I have this as a journal article, in an issue I am recycling, but it’s available as part of Miller’s book Subject to Change, which can still be acquired.
It’s a 1986 piece, from when I was worried about this question: was the decentering/death of the subject revolutionary if the subject to be killed, fragmented, and decentered was 3d world, a woman, or otherwise a minority or oppressed one.
Miller’s article is on the formation of a female critical subject and one person she discusses is Barthes, who as we know discussed the de-authorization of the author (“death of the author”). She reminds us that Gilbert and Gubar (“Is a pen a penis?”) indicate that de-authorization of male authority is one thing, and continued denial of female personhood is quite another. Specifically, she says the postmodernist decision that the author is dead prematurely forecloses the question of identity for women–who are actually NOT burdened by too much Self, Ego, Cogito. Women have always been excluded, “disoriginated,” and so on, and our relation to integrity, textuality, desire and authority is structurally different therefore. So the “crisis of the subject” is “irreducibly complicated” by the woman writer.
Foucault, in “What is an Author,” asks: “In granting a primordial status to écriture, do we not, in effect, simply reinscribe in transcendental terms the theological affirmation of its sacred origin?” … and (Spivak says) male subjectivity is based on naturalized access to dominant forms of power whereas women have an entirely different relationship to networks of power. I wrote on a post-it: Vallejo–subject-formation without nostalgia!
Much more is said, of course. And meanwhile, boundary 2 (Summer 1992) on feminism and postmodernism is of course available on JSTOR. I don’t think it’s really all that dated; there are a lot of interesting pieces including Wicke on the politics of the legal subject and Poovey on the summer movies of 1991, a topic of interest to me.
In this journal, connected to I am no longer sure which article but I think it is one of these, I have a piece of paper that says “Intelligibility. Cecilia must be rendered readable.” This is important, I think: our narrator can read Cecilia but says it’s hard to do; she’s dangerous because she’s not readable.
Yet reading, or knowing all the information, means destroying the [Baudrillardean simulacrum?] of social peace (and only Ma. de Regla and don Cándido have full knowledge of the family history). I will think about this.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 