JZ: Derrida’s work, for example, has been extremely important for me, but I also find it problematic at times. It’s not that I necessarily want to see Derrida’ s playfulness translated into ‘practical’ terms and then resolved, but I would expect him to do a bit more than just pose questions - as he does about the issue of sexual difference. Maybe it is as much as Derrida - a male philosopher - can do, which is stay back with his ‘friends’ and just ask questions from that position. Nevertheless, something seems to be missing for me.

SG: Oh, absolutely. His work suggests that he could do otherwise, but what he actually does is what I call SOS: same old stuff. And that gets onto what I think is a problem with a lot of these people’s work: Derrida, Lyotard, even Foucault sometimes. What happens is an attempt to be feminist by posing women as glorious or horrible, or perhaps a lack. Derrida ends up presenting this thing called the female language in the chora, and the whole slide to it. He probably thinks that by doing this he is saying that women are the untouched entities in the world. I find Derrida’s book, The Politics of Friendship, did this. There was so much beauty in his notion of founding/finding, and then he just loses it. The Post-Card is the same when he talks about being submissive, but what he means by this is being female. I’m annoyed at calling this sexist these days; I actually want to call it racism. Woman, or whatever we call it, is set up as this other, and the other is either an enemy or a loved-being. I don’t agree with any of the work that does this. In an attempt to deal with patriarchy or misogyny there is a recuperation of different levels of racist terminology of what a woman may or may not be; all the variations on a theme. There is this new cartoon called Chicken and Cow. It is the first lesbian, or maybe transgender, cartoon I’ve seen. Chicken should be a female, and so should Cow, but Chicken has in fact decided to be a boy, and Cow calls it his sister. Sometimes Cow calls Chicken a girl, sometimes Cow calls Chicken a brother. The cartoon offers a whole layer of different female possibilities, from rolling around in a pig pen to playing in a rock band, which escapes the philosophers like Derrida. It seems woman is a fem, and fem is light, beautiful and cherishable. Some people say, in the sort of pseudo-Kant way, that to question this view is to throw it overboard, and that by asserting that women are primarily persons you are bringing in humanism. I don’t want to do that, but let’s take the hard case and say we are doing it, so what? On this level, what is so horrible about humanism that upsets these people so badly? If you are saying that all people are capable of doing lots of things - murdering each other, loving each other, thinking rationally, thinking irrationally - you come down to the notion of the body again. There is a big debate in the transgender community around what the male hormones are, if you are going female to male. That the male hormone makes you more aggressive is taken as a given. At the end of the day this kind of genetic response has its limitations. I don’t say that there isn’t anything to it, but it has its limitations which I don’t think people like Derrida or Irigaray have been able to take up. What Irigaray says has its place and needs to be said, but the way it’s been said is problematic.

JZ:. I try to read Irigaray as opening up this space that I find lacking in, say, Derrida. Thinking in terms of sexual difference wouldn’t for me reclaim the old binaries, as there is all sorts of interconnections possible which come after the liberal humanism scenario. So when what you also called ‘humanism’ returns, it already has a consciousness of having gone through the phase of sexual difference, realising that there are more than two. I believe that it is within this space that equality can be claimed, but it won’t be as innocent as it used to be.