’ ” (100), his dance stance, his deconstructive movements,
are never simply oppositional. He doesn’t try to promote a philosophy of
dance against a politics of stance. Any such oppositional move would be
caught in the “positional” rhetoric the dancing steps purport to escape.
There is therefore no attempt on his part to dismiss the “placement”
efforts of “organized, patient, laborious ‘feminist’ struggles” (95) in favor
of the atopical “madness of the dance” (95). What he advocates, rather, is
a relentless stepping in and out of traditional political and philosophical
confi nes. If “the real conditions in which women’s struggles develop on
all fronts [. . .] require the preservation (within longer or shorter phases)
d i f f e r e n c e s 55

of metaphysical presuppositions,” one must “question [them] at a later

phase—or an other place—because they belong to the dominant system that
one is deconstructing on a practical level” (97). Such a strategy, then, is not
simply “utopian,” nor is it simply “pragmatic,” much less self-contradictory.
What it requires is the opening of and constant play with a “multiplicity of
places, moments, forms and forces” (97): in short, it makes dancing both
possible and necessary. For, asks Derrida, “how can one breathe without
such punctuation and without the multiplicities of rhythm and steps? How
can one dance?” (97). It is important, even vital, that the movement not
be arrested, that the possibility of dance be opened, as the possibility of
stance, or stasis, is preserved.
The issue of reading arises precisely in the context of this
meditation on dance. Recalling his reading of Nietszche on women and
the misreadings it afforded him, Derrida writes:

In Spurs I have tried to formalize the movements and typical

moments of the scene that Nietszche creates throughout a very
broad and diverse body of texts. I have done this up to a certain
limit, one that I also indicate, where the decision to formalize
fails for reasons that are absolutely structural. Since these typi-
cal features are and must be unstable, sometimes contradictory,
and finally “undecidable,” any break in the movement of the
reading would settle in a counter-meaning, in the meaning
which becomes counter-meaning. (95) [. . . toute pause de lec-
ture s’installerait dans le contresens, dans le sens qui devient
automatiquement contresens. (“Chorégraphies” 101)]

One can formalize the features of a text and the contours of a

thought up to a “certain limit.” But there comes a moment, says Derrida,
when one has to recognize the structural instability of any construction;
at that point, any settling down, any settlement for one meaning or direc-
tion over an other, any attempt to arrest meaning by “breaking the move-
ment of reading” does indeed yield meaning—but as counter-meaning,
mismeaning, or misreading. Read on, move on; move on in order to fully
read, suggests Derrida; and he goes on and far: “I will go so far as to say that
it is to not read the syntax and punctuation of a given sentence when one
arrests the text in a certain position, thus settling on a thesis, meaning or
truth.” That, Derrida adds, is the “mistake or mistaking of hermeneutics”
(96). Any freezing of meaning, stance, or position is a mistake, the mistake
hermeneutics makes. Reading is or should be an infi nite and open process
56 Sexing Differances

or movement: a kind of dance. 2 Reading Derrida dancing therefore entails

that we in turn dance—with him.
Now, you may ask: what does “sexual difference” have to do
with “dancing” and “reading”? I would say that Derrida’s invitation to
dance is also, necessarily, an invitation to rewrite and reinscribe “sexual
difference” as (and in) “sexual differances” (with an “a” and in the plural),
that is, as a multiplicity of divided steps that resist stable formalizations,
a differing (and also deferring) dance if you will, that shakes subjects as
much as it shapes them in the movement(s) that draw them toward and
away from one another. Let me expand on this formulation.
In “Choreographies,” Derrida sums up his criticism of both
the Heideggerian and the Levinasian positions on the issue of “sexual dif-
ference.” As in “Geschlecht: Sexual Difference, Ontological Difference,”
he questions the neutrality of the Heideggerian Dasein, insofar as such a
neutrality amounts to an erasure not only of “sexual difference” itself, if it
exists as such, but even of the very question of its relevance for any attempt
to think, for instance and to begin with, about being in the world. As in “At
This Very Moment in This Work Here I Am,” he interrogates the philosophi-
cal secondarization of “sexual difference” by Levinas. But his attention to
the ways in which “sexual difference” figures or not and occupies or not a
certain place or space in philosophical endeavors that he reads and values
(Nietszche, Heidegger, Levinas) does not amount to a simple endorsement
of such a notion. As all his readers know, his interest in “sexual difference”
is precisely what leads him to forcefully question, hence deconstruct, the
binary logic that underwrites traditional notions of sexual difference and
of sexuality in general (to begin with, the oppositional divide between
heterosexuality and homosexuality). All aspects of what he calls “sexdual-
ity” come under his critical scrutiny. He doesn’t leave sexual difference at
rest: he doesn’t leave it in place. And as always, the effect (rather than the
result) of deconstruction is not one of dismissal of the deconstructed terms
or notions, but one of “multiplication.” In his recent seminar, “La Bête et le
Souverain,” he warned his audience: “Chaque fois qu’on remet en question
une limite oppositionnelle, loin d’en conclure à l’identité, il faut multiplier
au contraire l’attention aux différences, raffi ner l’analyse dans un champ
restructuré” (444). [Each time one calls into question an oppositional limit,
far from drawing a conclusion about the identity of the deconstructed terms,
one should, on the contrary, multiply one’s attention to the differences,
refi ne one’s analysis in a restructured field” (my trans.)]
d i f f e r e n c e s 57

