"Ženské psaní" jako inscenace limit textu

Title:

"Ženské psaní" jako inscenace limit textu

Creator:

Matonoha, Jan

Identifier:

https://cdk.lib.cas.cz/client/handle/uuid:d297eb9f-1a7b-483f-bcae-a78086801e8a
uuid:d297eb9f-1a7b-483f-bcae-a78086801e8a

Type:

model:article and TEXT

Format:

bez média and svazek

Description:

This article examines the nature of the relationship between the kind of textual politics, here referredto as ‘women’s writing’, and the dominant discursive practice of Czech culture, whoselogic and functioning is best encapsulated in the Derridean term ‘phallogocentrism’. Women’swriting is defined here as the kind of writing which locates itself outside the domain and logicof a phallogocentric discourse, trying to challenge and undermine its hegemonic status. In thisrespect, women’s writing is not delimited by the sex of an author, but by his/her gendered subjectivity,his/her position within the discursive formation, and his/her attitude to hegemonic languagepractices. Women’s writing, as understood in this thesis, critically reflects upon the role oflanguage as a decisive medium for our thinking, and questions the notion of subjectivity, whichis usually equated with the Cartesian Ego and conceived as an autonomous entity. Through itstextual strategies, women’s writing reflects upon the fact that we all are inevitably ‘inserted’ intolanguage. Consequently, rather than striving to free itself of – inevitable – discursive formationand constraints, it highlights the formative role of language by means of an ironic, palimpsest‑likere‑writingof conventional literary narratives, as well as by means of textual politics definedby the continuous displacement of meaning. The criticism of the phallogocentric concept of subjectivityis on the one hand informed by the decentring of the identity of the narrating subject,and on the other by one’s awareness of one’s epistemic situatedness within a particular discursivespace. The logic and economy of women’s writing is determined by the tension between itsdrive towards non‑phallogocentricdiscourse, and its paradoxical, yet inevitable dependence onsymbolic codes and hegemonic discursive practices. The subversive potential of women’s writing,as understood here, is thus not situated within a space seen as a radical ‘beyond’, but is directedinwards, into the fissures of the phallogocentric discourse itself.In order to exemplify the features of women’s writing, the article discusses a novel Slabikářotcovského jazyka (A Primer of the Father Tongue) by Sylvie Richterová (who is, apart fromSoučková, Linhartová, Hodrová, and Hrabal, one of the authors discussed in a monograph ofwhich the present article is an excerpt). Richterová’s novel, which may be read as a radical reassessmentof the genre of autobiography, is considered in the article a fragmented space ofmemory, which provides an ambiguous ground for an attempt to integrate a discontinuous identity,an integration that can never be fully accomplished. The paper then argues that one’s identitycan never be grasped as a full and unmediated presence due to both the nature of languagebased on the mechanism of constant deferral (Derrida) and the nature of always already splitsubjectivity based on an essential and constitutive lack (Lacan). Given this crucial yet impossibletask of achieving one’s identity in its full presence, what the text does is to enact textuallythe process of inevitable, benign ‘failure’. Thus, rather than a simple proposition, a meaning ora function of the text resides in recording textual traces of this profoundly meaningful ‘failure’. Ultimately,the article argues, the subversive potential of women’s writing can paradoxically only residein a strategic staging and performance of its very own discursive and epistemological limitsin process, or, as Miroslav Petříček puts it, as a pragmatic contradiction, which means that atthe textual and stylistic level, the text performs the exact opposite of what it conveys at the levelof its proposition.

Language:

Czech

Rights:

http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/
policy:public

Coverage:

201-227

Source:

Česká literatura | 2008 Volume:56 | Number:2

Harvested from:

CDK

Metadata only:

false