Summary Of Derrida's Flirting With The Truth

In this book, many of Derrida’s works have been interpreted by female theorists along with his interpretations own interpretations, and a crossing over between the two perspectives. The gender has been deconstructed and his works regarding gender has been analysed and broken down with respect to feminist paradigms.

The first work of his “Flirting with the truth” interpreted by Ellen K. Feder and Emily Zakin. Derrida talks about how how Woman and Truth have been interpreted as the opposite sides of the same coin. Here, the duality of truth and female have been explained by logocentrism. Logocentrism, as given by Derrida, as a reliance on presuppositions of the spiritual realms of the society (as explained by him as being “transcendental”). It means that to humans concepts and logic that is universal in nature exists within the human cognition even before actual processes of thought occurs. The concept of logocentrism has a close relation to phonocentrism that emphasises more on auditory stimulations and verbatim than written form to explain the semantic nature of language. This is because the specific nature of language can be determined in speech while the written format takes into more metaphorical sense. Derrida has explained it

The Lacanian concepts proceeds to view that castration be made for both the male and female as neither can possess it. However, Deridian explanations views that Males consider the penis as the phallus, and hence consider the females as castrated, since they are devoid of them. however, this inequality has been built on the concepts of castration anxiety suffered by males, which can be termed as the fear of the loss of the penis, and that is formed by the denial of the man’s own shortcomings to the phallic Law. In terms of Freudian concept, where the phallic desires are rooted to and from an infantile stage, “Femininity” has been described as “the little girl is a little man” (Freud, 1933) . The implication here is that feminization itself starts as a process due to the Oedipal complex, and the woman shares a masculine libido with the man, which fails to separate her from the man. This process is later altered by her own psyche. Feminization was thus considered as a process where a woman separates herself from her desires, which might not always yield to a loss of pleasure for her however. In “Spurs”, Derrida has addressed the question of woman as a conceptual and pre conceptual phenomenon that can be formalized in a set of