Severed Ties 1972–1973 243
Derrida, who was among the fi rst speakers, presented one of
those never-ending lectures that would soon become legendary in
Cerisy. His text fi lled over fi fty pages in the conference proceed-
ings published the following year in the 10/18 series; it would then
become a separate little book, Spurs. While the title announced was
‘The question of style’, Derrida immediately revealed that ‘woman
will be [his] subject’:
There is no such thing as a woman, as a truth in itself of
woman in itself. That much, at least, Nietzsche has said. Not
to mention the manifold typology of women in his work, its
horde of mothers, daughters, sisters, old maids, wives, govern-
esses, prostitutes, virgins, grandmothers, granddaughters, big
and little girls. For just this reason, then, there is no such thing
either as the truth of Nietzsche, or of Nietzsche’s text.^33He proceeded to trace these feminine fi gures, affi rming that ‘[t]he
question of the woman suspends the decidable opposition of true
and non-true [.. .].The hermeneutic project which postulates a true
sense of the text is disqualifi ed under this regime. Reading is freed
from horizon of the meaning or truth of being [.. .].’^34
Sarah Kofman, herself a Derrida specialist, opened the debate
in resounding terms: ‘I wished fi rst of all to thank Derrida for his
most eloquent paper. He spoke in the most magisterial way and
he’s left us with nothing more to say.. .’ But Heinz Wismann,
though acknowledging that the style of the paper would doubt-
less aff ect that of later work, put to Derrida a probing philological
question: is the truth, in Nietzsche’s view, ‘Frau’ or ‘Weib’? ‘It’s
Weib,’ Derrida immediately replied. But Wismann felt that, in his
paper, Derrida had constantly mixed up these two German words:
though both of them mean ‘woman’, they have almost opposite
meanings: Frau is a noble, respectful word, while ‘Weib, which has
a rather deprecatory connotation, designates woman insofar as she
arouses desire, the female, even the prostitute. [.. .] So we’d need to
follow in Nietzsche’s text the interplay of Frau and Weib if we are to
understand fully the metamorphosis of truth.’^35
The question that opened up the most far-reaching perspectives
came from Fauzia Assaad: ‘Might one night fi nd, at the limit of
your text, a possibility of doing philosophy in a feminine way?’
Delightedly, Derrida picked up the ball and ran with it: ‘Is that a
personal question? I too would like to write like (a) woman. I try
.. .’ The statement did not go unnoticed. This Cerisy conference,
and the book in which its proceedings were published, played an
important role in the reception of Derrida by feminists, especially in
the United States. Between Derrida and women (who had been so
often ignored by the Western philosophical tradition), an alliance