To upset “sexual difference,” to show how shaky its concept is

and how unsettling its effects, shouldn’t lead one to get rid of it too quickly.
Rather, one should pay attention to the ways in which it divides itself to the
point of escaping conventional limitations, trespassing borders (to begin
with, the borders that separate “man” and “woman”) and multiplying
sexual possibilities.
Still, you may ask, if most conventional notions of sexual dif-
ference reinforce patterns of “sexduality,” why keep the idiom of “sexual
difference” at all? Why not get rid of such a loaded expression rather
than pluralize it as Derrida likes to do to indicate—and perform—the
“multiplication” of deconstructed sexual differences?
There are indeed a number of important “reasons” for which
Derrida remains attached to the idiom of “sexual difference” (in the plural)
at the very moment he calls its assumptions into question. I will try and
address them all too briefl y, in an order that in no way reflects a chronology
or hierarchy of causes.
Remember, Derrida inherits “sexual difference.” He inherits
the locution from the French language, a gendered language in which
“difference” is feminine, 3 and the notion from a certain intellectual and
epistemological history, precisely the kind of history Foucault attempted to
account for in the fi rst volume of his History of Sexuality. The words that
make up the locution are of course old Latin words, but they made their
way in French in their current sense at a time that corresponds to what
Foucault termed “the Age of sexuality.” 4 More specifically, “sexual differ-
ence” gained currency as a locution at the end of the nineteenth century
and owes its status as an epistemological problem to psychoanalysis.
Using the term (at “quoting” distance so to speak) or even
“abusing” it in a playful way is therefore a way of acknowledging a certain
history, of referring (oneself and the reader) to it. As his readers know, Der-
rida is a relentless exponent of the complications and obligations involved
in inheritance and debt. Dissenting from the legacy of a certain tradition
involves acknowledging it, working through one’s debt to history. Derrida’s
faithfulness to the idiom of “sexual difference” is a token of his faithful-
ness to history as both a process and an issue. It is, in this case, one of the
ways in which he stages and problematizes his relation to modernity (the
term and the notion): no doubt in a different way than Foucault but with
an equally deep sense of the historicity of discourses. Indeed, and contrary
to what some detractors say, by affirming the inescapability of inheritance
58 Sexing Differances

