Supposing Truth to be a Woman ...

The title for this post was to have been the question of style. 

However - it is woman who will be my subject. Still, one might 

wonder whether that doesn't really amount to the same thing ... 

Indeed, like Derrida - who I'm paraphrasing here - we might easily decide there is a strong level of correspondence between women and style and, in turn, between the question of style and that of seduction. All three questions deserve to be thought philosophically; which is to say, in relation to politics, ethics, and notions of what constitutes Truth, developing Nietzsche's supposition concerning the latter along the way (i.e. feminizing what has traditionally been erected as an exclusively masculine concept). 

The first thing to establish is the following: if Truth is supposed to be a woman, then Truth would not love to go naked as Rousseau naively believed. Rather, Truth-as-woman would insist on being veiled: "And only through such a veil which thus falls over it could Truth become truth; profound, indecent, desirable." [59] 

In other words, her being is not a natural pre-given, but something artificially constructed and woman forms an indivisible unity with everything that serves to show off her beauty. Thus she understands not only the need for illusion, but practises the right to lie. It is therefore pointless to speak about the essence of woman, for she "distorts all vestige of essentiality, of identity, of property" [51] and this is why she's the very ruin of philosophy and politics as traditionally conceived in the grandiose and deluded terms of phallic stupidity.

This is not to deny - today of all days - the need for an "organized, patient, laborious" form of feminism, that takes account of "the real conditions in which women's struggles develop" [94]. However, as Derrida rightly points out, whilst these struggles often require the strategic maintenance of metaphysical presuppositions and forms of agency, anyone concerned with effecting radical change must eventually interrogate such ideals precisely because they belong to and uphold the very system one is attempting to deconstruct. 

A constant process of negotiation is therefore required between organized movements and those schizo-nomadic women of style who lay their own singularity on the line and appreciate that their strength relates not to agency, but to seduction, witchcraft, and the art of the dressing table.   

Note: all quotes are from Jacques Derrida, Spurs, trans. Barbara Harlow, The University of Chicago Press, 1979.