ABSTRACT
For Paul, and for us in this session, his responsibility, “Men in Feminism” has a subtitle, “Men and Feminist Theory,” and the problem is the “men and,” not the “feminist theory” which is known, understandable, ranged “within the array of post-structuralist discourses with which we are now over-familiar,” as such “not a problem.” For Derrida, feminism seems not so clear-oddly enough given that he after all is the arch poststructuralist-but more a matter of spaces between things; and he is not going to look attentively, no array, “only take a glimpse,” “entre-voir.” That, of course, is the vocabulary of fetishism: the glimpse, the inter-entre view, the seen but not attentively, on the margin of disturbance. Freud’s accounts of fetishism give us all the terms for this glimpsing-glancing seeing that does not stop to look, that turns away from the reality and leaves behind, off somewhere else. And, of course, fetishism was a major reference for Paul, but in a number of ways: from men as “the everyday practitioners of fetishism” to, in an earlier version, “feminists fetishising women” (but the question there is what is it that makes us need to see women, feminists liking women, talking about and finding terms for that, as fetishism?); and then also a fetishism of feminist theory which is seen to be not seen, perfectly framed in the academy outside of which it has no existence, perfectly understandable, no problem “of understanding per se.” We go from the glimpse to the clearly seen, from lack of attention to sure understanding, but it is the same strategy of not seeing: Derrida glances off the reality, Paul constructs its replacement image, his “feminist theory,” and then naturally enough fetishism becomes the necessary theoretical term, the mode of seeing and understanding. Who, after all, understands more than the fetishist? He understands perfectly, which is the problem or the normal state of functioning, depending on how you look at it; Freud stresses that the penis is “the normal prototype of fetishes” and the norm of sexual identity, “the primacy of the phallus,”2 the way we are, men and women, so that there is no escape for and from “feminists fetishising women.”