and indebtedness while questioning or rather exposing the fictionality of

genealogical narratives, Derrida shows himself to be, if not a historian
in any ordinary sense of the term, at least a dedicated and most original
thinker of the historical and historicizing processes.
There is another question of memory, albeit of a different kind.
“Sexual difference” brings back the linguistic memory of the “cut” it stems
from, as it were. Sexualis in Latin comes from secare, sectum, which means
to cut, to cleave, to divide in parts (hence words of Latin origin such as
section, dissection, etc.). To belong to one sex, then, insofar as one does,
would mean to have a certain cut, to be cut a certain way and to be cut
away from something or somebody else .
We know the crucial role a certain problematics of the cut
(coupure) has played from the very beginning in Derrida’s work. The
deconstruction of binary oppositions involves questioning the formation,
logic, and decisiveness of any clear-cut distinction and, conversely, under-
standing the relation of “structure” to “suture.” Indeed, when it comes to
cuts, and to all manners of cutting operations, for instance, circumcision,
Derrida’s memory is always fresh, fresh from the cut, still bleeding, as
Hélène Cixous masterplayfully shows in Portrait of Jacques Derrida as a
Young Jewish Saint. Which means also that the insistence on the cutting
edge of “sexual difference” and the typically Derridean attempt to “cut the
cut,” to rescind it (rather than suture it) to the point of undecidability, is
not simply a question of language, of reference and reverence toward ety-
mology. If the cut is in a certain way decisive in Derrida’s work, if it lends
itself for that matter to the operation of deconstruction that will render it
undecidable, it is thanks to a cluster of conditions, accidents, or events, at
the intersection of collective history, personal history, and language.
One begins to understand why Derrida would rather keep alive
the memory of the idiom of “sexual difference” even if—and because—it
prompts the utmost deconstructive gesture on his part (cutting—through—
the cut) than adopt the dominant idiom of today, that of “gender construc-
tion.”5 Not only because “sexual difference” makes sense and reference
in French, whereas “gender” (or “genre”) does not, or much less so, and
points to a different direction, linguistically and historically. But also, as
we have seen, because “sexual difference” opens up like a Sesame word
the psychic archive of cut, wound, partition, division—castration?—that
the word “gender” is quick to close for a philological mind attuned to the
histories of language.
d i f f e r e n c e s 59

Elsewhere, for instance when he deals with issues of literary

“genres,” with what he calls the “law of genre,” or with a certain history
of the aesthetic category of the “genius,” Derrida stresses the familial
connections of the words “genre” and “gender” with idioms and notions of
genetics (hence of natural production or reproduction), genealogy, gener-
icity, and generality. All those terms play an important role in traditional
modes of philosophical thinking and in what Derrida calls the history of
metaphysics. As such, they might lend themselves to potentially regressive
political uses. 6
Does Derrida’s insistence on problematizing the cut(s) of sexual
difference amount to an endorsement of psychoanalytic theory, for which
sexual difference, or rather sexual identity, is predicated on a certain
psychic experience of castration? Does his philosophical resistance to
totalizing gestures as well as to the (narcissistic) fantasies of wholeness
and sameness that can arise as a form of defense against both castra-
tion and castration theory, or either of them, suggest that Derrida indeed
endorses or yields to castration (theory)? Not exactly, not only. One might
say that Derrida does not resist it (castration, its theory). But he doesn’t
stop at it. He is not stopped by it. He steps—aside. Remember: the cuts of
sexual differences (in the plural) as he reads them yield multiple parts.7
Cuts yield parts, parts multiply without necessarily cohering. Decastra-
tion, then. In-fi nitude without sovereignty of the deconstructed, I mean,
a decastrated subject. In this sense and at this point, Derrida’s thought or
trail of writing parts ways with the Levinasian notion of the fi nitude of
the subject, such as informs Irigaray’s conception of the ethical subject
as not-all, not-whole, hence not almighty.
Decastration? Isn’t this a dream? A dream word and his dream
of the impossible? Yes, it may be a dream, a dream of what may be. Der-
rida is an avowed dreamer. More exactly, as Cixous points out in her Por-
trait and in “Fichus et Caleçons,” he dreams of dreaming, of making and
reading the world, of taking part(s) in it in a dream in different and new
ways, that is, as one may do in a dream, as one actually does in a dream,
thanks to the dream. “Does the dream itself not prove that what is dreamt
of must be there in order for it to provide the dream?” asks Derrida in
“Choreographies” (108). “Il faut rêver,” he often says. One must, one ought,
to dream. And to “dream” in French involves dancing, or, to speak like
Derrida, pre-dancing or arche-dancing steps, since rêver, a strange word
with an uncertain and mixed origin—half popular Latin, half Gallic—
60 Sexing Differances

literally means to stray and stroll with the mind, to step outside the
trodden paths, to take unforeseeable steps, like a vagrant being.
See how he dreams toward the end of “Choreographies”:

