Homage to the Caryatids (additional post)

'If woman or the feminine is valued because it is undecidable, then it is valued for what she is, she is not valued for her specificity. She is valued as a metaphor for the impossibility of any specificity. [Derrida] He erases her difference and any possibility of her specificity. (...)' 
Oliver, K. (1995) Feminizing Nietzsche: philosophy's relation to the feminine. Routledge, London. p70

Derrida might have a point - a risky statement, since according to his writings he uses undecidability as a philosophy and not part of phenomenology. Deconstruction and his 'undecidability' here are juxtaposed with feminism. Can I truly say I believe that? I can not be sure. I can identify a sort of connection to undecidability and woman and then I would think again and probably I would not. Is this his vicious game of consciousness? If woman does have two contradictory qualities embedded in her être, that define her, then maybe she is the undecidable. Maybe this undecidability is the one that defines her but at the same time it doesn't. One can see from another side of this inquiry, in writings of De Beauvoir in The Second Sex commenting on the physical state of a woman:

          '(...) This glandular instability brings on a pronounced nervous instability. (...) It is during her periods that she feels her body most painfully as an obscure, alien thing; it is indeed, the prey of a stubborn and foreign life that each month constructs and then tears down a cradle within it; each month  all things are made ready for a child and then aborted in the crimson flow. Woman, like man, is her body; but her body is something other than herself.' p61

First of all, De Beauvoir's observation derives from that of Merleau-Ponty - a dismissed opinion by Derrida. She refers to something alien occurring, she refers to her as a victim of a stubborn and foreign life. By inserting the word alien she is introducing a contrast between that and the main. She goes on and mentions that a woman's body is something other than herself. Could it be that, this other self, part, is making her whole being undecidable? Could it be that De Beauvoir unwittingly cites undecidability, or is it that Derrida has managed to insert his mucilaginous idea in my head and I can't justify it? Is woman truly a mathematical undecidable equation - a metaphor? 

In her text Oliver, explains that Derrida inserts the woman in his text carefully so that he does not take the position of Lacan and Nietzsche, who dismiss woman completely. According to her, Derrida, writes about the woman in a way that he is almost seeking her support. Oliver goes on to express her disagreement and aporia: how women reading this would feel. I can not argue anything with certainty apart from the fact that I have been seduced by this dual methodology. The insertion of binary voices could be seen as the fundamental for grasping a woman's identity (even if it's not how he meant for it to be).

Closing extract

'The hymen, the consummation of differends, the continuity and confusion of the coitus, merges with what seems to be derived from; the hymen as protective screen, the jewel box of virginity, the vaginal partition, the fine, invisible veil which, in front of the hystera stands between desire and fulfillment.' From The Double Session pp 212-13


Image: an extract from my latest photographic depiction of the Caryatid.
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