Anthony\u27s Silence: The Intersection of Sex, Gender and Race in \u3cem\u3eDesigning Women\u3c/em\u3e

Editor\u27s Note: Lynn H. Turner and Helen Sterk examine one small part of the Designing Women script, a short speech by Anthony (one of the series\u27 regulars). They argue that, as the only African American male in the series, Anthony was in a unique position to examine the gender and race issues posed by the Thomas/Hill hearings, and by the Thomas nomination itself. Calling on writings by African .American scholars commenting on the Senate hearings and on race and gender issues generally, the authors conclude that the structure of Anthony\u27s speech represents a missed opportunity

Sanguine Resistance: dreaming of a future for blood

Photographs of human skin inscribed with tattoo-like texts, Jenny Holzer’s Lustmord series was first published in 1993, showcased in the Sunday magazine supplement of the newspaper, Suddeutsche Zeitung. Diane Elam drew attention to this work in her chapter on ‘Feminism’ in Deconstructions: A User’s Guide (2000), largely focusing on it as a linguistic performance between senders and receivers. She noted the blood used in the ink on the magazine’s cover text – blood donated from Bosnian women raped by Serbians in the Yugoslavian conflict – primarily in the context of its hypocritical reception: the German public recoiled from the impropriety of blood on the paper, not the systematic rape from which the series took leave. Between 1999 and 2001, Derrida’s seminars focused on the Death Penalty (seminars that are only now garnering widespread attention through the Derrida Seminars Translation Project). There, blood draws material, thematic, poetic and conceptual analysis. While the cruelty of making blood flow (cruor) floods the first volume of published seminars, the ‘Ninth Session’ in the second volume begins with the question ‘How to conceive of blood?’ subsequently repeating a refrain that asks after a possible future for blood. If the ‘concept’ is the ‘end of blood’ as Derrida argues, this chapter returns to Holzer to ask how the gift of blood in Lustmord might bypass this transubstantiation. Opening a future for blood might here offer a counter-path to lex talionis, overflowing the logic of calculated and cancelled debt mandated in the masculine libidinal economy of the law. While the mortification exhibited in the reception of Lustmord can be read as a reactive abjection that also staunches a future for blood, in this chapter it will lead to Freud’s misplaced transposition of the masculine and ‘primitive’ fear of defloration into the feminine compulsion to violently steal the penis from which she is otherwise denied. Threatening castration in order to mask her own state, Freud finds this ostensibly eternal condition repeated most strongly in the ‘emancipated’ writerly women of his own time. Yet rather than frontally refute Freud, Derrida joins in deconstructive alliance with these women in echo of resistance to the red thread of the death penalty historically offered not by philosophers or politicians but by poets and writers. In light of her ‘female libidinal economy’ as that which is both ‘endless’ and ‘difficult to read,’ ‘Sanguine Resistance’ writes the Cixous of ‘Castration or Decapitation?’ into this alliance. Moreover, where Cixous offers to ‘relieve man of his phallus’, this chapter finds a displacement of retribution in favour of another ‘erogenous field’ that, in supplanting concept, contract, and castration, might dream of a future for blood. Key texts: Gil Anidjar, ‘Le Cru: Derrida’s Blood’ in theory@buffalo 2015. Hélène Cixous, ‘Castration or Decapitation?’ trans. Annette Kuhn, in Signs, 7.1 1981. Jacques Derrida, The Death Penalty, Volume 2, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg, Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2017. Diane Elam, ‘Deconstruction and Feminism’ in Nicholas Royle, ed. Deconstructions: A User’s Guide, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000. Sigmund Freud, [1917] ‘The Taboo of Virginity’ in Five Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, Leonardo da Vinci and Other Works, Volume XI in the Penguin Freud Library, trans. James Strachey, Penguin Books

‘Animal Melancholia: on the scent of Dean Spanley’

For everything that happens at the edge of the orifices (of orality, but also of the ear, the eye-and all the ‘senses’ in general) the metonymy of ‘eating well’ [bien manger] would always be the rule. - Derrida ‘Eating Well’ The beguiling 2008 film adaptation of Lord Dunsany’s 1936 novella, Dean Spanley, prescribes what I call an ‘animal cure’ for the melancholia of an elderly man. This man, Fisk, maintains an extremely formalised relationship with his surviving son, Henslowe, with whom he can scarcely discuss the recent deaths of his wife and his other son. Henslowe becomes fascinated with the highly convincing stories produced by the local clergyman, the eponymous Dean, of his life as a dog when enjoying the scent of the Hungarian liquor, Tokay. Realising that the dog, in whose name the Dean speaks, uncannily recalls the lost pet of his father’s childhood, Henslowe effects his animal cure through the means of a dinner party. From the moment that this pet, Wag, is ‘returned’ through the medium of the Dean’s apparent recollections, Fisk can begin to cry and thus to admit his grief. Yet from this moment too, the intoxication with Dean Spanley fades: the last scene sees a happy Fisk accompanied by a new pet dog. Through the inhalation of Tokay, the Dean is transformed. His olfactory intake of the other speaks of an identification named in the narrative as reincarnation but that invites speculation on death, mourning, transference and friendship among and for animals, specifically the dog (as man’s best friend). Women may inhabit the periphery of this film, but the motivation and the action of Dean Spanley remain within the homosocial preserve of men and/as male dogs. With the turning point of the film located around the dinner table, this homosociality has the sense of the mythical ‘band of brothers’ enjoying the primal feast, gorging on the adventures told by the Dean and gloriously depicted by the film matching human voice-over to canine action. This essay will explore the interrelated oral processes of incorporation and introjection in the double mourning at stake in Dean Spanley, as exemplified by the terse Fisk and loquacious Dean (and as theorized by Abraham and Torok). While the Dean inadvertently teaches Fisk how to ‘eat well,’ in Derrida’s phrase, which is to say how to mourn, this essay will examine the uneven relation to mourning for humans and for animals, specifically that exceptional animal or exception to ‘animality’, the pet dog

When Species Kiss: some recent correspondence between animots

This paper considers the figure of the interspecies kiss in works by Donna Haraway, Hélène Cixous, and Carolee Schneemann in light of the impact on animal studies by Jacques Derrida. I elaborate key elements of Derrida’s increasingly glossed essay "The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow)" to show both their commonality with deconstruction more broadly and their conceptual importance in rethinking relations between humans and other animals in particular. These elements are not simply applied to Haraway, Cixous, and Schneemann but are interwoven with and developed by their works. I position the interspecies kiss, indeed the kiss in general, as performative. While "performativity" has become part of the lexicon of Visual Culture, often appearing simply in adjectival form, its more complex articulation in the work of Derrida is often overlooked. There the term, as part of his subtle displacement of signification, already impacts on what we thought was human property: rather than meaning residing in our organic, present possession, it becomes conditioned by a machinic, reactive repetition, the very quality that Descartes attempted to section off as the impoverished domain of the animal. Bringing organic and machinic into an enmeshed relation inevitably brings Haraway’s figure of the cyborg to mind, while the "doing" over "being" quality of the performative resonates with her emphasis on the relating of our encounters