What if we were to approach here [. . .] the area of a relationship

to the other where the code of sexual marks would no longer
be discriminating? The relationship would not be a-sexual, far
from it, but would be sexual [or sexed: “sexué” says the French]
otherwise: beyond the binary difference that governs the deco-
rum of all codes, beyond the opposition feminine/masculine,
beyond bisexuality as well, beyond homosexuality and hetero-
sexuality, which come to the same thing. As I dream of saving
the chance that this question offers I would like to believe in the
multiplicity of sexually marked voices. I would like to believe in
the masses, this indeterminable number of blended voices, this
mobile of non-identifi ed sexual marks whose choreography can
carry, divide, multiply the body of each “individual,” whether he
be classifi ed as “man” or as “woman” according to the criteria
of usage. (108, my emphasis) [Je voudrais croire à la multiplicité
de voix sexuellement marquées, à ce nombre indéterminable
de voix enchevêtrées, à ce mobile de marques sexuelles non
identifi ées. (114–15)]

Derrida dreams of a sexual relationship, albeit sexed other-

wise: not one that is divided into two parts, played by two recognizable
partners, but one that is inscribed in multiple ways. And that’s one more
reason to cling to the memories conjured up by the idiom of “sexual dif-
ference.” “Sexual difference” evokes and entails “sex,” contrary to the
idiom of “gender.” One could say that, for Derrida, “sex” (the word and
whatever it designates in French and in English), the cuts of sexes (be
they, as Derrida dreams them, “indeterminable” and “innumerable”), are
a condition of both love and dance. Without sex or section, without inter-
ruption, without what Derrida also calls “punctuation,” would there be
rhythm, would there be dance? Do not dancing steps, like poetic writing,
require the halting play of a certain caesura?
Without sex (and sexes), would a sexual relation be possible?
Without cuts of sorts, there might be no differences, be they internal or
external, no difference, for instance, between auto- and allo-eroticism, no
interruption and alteration of self-love, which is the condition by which a
d i f f e r e n c e s 61

love of the other might be possible. Indeed, without separations, partitions

of sorts, the chance for an other, any other(s) to come might be lost.
Derrida’s dream brings about a wish scene of lovemaking
between “voix enchevêtrées”: not exactly “blended” or blending voices
as the English translation suggests, but entangled or criss-crossed and
therefore connected-disconnected voices, a necessary condition for a new
polylog to emerge as opposed to the unison of conjugated voices in a tra-
ditional choral composition. The voices, he dreams, would perform a cho-
reography that could “carry, divide, multiply the body of each ‘individual,’
whether he be classified as ‘man’ or as ‘woman’ according to the criteria
of usage.” Thanks to its choreography, such a performance would achieve
the reinscription or rewriting of sexual difference in and as “sexual dif-
ferances,” giving rise to differences not only between subjects but within
each of them, making it impossible to assign identities, to recognize who
is speaking or singing, since each “individual” ’s body would divide and
multiply at the entangled voices’ call and therefore change places indefi-
nitely, infi nitely changing our set notions of “place.” “What kind of a dance
would there be,” asks Derrida in a fi nal dream-stroke,

or would there be one at all, if the sexes were not exchanged

according to rhythms that vary considerably? In a quite rigor-
ous sense, the exchange alone could not suffice either, however,
because the desire to escape the combinatory itself, to invent
incalculable choreographies, would remain. (108)

Obviously, Derrida, unlike Foucault, 8 doesn’t take issue with “sexuality”

(quite the contrary), only, as he says, with sexduality.
I have little space left to devote to Derrida’s erotics, which is
such an important aspect of his work, one that pervades his thinking and
informs his writing in so many ways, beyond its explicit and insisting
thematization. So close to the end assigned to my contribution, let me just
begin to broach the subject.
I’ll start with endings. A great many pieces devoted primarily
to the exploration of the topic of sexual difference end up with scenes
that evoke lovemaking in a variety of ways. I have just quoted from the
last paragraph of “Choreographies.” Whether lovemaking is conjured up
dreamily and wishfully, as in “Choreographies,” allegorically, as in “Four-
mis,” which toys toward the end with the figure of what Derrida calls the
“fête de la différence sexuelle” (the festival of sexual difference) among
62 Sexing Differances

