ABSTRACT
Between the romanticism of Nietzsche and the “civic-minded” feminist revolution of Morris/Solanis, Derrida’s formulation of the “antiessential” essentiality of woman casts a curiously shaped net. If Derrida is right to say that “she engulfs and distorts all vestiges of…identity,” what then does this “she” (re)present in performance? A shadow where “identity” should/ought to be? Is the representation of woman’s presence in fact a catalog of negation and absence-the perfect expression of Derrida’s idea of language-as-absence? Are her performances a “hubbub” in which the “loudest breakers become still as death”? Or is Derrida’s claim just another example of a man defining “the problem of woman”? In what
ways does Derrida speak to feminism, if at all? Or to put it another way, what do feminist theory and poststructuralism have to say to one another?
