Derrida and others identified phonocentrism, or the prioritizing of speech over writing, as an integral part of phallogocentrism. Derrida explored this idea in his essay "Plato's Pharmacy".[2]
Background
In contemporary literary and philosophical works concerned with gender, the term "phallogocentrism" is commonplace largely as a result of the writings of Jacques Derrida, the founder of the philosophy of deconstruction, which is considered by many academics to constitute an essential part of the discourse of postmodernism.[3] Deconstruction is a philosophy of "indeterminateness" and its opposing philosophy, "determinateness". According to deconstruction, indeterminate knowledge is "aporetic", i.e., based on contradictory facts or ideas ("aporias") that make it impossible to determine matters of truth with any degree of certitude; determinate knowledge, on the other hand, is "apodictic", i.e., based on facts or ideas that are considered to be "true", from one perspective or another.
The phallogocentric argument is premised on the claim that modern Western culture has been, and continues to be, both culturally and intellectually subjugated by "logocentrism" and "phallocentrism". Logocentrism is the term Derrida uses to refer to the philosophy of determinateness, while phallocentrism is the term he uses to describe the way logocentrism itself has been genderized by a "masculinist (phallic)" and "patriarchal" agenda. Hence, Derrida intentionally merges the two terms phallocentrism and logocentrism as "phallogocentrism".
The French feminist thinkers of the school of écriture féminine also share Derrida's phallogocentric reading of 'all of Western metaphysics'. For example, Catherine Clément and Hélène Cixous in "The Newly Born Woman" (1975) decry the "dual, hierarchical oppositions" set up by the traditional phallogocentric philosophy of determinateness, wherein "death is always at work" as "the premise of woman's abasement", woman who has been "colonized" by phallogocentric thinking.[4] According to Cixous and Clément, the 'crumbling' of this way of thinking will take place through a Derridean-inspired, anti-phallo/logocentric philosophy of indeterminateness.
Critique
Swedish cyberphilosophy authors Alexander Bard and Jan Söderqvist propose a critique of the Derridean take on phallogocentrism in their works Syntheism - Creating God in The Internet Age (2014) and Digital Libido - Sex, Power and Violence in The Network Society (2018) [where?], advocating a return to phallic vision as fundamental and necessary for western civilization after 1945. They regard this phallic return as materialized through technology rather than through ever more academic discourse. In response to Derrida et al, Bard & Söderqvist propose that the phallogocentric project - which they call eventology - rather needs to be complemented with a return to nomadology, or the myth of the eternal return of the same, a matrichal (sic) renaissance which they claim has already materialized in system theory and complexity theory, from which both feminism and androgynism are merely later but welcome effects. According to the authors, it is merely the centrism and not the phallogos in itself which has ever been problematic.[importance?]
French philosopher Catherine Malabou, part-time collaborator with Derrida himself, has taken a similar constructive critical approach to the idea of phallogocentrism, for example in her work Les nouveaux blessés (2007). Going into dialogue with psychoanalytic masters like Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan and most recently Alain Badiou - to whose philosophy of the event, Malabou responds with a radical traumatology firmly rooted in the neurosciences - her take is simply that psychoanalysis is inadequate to respond to the challenges she forwards due to its phallogocentrist fixation, a dilemma she believes the neurosciences are better fit to solve. The name of her solution to this problem is plasticity.[citation needed]
↑ Cixous, Hélène; Clément, Catherine (1986). The Newly Born Woman. Theory and History of Literature. Vol.24. Translated by Wing, Betsy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. p.65. ISBN0-8166-1466-0.
Deconstruction is a loosely-defined set of approaches to understanding the relationship between text and meaning. The concept of deconstruction was introduced by the philosopher Jacques Derrida, who described it as a turn away from Platonism's ideas of "true" forms and essences which are valued above appearances.
Jacques Derrida was an Algerian-born French philosopher. He developed the philosophy of deconstruction, which he utilized in a number of his texts, and which was developed through close readings of the linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure and Husserlian and Heideggerian phenomenology. He is one of the major figures associated with post-structuralism and postmodern philosophy although he distanced himself from post-structuralism and disowned the word "postmodernity".
Hélène Cixous is a French writer, playwright and literary critic. During her academic career, she was primarily associated with the Centre universitaire de Vincennes, which she co-founded in 1969 and where she created the first centre of women's studies at a European university. Known for her experimental writing style and great versatility as a writer and thinker, she has written more than seventy books dealing with multiple genres: theater, literary and feminist theory, art criticism, autobiography and poetic fiction.
John David Caputo is an American philosopher who is the Thomas J. Watson Professor of Religion Emeritus at Syracuse University and the David R. Cook Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at Villanova University. Caputo is a major figure associated with postmodern Christianity and continental philosophy of religion, as well as the founder of the theological movement known as weak theology. Much of Caputo's work focuses on hermeneutics, phenomenology, deconstruction, and theology.
Luce Irigaray is a Belgian-born French feminist, philosopher, linguist, psycholinguist, psychoanalyst, and cultural theorist who examines the uses and misuses of language in relation to women. Irigaray's first and most well known book, published in 1974, was Speculum of the Other Woman (1974), which analyzes the texts of Freud, Hegel, Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, and Kant through the lens of phallocentrism. Irigaray is the author of works analyzing many thinkers, including This Sex Which Is Not One (1977), which discusses Lacan's work as well as political economy; Elemental Passions (1982) can be read as a response to Merleau‐Ponty's article “The Intertwining—The Chiasm” in The Visible and the Invisible, and in The Forgetting of Air in Martin Heidegger (1999), Irigaray critiques Heidegger's emphasis on the element of earth as the ground of life and speech and his "oblivion" or forgetting of air.
