The question of Derrida's women
the other, in this case the question of woman (if one ignores the "but," which I will do but - only for the moment) returns the "other" to the position of object of knowledge.1 Such knowledge may be determinedly indeterminate - but indeterminacy itself can serve a purpose. Thus, the indeterminacy which Jacques Derrida ascribes to woman in his essay on Nietzsche's style, Spurs: Nietzsche's Styles/ ?perons: Les Styles de Nietzsche is often seen by his critics as yet another repositioning of woman as either the fetish of philosophy (Doane, 1989:125), or as the backdrop for the erection of a (masculine) philosophical system (See Irigaray, 1983). The beginning proper of Derrida's text is marked by a series of juxtapositions: the question of style/ the subject of woman: the question of style/veils and sails/ genres and genders/ spurs. Such an oblique entry into the question of woman allows one to overlook the ways that this essay might itself pose an interrogation of the "question of woman." If one is to examine the way that such an interrogation is articulated in the margins of this text, one must attend meticulously to Derrida's styles. One must therefore begin before the question of style2 and address the first question of his lecture: the question of the exergue. His attention in the first section of his reading to the form of the exergue will serve to situate the question of style as the question of woman. And because it is by means of an analysis of the exergue that Derrida problematizes the question of woman, I will pause at length in the space created by such an exergue.