ants (90), or whether it is performed textually as in “At This Very Moment

in This Work Here I Am,” which ends (or de-ends, since the performance
starts after the end of the philosophical argument proper) with an erotic
dialog, a fragmented and panting speech made up of interrupted and
entangled sentences uttered by two sexually indeterminate voices (I have
called it elsewhere a polyduo), 9 Derrida’s text does not so much thematize
the connection between the workings of sexual differances and love as
he performs it.
I sound as if there were no separation(s), no interruption(s), in
short, no differences for him between what conventional wisdom and psy-
choanalysis alike distinguish under the terms “sex” and “love.” There are
many, of course, and therefore one may have to fi nd deconstructive ways
to undo and outdo them. It seems to me that, in the texts I just mentioned
as well as in many others, where “sex” and “love” are inextricably inter-
twined, to the point, perhaps, of being unrecognizable as such, Derrida tries
to formulate relations between them other than the ones made available
and understandable by psychoanalysis (which entails working through
psychoanalysis, of course, rather than ignoring or discarding it).
After all, you may also say, “love” is an old philosophical topic.
Perhaps what distinguishes Derrida’s stance or dance here is that his is
not, or not only, a discourse on love but rather of love and that he is not
so much concerned as philosophers traditionally are with what love is or
appears to be—he is always weary of the ontological mode of question-
ing—as he is busy fi nding the formulas that might (re)invent it, as would
a poet, as did Rimbaud for instance.10
Not only are the genders and numbers of Derrida’s lovemakers
indeterminate, hence potentially multiple (not because Derrida embraces
a perverse notion of the desirability of multiple partnership, but as a
philosophical effect of the divisibility of the subject), but it would be dif-
ficult, indeed misguided, to try and say who or what is making, that is,
(re)inventing love in Derrida’s dreams of other sexual possibilities. At the
end of “Choreographies,” it is, as we have just seen, entangled “voices”
that dance Derrida’s love dance; it is “voices,” in other words, that are
sexed and sexing, sexualizing utterances. Not that Derrida is suddenly
reneging on his deconstructive analysis of “voice” as linked to notions of
self-presence and self-affection; the paleonymic use of the word “voice(s)”
(in the plural) hereby seeks to designate a certain process and loca-
tion of auto-hetero-affection in (and as) writing. In this sense, Derrida’s
appeal to “voices,” and more specifically “entangled voices,” should be
d i f f e r e n c e s 63

understood as a catachrestic trope for a certain eroticization of writing.

The criss-crossing of voices that cut through, double, and interrupt one
another with a loving and soft violence, thereby multiplying tonalities,
mirrors—indeed, figures—the differantial play of the letter, of all letters
together parting while partaking in the same game, as Derrida conceives
it. With more time I could expand on Derrida’s love of language, on his
notion of language as a wall-less chamber or playground in which writing
may be allowed (or may allow itself) to perform its erotic dance. Let me
just say that Derrida’s notion (and fantasy) of writing, of the unstoppable
incisiveness of all forms of tracing, of “style” as an art of punctuation, of
productive caesuras, of surprising cuts (and “decuts,” découpes) between
and within words, which jolt thinking into making new or rather different
connections11 (hence, perhaps, his attraction to Celan’s interrupted lines
and his interest in Cixous’s breathtaking play with the conventions of
punctuation), bear a close relation to his reading of—and interest in—the
multiple hence undecidable cuts of sexual differences.
“Voices,” then, not “subjects,” not even bodies, dance the dream
of other sexual choreographies. And yet, the body, or rather the word
“body,” is everywhere in Derrida’s writing; it comes to his mind and pen
when he comes to writing or when writing comes to surprise him. He fre-
quently resorts to such phrases as “un corps d’écriture” (a singular “body
of writing,” not the body of writing in general) or “le corps de la lettre”
(the body of the letter). The Derridean “body of writing” shouldn’t be con-
fused with the conventional designation of a corpus of texts as a “body of
writings,” or “a body of works,” even if Derrida obviously plays with this
traditional catachresis. Just like modern poets do (modern poetry and
literature in general have busied themselves turning linguistic memory
and idiom archives into weapons of verbal reinvention), he unburies and
reactivates the old Latin locution in the very movement (and at the very
moment) of its displacement. Such a displaced and literate replay of the
notion of “corpus” shouldn’t be read too quickly either as signaling a desire
to “write the body,” or to write “through the body.” As if one knew for sure,
once and for all, Derrida might say, what the body is and what the word
“body” designates. In other words, because it is not grounded in a precon-
ception of the “body,” the mention of the “body of writing” serves no easy
referential function. In a similar fashion, Derrida’s attraction to the “corps
de la lettre” (“body of the letter”), that is, to the letter of such a formula, in
no way indicates a naive belief in what was called in the nineteen-seventies
the “materiality of the signifier.” Derrida has exposed the philosophical
64 Sexing Differances

