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January 3, 2007
A review of Vicki Kirby's Telling Flesh by Jack Reynolds in Contretemps. It is entitled, 'Kirby, Merleau-Ponty, and the Question of an Embodied Deconstruction' and Reynolds quickly highlights Kirby's key argument in relation to poststructuralist feminism:
While Kirby’s references to Derrida are often quite allusive, he is an important background figure in her work, because many of the feminists that she seeks to criticise use Derridean deconstruction as an intellectual support. According to Kirby, recent feminist articulations of the body have a tendency to rely heavily upon the linguistic emphasis of certain early Derridean texts, and in this respect she finds theorists like Drucilla Cornell and Judith Butler to be complicit in something akin to the semiological reductionist reading. That is, they take Derrida as something of a linguistic idealist, even if they generally endorse this position rather than reject it, as the more unsympathetic critics of deconstruction have done. Kirby contends that Derrida actually resists any such reading of his work, and has an implied conception of the body that avoids this mere reversal of binary oppositions.
Instead of interpreting Derrida as a semiological reductionist---interpreting Derrida’s use of terms like ‘textuality’ and ‘writing’ narrowly, and limiting his significance to the realm of the linguistic, Kirby argues that terms like writing and textuality bear an applicability beyond the literal conception of the written word or text, and hence have a relevance that extends beyond their traditional domains.
Reynolds says that Kirby does more than merely refute the claim that Derrida is a semiological reductionist. She also explores what her proposed intertwining of the ideal and the material might mean for notions like materiality, and objects by arguing e that just as objects are influenced by what we describe as culture, so culture is influenced by materiality.
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Hopefully you'll be moderating these comments before they pop up ;-) It was just to say I'd bumped into your blog and was beginning to read it as itlooks interesting, then tried to bookmark the feed only to find the atom.xml file that was meant to be there wasn't...might still be a glitch my end, but thought I'd mention it ..