Max Deutscher

There is a tradition of philosophy—a conception we can easily under-stand as a limit of a tendency of our own thinking—that philosophy consists only of argument. The rest of the vast prepon-derance of words in philosophical texts is simply embroidery. ‘Naturally’, it will be conceded, actual philosophy books contain more or less of verbal pictures, words and phrases whose purpose is to evoke images, and many stories—examples, hard cases for definitions, and 4 anecdotes. These, it will be said, ‘are only the embellishments, the relief from work, the appetizers or the post-prandial delicacies.’

Developing a reading of some of Beauvoir and Sartre's most influential writings in philosophy, Max Deutscher explores contemporary philosophy in the light of the phenomenological tradition within which Being and Nothingness and The Second Sex occurred as striking events operating on the border of the modern and the 'post-modern'. Deutscher traces the shifts of genre that produce their gendered philosophies, and responds in terms of contemporary experience to the mood and the arguments of their works. Drawing upon the writings of two contemporary critics in particular - Michele Le Dœuff and Luce Irigaray - Deutscher reworks this part of philosophy's history in order to advance thinking in contemporary philosophy, generate renewed philosophical reflection on consciousness, freedom and one's relation to others, and to return a look still cast in our direction from an earlier time.

Spivak translates Derrida’s “il n’y a pas de hors-texte” as “there is nothing outside the text.” By considering how the aphorism works within his study of Rousseau on sexual and textual supplements, and by reviewing related expressions in French, a mistranslation is revealed. This is not a simple error, however. The distortion is generated by Derrida’s own broader context. We must not only distinguish signification from reference but also place the aphorism within Derrida’s allusion, in the first part of Of Grammatology, to an all-embracing arche-writing. The paper ends in thus opening out the discussion of a textual “inside” or “outside.”