shortcomings of such an understanding of the signifier, which depends

on the upholding of the binary division of the “sign” between content and
form and that ultimately reinforces the metaphysical opposition between
the sensible and the intelligible.12 The frequent mention of the body, its
multiple appearances on different and sometimes surprising philosophi-
cal occasions, cannot be simply understood as an index of a materialist
stance, all the more since “materialism,” or at least most materialisms
in the history of Western thought, still subscribe in Derrida’s view to the
metaphysical assumptions they purport to contest.
But, you may say, what about dancing? Can one dance or dream
of dancing without relying on material bodies, if not in reality, at least
in fantasy? Just as “entangled voices” are not bodies as such, but call for
them, as it were; just as cuts might serve to draw the psychic contours
of bodies, inscribing their necessity, prior to any recognizable shape or
figure; just as the experience of the wound, of multiple wounds, sets off
the process of self-affection through which and thanks to which a rela-
tion to “one’s body” might at some point be imagined and articulated, the
dance of sexual differances—and sexual differances as a dance—delineate
the holographic and moving contours of bodies to come, of bodies as they
might come. No simple materialism, then, and no simple realism either,
but rather, when he writes about writing as when he thinks about sexual
difference, when he sexes differances in writing, the multiple indexation
of an affective and passionate cathexis of . . .
Why I love Derrida? Because he loves.

