Abstract
In ‘The “Mechanics of Fluids’ Irigaray closes with a dis/location of a partial exile that exiles the ruling symbolic — a feminine language that ex-ists somewhere beyond comprehension. And to which in other parts of This Sex Which is Not One she describes as speaking (as) woman (parler-femme) as that experimental process that finds connections to female sexuality and writing for the disruption of the syntax of discursive logic based on masculine self-sameness. This writing of bodies (Écriture Féminine) on conclusion to her Fluids text, is suggestive of a proximity in “such close touch with itself that it confounds your discretion” … of a self-confounded by not having yet understood everything. In an embrace of that which is not yet understood, and further desires for something beyond a totalized position of knowing everything, and what is more, a future-anteriority space-time process, my approach turns to the Écriture Féminine of Hélène Cixous and Jacques Derrida. In Derrida’s text “Fourmis’, Lectures on Sexual Difference —he describes a dream encounter as the gift of sexual difference through Cixous writings on an ant, whose body is inscribed, cut, marked through the passage or passing of the text as the imperceptible and innumerable darkness of sexual difference. His encounter, he insists is one of interruption—as a time against time—a future anterior that could not quite anticipate the affect of her language’s gift. Her gift advances on the dream of innumerability, where unthought-thought ex-ists beyond to rational comprehension. Outside of representational or conceptual paradigmatics exists the dream as a beyond all recognisable codes of sexual difference that exists in a shifting destiny, an existence proven because the dream of innumerability (beyond the figure 2) itself exists: “Does the dream itself not prove that what is dreamt of must be there in order for it to provide the dream?” (See Derrida, J. & Conley, V.A., ‘Voice II…’ Boundary 2, Vol.12. (No.2. 1984) pp. 68-93 (On Feminine Writing: A Boundary 2 Symposium).
