if we were, to use Kolodny s metaphor, dancing past the minefield, as if we could
all afford to be equally tolerant in a free interpretive community. In Brazil it is
perhaps easier to see through this ideology - our daily fives give the lie to such
promise. Tolerance is a luxury granted to the unimportant, interpretation can be
various, but it is invariably the dominant version that gets enforced. The concept
of community in a country where the distribution of wealth is among the worst
in the whole world is untenable. Positing a feminist theory of a non-existing
egalitarian world is more likely to hinder than to promote the consciousness
raising and the mobilization which the struggle necessary to get to this world
requires. .
That would certainly be a radical practice. But in a turn that should
hardly surprise us,‘radical’ can be used to mean a number of things. Concerning
feminist literary criticism it has acquired another connotation in the past ten
years: according to Sabina Lovibond, in the 90s, radical ‘has changed its meaning
from a tendency marked out by the view of men - rather than, say, capitalism -
as women’s “main enemy”, to a more updated sense defined ‘not in terms of any
particular activism, but by the questioning of certain untenable theoretical
assumptions - and so to the authoritarian power struggles which these
assumptions are held to sustain’."
In this sense radical feminism has joined in the ranks of what we call, for
lack of a better word, poststructuralism. As we know, poststructuralism is marked
by the linguistic turn, the awareness, at first, of the obvious fact that language is
practical consciousness, that it is through language that we relate to reality. This
awareness is then radicalized into the assumption that everything is a text, or, to
quote the name of the father, that ,il nγ a pas de hors texte.’ One of the
characteristic moves in a poststructuralist reading is to submit language to close
scrutiny and thus reveal its concealed binary oppositions, which the critic then
proceeds to track down, and deconstruct.
And throughout the 80s, in Brazil as elsewhere, the most visible branch
of poststructuralism in literary criticism was, of course, deconstruction. One of
its many lures for‘subordinate groups’- whether women or third world countries
- lies precisely in its questioning of the hierarchies concealed in binary
oppositions. From this perspective, centre is no longer to be seen as superior to
periphery, male to female, model to imitation, or signified to signifier. Of course
it remains to be seen whether this break at the level of rhetoric would actually
enable us to recognize, balance out, or combat the hierarchical relations of actual
subordination out there, where language is not a play of Signifiers but a human
practice enmeshed in social conditions in which struggle, not free play, is the
rule.
11 Lovibond, Sabina,’Can Feminists Mean what they Say?’ New Left Review, 220, Nov-Dec 1996,98.
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