p.s. The very fact that Derrida took such issues as “sexual dif-
ference” or various forms and claims of feminism seriously strikes me
today, and sadly so, as an almost unique philosophical gesture on his part.
The current acclaim of discourses that do not bother with such issues and
are not in the least bothered by them, the quiet reassertion of a Western
centeredness undisturbed by the closure of its metaphysical tradition
and by the possible limitations of its cultural and historical framework,
in short, the return to center stage of what Derrida aptly called “phal-
logocentrism,” throws into relief the boldness of his attempt to interrupt
and complicate (without ever naively claiming to break away from) the
set course of Western philosophy.
d i f f e r e n c e s
anne-emmanuelle berger is Professor of French Literature at Cornell University and Visit-
ing Professor at the Centre de Recherches en Etudes Féminines at Paris VIII University. Her
recent publications include Algeria in Others’ Languages (Cornell University Press, 2002)
and Scènes d’aumône: Misère et poésie au XIXe siècle (Champion, 2004). She is currently
writing on Derrida.
Notes 1 Christie McDonald starts by ask-
ing Derrida: “[. . .] if the ques-
tion of sexual difference is not
a regional one (in the sense of
subsidiary), if indeed it ‘may no
longer be a question,’ as you sug-
gest, how would you describe
‘woman’s place?’ ” (89).
2 To dance is not simply, however,
a wild and indiscriminate way of
shaking one’s body. One has to
learn to dance, to follow and cre-
ate rhythms, to calculate steps,
to choreograph displacements.
Conversely, to read as one dances
means that one cannot read what-
ever one pleases to see in a text.
One has to be aware of the text’s
dance, of its own disturbing
calculations, be they unconscious
on the part of the “author.”
3 Derrida never fails to show how
language tricks us and plays
with us, with him, in his idiom.
Hence his attention to the play
of grammatical genders and the
differences they create or add
in French (to begin with, that
“gender” is a masculine word
and “difference” is gendered
feminine).
4 The adjective “sexuel” in the
modern sense is fi rst attested in
French in the middle of the eigh-
teenth century. In Latin, “sexu-
alis” refers to the feminine sex, as
in the now outdated expressions
in French “le sexe” or “le beau
sexe” (the fair sex).
5 On this issue, see Peggy Kamuf’s
“The Other Sexual Difference.”
6 In a piece titled “The End of
Sexual Difference?” Judith Butler
65
shows how the politics (and the
polemics) surrounding the use of
the word “gender” in feminist and
queer theory, particularly Anglo-
American theory, have produced
new readings of it, which have
in turn contributed to shift its
semantic course by adding unex-
pected meanings to it. She recalls
in particular how, at the United
Nations Meeting on the Status of
Women that took place in Beijing
in 1995, the Vatican decided to
strike off the word “gender” from
its document because such a word
was considered by the Catholic
hierarchy to have become a code
word for “homosexuality,” that
is, unnatural or anti-natural
sexual behavior and “identity”
(423–24). Such a philological
deprogramming (all the more
striking since the Church speaks
Latin and is aware of the natu-
ralizing implications of “genus,
generis” in Latin) and the conse-
quent political reprogramming
of the word are an example of the
ways in which different contexts
(i.e., specific historical, cultural,
or political confi gurations, be
they lasting or provisional) can
and do affect meaning and even
the fate of language(s). Derrida
forcefully addresses the issue of
such “recontextualizations,” for
instance in “This Strange Institu-
tion Called Literature.” Accord-
ing to him, the very iterability of
any trace or mark (for instance,
of the word “gender”) opens it up
to alterations. The same goes for
works of literature. Certain texts
fully grounded in a precise
history that prompts them into
existence, texts that are loaded
with historical references to their
66
own context of formulation, can
nonetheless lend themselves to
fruitful readings whose frames of
reference are very distant from
the “original” time and place of
the texts read. “This,” he tells
Derek Attridge, “has to do
with the structure of a text,
with [. . .] its iterability, which
both puts down roots in the unity
of a context and immediately
opens this non-saturable context
onto a recontextualization. [. . .]
The iterability of the trace (unic-
ity, identification and alteration
in repetition) is the condition of
historicity [. . .]” (“This Strange”
63). Derrida, however, would
probably not consider the rese-
manticization of “gender” by the
Vatican to be a legitimate or per-
tinent “alteration” of the mark,
since it leads (and amounts) to
a mere gesture of erasure. Such
an erasure deprives the word
of any historical becoming and
deprives us, by the same token,
of the memories it carries with it.
Butler uses this example to make
an argument, which, though it
proceeds from a different logic
(and from a kind of philosophi-
cal wisdom rather than from a
philosophy of history), ends up on
the same side, that is, the side of
fi delity to linguistic memory con-
ceived as the condition, or rather
one of the conditions, at which
a future can remain open. Not-
ing that attacks against the ways
certain issues are worded or the
dismissal of certain phrases on
political or ideological grounds
(masquerading as “philosophi-
cal” objections) all too often lead
to prohibition and censorship,
she uses the example of what the
Pope does with the word “gender”
to caution against dropping too
quickly any reference to the locu-
tion “sexual difference.”
Sexing Differances
One could add that
to replace a word or phrase by
another without displacing the
system within which it functions
or without at least questioning
its basic assumptions would not
only leave such a system in place;
it might also, as Geoffrey Ben-
nington rightly points out, when,
following Derrida, he cautions
against naive appeals to a radi-
cally new terminology, produce
an amnesia that might actually
help consolidate the system in
place (see Jacques Derrida,
“The Sign,” No. 12, 35–36).
7 I don’t have time to expand
here on this important distinc-
tion. Sexual difference(s), for
Derrida, do not give themselves to
see; they are not a question of per-
ception, much less of evidence,
nor even of fantasy. They lend
themselves to reading and
to reading only. (On this topic,
see “Fourmis.”)
8 Foucault’s complicated argument
with “sexuality” deserves
a lengthy qualification I can’t
provide within the framework
of this paper.
9 See “Pas de deux.”
10 “L’amour est à réinventer, on
le sait [Love is to be reinvented,
one knows it],” says Rimbaud’s
“infernal spouse” in “Délires I”
(Une Saison en enfer).
11 It would take another paper, one
which I think is called for, to
explain why Derrida might pre-
fer the word “other” (as in “other
sexual choreographies”) to the
word “new” to designate the event
or advent of yet unread, unseen,
or unheard of (im)possibilities.
12 On this issue, see Geoffrey Ben-
nington’s summary of Derrida’s
problematics of the sign in his
Jacques Derrida 27–42.
d i f f e r e n c e s 67

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