...uch, here was my message to Keston: written without knowing 
whether to be bothered sending it, then sending it in panic, 
unfinished:




A typically shifty and unasked-for intervention in an argument 
between Keston and Ira,  not the argument I would want to involve 
myself in (resisting the pull of the structural necessity of beginning and ending
 in unsupportable and basically irrelevant or uninteresting declarations of 
who is more`feminist`, Prynne or Derrida, or who was last `sexist` (!), Prynne 
on Tue 3 February 1976, or Derrida on a balmy Friday in 1972 ?).

Especially as I haven`t looked at Spurs for years [not since Steve 
Archibald left them], and Nietzsche for 
even longer.  But

>What Derrida asserts his own immunity from having with all due obviousness
>to recognize, is that Nietzsche's 'affirmations' of WOMAN are mere
>reaffirmations or corroborations of an attitude already articulated,
>concerning the delimiting problem of determining an undecadent and
>post-nihilistic means of -evaluating-, of ranking; as such, WOMAN -serves-
>as an occasion upon which further to explicate a pervasive commitment,
>which is itself wholly grounded in a polemical address which from its very
>inception has been concerned only to articulate what it conceives to be
>thoroughly and classically -masculine- topics.

"Mere": one deconstructive strategy, as you well know, involves 
seizing upon what has been dismissed as "mere" in order to show how 
the dismissal works to suppress a discernible and logical dependency 
of what is not "mere" upon what it dismisses.  If I recall rightly, 
Spurs, its frame, takes Heidegger to task for this very dismissal of 
the concept of WOMAN in his reading of N.  A dismissal Derrida writes 
as central to H`s reading.  The danger might be, in your own 
relegation of the question of WOMAN in Nietzsche, falling in with N`s own 
logic, that the polemical point of N`s text (the argument about 
Value) is allowed to go on without WOMAN.  Derrida`s reading would, 
by resisting the internal logic of N`s own process, be an 
intervention which resists this danger.  [This might well be 
bollocks; as I say, I don`t have a copy of Spurs to hand; I`m making 
this up in order to be the wet-paper-bag-antithesis, for the sake of 
argument.]

 

> SHE is a permutation; HER
>significance within his scheme - even the significance of her
>evasiveness and otherness - derives overtly from a masculinized project.

> Derrida's investment in the technics of sophisticated
>contrariness. 

[Oh shit, I`m supposed to be elsewhere...late for an 
appointment...back tomorrow.]

robin           



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