In continental philosophy and psychoanalysis, jouissance is the transgression of a subject's regulation of pleasure. It is linked to the division and splitting of the subject involved, which spontaneously compels the subject to transgress the prohibitions imposed on enjoyment and to go beyond the pleasure principle. Beyond this limit, pleasure then becomes pain, before this initial "painful principle" develops into what Jacques Lacan called jouissance; it is suffering, epitomized in Lacan's remark about "the recoil imposed on everyone, in so far as it involves terrible promises, by the approach of jouissance as such". He also linked jouissance to the castration complex, and especially to the aggression of the death drives.
Écriture féminine, or "women's writing", is a term coined by French feminist and literary theorist Hélène Cixous in her 1975 essay "The Laugh of the Medusa". Cixous aimed to establish a genre of literary writing that deviates from traditional masculine styles of writing, one which examines the relationship between the cultural and psychological inscription of the female body and female difference in language and text. This strand of feminist literary theory originated in France in the early 1970s through the works of Cixous and other theorists including Luce Irigaray, Chantal Chawaf, Catherine Clément and Julia Kristeva, and has subsequently been expanded upon by writers such as psychoanalytic theorist Bracha Ettinger. who emerged in this field in the early 1990s,
"Logocentrism" is a term coined by the German philosopher Ludwig Klages in the early 1900s. It refers to the tradition of Western science and philosophy that regards words and language as a fundamental expression of an external reality. It holds the logos as epistemologically superior and that there is an original, irreducible object which the logos represent. According to logocentrism, the logos is the ideal representation of the Platonic ideal.
A binary opposition is a pair of related terms or concepts that are opposite in meaning. Binary opposition is the system of language and/or thought by which two theoretical opposites are strictly defined and set off against one another. It is the contrast between two mutually exclusive terms, such as on and off, up and down, left and right. Binary opposition is an important concept of structuralism, which sees such distinctions as fundamental to all language and thought. In structuralism, a binary opposition is seen as a fundamental organizer of human philosophy, culture, and language.
Geoffrey Bennington is Asa Griggs Candler Professor of French and Professor of Comparative Literature at Emory University in Georgia, United States, and Professor of Philosophy at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland, as well as a member of the International College of Philosophy in Paris. He is a literary critic and philosopher, best known as an expert on deconstruction and the works of Jacques Derrida and Jean-François Lyotard. Bennington has translated many of Derrida's works into English.
Phallocentrism is the ideology that the phallus, or male sexual organ, is the central element in the organization of the social world. Phallocentrism has been analyzed in literary criticism, psychoanalysis and psychology, linguistics, medicine and health care, and philosophy.
The Symbolic is the order in the unconscious that gives rise to subjectivity and bridges intersubjectivity between two subjects; an example is Jacques Lacan's idea of desire as the desire of the Other, maintained by the Symbolic's subjectification of the Other into speech. In the later psychoanalytic theory of Lacan, it is linked by the sinthome to the Imaginary and the Real.
Peggy Kamuf is the Marion Frances Chevalier Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California. She is one of the primary English translators of the works of Jacques Derrida. She received the American Comparative Literature Association's 2006 René Wellek Prize for her 2005 work Book of Addresses.
Trace is one of the most important concepts in Derridian deconstruction. In the 1960s, Jacques Derrida used this concept in two of his early books, namely Writing and Difference and Of Grammatology.
Catherine Malabou is a French philosopher. She is a Professor at the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy (CRMEP) at Kingston University, at the European Graduate School, and in the department of Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine, a position formerly held by Jacques Derrida.
This is a list of articles in continental philosophy.
Poststructural feminism is a branch of feminism that engages with insights from post-structuralist thought. Poststructural feminism emphasizes "the contingent and discursive nature of all identities", and in particular the social construction of gendered subjectivities. A contribution of this branch was to argue that there is no universal single category of "woman" or "man."
Martin McQuillan is a Scottish-born literary theorist, cultural critic and journalist currently employed at Edge Hill University. He was Professor of Literary Theory and Cultural Analysis and Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at Kingston University, London, where he was also Co-Director of The London Graduate School, and was Deputy Vice-Chancellor of Research, Business and Innovation between 2015 and 2017. He was previously Pro-Dean of Research (2005–09) for the Faculty of Performance, Visual Arts and Communications at the University of Leeds, where he was also Head of the School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies (2001–2005). Before that he was a lecturer in English at Staffordshire University (1997–2000).
"The Laugh of the Medusa" is an essay by French feminist critic Hélène Cixous. Originally written in French as "Le Rire de la Méduse" in 1975, it was translated into English by Paula Cohen and Keith Cohen in 1976. In the essay, Cixous issues an ultimatum: that women can either read and choose to stay trapped in their own bodies by a language that does not allow them to express themselves, or they can use the body as a way to communicate. She describes a writing style, écriture féminine, that she says attempts to move outside of the conventional rules found in patriarchal systems. She argues that écriture feminine allows women to address their needs by building strong self-narratives and identity. This text is situated in a history of feminist conversations that separated women in terms of their gender and women in terms of authorship. The "Laugh of the Medusa" addresses this rhetoric, writing on individuality and commanding women to use writing and the body as sources of power and inspiration.
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